Istanbul
In words, images and music

Diving into this text of Loti can be at first difficult. Long – and sometimes heavy – descriptions don't help to penetrate the story. But as the characters discover themselves and Constantinople is planted, poetry permeates the reader. The slowness of the text follows history: that of the life of Turkish women at the beginning of the 20th century, partitioned by the rules of the harem. Lost in a life of emptiness and troubles, they mourn their unreachable dreams with the only man who can listen to them: a French writer – a Westerner, who gradually becomes their confidant and friend. They are eager to be listened to, to reveal their souls, in a world where they serve only as dolls and where their lives are directed by the sole decision of men.

So we get married without our confession, like sheep or fillies.

Your existence, so colourful, so exciting, allows you to conceive of ours, so pale, made of years that drag on without leaving memories. In advance, we always know what tomorrow will bring – nothing.We live on grey pearls, stuffed with an eternal down that gives us nostalgia for pebbles and thorns.

Then, afterwards, to find oneself pretty, in the silver mirror, to find oneself young, charming, and to be saddened by it.

But there is a story in the story… this writer is indeed Pierre Loti himself, who, “trapped” by a French journalist defending the feminist cause – Marie Léra, will tell her secret meetings in the Stamboul of 1904 with two genuine Turkish women, Zennour and Nouryé Noury-Bey, and Marie Léra, aka Leyla, who pretends to be one of their own, under her black veil.

Pierre Loti is then idolized by Turkish women, since the publication of his novel Ayizadé, describing the loves between a European naval officer and a young woman cloistered in the harem of an old Turkish men. The French journalist and her two Turkish friends, by their stratagem, want her to write the sequel to Ayizadé, describing the condition of Turkish women.

Loti will never know that a French woman was hiding behind one of these women, since 10 years after her death, Marie Léra – under her pseudonym – will reveal in Le Figaro the story of this deception:

First we wrote to him for the simple pleasure of writing, to reveal to him the Muslim of Turkey, modern, cultured, unhappy. But little by little the desire came to us that Iui made known to the world the paradoxical and painful condition of the young Turkish women of the twentieth century.

Through us he would know these closed, often tragic lives; he would know the traditions, he would penetrate in spirit into these homes inaccessible to a European.

Our letters were written fervently, sincerely, sometimes with tears. Because if we made Loti live a novel, we also lived it.

The death of one of the women, Djénane, recounted in the text, is false, imagined by the 3 women to put an end to their exchanges with the writer. Pierre Loti received an official announcement of his death….

The novel will be a success and will highlight the living conditions of these women.

The title may be misleading: the novel doesn't focus on the history of the Pera Palace, but on Constantinople during the Second World War: the future Istanbul. Locked between the West and the East, the city lived its dark hours before the emergence of the new Turkish Republic.
It becomes a hub of espionage, geopolitics.