Who was Pierre Loti?
It is of course Eyüp,or Eyüp Sultan, as it is called these days, and more precisely the cemetery that rises up from Eyüp mosque and spreads across like a panorama toward the few eateries perched at the top of the hill. One of these places is known as Pierre Loti’s Café. Not a very Turkish-sounding name, but Pierre Loti, or rather Louis Marie Julien Viaud (1850-1923), was French. Viaud, an officer of the French navy, found himself in Istanbul following an incident known as “the event of Salonica.” The ship he was stationed on, a part of the French Mediterranean squadron, arrived in Salonica on May 16, 1876. On that same day, Loti, the main character in the book “Aziyade,” witnesses six dead bodies, “writhing in the horrible contortions of hanging” in the main square of Salonica. This punishment, prescribed by the sultan was in response to the murder of French and German consuls sent to intervene in the fiasco emerging after a Bulgarian girl, recently converted to Islam, was prevented fr
Pierre Loti was a French writer who lived from 1850 to 1923, whose actual name was Louis Marie Julien Viaud. When he resided in Istanbul, one of his most frequent haunts was this cafe, which was then known as “Rabia Kadın Coffeehouse”. He is said to have been particularly fond of smoking nargile. In honor of the fact that he frequented the cafe, it was rechristened as “Pierre Loti”, and continues to carry this name today.
