Introduction

A 1922 map of Istanbul from the Pusey Map Collection at Harvard University.

Perhaps one should be grateful, rather than cynical, about the fact that the Pera Palace can still exist in a city that changes so rapidly. -Kaya Genc, The Daily Sabah

In a city that bridges eastern and western cultures, Istanbul has always been a city teeming with culture, its reputation and personality skirting the line of westernization and what threats such an evolution might pose for the city’s future history. 

Throughout its history as a cite within the city, the Pera Palace Hotel has seen and participated in the effects of the westernization of the city that came along with globalization during the 20th century.

In terms of the hotel’s status as a lieux de memoire, it was not always the historical sensation that it seems to be today—famous hotel guests (among them Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Hitchcock, and Agatha Christie) along with increased tourism and an emphasis on the nostalgic and “classic” parts of Istanbul all worked together to make the site a lieux de memoire.