High Tea at the Pera Palas in Istanbul

Afternoon Tea at the Historic Pera Palas

Savvy, seasoned travelers can argue the best places in the world for High Tea.  In London,  the wonderful establishments, many historical, that offer this 17th century delight are too numerous to list, and there's always the fabulous Victoria Room in Sydney, Australia.  Some may even argue that if you want true tradition, you must experience high tea in one of the former British colonies.  But as for me, I'll take Istanbul and the mysterious Pera Palas any day, or week, or year.  Actually, I do take it, at least once a year.

    You see, High Tea is not just about the scones, sweets, savories, and Earl Gray.  It is about experience, ambience, anachronism, romance, and mystery.  Why just sit for tea and then leave, when you can wander a bit, step back in time, have all your senses stimulated, and dream awhile? I left my colleagues sitting with Earl and wonderful piano music, wandered from the Pera's opulent Kubeli Salon, to the hundred plus year old wooden elevator.

    As it carried me slowly to the fourth floor, I was transported to the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and imagined the famous and often times notorious who had been here before me......and are still here.  The atmosphere is thick, replete with whispers, secret negotiations, deceptions, and decisions that perhaps changed the course of history.   Had Mata Hari ridden this same elevator on her way to a clandestine meeting with a German liaison?  And on one of the floors below had Cicero, the famous spy, handed over invaluable information that turned the tide of Nazi warfare?  Did this same elevator carry Leon Trotsky to secret sessions with other compatriots of the Russian Revolutionary intelligentsia?

    I was shaken from my dream as the attendant stepped out of the elevator, held the door open, and motioned me to follow.  He led me down a red carpeted corridor, turned right down another, and stopped in front of a rather undistinguished door, that he unlocked and opened.  My eyes were immediately drawn to the writing table, sitting there just as she left it.  Years before, Agatha Christie had sat there and written, Murder on the Orient Express.   The Pera Palas was built in 1892 for the clientele of that magnificent railway, with the idea in mind that it must equal in grandeur the Orient Express.  Passengers were dropped off at the train station in the old city and swiftly carried across the Golden Horn in curtained horse drawn carriages right up to the door of the Pera Palas.  Why all the secrecy?  The hotel, just like Istanbul, has an air of mystery and intrigue, of undiscovered secrets, and of history held in place as the ghosts of past players whisk about.  It can be a bit unsettling.

   Closing the door to her room, I walked back towards the lift, preferring this time to take the stairs.  This, too, should be done slowly. The mirrored brass balustrade leads you down wide scarlet carpeted marble steps.  The period furniture on each landing is exquisite, as it is throughout the entire hotel.  The polished woodwork and molding is from bygone days when carpenters took particular care with their craft.  The Pera Palas takes you back through 120 years of history, to Old Constantinople, on a flying carpet.  The ambience is unbelievable as your mind wanders and your senses intensify.  With every step you take the creaking wooden floors remind you that much has gone on here before you.

    Getting back to Afternoon Tea could wait a little longer. On the first and second floors, I wandered past rooms with brass plates on the doors, signifying the famous, the infamous, and the enigmas who had slept in the beds behind. Back at the Kubeli Salon, I peeked in on my friends, so wrapped up in the music and their surroundings, that they hadn't even noticed I'd left.  Entering the historic bar with cushioned chairs arranged in a fashion to encourage one to linger, my mind began to wander again.  Had Ernest Hemingway sat here contemplating the "lost generation" he so vividly captured in his novels?  My eyes swept the bar with it's highly polished brass and wood and antique mirror.  Only then did Hemingway come into focus.  I could see him leaning there, and Greta Garbo upon the barstool, cocktails in hand, emptied glasses on the bar, laughing in ridicule at the expense of some politician, talking derisively of a nation full of shallow people with no direction.  Glimpsing the doorway, Josephine Baker traipses through, exotically clad in a manner that defied acceptability, dog at the end of a jeweled leash.

      But this was not a mere haven for expatriates and Bohemians.  Josip Broz Tito, too, had come here, the one Eastern Bloc head of State courageous enough to defy the Soviet Union and pave a separate path for his country. The Pera Palas  has accommodated European royalty and Prime Ministers, as well as Middle Eastern shahs, pashas, sheiks and princes, actors, First Ladies, writers, and expatriates.  And, it, like the exotic city of Istanbul that surrounds it, has hypnotically attracted me for 35 years.  I do not always stay in the Pera Palas, but it always beckons and lures, usually late in the afternoon, as seagulls glide past minarets decorating an orange and purple sunset.  This is the time and place to relax over High Tea, relish the day's experiences, and plan the evening ahead, like many who have left their indelible mark on history have done before.

Harem: Part 2, The Eunuchs

Sultans retained a large number of eunuchs, sometimes as many as 800, to guard the women of the harem. Once again, keep in mind that I am writing of the most famous harem of all, the Topkapi in Istanbul. Where and how did the sultans get this corps of eunuchs? Most were either non-Muslim prisoners of war or slaves, were castrated before puberty, and spent their entire lives in servitude to the sultan within the latticed walls of the extravagant, labyrinthine harem on the shores of the Bosporus in Istanbul. Or, shall I call it Constantinople? With the exception of the occasional outing, the life of the eunuch was confining, although not nearly so much as that of the odalisques. And let's not forget the all too frequent charge to bundle up a young woman in a sack, leave the halls of the harem, row beyond the shores of the point that contained the massive, exquisitely tiled complex, and dump her into the rapid undercurrents of the Bosporus. Oh, yes. At the bottom of this historic waterway lies the bones of many young women who perhaps came into the bad graces of the sultan's mother, or of women far more powerful within the harem. And what was her particular crime? Perhaps she had just given birth to the sultan's son. Whatever her "crime", life within the harem was precarious, and filled with just as much mystery and intrigue as the secret passages and hidden chambers of the Topkapi Harem itself.


