
Midnight at the Pera Palace
The Birth of Modern Istanbul
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Charles King
At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock.
Yet in Istanbul - an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city - people were looking toward an uncertain future. Never purely Turkish, Istanbul was home to generations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, as well as Muslims. It welcomed White Russian nobles ousted by the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik assassins on the trail of the exiled Leon Trotsky, German professors, British diplomats, and American entrepreneurs - a multicultural panoply of performers and poets, do-gooders and ne'er-do-wells. During the Second World War, thousands of Jews fleeing occupied Europe found passage through Istanbul, some with the help of the future Pope John XXIII. At the Pera Palace, Istanbul's most luxurious hotel, so many spies mingled in the lobby that the manager posted a sign asking them to relinquish their seats to paying guests.
With beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world and reshaped the meaning of cosmopolitanism.
©2014 Charles King (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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A wide-ranging exploration of a fascinating city
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Interesting story of Istanbul in 20th century
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Rambling narratives
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good book dBm 9 smothers sign up for
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The birth of modern-day Istanbul
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Probably Better in Hard Copy
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Perhaps the book would be more accurately described by using its subtitle "The Birth of Modern Istanbul" as the Pera Palace disappears from large parts of the book. But King gave me an understanding of the change of the Turks primary definition of themselves from a religious (Muslim) culture to a national culture.
I also learned about the movement of White Russians to Istanbul and the efforts of some (including Angelo Roncalli, later to be Pope John XXIII) to allow the Jews to escape the Holocaust, and other things.This book expanded my comprehension of this time and this place
birth of a nation-state
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A long read
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Excellent
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Outstanding glimse into istanbul n modern turkey
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