The Great Riot of Istanbul
(Sunday Times, September 11, 1955)
From Ian Fleming, Special Representative of The Sunday Times at the International Police Conference.
This week’s great riot of Istanbul—the worst insurrection in the history of modern Turkey—is a reminder that Great Britain is very fortunate in being an Island nation. She has never built up those hatreds that fester between neighbours in a suburban street and lead to fisticuffs and end up in court and a shameful half column in the evening paper—the hatreds that gather and come to a head between two families or even two generations in the same house, and that sometimes end in murder—the hatreds between Arab and Jew, German and Frenchman, Pole and Russian, Turk and Greek.
This was to have been a great week for Turkey. Obedient to the undying memory of Ataturk, she has continued to mould her destiny away from the East and towards the West, perhaps in defiance of her stars and certainly in defiance of her true personality, which is at least three-quarters oriental.
To begin with, she successfully changed her spots. She abolished the fez, the harem, her Sultans. (Only twelve eunuchs remain in the “Association of Former Eunuchs” that held its annual reunion here last Sunday. Thirty years ago there were one hundred and ninety. Fifty years ago the Sultan had four thousand.)
She turned her fabulous palaces—and they really are fabulous—into museums. She imported large quantities of French and English culture, German machinery and American taxicabs. She played her cards carefully during the last war. Then she joined N.A.T.O. She bolstered her currency with a tough exchange rate (difficult and dangerous for the operators).
The educated Turk became a carefully dressed provincial Frenchman with a Homburg and a briefcase and a ballpoint pen. Mr. Conrad Hilton, a man who considers even England a bad risk for an hotel, built the Istanbul Hilton, the most fabulous modern hotel in Europe. The International conference delegates flocked, like the quail whose season opens also this week, into the Golden Gates and this was to be the sixty-four dollar week in a record season.
This week would surely have made the recently joined member of the European Club eligible, even for the committee, for the prospect of busy modern Istanbul would surely please even those most sensitive confidential agents of the modern State—the police and the economists.
On Monday in an atmosphere of friendly efficiency began the Twenty-fourth General Assembly of the International Police Commission (Interpol), and the police chiefs of the world went into a conclave on such matters affecting the public safety as I described last Sunday. That was Monday. On Wednesday the 200 delegates to the conference of the International Monetary Fund started coming in to discuss that very delicate matter, the credit of nations—including the credit of Turkey. Between these two days the Turkish Common Man broke out from behind Turkey’s smile of welcome and reduced Istanbul to a shambles.
On Wednesday morning martial law was declared, and the official Interpol lunch arranged by the Chief of Police of Istanbul had to be cancelled as its venue, a restaurant, had been razed to the ground. That evening the heads of the police of fifty-two countries, after getting off cables to their wives, were confined for their safety to their hotels. There, with the banker economists of the International Monetary Fund, the two congresses lugubriously danced at the centre of the curfew.
The whole damage, a small fraction of which I witnessed, was done in eight hours of darkness by the peaceful light of a three-quarter moon. At six o’clock the fuse of hatred against the Greeks that had been creeping through the years reached the powder with reports that Ataturk’s birthplace at Salonika had been bombed by Greek terrorists. (In fact only a window had been broken by a bomb thrown at the Turkish consulate on Salonika. The proprietor of the leading evening paper and his editor are among the 2,000 rioters now under arrest.)
Spontaneously on both sides of the Bosphorus in every noisome alley and smart boulevard hatred erupted and ran through the streets like lava.
Several times during that night curiosity sucked me out of the safety of the Hilton Hotel and down into the city, where mobs went howling through the streets, each under its streaming red flag with the white star and sickle moon. Occasional bursts of shouting rose out of the angry murmur of the crowds, then would come the crash of plate-glass and perhaps part of a scream.
A car went out of control and charged the yelling crowd and the yells changed to screams and gesticulating hands showed briefly as the bodies went down before it. And over all there was the trill of the ambulances and the whistling howl of the new police cars imported from America.
