Pera Palas Pie

When I first arrived in Turkey with a girlfriend at the age of eighteen, on a trip paid for by her generous father, we went to the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul, the legendary spies’ hotel. It was certainly a hotel to capture our imagination, with its much faded grandeur: huge and shabby reception rooms, marble floored bathrooms and the ornate, gilded lift. The hotel was almost empty when we stayed there, and I shall always remember our first evening when the two of us sat completely alone i