IN NOVEMBER 1920, THE RUSSIAN FUTURIST ILIA Zdanevich steamed down the Bosporus past a number of Russian warships moored at Istanbul. The initial awe he felt at witnessing the great moment when the Russian navy reached what Napoleon Bonaparte had called the “capital of the world” soon dissipated. Ragged military paupers clustered upon the remnants of a once-mighty Tsarist navy, battered by its experience in the First World War and three years of civil war against Moscow’s new communist revolutionaries.
Zdanevich was not the only one to be affected by this “most terrible, devastating, and miserable” sight. “It makes my hair stand on end,” wrote the Turkish novelist and diplomat, Yakup Kadri, in Istanbul’s most popular İkdam newspaper.
Empires were collapsing everywhere in the winter of 1920. German-built train terminals on both the European and Asian sides heaved with soldiers and refugees returning to states that had crumbled in their absence. After secretly promising Istanbul to the Tsar and losing 45,000 troops in the Dardanelles campaign in a bid to frustrate a Russian takeover by reaching the city first, the British arrived in November 1918 at the head of an Allied armada. Turkish-Greek geopolitician Stefanos Yerasimos noted in his book Constantinople 1914-1923 that the British believed themselves to “own the head of the dragon, but in reality are trapped within the skin of a dead snake, crawling with a myriad worms”.
Zdanevich was on his way to Paris, but loitered for a full year in Istanbul. He documented the destitute Russian soldiers haunting the gypsy encampments in the landfills around the Hagia Sofia, and the impromptu markets in the muddy bases of the hills of Pera where refugees sought to sell on the multicoloured paper currencies issued by already-extinguished Red and White republics that had sprung up in the Bolshevik Revolution’s wake.
While most chroniclers of the city focused on.
