OUR stay in Erenkeuy which had started under such pleasant auspices continued in perfect harmony and developed additional ties between my wife and her new Turkish relations. A most cordial friendship grew between her and my cousin, the daughter of my second aunt. She had been educated at the American College for Girls of Constantinople and her education was therefore a most happy blend of the Orient and the Occident. It opened an additional ground of common understanding between the two girls who became rapidly inseparable friends. The following winter when we were all in the city my cousin, my sister and my wife formed a constant trio which broke up only when my sister left Constantinople for extensive travel in Western Europe.
There was another Turkish girl in Erenkeuy who came often to call. She was a school mate of my cousin and not only spoke perfect English but wrote it perfectly too. Her ambition was to make English-speaking people familiar with Turkish literature. This Turkish girl is very active in the American colony of Constantinople.
She was then hoping to induce the American Relief Association to engage in relief work for the needy Turks also. But I am afraid that she found this task somewhat difficult. I have heard it said that while it is comparatively easy to obtain financial support for Armenians and Greeks, it is more difficult to obtain funds for the Turks. A well-managed campaign following an energetic propaganda by which Turks are represented as committing wholesale massacres and atrocities against the Christian elements in the Near East is always sure to bring substantial financial assistance for Armenians and Greeks and incidentally to secure a longer lease of life to the jobs of all those employed in Relief or Missionary work in Turkey. But how could money be raised for the Turks? To create public sympathy for them in America would necessitate the destruction of all the fables so elaborately created by years of anti-Turkish propaganda. It is easier to follow the lines of least resistance, to follow the beaten road by spreading news of massacres and atrocities whenever funds are needed. The only requirement in this case is to make a propaganda whose virulence is in direct proportion to the reluctance of the public in subscribing for new funds. Whenever the public seems to have lost interest or seems to be acquiring a more accurate knowledge of the Greeks and Armenians—whenever either of these conditions coincide with the need of more funds—aspectacular report on new Turkish atrocities is staged and the flow of money is stimulated. The tide runs Eastward, but there it is carefully canalized into Greek and Armenian channels alone. The money has been collected for them and must be distributed exclusively to them. What difference does it make if hundreds of thousands of Turks, old men, women and children rendered homeless by the Greek invasion or by the repeated Armenian revolutions, are dying from lack of clothes, lack of shelter, lack of food. The Turks are human beings too, that is true, but they call God “Allah.” and it does not sound the same!
The Turks are thrown exclusively on their own meagre resources for relieving their own refugees, for helping their needy. I must say that despite their extremely restricted means they achieve this difficult task with unexpected efficiency. The work of relief is almost exclusively in the hands of committees of Turkish women who work with untiring abnegation. The president of one of these committees, Madame Memdouh Bey, a cousin of my aunts', was quite a frequent visitor at Erenkeuy and told us of how they are organized and how they work. These committees are built upon such efficient business lines that I feel I should describe them to some extent so as to give an idea of the administrative and organizing capacities of modern Turkish women. Each relief association specializes in a given activity. Onetakes care of refugees, another of the needy orphans, a third one of the Red Crescent—which is the Turkish Red Cross—and so forth. Each Association is divided into Committees, every one of which is assigned to one district and is an autonomous unit with a president and also a secretary managing its executive work. These committees are divided into sub-committees: one in charge of collections, one responsible for distributions and one to organize and conduct productive work. The ladies in charge of collecting continuously canvass their districts and classify all donations—be they money or wearing apparel. They organize tag days, garden parties, concerts, etc., to secure any additional supplies and funds possible.
My wife participated in several of these tag days but on such occasions she had to don the “charshaf” so as not to be conspicuously the only foreigner among the Turkish ladies. On these days the streets of Stamboul are full of groups of Turkish ladies, young girls and children, a red ribbon pinned on their breasts with the name of the Association they are collecting for written on it, smilingly offering their tags to the public. They bother the foreigners very little and solicit charity only from the Turks. The ladies who have shouldered the responsibility of distributing the charity thus collected canvass thoroughly their respective district, to find the refugees or the needy who deserve the most urgent attention, determine systematically their needs and supply them with the help they require. Any funds that remain available to the Committee after such distribution are then turned over to the sub-committee in charge of organizing and conducting productive work. Here all needy women and girls who can earn their living are brought together and given work in dressmaking or embroidery establishments which are under the direct management of the ladies of this sub-committee. The men are similarly given work in furniture making or carpentry establishments. Men, women and children thus employed are of course paid for their work, their products are sold and the profits realized on them are again placed at the disposal of the Committee.
