Strike the Keys of the Topkapi Organ by Ben Mallalieu

As soon as the seat-belt signs were turned off, he lit his first cigarette of the flight. No one had checked his hand luggage, which was just as well as it contained, among other things, two flat throwing knives, 50 rounds of .25 ammunition, a silencer hidden in a tube of Palmolive shaving cream and a cyanide death pill. And a modern metal-detector gate would, hopefully, have revealed that the slight bulge beneath his left armpit was made by a Beretta revolver.

Air travel was different in James Bond’s day. His 10.30 BEA Flight 130 to Istanbul had to stop for refuelling at Rome and Athens; somewhere over the Sea of Marmara he enjoyed “an excellent dinner”; and, reading between the lines of From Russia with Love, you get the impression that the intrepid spy was slightly nervous.

But, at first sight, Istanbul has hardly changed. Forty minutes’ drive from the airport, you broach the old city walls, turn off up the hill to Sultanahmet and you could be back in the 19th century, apart from the traffic. You can even still imagine the city where Thomas Dallam landed in 1599, bringing a wondrous organ as a gift from Elizabeth I to Sultan Mehmed III.

He came by ship along the Bosphorus, “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” according to WB Yeats. You don’t see any dolphins or hear any gongs, but the magic is still there. Istanbul is the real eternal city, the oldest in the world. Athens and Rome were great classical centres, but for most of the Middle Ages they were little more than villages. Istanbul has been a great metropolis continuously for 2,500 years, which is why Hagia Sophia is a living building while the Parthenon and the Coliseum are merely ruins.

But the Istanbul I knew in the 1970s has been improbably smartened up for tourists. Most of the good, cheap cafes in Divan Yolu have been turned into carpet and craftwork shops, and no fashionable young Turk would been seen drinking in Sultanahmet. The smart place to be is now Beyo?lu, across the Golden Horn, which is said to boast a cafe society to equal as Berlin or Barcelona. The Yucelt Turist Hotel, where I often stayed — as did the student Bill Clinton and Billy Hayes of Midnight Express — now caters for a younger and no doubt better behaved class of backpacker. Hayes’s disastrous dope deal which landed him in Sultanahmet prison was negotiated round the corner in the Pudding Shop cafe. It too is still there, but somehow it now regards itself as a national monument: “World famous since 1959,” says the new sign outside — and just as bad as it ever was. The Sultan Pub, with its Lionel Ritchie background music on the corner by Constantine’s cistern, is even worse.

Strangest of all, Sultanahmet prison has been turned into an immensely stylish (and expensive) hotel by the ubiquitous Four Seasons chain. It was always an elegant, if sinister, place (Istanbul’s most closely guarded secret?), often described as the most beautiful prison in the world, although probably not by its inmates. The old exercise yard has been imaginatively landscaped, and on a summer night, even if you are not a resident, you are free to sit at the bar on the roof, next to the former guards’ look-out tower (do they do lock-ins?), and admire the view of Hagia Sophia next door. The domes of Istanbul reminded Bond of “big firm breasts”, but he had no metaphor for the minarets. “A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains/ All that man is,” wrote Yeats.

Do any of the guests wonder about the previous, less pampered occupants as they eat their impeccably served breakfasts in the morning room, beside a wall tastefully decorated with antique padlocks? When the time comes for their own midnight express, the ever-helpful doorman will flag them down a cab.

Does this matter? Perhaps not. In the western mind, beauty and cruelty have always been inextricably mixed in its perception of the city. When he landed in 1810, Lord Byron was confronted by dogs snarling over a corpse, a sight that probably appealed to the darker side of his nature. Hitching across Europe in the cold winter of 1974, I was told the no doubt apocryphal story of a dead hippie found outside the Pudding Shop, his body drained of blood.

Wandering around Istanbul, you can still feel an exciting shiver of danger, even without four kilos of hashish strapped to your waist like Billy Hayes. But the irony is that there is possibly no safer city to walk at night, and I have learnt that in bad times and sudden disasters there are few better people to have on your side than the Turks.