When, nauseated, I finally got back to my hotel a muddy, tough-looking squadron of cavalry were guarding the approaches, but they never fired their 1914-18 Mausers and I think there was no shooting by either side during the riot. It was a night of the long staves and these were quickly put away at dawn when the Sherman tanks came in and the first Turkish Division got a grip of the town. For it is broken, and millions of pounds’ worth of damage was done that night. Countless businessmen are wiped out. Including several British merchants, and the Consulate and the rest of the British community are rallying to their help.
And now the normal disorder of Istanbul is being re-established and on a higher level Ankara and Athens are doing their own mopping-up. In a day or two the police chiefs and their cohorts will depart. As for Turkey, her splendid progress in the International game of snakes and ladders has suffered. She has landed on a snake and must now go back and wait patiently until she can throw a six and get back into the game again.
Commentary: Since Turkey is back in the news and in turmoil again, this seemed like a good time to share Fleming’s eyewitness report. Some background information on how he ended up in the eye of the storm:
In September 1955 Fleming accompanied joined Sir Ronald Howe, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, to Istanbul for the International Police (Interpol) Conference.
Bond fans might remember that Howe had appeared in Moonraker as Superintendent Ronnie Vallance (the surname was that of Fleming’s accountant, Vallance Lodge). After From Russia With Love was published, Howe glowingly reviewed it for the Sunday Times and called Fleming was called “the most readable and highly polished writer of adventure stories to have appeared since the war.” But, Andrew Lycett revealed decades later, Howe’s review was actually written by John Pearson–who had recently graduated from Cambridge before joining the paper.
Like James Bond in From Russia With Love, Fleming flew to Istanbul with a copy of Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios on his knee. Unlike Bond, he avoided the dingy Pera Palace and stayed in the luxurious Hilton. The Interpol conference turned out to be dull and Fleming wrote to Admiral Godfrey ‘The trouble with these policemen is that they have no idea what is really interesting in their jobs and regard criminal matters as really a great bore.’ But on Tuesday, September 6, as the policemen met in the Chalet of Yildiz Palace, the seeds of the riot were germinating.
As Pearson so aptly put it:
Here at last then, in Istanbul, we have Fleming confronted with that face of violence which had haunted and fascinated him since boyhood. Here in reality was what he had written about so many times from his imagination – the smell of death and the tumult of danger – bloodshed, chaos and carnage. And how did he react? He was, he wrote, ‘nauseated’ by what he had seen. …Fleming the symmetrist had seen real violence at last. Fascinated yet appalled by it, he had retreated gratefully to the side of order and tranquillity. For the riot brought out in him the strange quality which was at the root of all his fantasies and all his books – that ‘threat of doom’, that ‘atmosphere of suspense married to horrible acts’ – which he had thrilled to at Eton in the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe and which was really the thrill and horror with which the obsessively ordered mind reacts to apprehensions of chaos.
There is in fact a touch of supreme irony about these few days of his in Istanbul. He had come prepared to gather material for an imaginary act of violence and cruelty. Instead he found the real thing…
The riot played an important role in the making of From Russia With Love, because it introduced Fleming to Nazim Kalkavan, the Oxford-educated shipowner who became the model for Darko Kerim, “one of those rare characters whom Fleming’s hero respects and admires as a fellow spirit," as Pearson notes. The pro-British Kalkavan was horrified by the impression the riot made on foreigners and called at the Hilton the morning after to invite the conference goers to his villa on the Bosphorus. Fleming accepted and the two men quickly became good friends.
“I have rarely met anyone in my life,” Kalkavan said of Fleming, "with so much warmth and with a personality so full of life, an alertness encompassing all. He was always inquiring; we used to have endless talks mooching about the city.” Over the course of several days Kalkavan showed Fleming across town. What they saw was incorporated into From Russia With Love, and Fleming even wrote down his friend’s words to give them to Darko Kerim. The following dialogue by Kalkavan will sound familiar to anyone who’s read the novel:
“I have always smoked and drunk and loved too much. In fact I have lived not too long but too much. One day the Iron Crab will get me. Then I shall have died of living too much. Like all people who have known poverty, my chief pleasures are the best food, the best servants and changing my underclothes every day.”
Perhaps Fleming knew the Iron Crab would get him too.
One last note. I have an additional reason for posting this article–next week I’m flying to Istanbul. Posts in this thread will resume in mid-September.