On February 8, 1919, the French general Franchet d' Espèrey entered the city on a white horse, emulating Mehmed the Conqueror's entrance in 1453 after the Fall of Constantinople, signifying that Ottoman sovereignty over the imperial city was over.
Conversely, thousands of soldiers of all ranks from the Czar's army had long been scattered into the least expected and most excruciating jobs at hotels, concert halls, cabarets, gambling houses, restaurants, bars, café chantants, movie theatres, beaches, nightclubs and streets. They washed dishes and carried trays in restaurants, worked as croupiers in gambling houses jam-packed with lies, peddled dolls at street corners, provided piano accompaniment to cabaret dancers in boisterous entertainment halls. Every corner was appropriated and each job filled. Amidst this chaos, Count General Pavel Pavlovich Antipov tried to find his way with steps as shaky as those of a new born foal learning to walk on its trembling legs. After looking around for weeks on end, the only job he could finally find was that of a checkroom attendant in a café chantant - a place frequented by arrogant French and English officers out with their delicate, sable-coated, cherry-lipsticked lovers; by sybarite Italian painters carving Eastern gravures with women always portrayed as being pasty and plump and streets as shady and snaky; by glum Jewish bankers in need of pumping loans to the palace so that they could get back the ones previously provided; by profligate Turkish young men satiated with the wealth inherited but insatiable in spending it; by spies not letting anything slip away even when blind drunk; by bohemians, dandies and all those lost souls in search of lust or adventure.
Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918-1923
by Nur Bilge Criss
Middle East Quarterly
December 1999
Reviewed by Daniel Pipes
The Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire in 1914 made the monumentally wrong-headed (and completely gratuitous) error of joining the Entente in World War I, a decision that left their empire defeated and dismembered four years later. Perhaps the most painful specific consequence was the occupation of the imperial capital at Istanbul in November 1918 by British and other forces, where they remained until October 1923. Although this occupation came to a fairly quick end, at the time the combination of the loser's despondence and the victors' anger (the British high commissioner wrote of the need "to show no kind of favour whatsoever to any Turk and to hold out no hope for them") made it seem like the foreigners would remain for a very long time. The reasons why it did not last for even five years, due to the military force of the Turkish nationalists led by Kemal Atatürk, is the subject of Criss' thoroughly researched and elegant study.
She points to several main factors in ending the occupation: British underestimation of the Turks, the Turkish nationalists' inheriting intact institutions from the Ottomans and their ability to put together a government in Ankara, the weakness of the nationalists' domestic opponents, and the dissension that splintered the Allied forces. The first is perhaps the most interesting of these factors, because it still has relevance for current politics: Westerners, both on the ground and at a distance, tended to assume that the Turks would submit to Allied domination with what one British Foreign Ministry official termed "sulky fatalism." But there was no chance of this, Criss concludes from a close scrutiny of the Turkish sources: "The war was not over as far as the leaders of the CUP [i.e., the Young Turks] were concerned."...
