THD can sum up Istanbul's character in a word, byzantine. The city is a wormwood of streets, passages, and bazaars, which also describes the know-how to know how to navigate the place.
The one hotel that encapsulates this spirit is the Pera Palace Hotel Jumeirah, because of it's long history, celebrated guest list (Mata Hari, Josephine Baker, Edward VIII, and Sarah Bernhardt, among others), and a grand lobby (below) as well as an interior lobby whose shadowy corners and dusky atmosphere still convey a sense of the intrigue that marked the place through three wars, One, Two, and Cold, as well as the Interwar decades.
Among the Pera's famous guests was a great creator of detective fiction, Agatha Christie, a regular guest from 1926-1932. Her preferred room, 411, is now the Agatha Christie Suite, a bedroom done in rich crimson and Burgundy brocade, her favorite colors, with a replica of her typewriter on the desk. (She did not write Murder on the
Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, lodged in Suite 101, which is now a museum dedicated to him. Ernest Hemingway was a denizen of the hotel after World War One, when he was a military reporter. In 1922, he stayed in a 20-series suite (below) because it overlooked a street used by the military when moving troops. The room was his spy crow's nest.
The hotel also turns up in fiction. The main character of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Harry, stays in the Pera Palace. As do Henry Pulling and his aunt Augusta Bertram in Graham Greene's fabulous comic novel Travels With My Aunt. The one fictional character who you'd think would have stayed at the Pera but didn't was Christie's Hercule Poirot. She lodged him at the Pera Palace's then great competitor, the Tokatlian, which no longer exists.
The Pera Palace was born to intrigue: It was built by the Eastern & Orient Express Railway in 1892 to fill a market niche: A luxury hotel for its passengers disembarking from the Venice-Simplon Orient Express. It was also a harbinger of modernism, Turkey's first building, outside of the Ottoman palaces, to have electricity, the country's first hotel to provide hot running water, and its first hotel (and the second one in Europe) to have an electric elevator, which is still running (next page). It's the cage-style elevator that you find in Hitchcock films (he stayed at the Pera, too). According to the hotel, it costs a small fortune to maintain. The hotel still contains 198 original pieces of furniture, and most rooms, no matter the category, have one of them.
The Pera Palace stands on a rise across the Golden Horn from the Old City--Pera in Turkish means "over there" or "the other side," which was the shorthand directional to the Beyoglu district. Beyoglu, and in particular Galata, became the European enclave, and it is still home to most European consulates, which is why the hotel became such a crossroads for celebrities, diplomats, spies, and shady people.
The Pera Palace has been through its share of reversals of fortune, nicely narrated in Midnight at the Pera Palace, but now stands on a solid foundation, courtesy of the top-to-bottom renovation from 2006-2010 by Jumeirah.
For all of the intrigue that went on in the lobby, the room layout is simple to grasp. The rooms to get are the Golden Horn-view rooms, the 01 to 09 series, most of which are Deluxe Doubles (good space, great walk-in shower). The lower the number, the more of the old city (and the minarets of the major mosques) that you'll see.
Many of the name suites are more mystique than view. The Agatha Christie Suite and the other 11-series look up a major traffic artery. The six Garbo Suites (the 12-series)--she stayed at the Pera while shooting a movie in 1924--are on a back corner of the hotel, perfect if you vant to be alone. (THD loved the rose-colored decor, Garbo's favorite hue.) The Hemingway Suites look at buildings across the road, but have a nice period sense.
The 01-series are the big suites, and have the best views of the Golden Horn and over to the Old City. Number 401 is the Presidential, nicely understated here and with a straight-on view of the Blue Mosque. Number 601 is the art-deco Piano Suite (below). Then there are the grand King Edward VIII and Emperor Franz Joseph Suites. The Piano Suite is intimate, the other two regal. Know thyself.
And isn't that the essence of intrigue?