Turkish ladies also run orphan asylums where little boys and little girls who have lost both father and mother in the turmoil of the different wars or in the forced evacuation of their homesteads before the Greek or Armenian irredentists, are taken care of and educated. When the little girls have reached the age of fifteen they are given into families where they work—under the continuous supervision of the Committee for orphans. The ladies of this committee keep a vigilant and motherly watch over the welfare of these girls. Once a month the girls are subjected to a medical examination to determine if their health is properly taken care of. Once a month some lady of the Committee makes an unexpected call in every house where any ofthese orphan girls are working to ascertain how they are treated, what work they are doing, and if they are satisfied with their employers. She has also the privilege—which she often takes advantage of—using her savings as a dowry to start married life.
Needless to say that the ladies engaged in this relief work are all volunteers. They belong mostly to the upper classes and devote all their time and energy to the charities they have undertaken. We have seen them at work time and again and their devotion and abnegation is beyond praise. I think that the most active of these ladies—at least those who are most in the public eye because of the executive positions they hold in the Committees—are Madame Memdouh Bey, Madame Ismail Djenani Bey, Madame Edhem Bey and Madame Houloussi Bey. But there are hundreds and thousands of others whose work, while not as prominent, is none the less efficient, silent little women with hearts of gold devoting their life to some work of charity and mercy.
In the shadows of the old garden at Erenkeuy, my aunts were incessantly engaged in bringing their contribution to this general work of relief. They would sit in a circle under some big trees and be busy one day sewing garments for refugees, another day packing medicines for the Red Crescent, or knitting socks, sweaters or gloves for the soldiers of the Nationalist Armies. They wouldremain at work for hours at a time, day in and day out, in their quiet, unostentatious ways making a most touching picture: a group incessantly engaged in humanitarian work—the elder aunt, poised and refined, directing the work of all and participating in it with all her untiring activity—the second aunt, emaciated by years of domestic troubles caused by the kaleidoscopic political changes and wars of Turkey, but still cheerful and hopeful—the youngest aunt, as sweet as a Madonna and as resigned as one—cutting, sewing or packing with the help of their children.
I confess that I was not a little surprised by this continuous activity in which all Turkish women, without distinction of class, took a feverish part. It is true that even before I left Constantinople women were already much more emancipated than they generally were given credit for being by foreigners—it is true that I was hoping to find them at my return well on the road to full emancipation. But frankly I was not prepared for the long stride they had made during these few years. I was especially not prepared to see them so competent in public organization and so businesslike in the conduct of actual productive work. I expected to find them rather inefficient in the new fields opened to them for the first time after so many generations of seclusion.
I said this frankly to my aunt, one Friday afternoon, on the eve of our departure from Erenkeuy.We were enjoying the ever attractive sunset from the terraces of a public garden on the shores of the Sea of Marmora. At a distance and blurred by the purple haze of the horizon, Prinkipo and the other islands were reflecting their dark green hills in the opalescent sea where glimmered the dancing lights of an orange-coloured sun. Gentle waves were breaking in cadence over the rocks at our feet. Around us other Turkish families were sitting at wooden tables in small groups. We had just finished sipping our coffees. The general relaxation preceding all oriental sunsets was gradually creeping over nature together with the lavendar shadows of the coming twilight. My aunts had been working hard that day, and I told them how much I admired them and all their Turkish sisters for their indefatigable activities, for their efficiency in works they had not participated in for generations.
My aunt looked at me. Then she laughed in her musical and contagious manner: “You talk like a foreigner, my son,” she said. “Whenever foreigners talk of the new emancipation of Turkish women, they express their surprise at our efficiency.”
I explained to my aunt what I meant—I said: “Our women have been kept for so many generations out of all activities, their attention has been consecrated for so many centuries exclusively on their homes and families and they have so recentlyacquired their freedom, that I can not help being surprised to find them turning their freedom into really productive channels and to see how capable they are in their new pursuits.”
