The train passes the old, reddish Byzantine wall and goes into a culvert again. It comes out and you get flashes of squatting, mushroom-like mosques always with their dirty-white minarets rising from the corners. Everything white in Constantinople is dirty white. When you see the color a white shirt gets in twelve hours you appreciate the color a white minaret gets in four hundred years. (Ernest Hemingway, “Constantinople, Dirty and White, Not Glistening and Sinister,” Toronto Daily Star (October 18, 1922), reprinted here and in Hemingway 1985, pp. 227-229)

When the young Ernest Hemingway arrived in Istanbul on September 30, 1922, he was still a little-known, 23-year-old expat in Paris making ends meet by writing up weekly features for a Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star. (Reynolds 1999, ch. 2) He had been assigned to cover the latest developments in the three-year Greco-Turkish War (see, e.g., Maksudyan 2023, p. 238), which was then entering its final phase after troops led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had launched a new offensive, re-captured Smyrna (İzmir), and were converging on Constantinople, the historic capital city of the old Ottoman Empire. Many scholars have already explored the political and literary sides of Hemingway’s three-week visit to the Near East in the fall of 1922 (see, e.g., Oğuz 2019; Kuyucu 2013; Kenne 2012; Fortuny 2009; Stewart 2003; Lecouras 2001; Meyers 1984; Fenton 1954), my work, by contrast, will explore Hemingway’s first impressions the Queen of Cities through three different city spaces he saw and experienced on the first day of his visit to Constantinople: the Sirkeci train station in the historic peninsula, the old Galata bridge across the Golden Horn, and the Hotel de Londres in the hills of the Pera neighborhood of the European district of the city.