Because eunuchs were so trusted by the sultans, many became quite powerful. Unlike the odalisques, the young women of the harem, eunuchs were well informed of circumstances in the outside world. They stood next to the sultan as he met with foreign dignitaries and were privy to what the king discussed in foreign affairs as well as all the secrets within the palace. Do not forget the story of Esther, and the advice given to her by Hegai, the eunuch, concerning how to gain the favor of King Xerxes, and become queen.

In the beginning, and, once again, I am talking about Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, white slaves from Russia were used as eunuchs. But they had a high mortality rate, so, usually the eunuchs were black. Most came from around the modern day areas of Ethiopia and the Sudan. They were stronger and had more endurance and had a higher survival rate from the castration process. However, their color also proved to have another purpose purely related to their relationship with the women they were charged to watch over. As hard as it is to believe, the process of castration was not always permanent, and a eunuch fathering a child, though rare, was not unheard of. If an odalisque gave birth to a child of mixed race (the loss of sexual organs did not always mean the eunuch lost sexual desire), thus evidence that a eunuch had usurped his authority, her life and that of her child hung in the balance. Many women in the harem died young.

More often than not, the castration process occurred before they left Africa. The mortality rate, as you can imagine, was very high. Think of the sweltering heat and humidity. How did they heal? They were buried up to their necks in sand for this process. (If this is too much information, perhaps you'd be better off reading my last blog about the Jack Daniels Apples.) If they survived, they became a hot commodity (pardon the pun). There were different types of castration, but maybe I shouldn't go into that. Even Sir Richard Burton, famed author of The Thousand and One Nights wrote of this.

The life of the eunuch in the Topkapi Harem mirrored that of the young women they watched over. The castration process resulted in the eunuchs being somewhat effiminate, so they tended to enjoy the same types of lavishness and pampering they gave to the women. Many became musically incined and very poetic. They dressed in lavish clothes, bathed in the palace pools, ate sweets, and grew fat. Their training began when they were young and new at the palace. Sometimes, they even got married, which resulted in them having to live outside the harem, and the end to this part of the story.

Harem: A Brief Glimpse Behind the Latticed Walls, Part 1

I've always been amazed at the number of people who travel to Istanbul and totally miss out on seeing the Topkapi Harem. Granted, you run the risk of long lines and are subjected to a guided tour, often led by monotonic young female docents totally uninterested in the beauty and historical mystique of the place. (I always assumed that perhaps they, too, like the odalisques who once graced those labyrinthine walls, had used opium to put them in the mood.) And as much as I know that no one upon returning from a trip wants to be told what they have missed out on, I still can't help but wonder what is on the mind of a guide who feels the Harem tours are actually optional.

When you step inside the beautiful latticed, tiled, and maze like walls of the Topkapi Harem, you step back in history to a time that has unfortunately been inaccurately and gratuitously portrayed in film and literature. For this was not a place where the Sultan invited men for a rollicking good time of wine and orgy. The word, harem, is derived from the Arabic, haram, which means, "unlawful" and "forbidden". The only men allowed inside the Harem were the sultan, his sons (who were also schooled there), and the eunuchs who took care of the women. It was a place in which the women were protected and isolated from the outside world; hence the feelings of loneliness, despair, and even terror (I'll cover this later) that led to the rampant use of opium among the young women. They even learned that it entered the bloodstream much more quickly if chewed rather than smoked.

Young, beautiful, non-Moslem girls, referred to as odalisques, were taken from the slave markets and presented to the Sultan, often by his governors. Some were kidnapped from the area around the Caucasus, or were sold by their parents. They were looked over by trained eunuchs to ensure they had no bodily imperfections prior to being presented to the Valide Sultana (Sultan's mother) for approval. Their Christian name was then changed to a Persian one, they converted to Islam, and began a very intricate and lengthy training in etiquette and Islamic culture. (You may recall in the Biblical account of Esther that the women went through a year of beauty treatments prior to being presented to King Xerxes.)

This obsession with beauty combined with the exotic mystery that permeates the Harem walls, are ever present when you walk through this enclosed section of the Topkapi Palace. You can sense the power, competitiveness, fear, and intrigue that engulfed the daily lives of the women. The last time I was there, I could even feel the whisk of a young odalisque glide past me in her flowing diaphanous costume, perhaps on her way to a private meeting with a eunuch who could gain her an audience with the Sultan. Or was she fleeing for her life, having given birth to the Sultan's son; an event which would have incurred the wrath, jealousy, and murderous plots of her rivals? The waters of the Bosporus are filled with the corpses of young Harem women who were placed in a sack and tossed into it's murky, swift flowing waters. This fact never escapes my imagination when I walk along it's shores on my trips to Istanbul, nor the fact that it was usually a eunuch who did the "sacking". Eunuchs became quite powerful and influential in the days of the Topkapi Harem. But this warrants another blog all to itself.