That is the title of this intriguing open-access paper, sans question mark, by Peter Königs (pictured below), a ‘Junior Professor’ at TU Dortmund University working on topics in the ethics of technology, political philosophy, and moral psychology. Hat tip: the Amazing Tyler Cowen.
A new article in the Columbia Law Review titled “Reasons for Interpretation” by Francisco J. Urbina (see here) brought to my mind my 2016 paper “Probabilistic Interpretation“. For his part, Professor Urbina presents a “systematic analysis of the different kinds of reasons usually canvassed to defend theories of interpretation” in constitutional law. My paper, by contrast, presents a simple probabilistic model of legal interpretation. Specifically, in place of a semantic or philosophical theory of interpretation, I model the problem of interpretation probabilistically as a “best-choice secretary problem” (see, for example, a formal mathematical statement of the problem below) in which a problem-solving judge strives to select the best interpretation of a given rule from a finite set of n possible interpretations of such rule.
Note: this is the last installment (for now) of my series of blog posts on “Hemingway in Istanbul”
Over a decade after his visit to Constantinople in 1922, Hemingway wrote a piece of fiction titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (Hemingway 1997/1936). Although this story is set in Africa, it contains a flashback sequence set in Constantinople during the allied occupation of the city. Among other things, the narrator of Hemingway’s story remembers how “he had whored the whole time” during his visit to Constantinople and recounts a fight over “a hot Armenian slut” who “slung her belly against him so it almost scalded” (Hemingway, 1997/1936: 67). Are these nightlife flashbacks in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” grounded in Hemingway’s own experience of the sex trade in the Near East during his fall 1922 visit? If so,this seedy side of Hemingway’s sojourn deserves to be explored further. Where in the Sixth District were the nightclubs, bars, and brothels described in the nightlife flashbacks located, and how many did Hemingway himself visit during his three-week sojourn in the Queen of Cities?
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.
“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:
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.
I will resume my series on “Hemingway in Istanbul” on Monday; in the meantime, below is the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, one of my father’s favorite songs. This version features 75 musicians on the Island and in exile. May our beloved Republic of Cuba be free one day soon! Hat tip: Gustavo G.
(Today, 2 Nov., is Día de los Muertos.)
I will resume my series on “Hemingway in Istanbul” in the next day or two; in the meantime, check out this short but informative video by Jared Dees a/k/a “The Religion Teacher” explaining the meaning of All Saints’ Day:
“In the station are a jam of porters, hotel runners, and Anglo-Levantine gentlemen in slightly soiled collars, badly soiled white trousers, garlicized breaths and hopeful manners who hope to be hired as interpreters…. I called a porter, gave him my bags, and told him, ‘Hotel de Londres’ ….” (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)
That is Ernest Hemingway’s description of his arrival in Constantinople, first published in the 18 October 1922 edition of The Toronto Daily Star under the headline “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister.” His first footsteps inside the Queen of Cities would have been in the main railway station, which was then called Müşir Ahmet Pasha Station, in the Sirkeci neighborhood of Istanbul, where Hemingway would have disembarked on that fall day in 1922.
This railway station was the eastern terminus of the famed Orient Express connecting Western Europe with the Near East. Hemingway had boarded the original “Simplon Orient Express” at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on September 25, most likely travelled through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (see, e.g., Pangere 2024) before finally arriving in Constantinople on September 30. In all, Hemingway’s journey would have taken 80 hours and covered 3,094 kilometers. (Ibid.)
A temporary train station was first built in Sirkeci in the 1870s when Sultan Abdülhamit II allowed a stretch of track to be built through the gardens skirting Topkapi Palace. (Thrifty Traveller 2013). The railway line connecting Istanbul to the outside world ran along the shoreline of the Sea of Marmara. Ibid.) Abdülhamit II then appointed a Prussian architect, August Jasmund, to design a new permanent train station to replace a temporary one built in 1873. (See Turkish State Railways n.d.) Construction began on February 11, 1888, and was completed in 1890. (The station officially opened to the public on November 3, 1890. Ibid.) Among the building’s state-of-the-art innovations are gas lighting and heating provided by large tile stoves made in Austria.
According to one scholar and travel blogger (Caroline Swicegood 2017), Istanbul’s main railway station became “one of the best-known examples of European Orientalism, the general term for Western adaptations of architecture in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the Eastern world.” The train station featured turrets, many restaurants, and a beer garden: “On both sides of the middle entrance, there were turret clocks, three big restaurants, a large beer-garden, and an outdoor restaurant behind the station,” and “[t]he sea was reaching to the building foot and terraces led down to the sea.” (Turkish State Railways n.d.). Alas, according to one contemporary source (Thrifty Traveller 2013), the beer garden and outdoor restaurants in front of the station on terraces leading down to the sea are now gone, for they have been replaced by “a petrol station and a busy highway”, which blocks direct access to the waterfront.”
The old and glamorous eastern terminus of the Orient Express is now called “Sirkeci Station” (Sirkeci Garı) and is a local railway line only. Alas, the original Orient Express stopped running to Istanbul on May 19, 1977, and all international connections to Sirkeci Station stopped in May 2013. (Pangere 2024) Today, Sirkeci is a touristy waterfront area located on the tip of Istanbul’s historic peninsula, near the confluence of the Golden Horn with the southern entrance of the Bosphorus strait and the Sea of Marmara, just northwest of Gülhane Park and the Topkapı Palace. During the Byzantine period, Sirkeci was known as “Prosphorion” (Προσφόριον), and it contained a busy harbor, which no longer exists. (Ibid.) It is unlikely, however, that Hemingway spent much time Sirkeci, since, by his account, he hailed a taxi directly to his lodgings, the Hotel de Londres, which is still in existence in the Pera district of the city across the Galata Bridge.
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.
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