It was almost noon on 25 June 1922, when a ship named Ümit (Hope) slowly pulled up to the Zeytinburnu port in Istanbul. It was carrying hundreds of Ottoman-Turkish passengers – released prisoners of war – whose long and strange trip had started in a carrier with a Japanese flag from Vladivostok, Russia's major port on the Sea of Japan. The passengers were Ottoman prisoners of war being repatriated after spending years in captivity in Siberia. Everyone was on deck. Those who hailed from the city or had deployed from there were seeing the capital of the Ottoman Empire, or what remained of it, for the first time since their deployment. In 1914, when the Ottomans entered the Great War, Istanbul was bustling with Ottoman soldiers on their way to the scattered fronts where they would be expected to fight for the empire. Now, eight years later, the city to which they returned was under allied occupation, and had been since the end of the war in November 1918. The city was still crowded with soldiers, but this time the soldiers were from the occupation forces.