“Why should we be incapable or inefficient?” asked my aunt, “and why should the seclusion of Turkish women in past generations influence or interfere with the organizing, administrative or productive capacities of the Turkish women of this generation? After all women do not belong to a different race than men, we are the daughters of men and inherit their qualities—or their faults—their capacities or their inefficiency, just as much as their sons do. This present generation, without distinction of sex, has inherited the accumulated qualities or faults of all past generations. It is not the sex which makes or mars the individual, which makes or mars his or her talents. Individual talents, qualities or faults are of course inherited to a great degree, but they don't descend exclusively from women to women and from men to men. Furthermore they are especially enhanced by the education, upbringing and training of the individual and I consider that the Turkish women of this generation have had individually a better opportunity than their brothers—or even than their western sisters—to prepare, educate and train themselves for the work they are now doing. The Turkish men of this generation have had to struggle for life as soon as they were out of boyhood and, confronted by the necessity of earning their immediate living, they did not have the opportunity of preparing themselves for the lines of activity best suited to their individual talents—or else and still worse, they have been drafted into the armies and have fought consecutively for the last fifteen years. Thousands have perished in these wars, thousands and thousands have been maimed or otherwise incapacitated for life. As for western women, those of the higher classes—therefore those who have received a better education—are caught in a whirlwind of social amusement as soon as they are little more than children and the greatest majority keep throughout their lives the earmark of the influence that society has impressed on them in their early youth. It is therefore only western women who start life with the handicap of a lesser education who, through hard work and perseverance, are generally the women who accomplish things in the Western world. This is not the case with the Turkish women of this generation. They have had an opportunity to study and prepare thoroughly until they had reached maturity. They had no social life to interfere with their studies. It is true that they did not prepare to enter personally the different fields of activity as they did not expect that their full emancipation would come so soon. But they were conscious of being the mothers of the coming generation,and to prepare their sons and daughters for their task, they equipped themselves with all the knowledge they desired to impart and they had plenty of leisure to do this. That is why you see now so many Turkish women efficient in the activities they have deliberately shouldered.”
“Tell me, my aunt, how did the participation of Turkish women in all activities of life come to pass? Was it sudden or gradual?”
“When the war came and all the men were called to the front, women unostentatiously stepped into the employments left vacant. As is generally the case in all movements of emancipation for which people are really ready the movement started in the lower classes. Pushed by necessity, some young girls dared to apply for clerical employments in shops and offices. At the time hundreds of ladies of the higher classes were engaged in helping at home the Red Crescent and other relief works. They had studied nursing. Encouraged by the fact that their less fortunate sisters had met with no opposition and were working openly in shops and offices, they in turn offered their services as nurses. Much of the field work and hospital work of the Red Crescent was confided to them to liberate men for military service. This is just what happened in other countries. But the change was greater and more permanent in Turkey. The daily contact of Turkish women with the public during the war years resulted of coursein tearing down the social walls which had so far secluded them and once these walls were destroyed no one desired to build them up again. Turkish women had proved their administrative and organizing capacities in relief and charitable work during the war. There was no reason why they should not continue to give the country the benefit of their services even after the general war was ended. Furthermore there was still much relief and charitable work to be done and Turkey needed good administrators and organisers in many fields. So within a few years, but with gradual steps, the emancipation of Turkish women became complete, and to-day it is so thorough that any woman in Turkey can fill any responsible position as long as she has shown herself capable of it. In Anatolia, we have a woman, Halidé Hanoum, who was elected Minister of Public Education by the National Assembly.”
I wanted to know how Anatolia and the rural districts had reacted to this emancipation of women.