The earlier residents are closer at hand in the claustrophobic warren of the Topkapi harem. It is almost as though they only moved out a few weeks ago, and it is easy to imagine the pervading scent of jasmine, frankincense, burning cloves and opium. The hard edges of the marble steps have been softened by centuries of brocade slippers. The white and blue Iznik tiles are as bright as the day they were made.

For its inmates, the harem offered a life of almost unbelievable luxury and idleness, although often a dangerous one. But it is good to learn that the women of the harem — mostly Greeks, Georgians, Armenians and Circassians — were paid proper wages and could, on their retirement, live wealthy and independent lives, provided they hadn’t previously been tied in weighted sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus. The sons of the sultan also had an uncertain future in their Golden Cages. Dallam’s friend Mehmed III murdered 19 of his brothers on his way to the throne. And the life of a palace eunuch, deprived of his own wondrous organ, must have had its own special disappointments.

As for the sultans, for whose sole pleasure the entire palace existed, their portraits reveal them as terminally bored, utterly played out before their time. As is often the case with fantasies, the idea of having an unlimited supply of willing concubines is better in imagination than reality. Bill Clinton might have liked it, although not James Bond, who was probably more interested in the chase than the consummation.

Few places in the world have so captured the western imagination, inspiring writers, artists and composers from Mozart and Ingres all the way down to the anonymous 19th-century author of The Lustful Turk, but in its 400 years as a working harem, only one entire western male was ever allowed inside while the women were in residence, and that was Dallam.

One day, a courtier, risking certain death, took him into the sultan’s private apartments where he was allowed to sit on Mehmed’s throne and brandish his ceremonial sword (perhaps the same throne and sword now safely behind glass in the museum). Then, “crossing through a little square court paved with marble, he pointed me to go to a grate in a wall, but made me a sign that he might not go thither himself. Through that grate, I did see 30 of the Grand Sinyor’s concubines that were playing with a ball in another court. At the first sight of them, I thought they had been young men, but when I saw the hair of their heads hang down on their backs, I did know them to be women, and very pretty ones indeed.

“I stood so long looking upon them that he which had showed me all this kindness began to be very angry with me. He made a wry mouth, and stamped with his foot to make me give over looking; the which I was very loath to do, for the sight did please me wondrous well.”



Box copy

Dallam’s organ was certainly a wonderful thing. Standing 16ft high, it could be played manually or automatically; it had a clock with a chime of 16 bells, two moving figures that blew trumpets and a “hollybush full of blackbirds and thrushes, which at the end of the music did sing and shake their wings”. Elizabeth I hoped it would be a “great and curious present which no doubt will be talked of, and be very scandalous among other nations, specially the Germans”.

It had cost the merchants of the Levant Company, who picked up the tab, the enormous sum of £3,550, but when unpacked after the voyage, it was found to have become badly unstuck, and the British ambassador, Henry Lello, said that it was not worth 11 pence. “My answer unto our ambassador at this time I will omit,” Dallam wrote in his diary, and he managed to put it back together in only 10 days in time for the official presentation to the sultan.

Mehmed III arrived with a retinue of 300 uniformed pages, including 100 dwarfs and 100 deaf mutes, and was so delighted that Dallam was made a favourite of the court and given a freedom of the palace unequalled by any western visitor before or since.

Dallam built many organs on his return to England including those at Eton, King’s College Cambridge and Worcester and Wells cathedrals, but most fell foul of English religious fundamentalism and were destroyed by the puritans in the Civil War. Only the one at King’s survived, but like the old broom that has had four new heads and three new shafts, little or nothing of Dallam’s original remains. (There are, however, two instruments by his son Robert in Britanny, and the one in Lanvellec — where a festival of baroque music is held every October — is said to be identical to Thomas’s original organ at King’s.)

No sources mention the fate of the Topkapi organ. Is it possible that parts of it, at least, are waiting to be rediscovered in some dusty corner of the palace? Istanbul is a place where almost anything is possible.

Unfortunately, the curator of Topkapi soon put me right. Although it never became “very scandalous among other nations”, even the Germans, its two human automata offended the fundamentalist sensibilities of Sultan Ahmed I who took an axe to the wondrous organ soon after he succeeded Mehmed in 1620.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.