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It has been over ten days now, since I started researching and writing about Lulu. Before going to Istanbul I tried to make a last effort to find the exact location of her grave. No luck with Google,  again I  came up empty handed about the plot of her grave location in the Catholic Cemetery,  but bingo...!  I found an article written  about her mother, dated August 3, 1986 in the Cumhuriyet Daily with some pictures. The article written by Tarik Ersoy titled : “ Men were lazy, women were ambitious” and subtitled:” An Istanbulite English Lady”, has a picture of  Lulu and her mother Rena aka Mummy* in their balcony of their condominium in  Siraselviler Caddesi with the minaret of a small mosque  showing in the background. In the second picture Mummy is sitting at a desk apparently in her study with legs crossed and her hands together on her knees, wearing a plaid skirt, little flower pots showing in the window sill. She was ninety eight years of age when the pictures were taken and Lulu had to be close to seventy.

The article is an interview with Rena Duran, an English woman who marries the famous Turkish Geographer Faik Sabri in London in 1912. The young man is studying in Sorbonne when they first met and until he proposes to her he disguises himself as a Frenchman. When the young English woman learns that her future husband is actually a Turk, she does not show any reaction but merely says “since you want to learn English and we both like to travel, Constantinople is fine with me.” So the groom to be, puts his fez on and they go to the Turkish Embassy in London for a civil ceremony. She tells that when they moved to Istanbul in 1912 the city was still referred as “Constantinople” and most everybody spoke French in the Pera district where they lived, so she never needed to learn Turkish. She still did not speak Turkish fluently like her daughter, although Lulu had some difficulty in reading Turkish.

Why did Faik Sabri initially not tell Mummy that he was Turkish? My guess, the reason was religious as well as political. Before the war Ottomans were under the  military influence of Germany and conflicted with the British in the Middle East and elsewhere and also Mr. Duran was of the Islamic faith. He must have felt uneasy telling her everything at once when they first met in Paris. As far as the photographs in the article, I wish the article included  Lulu’s and her Mother’s pictures of earlier years. After all 26 years had past since the pictures were taken when Jan Claire had first met the mother and daughter. But these were the only pictures of them and I was happy.

Rena who became a dual citizen and accepted Turkish citizenship when they moved to Istanbul speaks of the city in two distinct era : before and after the Turkish Republic. Before the Republic, during Ottoman times it was not easy without getting harassed to walk in other parts of Istanbul except Pera, with a short sleeve dress. Turkish women had come a long way since then and they don’t want to go back to the old days. Then men were lazy and women always ambitious. While she was living on Sıraselviller Street by Rue de Pera during the war years she hadn’t seen to many Turkish women. One day she learned that at the famous Tokatlayan Han Hotel in Bosphorus there was going to be a tea party for women in a ball room designated for women only. So she dresses up in a black “Çarşaf” calls a “fayton” and tells the coachman to drive the horse carriage to the Tokatlayan Hotel. It is usually little over an hours drive from Taksim down the hill to the shores of Bosphorus to the bay of Terapia. The story is similar to the one Jan Claire wrote to me about the taxi driver. Instead of taking the shortest way down the hill the coachman drives the carriage for hours on the side roads on top of the the hills and every time Mummy asks him why he is not going the right way she does not get an answer. Mummy is furious when she finally arrives at the Hotel where her hosts had sent some people to look for her. She calms down when they translate to her what the coachman says. It is the years of the World war I and all horses are confiscated by the army officers  to be used for the cavalry. The poor man was trying to use roads where he was most unlikely to be seen .

Mrs. Duran is telling the interviewer how beautiful the street of Sira Selviler (Rows of Cypresses) was when they first move here seventy years ago, how much greenery was around and how they could see the blue waters of Bosphorus from their balcony. Now she says,  our view is blocked by these tall apartment  buildings and it so loud in the street. While she is talking all of a sudden the “muezzin” starts singing the afternoon prayer from the nearby little mosque.

“We don’t mind the imams call for the prayer, but what we mind is that he recorded his voice on a cassette and he is  playing  it five times a day without going up the minarette and really performing. Then all of a sudden as if she remembered something she shakes her head and says “It is tea time”. Lulu goes to the kitchen to bring the tea and Mummy  goes out to the balcony with a hand full of  bird feed. "These two pigeons are used to me over the years." she says as they start eating the bird feed by her feet.

As my travel date to Istanbul gets closer I am nervously looking for some clues as to how to find Lulu’s grave. It is not an easy task; the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery  is an ancient  cemetery with thousands of graves from different nationalities of people. Researchıng from the internet I came up with five pages of blueprints of the outlay of the cemetery. The cemetery is divided among at least seven different sections : German, English, American, Armenian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. And of course, the largest section is the English section.  I don’t even know how old the handmade blueprint is. After printing each page on my printer I started cutting the edges of the paper and tried to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. I am thinking to myself : I will definitely need some help unless I am ready to look for her grave without a direction among thousands of graves .

The help came from two of Lulu’s best friends. Mary Berkmen the head librarian at MIAM, which is the Advanced Studies in Music, a department of the ITU, the Technical University of Istanbul. Jan Claire had given her name to me but had also  told me he had lost touch with her in the  recent years. The reason for this I found out, was because he was misspelling one letter of her last name: Berkman instead of Berkmen. After some research I found her e-mail address and she not only sent me a picture of Mummy and Lulu, but also gave me directions within the cemetery:

Lulu’s grave is very close to the chapel on the right hand  side looking up from the chapel door.

I could not ask for more. 

The other lady friend was Tengün Sevinç who was also a friend of Mary Berkmen. We emailed each other and in her email she mentioned that Lulu was a dear friend and she had lots of books and documents of Lulu which she was ready to share with me. She also send an email  to another good friend of Lulu; Angela Roome, who also provided me with some more valuable information:

I lived opposite her friend Ike and another American whose name I have forgotten but who later became a kind of aide-de-camp to the Sultan of Oman. Anyway, what surprised me about your article was that there was no mention either of Scrabble which became a passion with Lulu or Adair Mill with whom she was close friends with from about the fifties up until she died. She was friends with many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the day, both painters and actors. Some of them are still alive such as Gulriz Sururi, a well known star of the stage.