The New Year party where time jumped forward nearly 600 years
By Maureen O’Hare, CNN
Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) — If you dreamed of holding one of history’s most seismic New Year parties, one capable of ripping through six centuries of time and uniting the chronology of a whole country at the stroke of midnight, you’d choose a ballroom like this.
When the Champagne popped in this room on December 31, 1925, Turkey officially abolished the Rumi calendar, which was pinned to the year 1341, and instantly woke up in the Western Gregorian year of 1926. It was a literal 585-year chronological leap, executed overnight.
To pull off such a feat, you need a worthy venue. The Grand Pera Ballroom in the Pera Palace Hotel exactly fits the bill: a gleaming line of crystal chandeliers suspended from Belle Époque-style gold-leaf ceiling medallions, gilded cornices, floral moldings, ivory woodwork and floor-to-ceiling curtains with enough sumptuous fabric to make a dozen ballgowns.
Built in 1892 to host passengers arriving in Istanbul on the Orient Express long-distance train service, the hotel was a place of pioneering luxury. It was the first establishment in Istanbul to provide electricity and hot water outside of the Ottoman palaces, and it was home to the second electric elevator in Europe (the first being in the Eiffel Tower.)
By the time it hosted Turkey’s first-ever Western New Year’s Eve party to ring in that gigantic chronological jump, the hotel was, in a city famously described as the meeting point between east and west, the global crossroads within a global crossroads.
While the six-story Neoclassical landmark on a hillside in the lively Beyoğlu district, overlooking the natural harbor of the Golden Horn has seen its clientele change over the years, its original sumptuous design by architect Alexander Vallaury has been well preserved by its two renovations in 2010 and 2014.
In Beyoğlu, the narrow streets are jammed with cars and yellow taxis, revelers spill out onto the hillside steps from busy bars, and vintage red trams move through the throng of pedestrians day and night on nearby İstiklal Avenue.
However, past the uniformed doormen and through the Pera Palace’s revolving door lies an opulent Art Nouveau time capsule with Ottoman accents. The marble walls and columns impress with grandeur, but the red velvet furnishings and soft light from the chandeliers are soft and welcoming. The guests, mostly older Americans and Europeans, flit between the patisserie, the lounge and the Orient Bar.
Greta Garbo and Jackie O
The hotel’s history is inextricably bound to the birth of the modern Turkish nation under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks.” It’s also welcomed 20th-century icons from cinema, literature and politics.
“This is the elevator that our founding father Mustafa Kemal has used, Agatha Christie has used, Alfred Hitchcock has used,” says Ezgi Pek, the hotel’s marketing coordinator, as the surprisingly spacious dark-wood elevator trundles up through the building’s six floors. A red velvet banquette lines the rear, so that VIPs of yore need not endure one minute without seated luxury.
The roll call of celebrated guests is long. There are pink-curtained rooms dedicated to Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and suites in honor of dancer-spy Mata Hari and writers Ernest Hemingway and Pierre Loti. The cinematic Hitchcock suite has silver curtains and bedding while Christie’s Room 411 has a replica of her typewriter. The English mystery writer is rumored to have written her 1934 novel “Murder on the Orient Express” during a stay here, but the hotel had already been at the center of plenty of real-life drama.
The early 20th century was a time of unprecedented turmoil across the continents of Europe and Asia. In the 40 or so short years since the hotel’s official opening in 1895, it had witnessed the reigns of three Ottoman sultans, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of the Turkish Republic.
After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I, Allied forces used the hotel as their unofficial headquarters during their occupation of Istanbul from 1918 to 1923. Added to this mix, the Pera Palace was filled with Russian émigrés fleeing the Revolution of 1917 and selling family heirlooms to keep afloat. Atatürk was then an Ottoman military commander and was a frequent visitor at the Pera Palace.
“It’s very important to show how important this building is for the history of Turkey,” says Pek of the hotel’s unique legacy that inspired Charles King’s non-fiction book “Midnight at the Pera Palace,” as well as a time-traveling Netflix drama series of the same name, loosely based on King’s book.
‘Little Europe’
“Around the 1870s there are two big fires around the area, because all the houses were the wooden houses,” says Pek. The loss of the older Ottoman-style buildings cleared the way for the building of grand new boulevards and a rebirth of the neighborhood, including the construction of the Pera Palace.
Pera, as the area was then known, comes from the Greek for “over there.” The center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire was across the waters of the Golden Horn, while Pera — home to an eclectic mix of communities — earned the nickname of “Little Europe.” The area’s Westernized ways gained it a reputation for parties and permissiveness — and the third “p” that marked the age was politics.
By the beginning of the 20th century, no major power “faced the near-constant uprisings, rebellions, and guerrilla campaigns that confronted the aging Sultan Abdülhamid II,” writes King in “Midnight at the Pera Palace.” “The number of informants was so great that a sign in the Pera Palace reportedly requested government agents to yield seats in the lounge to paying guests.”
The Netflix drama series is set at the hotel during the Allied occupation, with the plot centred around a modern-day journalist who time-travels back to 1919 and must prevent an assassination attempt on Atatürk.
The end of the Ottoman Empire and formation of the Turkish Republic brought sweeping changes across the country, but the shift that was most emblematic of the transformation was Turkey’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar in December 1925. Before Saudi Arabia made the switch in 2016, Turkey was the last country in the world to make this transition. (Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan are the four countries left which do not use it as their civil calendar).
Before the Champagne popped at midnight in the Grand Pera Ballroom, never before had all Turks “marked exactly the same hour, month and year,” writes King. While the republican government still numbered the year from the Rumi calendar, various communities used their own tracking. “Greek Orthodox used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Western, or Gregorian one, observant Jews followed their own lunar reckoning. Pious Muslims counted days according to sunrise, sunset, and the calls to prayer.”
The Pera Palace defines itself as a museum-hotel and is recognized in Turkey as a historical monument. Its hallways are filled with displays from its colorful past, including a sedan chair which once carried wealthy guests directly from the Orient Express train to the hotel.
The rail age and time travel
The Orient Express, launched in 1883, was a pioneer in long-distance, international rail travel and linked Paris to Istanbul in less than 76 hours. The advent of rail travel in the 19th century was a catalyst for the adoption of standardized time in countries around the world, to put an end to the chaos of towns and stations having non-uniform local times. While global time zones now seem solid and immutable, they are a relatively new concept. The world’s first standardized time arrangement, “railway time,” was introduced by the Great Western Railway in England as recently as November 1840.
The most sought-after rooms at the Pera Palace are those whose French balconies look out over the Golden Horn. “We got an extraordinary sunset last night on arrival,” says Barbara Pool over breakfast in the Agatha Restaurant. She’s in Istanbul on vacation from running her own hotel with a colorful past: the Casa De La Noche, a former bordello in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her friend and bridge partner Mike Pope chose the Pera Palace for their visit “because it’s a historic site” and he’d previously visited the hotel’s Atatürk museum, in Room 101.
The Kubelli Lounge is the jewel in the Pera Palace Hotel’s crown, with its domed ceilings, marble walls and antique furniture. This is the setting for the hotel’s famed Afternoon Tea, a lavish buffet-style arrangement of desserts and savory treats which, at $80 a head, is relatively good value for three hours of high-end grazing. For overnight stays, service isn’t always at the level one might expect from a five-star — this Grande Dame can get a little scatty in her old age — but with rooms starting at $250 it’s at a lower price point than many of Istanbul’s newer luxury offerings and with a great deal more character.
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