Like Moscow, Constantinople had its own religious “soundscape” that showed visitors how far they had traveled. Instead of a chorus of church bells marking the daily round of services, here it was a single male voice from atop a minaret calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. The muezzin would begin with a mellifluous tenor chant—“Allahu Akbar,” “God is Great”—that would draw out into a long, oscillating slide, slowly soaring and descending, like a seagull riding a breeze over the Golden Horn. The muezzin’s final words— “La ilaha illa Allah,” “There is no god except the One God”—would then fade and dissolve in the crash of the city’s background noise: the clatter of cart wheels and hooves on cobblestones, trams banging and squealing, automobile klaxons blaring as drivers raced through narrow streets, vendors shrieking out the virtues of their wares.
Just walking up the steep streets from Galata to Pera was like passing through an ethnic kaleidoscope. Harold Armstrong, one of the many English officers who served in the Allied military administration of the city, captured this impression (even though he viewed it with an Occidental’s superciliousness).
There were long-bearded Armenian priests with rusty gowns and chimney-pot hats, and Greek priests in top-hats with the brims knocked off and dirty shabby boots sticking out from under dingy gowns. There were hodjas [Muslim schoolmasters] in turbans, Turks and French colonial troops in fezes. There were slit-eyed Kalmucks, great gaunt eunuchs, Turkish bloods of the Effendi and Pasha [lord and master] class, men with hats on, as in London, men with black astrakan brimless caps on, just as in Teheran or Tiflis. There were women in veils and women in hats, and street vendors and beggars with horrors of open sores and mutilated limbs asking for alms. Some loitered talking and sucking cigarettes. The rest elbowed and rushed, twisted, turned and butted me off the narrow pavements into the complicated medley of vehicles in the road. Everywhere there was confusion, noise and bustle.
A sight that especially astounded many visitors was the city’s “hamals,” traditional porters who carried enormous loads on their backs, be it hundreds of pounds of coal, a freshly killed beef carcass, or a new bureau measuring twelve by four feet and filling the entire narrow street so that pedestrians had to squeeze into doorways to let it pass.
The Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn that linked the European districts with Muslim Stambul on the other side showed most spectacularly the city’s mix of cultures. Visitors would go to the bridge just to observe the great parade of people wending their way across: Turks, Tatars, Kurds, Georgians, Arabs, Russians, Jews; sailors from American warships, Gypsies in tattered robes, Persians in high fur caps. On any given day, one could see a Circassian from the Caucasus in a tunic with rows of cartridge pockets and a sheathed dagger in his belt, a French Catholic Sister of Charity in her billowing black robes, or an old Turk with a bit of green on his turban to show that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The transport on the bridge was as varied as the population: modern automobiles, wagons drawn by horses and oxen, mules hauling baskets, even occasional caravans of camels.
Once across the bridge, however, the crowds and racket melted away. In 1919, Stambul was still the home of old Muslim Turkish traditions, with narrow, quiet, shaded streets; the upper floors of the weathered two-and three-story wooden houses, shuttered and jutting out over passersby, dimmed the light even more. In Stambul life turned inward, and at night the quarter was silent and seemed deserted. But at its heart, concentrated in a space less than a mile long, are Constantinople’s grandest and most cherished monuments from the past, and what Frederick saw then, one can still see today. In the middle soars Hagia Sophia, built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century, once the patriarchal basilica of Eastern Christianity, and converted into a mosque by the Ottomans after their conquest in the fifteenth century. Facing it like an echo in stone is the vast, blue-tiled seventeenth-century Mosque of Sultan Ahmed, its rising cascade of domes guarded by six minarets. And on Seraglio Point, jutting into the Bosporus, sprawls Topkapi Palace—a maze of pavilions, galleries, and courtyards that was the residence of the sultans for four hundred years, before the Dolmabahçe Palace was built in the nineteenth century. The glories of the Ottoman past, and remnants of Byzantine architectural marvels, were everywhere in Stambul. Then as now, no visit to the quarter could end without a foray into its Grand Bazaar—a labyrinthine covered market encompassing scores of streets and thousands of shops, all piled high with a riot of goods.
Like the European quarter where Frederick settled, Constantinople’s postwar history also seemed fashioned to fit his needs. The Allies began their occupation only days after the armistice, with the British taking control of Pera. The French got Galata, as well as Stambul. The Italians were in Scutari, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Because the Americans had not been at war with Turkey, they did not administer any territory, but their activities and interests were also concentrated in Pera; in fact, the American embassy and consulate general were only a few dozen steps from the Pera Palace Hotel, where Frederick stayed at first.
The Allies also arrived with plans to stay. They had agreed among themselves to carve up the vast Ottoman Empire, leaving only the core of Anatolia to the Turks, and to divide its mineral-and oil-rich territories by drawing lines across maps without regard to who lived where. The affected areas included present-day Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, and we live to this day with the consequences of those decisions. Constantinople itself would be transformed into an international city, resembling what Shanghai had been in China since the nineteenth century. To secure their position and to intimidate the defeated Turks, the Allies brought a fleet of several dozen warships to the Bosporus and anchored them off the Dolmabahçe Palace.
Thousands of British, French, Italian, and American officers, soldiers, sailors, diplomats, and businessmen poured into the city, and the nature of commerce in Pera changed accordingly. Many of the military arrivals were single men who brought with them an appetite for wine, women, and song. Such interests were inimical to conservative Turkish Muslim culture, but the liberal, Europeanized districts were happy to satisfy them. And it is doubtful that there was anyone in Constantinople in the spring of 1919 with more or better experience in this line of work than Frederick.
The historical and social forces swirling through the city had thus created another charmed circle, one within which Frederick could try to reproduce the world that had made him rich and famous in Moscow. He would have to deal with the American diplomats and their racism, but Jenkins’s acceptance of him in Odessa set a precedent that he could try to build on in the future.
Frederick also had the consolation that for the Turks and other natives of Constantinople, his race was of no concern. The Ottoman Empire had stretched from North Africa to Europe to the Near East and into Asia; it was racially heterogeneous and parsed the world very differently than white America did. A Turk who met Frederick would want to know first if he was a Muslim or not and after learning that he was a Christian would not care at all that he was married to a white Christian woman. In fact, black Africans had regularly risen to high positions at the Turkish sultan’s court. The Ottoman language, which was replaced by modern Turkish only in 1928, did not even have a special word for “Negro” in the American sense; it used “Arap,” or “Arab,” for anyone who was dark-skinned. (The African-American writer James Baldwin would discover that this tradition was still alive in Istanbul as late as the 1960s.) History had uprooted Frederick from Russia very painfully, but the place of exile that it had chosen for him was unique in the world at the time. He had been given a remarkable second chance.