“The peasant women were always more emancipated than the city women, my son. Our peasants have remained in a way much nearer to the original precepts of our religion and to the old traditions of the Turks than our city dwellers. We have deviated from our religion and racial traditions by the contact we were forced to enter into with the degenerate Levantine elements dwellingin the cities. Muslim laws placed women on equality with men long before western laws did so, and at the time of the Prophet women were allowed more freedom than they ever had before. The Koran is full of mentions of women who were participating in public life and the only restriction placed on women in the Holy Book—a restriction which was necessary to correct the customs of the Arabs living in warm climates—is that women should not appear in public unless they were covered from the breasts down to the ankles. This is a simple rule of decency and modesty. As for the original Turkish customs they used to be so liberal that women participated in public affairs among the nomad Turkish tribes roaming on the plateau of Pamir, centuries ago. Many a Turkish woman was then the recognized chieftain of her tribe. Many a Turkish Joan of Arc has fought on the battlefields shoulder to shoulder with her warriors. It is only after the Muslims and the Turks came in contact with the decadent Byzantine Empire, it is only after the Turks conquered the dissolute colonies of old Rome and ancient Greece in Asia Minor that the Turks—especially those who settled in the cities—adopted certain customs of the conquered races. Unfortunately these customs are identified to-day, in the eyes of the foreigners, with the Turks and the Muslims as if they had originated with them. But that is not the case. While polygamy was not strictly forbidden so as to prevent—as was then the case in Europe—the increase of bastards and illegitimate children, Harems in the original sense of the word did not exist in Muslim or Turkish countries until they assimilated byzantine customs. The seclusion of women in separate apartments where they were condemned to lead the life of recluses pampered and spoiled solely for the pleasure of their master, can be retraced to the “Gyneceum” of Byzance. So can the custom of veiling the women when they went out, as evidenced by the pictures on old Grecian vases. The barbarous institution of Eunuchs is exclusively Byzantine. All these were certainly not originally Turkish customs and they have nearly never been practised by the peasants and country people of Turkey, except the custom which made it obligatory for women to be entirely veiled in the presence of men. Otherwise the rural population never restricted its women in any way. They always participated in the every-day life of their men. You should have been with us when I went to Eski-Shehir, in Anatolia, with your uncle during the war.” Here my aunt drew such a picture of her arrival at Eski-Shehir that I will try to give an account of it, in her own words.
“It was before your uncle was taken ill,” she said, “and he was considering starting some local industries in Anatolia. He chose Eski-Shehir on account of the railroad facilities it offers and wewent there. Only a few men who had been prevented from going to war on account of old age or infirmity were left in the country. But the people who had heard that a pasha from Constantinople was coming with his wife, sent a delegation to meet us at the station. They insisted on our being their guests and they informed us that they had especially prepared a house for us. To refuse would have hurt their feelings. They had chosen the best available house in the whole neighbourhood. It was located far in the country at an hour and a half's ride in a carriage from the station. We arrived in the evening and by the time the customary greetings had been exchanged with the delegation it was already dark. The whole delegation insisted on forming an escort of honour and accompanying us to our lodgings. We took a carriage and the ten or twelve peasants which formed the delegation got on their horses, two preceding us, the rest forming a semi-circle around our carriage. In the dark night we went through valleys and hilltops escorted by this most picturesque cavalcade; mostly old men with white beards, but sitting straight on their horses. Of the only two young men who were there, one was blind in one eye, and the other was lame. They all wore their country costumes: trousers cut as riding breeches but worn without leggings, wide belts of gay colour wrapped from hips to the middle of the breast and tight-fitting tunicscrossed by cartridge-bearing leather thongs. With their turbaned heads and their rifles swinging from their shoulders they made a martial picture in contrast with their courteous demeanour, their subdued voices and their most peaceful eyes. I must say, however, that it was a reassuring escort to have for crossing the country at night.
