the U.S. embassy in the Italian villa Palazzo Corpi in the mornings so he could escape to his naval yacht, the USS Scorpion, in the afternoons.
The city was crowded, noisy, and unbearably hot, and the streets smelled of a nauseating stew of garbage, sewage, and grilled meat. Even in the fashionable embassy district along the Grand Rue de Pera, street vendors shouted, wood carts clanged over the narrow side streets that cascaded down cobbled steps, beggars harangued tourists, and men with tiny uniformed monkeys and tin cups banged their tambourines.
Bristol’s routine, when he could manage it, was to finish his meetings and written reports in the early afternoon, then ride in his admiral’s barge to the Scorpion, a sleek two-masted motor vessel moored six miles up the Bosporus at Therapia, an old Greek resort town of blue and pink mansions where he kept his yacht as a summer residence. There was often a cool breeze at Therapia that lifted off the Black Sea, and it was a pleasant place to sit on the deck with an iced drink or play tennis in the dappled shade of the giant plane and eucalyptus trees.
Constantinople in 1922 was a heaving and rotting city of a millionand a half people—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians, Circassians, Arabs, Persians, Albanians, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Tartars, and Kalmucks—among others. It was also the temporary home of a hundred thousand Russian refugees, poor soldiers as well as Russian officers and aristocrats, men and women, who had fled Soviet Russia in 1919 and 1920 after the defeat of White Russians in the civil war that had followed the Bolshevik revolution. The Russian refugees were packed into wooden barracks, cheap boardinghouses, and hotels. Russian soldiers, wearing their tsar’s army medals on their tunics, sold paper flowers along the streets to get coins for food, and elegant Russian women whose families had owned country estates waited on tables and sang Russian folk songs for tips in restaurants—the Muscovite and Maxim’s were two American favorites. Maxim’s was owned by a black American who had left his restaurant in Moscow and come to Constantinople with his White Russian wife.
The Bosporus, a thirty-mile natural canal of southward-rushing water, divides Constantinople between Asia and Europe. The Bosporus connects the Black Sea to the turquoise basin called the Sea of Marmara, which in turn flows into the Mediterranean by way of a thirty-eight-mile slim passage called the Dardanelles. The Bosporus is a maritime anomaly of two flows—fresh water on the surface moving from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and salt water at the bottom moving from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Gorged by the great rivers of Europe (Danube, Dniester, Dnieper), the Black Sea is twenty inches higher than the Mediterranean; the Bosporus is the geological pipe that connects the two, swollen by swift water and swirling currents.
Constantinople sits at the terminus of the Bosporus. Bisected by the river, the city is fissured yet again by a deep inlet on the European side—the Golden Horn. So it is a metropolis of three parts—on the European side, Pera, which in 1922 was the redoubt of Europeans, embassies, including the Palazzo Corpi, hotels, cafés, and brothels; and Stamboul—the site of the old walled city of Christian Byzantium and location of the St. Sophia Mosque. In 1922, the two parts of the city were connected by the floating Galata Bridge, a span first erected in the sixth century by Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great. On the Asiatic side of theBosporus lay Scutari—in 1922, the dense urban aggregation of oriental Anatolia. After World War I, Constantinople was a whispering city of down-market intrigue: “The Bosporus,” wrote a navy intelligence officer, “was a dumping of all Europe’s war crooks and spies.”
Punctilious and ordered, Bristol maintained a crisp military demeanor even in Constantinople’s torpor, which was particularly
The city was crowded, noisy, and unbearably hot, and the streets smelled of a nauseating stew of garbage, sewage, and grilled meat. Even in the fashionable embassy district along the Grand Rue de Pera, street vendors shouted, wood carts clanged over the narrow side streets that cascaded down cobbled steps, beggars harangued tourists, and men with tiny uniformed monkeys and tin cups banged their tambourines.
Bristol’s routine, when he could manage it, was to finish his meetings and written reports in the early afternoon, then ride in his admiral’s barge to the Scorpion, a sleek two-masted motor vessel moored six miles up the Bosporus at Therapia, an old Greek resort town of blue and pink mansions where he kept his yacht as a summer residence. There was often a cool breeze at Therapia that lifted off the Black Sea, and it was a pleasant place to sit on the deck with an iced drink or play tennis in the dappled shade of the giant plane and eucalyptus trees.
Constantinople in 1922 was a heaving and rotting city of a millionand a half people—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians, Circassians, Arabs, Persians, Albanians, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Tartars, and Kalmucks—among others. It was also the temporary home of a hundred thousand Russian refugees, poor soldiers as well as Russian officers and aristocrats, men and women, who had fled Soviet Russia in 1919 and 1920 after the defeat of White Russians in the civil war that had followed the Bolshevik revolution. The Russian refugees were packed into wooden barracks, cheap boardinghouses, and hotels. Russian soldiers, wearing their tsar’s army medals on their tunics, sold paper flowers along the streets to get coins for food, and elegant Russian women whose families had owned country estates waited on tables and sang Russian folk songs for tips in restaurants—the Muscovite and Maxim’s were two American favorites. Maxim’s was owned by a black American who had left his restaurant in Moscow and come to Constantinople with his White Russian wife.
The Bosporus, a thirty-mile natural canal of southward-rushing water, divides Constantinople between Asia and Europe. The Bosporus connects the Black Sea to the turquoise basin called the Sea of Marmara, which in turn flows into the Mediterranean by way of a thirty-eight-mile slim passage called the Dardanelles. The Bosporus is a maritime anomaly of two flows—fresh water on the surface moving from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and salt water at the bottom moving from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Gorged by the great rivers of Europe (Danube, Dniester, Dnieper), the Black Sea is twenty inches higher than the Mediterranean; the Bosporus is the geological pipe that connects the two, swollen by swift water and swirling currents.
Constantinople sits at the terminus of the Bosporus. Bisected by the river, the city is fissured yet again by a deep inlet on the European side—the Golden Horn. So it is a metropolis of three parts—on the European side, Pera, which in 1922 was the redoubt of Europeans, embassies, including the Palazzo Corpi, hotels, cafés, and brothels; and Stamboul—the site of the old walled city of Christian Byzantium and location of the St. Sophia Mosque. In 1922, the two parts of the city were connected by the floating Galata Bridge, a span first erected in the sixth century by Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great. On the Asiatic side of theBosporus lay Scutari—in 1922, the dense urban aggregation of oriental Anatolia. After World War I, Constantinople was a whispering city of down-market intrigue: “The Bosporus,” wrote a navy intelligence officer, “was a dumping of all Europe’s war crooks and spies.”
Punctilious and ordered, Bristol maintained a crisp military demeanor even in Constantinople’s torpor, which was particularly
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