1920 | White Army Refugees

When the humiliating and painful French quarantine procedures were finished, the Russian refugees were finally put on steamers for the hour-long trip south to Constantinople. Then as now, the first glimpse of the city was breathtaking. Shimmering straight ahead in the distance, and dominating the promontory known as Seraglio Point, stood Topkapi Palace, the old seat of the Ottoman Sultans, and beside it, silhouetted against the sky, rose the thin minarets and giant domes of the mosques in the old part of the city—the legendary, Muslim Stambul. 

On the right, by the water’s edge, the boat soon passed a vast, low building of gleaming white marble, the present Sultan’s Dolmabahce Palace, decorated with elaborate carvings that looked like frozen sea foam. 

A bit further on, small houses suddenly began to increase in number and to climb up the steep slopes of Galata and Pera, the European parts of the city, over which loomed the stubby cylinder of the Galata Tower. 

The Golden Horn, a long natural harbor between Stambul and the European parts of the city, as well as the entire waterway around Thomas’ boat, teemed with traffic:  dozens of grey European warships rested heavily at anchor; ferries linking the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus churned back and forth; countless small boats under oars or sail coursed in every direction. 

Source

Mavi Boncuk | Palace Theater and Royal Stables at Dolmabahce becomes a temporary home for White Russian[1] refugees.

[1] Due to the civil war in Russia after the 1917 October Revolution, the counterrevolutionary White Army withdrew to the Crimea. The officers brought their families there, too. After the final defeat of the White Army in Crimea, almost 150,000 Russians came in 126 ships to the Ottoman Empire in 1920. The empire was then under occupation by French, British, Italian and Greek forces in the wake of World War I. Read more: Remembering the White Russians of Gallipoli