“We arrived at the house, a darling little farmhouse of one floor in the midst of tall trees which reflected their spectral shadows in the gurgling black waters of a stream. Our escort dismounted and entered the house with us where we were received by a committee of women. They had prepared supper and had made everything ready for us. They were dressed in long, flowing robes, their heads covered with a veil and they stood respectfully with their hands folded, watching us carefully so as to anticipate our smallest wishes. Dear, pure, honest country folk of Anatolia! How much they can teach us, how much they can teach the western world of hospitality, modesty and faithfulness! The women were veiled in the presence of men, but they acted their part as hostesses while the men talked in the same room with my husband. After having settled us to their own satisfaction they departed all together, even the owners of the house insisting on leaving so that we might be more comfortable. They left us their servants to take care of us. Next day and all the days of our stay at Eski-Shehir,groups of peasant girls would come to visit me, to enquire if I needed anything and to entertain me as best they could. They would shyly stand at the door until I forced them to come in. I had all the trouble in the world to break them of the habit of sitting on the floor out of respect to their guests, as they considered it ill-bred to sit on a level with me. They would come in the evenings, for during the day they would be busy working in their fields. Healthy and strong women they were, with red cheeks and bashful eyes. They were not the type of women living for the pleasure of their husbands, or of slaves toiling for their masters. They were wholesome women, good daughters, good wives, good mothers who had for generations been conscious of their duty to the community and accomplished it efficiently—helpmates freely helping their men, freely assisting them or willingly shouldering their husbands' responsibility in case of absence and taking care of the welfare of their families, their homes, their fields or their villages and withal keeping their unassuming modesty intact—the modesty which is, or should be, the national characteristic of all Turkish women.”
My aunt was silent for a while. Her compelling personality made us fully share her love for her Anatolian sisters. She slowly got up and gave the signal for returning home. We walked together. It was our last day in Erenkeuyand I had not yet exhausted her views on the subject of the emancipation of Turkish women. I now asked her if she thought that its influence had been salutory upon general morality in the big cities.
“It certainly has,” answered my aunt. “In the old days we did not know the friends of our husbands, brothers or sons. We were excluded from the company of men and could not therefore help our own sons in selecting their friends. Much less of course our husbands. We always feared the deteriorating influence that even one bad associate can have on a whole crowd. The Turkish proverb says that one bad apple is sufficient to rot a whole basket full of good apples. Men left to their own resources are liable to seek distraction in drinking, in cards and other unwholesome pastimes. Many a Turkish man has suffered in the past the consequences of the exclusion of women from social gatherings—just as many a western man suffers now from the consequences of leading too absorbing a club life. But now that we participate in social reunions as well as in other activities we can more fully make our influence felt among the men. Our continuous contact with their friends has rendered our husbands, brothers and sons more careful about the character of the men they associate with. Now that you are married you would not ask to your house a man about whose character you might havesome doubts. But if your wife was not with you, you might not be so strict about the manners and the behaviour of those you associate with.
“Of course we Turkish women of this generation have a double duty to perform now that we have acquired our freedom. We must first see that this freedom is not turned into license as in some western countries, where young men and young girls are allowed to go out alone in couples, or—still worse—where husbands and wives cultivate different sets of friends. We must also watch very carefully over our modesty, and this is our most difficult task. Many Turkish women are taking advantage of their new freedom to trample all modesty under their feet. Alas! too many are already “over-westernized” and associate too freely with foreigners or with Levantinized Turks in the salons of Pera. Not that I object to the society of foreign men, but how are we to know the character and the antecedents of all those foreigners who are at present in Constantinople? They are mostly officers in a faraway vanquished country or civilians desirous of staking their all in get-rich-quick business ventures. How are we to know of their education, their morals and their principles? We are therefore obliged to be especially careful with foreign men. Our duty now is to raise the new generation of girls as rationally as the well-educated western girls. We want our girls to preserve their modesty, nomatter how free they are, we want them to know how to take good care of themselves, no matter whom they associate with. We don't want them to abuse their freedom. We want them to be as rational and thoughtful as my little American daughter here.”
And so saying my aunt lovingly passed her arm on my wife's shoulders, in a graceful movement of all-embracing protection. They looked at each other with comprehending love. The girl of New Orleans smiled her grateful appreciation in the eyes of the woman of Turkey.
IT was with real regrets that we left Erenkeuy.
A visit in such a congenial atmosphere ends always too soon even if it has extended over two weeks. But I wanted my wife to know our cousins who lived on the Bosphorus, to whom we had already announced our coming, and I wanted her to come in close touch with the different aspects of home life in Turkey, to see the Turks from different angles. So we had to tear ourselves from Erenkeuy, after exchanging repeated promises of seeing each other soon and often in town, promises which—needless to say—were kept faithfully on both sides.
In the strict sense of the word our cousins are not really cousins of ours and would not even count as relations in western countries. However, as I said before, family bonds are so strong in Turkey, the clan spirit is so developed, that we call cousins even the nephews of our aunts by marriage. We consider them as such and we are brought up to feel toward them as such.
