We clattered up a steep street, past shop windows, banks, restaurants, saloons with their signs printed in four languages, scraped by jangling tramcars, were honked at by motorcars filled with British officers, were nearly run down by motors filled with French officers, passed a constant stream of men in business clothes, wearing either fezzes or straw hats, and climbed all the time. (Hemingway 1985/1922, p. 228)

When Hemingway checked into his hotel in Constantinople on that fall day in 1922, there was a power vacuum in the region. The centuries-old Ottoman Empire had collapsed after World War I, but at the same time the nascent Republic of Turkey did not yet exist. The Near East, including Constantinople, was under Allied occupation from 1918 until 1923, and the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Italy) were responsible for several civil functions, including passport control, police, tribunals, and prisons. (See generally Criss 1999.) The first two sentences of Hemingway’s first dispatch from the Near East (“British Can Save Constantinople,” dated September 30, 1922), which he most likely typed up in his hotel room upon his arrival–captures this unstable state of affairs in just a few words: “Constantinople is noisy, hot, hilly, dirty, and beautiful. It is packed with uniforms and rumors.” (Ibid., p. 211)

Hemingway further describes his first foray into Constantinople in a subsequent dispatch to the Toronto Star: “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister,” dated October 18, 1922. (Hemingway 1985/1922, pp. 227-229) By way of comparison, Hemingway’s first dispatch from Constantinople (the one dated September 30) consists of six short sentences and a total of 74 words, while the dispatch dated October 18 is over ten times longer; it contains over a dozen full-length paragraphs and a total of 1085 words.) In this lengthy report, Hemingway identifies the name of his hotel, the “Hotel de Londres” (to locals, Buyak Londra), and he tells us in passing that it was recommended to him by a Frenchman he had met during his train travel from Paris. (Ibid., p. 227)

As it happens, this hotel still exists, and it is located in the artsy Beyoğlu neighborhood, which at the time of Hemingway’s visit was known as Pera, in Constantinople’s Sixth District. For his part, Hemingway describes Pera thus: “Pera is the European quarter. It is higher on the hill than Galata, the business quarter, and is strung along one narrow, dirty, steep, cobbled, tramcar-filled street.” But as late as the 1780s, when another young artist (19-year-old Antoine-Ignace Melling) first set out for Istanbul, this area was still vineyards: “In the beginning, Melling worked as a tutor in the Pera vineyards, where a cosmopolitan society was growing up in the neighborhoods surrounding the embassies, and where we can see the first seeds of today’s Beyoğlu.” (Pamuk 2006, p. 64)

The first hotels of Istanbul began to be built in Pera–the more cosmopolitan and “westernized” section of the city–in the second half of the 19th century, when the Simplon-Orient Express connected Istanbul to the West in 1883. (Motley Turkey n.d. As an aside, the Orient Express railway was not extended into Istanbul until 1888. Before 1888, the last stop of the Orient Express was Sofia, Bulgaria, so westerners who wanted to see Istanbul could only come to the city via ferry services from Bulgaria. Ibid.) One of those hotels was the Hotel Buyuk Londra or Grand Hotel De Londres–considered “the most prestigious establishment in the area of Pera, at that time” (Paynter n.d.)–as well as one of the few hotels that have survived from that era to our time. This hotel was originally build as residence in 1890 and was then called the “Belle Vue” (Grand Hotel de Londres, “About us”, https://londrahotel.net/about-us/), no doubt because of its panoramic and unimpeded view of the Golden Horn, which could even be seen from the lobby. (Motley Turkey n.d.) On the front side of the hotel was the popular “Tepeba şı Park” (ibid.)

The Belle Vue/Londra was originally designed by an Italian architect by the name of Guglielmo Semprini (a plate with the name “G. SEMPRINI ARCHITETTO” appears at the right upper corner at the ground floor level in the front side of the structure; Özkurt 2019, p. 213) and was constructed in 1891 or 1892 by two Ottoman Greek business partners, identified by two of my sources as “L. Adamopoulos and N. Aperghis.” (Osterlund 2019; see also Özkurt 2019, p. 213) The hotel replaced a wooden mansion (Özkurt 2019, p. 213), the former residence of Glavany family, whose name was given to an adjacent street (today “Kallavi street”). (Motley Turkey n.d.) The building was five storeys tall and, according to one source “had the latest technology of the time, including a hydraulic elevator and bathrooms with tubs ….” (Ibid.)

Since this historic building first opened its doors in the 1890s, ownership and management of the hotel has changed hands only a few times. In one of his dispatches from Constantinople, for example, Hemingway writes, “The landlord of my hotel is a Greek. He has bought the place with his life’s savings. Everything he has in the world is invested it. I am now his only guest.” (Hemingway 1985/1922, p. 230-231) Since Hemingway refers to a single owner, either one of the two original Greek partners who built the hotel (Adamopoulos and Aperghis) bought the other out, or perhaps they sold their interest in the hotel to a new party. According to an advertisement in the Istanbul City Guide 1926, the name of the owner of the hotel was Moulatich, while the D’Andria family appear as the new owners of the hotel in land registry records from the 1930s. (Motley Turkey n.d.) The D’Andria family owned and operated the hotel until 1967, when the Huzmeli family took over the hotel. (Ibid.) Today, the hotel is still owned by the Huzmeli family (Osterlund 2019) and is located at Tepebaşı, Meşrutiyet Street No: 117. (Özkurt 2019, p. 213)

At the time of Hemingway’s visit in the fall of 1922, the Hotel de Londres was “the first modern hotel building of Istanbul.” (Özkurt 2019, p. 213) Among other amenities, it “had the latest technology of the time, including a hydraulic elevator and bathrooms with tubs ….” (Motley Turkey n.d.) So we can imagine Hemingway taking a warm bath in the sanctuary of his luxurious room; opening his window to take in the sights and sounds and smells of the Golden Horn, full of “masts and grimy and smoky funnels,” and of the “dust-colored hills” of Old Constantinople beyond (Hemingway 1985/1922, p. 229); and then turning to typewriter to punch out the first of many dispatches from his hotel room:

I stood on the dusty, rubbish-strewn hillside of Pera, after I had cleaned up at the hotel, and looked down at the harbor, forested with masts and grimy with smoky funnels and across at the dust-colored hills on the other side …. (Ibid., p. 229)

I will conclude my series on “Hemingway in Istanbul” in my next post.