“We drove in a mass of traffic onto a long bridge. White pants [Hemingway’s hired guide] gave the Turkish gendarme a dirty, crumpled note, and we crossed a tangle of shipping on both sides. You can only see patches of the water because of the way the boats were packed.” (Ernest Hemingway, “Constantinople, Dirty and White, Not Glistening and Sinister,” Toronto Daily Star (October 18, 1922), reprinted here and inHemingway 1985, pp. 227-229)

After arriving at the Sirkeci train station and hiring a cab and local guide, the war correspondent and aspiring writer Ernest Hemingway would first make his way to his hotel–the “Hotel de Londres”, which was located in the Pera neighborhood in the “Sixth District” of Constantinople lore–so the “long bridge” he refers to was most likely the famed Galata Bridge and the “dirty, crumpled note”, the toll to cross that bridge. At the time of Hemingway’s visit to “Old Constan”, officials in white uniforms, Galata Bridge’s “infamous toll collectors”, stood at both ends of the bridge (Gencer 2021), and according to Wikipedia, the tolls varied depending on how one crossed the bridge:

• Free: military and law enforcement personnel, fire fighters on duty, clergy,
• 3 Ottoman para: sheep, goats or other animals
• 5 para: pedestrians
• 10 para: people with backpacks
• 20 para: load-bearing animals
• 100 para: horse carriages [*]

But the bridge Hemingway crossed on September 30, 1922, was not the first bridge in this location. It was the fourth of five Galata bridges. The first bridge was completed in 1845, was made entirely of wood, and was called the Cisr-i Cedid (“New Bridge”) to distinguish it from an older bridge that was built further up the Golden Horn, the Cisr-i Atik (“Old Bridge”). (See Structurae, Cisr-i Cedid [1845].) According to one contemporary guidebook, the first Galata bridge was also known as “Sultan Valideh Bridge,” named after the mother of Abdülmecid I, the 31st sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who ruled from from 1839 to 1861.

The Cisr-i Cedid/Sultan Valideh Bridge was replaced in 1863 by a second wooden bridge built by Ethem Pertev Paşa on the orders of Sultan Abdulaziz, who ruled from 1861 to 1876 (Structurae, Cisr-i Cedid [1863]), while a third bridge then replaced the second one in 1875 and was 480 m (1,570 ft) long and 14 m (46 ft) wide and rested on 24 pontoons. (See Structurae, Cisr-i Cedid [1875].) The third Galata Bridge was built at a cost of 105,000 gold liras and was used until 1912 when it was towed upstream to replace the old Cisr-i Atik Bridge. (Ibid.)

The fourth Galata bridge (the bridge that Hemingway would have crossed in 1922, is today known as Eski Köprü (“the old bridge”) was built in 1912 by the German firm Hüttenwerk Oberhausen AG for 350,000 gold liras. (See Structurae, Galata Floating Bridge.) This floating bridge was 466 meters long (1,529 feet) and 25 meters wide (82 feet) and was made of 12 individual pieces; 2 terrestrial pieces 17 meters in length, 9 pieces around 40 meters in length, and a central piece 66.7 meters in length, which made the bridge moveable. (Ibid.)

Alas, the fourth bridge was destroyed in a fire in 1992 and replaced by a bascule bridge in 1994, just a few meters away from the previous bridge, between Karaköy and Eminönü. (See Structurae, Galata Bridge [1994].) The new bridge is 490 meters long (1,610 feet) and 42 meters wide (138 feet) with two vehicular lanes and one walkway in each direction. (Ibid.) The fifth Galata Bridge was built by a Turkish construction company and designed and supervised by the Göncer Ayalp Engineering Company (GAMB), and tram tracks run down the middle of the bridge to allow the T1 tram to run from Bağcılar, in the western suburbs, to Kabataş, a few blocks away from Dolmabahçe Palace. (Ibid.)

On September 30, 1922, Hemingway was heading to his hotel in hills of the fashionable Pera district across the Golden Horn, or in the immortal words of Turkish novelist Peyami Safa (a contemporary of Hemingway’s; both writers were born in 1899!), “a person who went from Fatih [Old Constantinople] to Harbiye [accross the Golden Horn] via the bridge passed into a different civilisation and culture”. (Peyami Safa, Fatih-Harbiye)

At the time of Hemingway’s visit, the Old Galata Bridge was a central thoroughfare of Istanbul, a physical link between “Old Constantinople”–i.e. the old walled city and historical peninsula where the main railway station was located–and the more modern European districts of Beyoğlu, Galata, and Pera–where all the foreign embassies were located and where a large proportion of the inhabitants were non-Muslim. I will describe Hemingway’s hotel and survey the neighborhood of Pera in my next post …

[*] The tolls were collected from 25 November 25 1845 to 31 May 1930, while the para was a subdivision of the piastre, with 40 para = 1 piastre, and the piastre, in turn, was a subdivision of the Ottoman lira, with 100 piastres = 1 lira. The para also continued to be used, with 40 para = 1 piastre. Although the Ottoman Empire was officially abolished in 1922, these units of currency remained in circulation until the end of 1927, when the newly-established Republic of Turkey was in a position to issue its own banknotes.