Our cousins live on the European side of the Bosphorus, at Emirghian, about half-way between the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, in one ofthose old houses built right on the edge of the water. Theirs is one of the few remaining typically Turkish country houses on the Bosphorus, most of the others have either been destroyed by fire, fallen in ruins, or else been replaced by modern structures—villas, apartment houses, warehouses and depots which have, alas, contaminated with their ultra-modern and commercial appearance the otherwise smilingly passive shores of the Bosphorus. Thus this waterway, unique in the world, this natural canal between two seas, which winds its way in graceful curves between the green hills of two continents, offers now the sad spectacle of charred ruins—where a few tumbling walls blackened by fire are all that is left of the beautiful estates which adorned it but a few years ago—with here and there a few pretentious buildings whose showy architecture is a patent proof of the rapidity with which their owners have accumulated wealth during the war and post-war profiteering period. Worst of all, the lower Bosphorus is now bristling with quite a few high apartment houses peopled with chattering and noisy Levantines. Such apartment houses, with their tenants, are as out of place on the wonderful shores of this peerless waterway as the corrugated roofs and asbestos walls of the coal depots and general merchandising warehouses, hastily erected in recent years under the guidance of interested—if inartistic—foreign business men.
All the way to Emirghian I gave thanks to the Almighty for having protected at least a few imperial palaces and a few old estates which could still give an idea of what the Bosphorus looked like before the war. A few, low, rambling buildings of one or, at the most, two floors, growing lengthwise instead of upward, without a thought of economizing the land, surrounded with parks where grow old trees, are happily still left as a living proof of past splendour and good taste, and complete disregard of business advantages.
Our cousin's house is one of them, possibly a little more dilapidated, a little less comfortable than most of the other surviving buildings, as it has been for a very long time deprived of the yearly repairs that so large a house always needs. But what do we care: within the walls of its almost limitless entrance hall, on the wide steps of its gorgeously curved classical stairways, behind the latticed windows of its immense rooms, the hospitality we find is as sincere and as great as the one extended generations ago by one of the most brilliant Grand Vezirs of Turkey, who was then the head of the family, at a time when to be the Grand Vezir of Turkey really meant all the splendour that the world suggests.
Our hostess is a widow who speaks French so fluently that she would be taken for a French woman if she did not have the graceful poise anddignity so typical of Turkish women. Her husband filled a most important position in the Imperial palace in the time of the late Sultan, and was one of the most accomplished men I have ever met anywhere. Besides being a distinguished diplomat he was an art connoisseur and had accumulated a priceless collection of antique pictures, porcelains, carpets and books. Alas, this collection was destroyed a few years ago when their town house fell the victim of one of those all-destroying fires characteristic of Constantinople. Only a few of the secondary pieces of the collection which were left in their country house on the Bosphorus can still be seen there and are an attestation of what the collection used to be. To cap it all, the collection was insured in pre-war days in Turkish pounds which at that time had a gold value, and the fire having taken place during the war, and insurance being paid after the armistice, the family could only collect Turkish paper pounds. Thus, besides the irreparable moral loss, they had to suffer a very large material loss by recovering only one seventh of the value the collection was insured originally for. This is another example among millions of the terrible losses suffered in the last years by the Turks for reasons absolutely outside their control. It is a wonder that, despite all, they keep their composure and their dignity. Calm before the most unimaginable trials, keeping a firm front through the worst calamities, nevercomplaining, never discouraged, never losing faith—truly the Turkish race is the most stoical of all.
Our young host, the only son of the family, is just on a leave from Germany where he went during the war to finish his studies and where he has remained since then, having obtained a leading position in one of the largest electrical engineering enterprises in Germany. His mother is justly proud of the success of her son and we frankly rejoice with her that one of us, a pure Turk in all respects, has evidently acquired such a complete technical knowledge and has shown so much capacity as to be picked out to fill a responsible position in one of the leading firms of a country known the world over for the technical ability of its electrical engineers. We ask Kemal to tell us his experiences in Germany, but he is too modest to talk of himself. He prefers to tell us how his firm is organized. He greatly admires the Germans for their efficiency but is not otherwise very keen about living with them. He finds the Germans too machine made, too materialistic to suit a Turk. His one ambition is to perfect himself in his profession and then to settle in Turkey where he will be able to give to his country the benefit of the knowledge he will have acquired. He wants to return to Germany for this purpose, but when we press him to tell us if it is for this purpose alone he admitsthat he has another more personal reason: he is engaged to a young girl in Munich and at the end of his leave his mother will accompany him to Germany where he will get married. The poor boy is heartbroken that his father, Ismet Bey, did not live long enough to meet his wife. Kemal speaks English most perfectly and says that his future wife does so also. He is therefore looking forward to having her meet her new cousin, my wife.
