Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [34]
“We stayed at a small, friendly establishment (which John Freely had suggested) at one end of the Hippodrome in the Sultanahmet neighborhood near Topkapı Palace and other delights. The Alzer is a simple hotel, but its location on the Hippodrome—the oval that had been laid down by Constantine for horse-racing—gave it a wonderful advantage, which it exploited by providing a breakfast room, surrounded on three sides by windows, on its top floor, the sixth, just one floor up from our own rooms.
“We discovered this soon-to-be-our-favorite spot on the first evening when the desk clerk suggested we could go up there to watch the sunset. When we stepped into it we realized we were essentially eyeball-to-eyeball with the dome of the Blue Mosque, with the rosy, red-orange dome of the Haghia Sofia floating slightly off in the distance, and the Sea of Marmara and a gorgeous sky behind them. It was a sight of such exoticism and beauty at every hour we saw it that we never tired of it, and we ended up going there at every opportunity—to have breakfast, to write letters, just to absorb all the fascinating new things we had seen during the day. Grand buildings always inspire, but the special gift of the room at the top of the Alzer Hotel was that it gave us an intimacy, a special feeling of ownership, even love, for these two famous landmarks, epic in their importance to art, religion, and history.”
—Ann Close, longtime senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and editor of John Freely’s Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World
Million Must Quit Homes in Near East, Lausanne Decrees
EDWIN L. JAMES
THE 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey remains a major event in contemporary Turkish history, even now. Authorized by the Treaty of Lausanne, the exchange was the first of its kind in the twentieth century, involving nearly two million people.
In Greece the exchange is known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, and it followed what could also be referred to as a catastrophe, the Megali Idea (Great Idea), the attempt to acquire land for a greater Greece—notably along the Aegean coast, up to Istanbul, and westward into Thrace. The Greeks felt this land was rightly theirs, and they were encouraged to embark on this folly by the British. After landing troops at Smyrna (present-day Izmir), the Greeks pressed onward until they met with the Turkish army, led by Kemal Pasha who later earned the title of Atatürk, Father of the Turks, in 1934. The Turks were the victors in this Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), a surprising achievement, perhaps, after having sided with the defeated Central Powers in World War I. Few probably believed that the “sick man of Europe”—the phrase was coined by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia in 1844 to describe the Ottoman Empire—could succeed. Indeed, the Treaty of Sèvres, the 1920 peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies (excluding Russia and the United States), virtually abolished Turkish sovereignty—and France, Italy, and Great Britain had secretly begun carving up the Ottoman Empire for themselves as early as 1915.
Turkish independence was thus extremely hard won, and once achieved, extremely hard to arrest. Atatürk and his followers understood that momentum was on their side, and they also believed that Anatolian Turkish nationalism was the only way forward for this new nation-state. Their determination for independence was so great that “it could