The drawing-room in which we were was a spacious room with many doors and windows. The lattices were up and the windows opened and the breeze from the Bosphorus is so cool at this season that the great open fireplace where big logs burned was barely enough to warm the room. We sat near the windows on a wide divan which skirted about one-fourth of the walls of the room, and to keep us warmer they had placed at the corner nearest to us, a big brazero of shining copper, filled with glowing charcoal. The windows were nearly over the water, so near in fact that the rustling of the current, which is quite strong on the Bosphorus, was plainly audible. It gave the impression of being on a ship: the blue waters ran southward in an endless chain of racing wavelets and the house seemed to be floating toward the north. But opposite us the green hills of Asia, with a line of houses skirting the shores and with big Anatolian mountains towering the blue-gray horizon reminded us that our seeming flight toward the Black Sea was only an illusion caused by the incessant rush of the current. Big “mahons” or Turkish barges which have kept the graceful lines of the old caiks, passed before our eyes, gliding silently on the blue wavelets, their Oriental triangular sails swelled in the breeze. A large Italian cargo boat plowed its way toward some romantic port of the Black Sea: Costanza, where Roumanian peasant girls will purchase its cargo of vividly coloured textiles in exchange for oil, so much needed in Italy, or perhaps Batoum, where a cosmopolitan crowd of traders will give flour, sugar and other food supplies to the starving population of Caucasia against non-edible jewels, furs or platinum of limitless value. Who knows? Perhaps it goes to Odessa or Novorossisk to try bartering with Tartars and Russians, Mongols and even Chinamen who now form the motley crowd of Bolshevik Southern Russia. The Bosphorus is the gate of a whole world—a world fraught with mysterious possibilities; tempting opportunities of stupendous gains, frightful danger of very real losses, commercial and political possibilities of such magnitude that it makes you shudder to think of them. And here we are at the very gate of this world, a gate patrolled as usual by England. See that gray destroyer, slim as an arrow, speeding toward its base, the harbour of Constantinople. It fliesthe British flag and is coming back from the Black Sea.
I am called back from my dreams and visions by Madame Ismet Bey who is pointing out the outstanding places of the landscape to my wife. From where we are the Bosphorus looks like a lake, the sinuous curves at the two ends making it impossible to distinguish where Europe ends and Asia begins. There, on our extreme left and near the water, is the country estate of Khedive Ismail Pasha, father of the last Khedive of Egypt who was dethroned by England during the war because of his pro-Turkish sentiments. Ismail Pasha's estate is in Europe but the hills which seem next to it are on the other side, in Asia, and the funny looking buildings on top as well as the low buildings on the shore are the depots of the Standard Oil Company. They used to belong to an uncle of Madame Ismet Bey but now they belong to the Standard Oil. No, her uncle has not sold his rights: it just happened that the Standard Oil stepped in before he had time to have them renewed. His house, or what used to be his house is the one just opposite us. He used to have the most beautiful caiks in the Bosphorus, ten or fifteen years ago, and his wife and his daughters would go every Friday to the Sweet Waters of Asia in those long, slim racing barks, with tapering ends, rowed by three or sometimes four boatmen with flowing sleeves, a beautiful embroideredcarpet covering the stern, its corners trailing in the sea. He used to have a passion for flowers and you can see even from here the roof of the hot-house where he grew the most exotic plants he could think of: rare varieties of chrysanthemums and poppies from the Far East, tulips from Turkestan and Persia, mogra and lotus trees from India. Now he has sold his house and has barely enough to live on.
The Sweet Waters of Asia are nearby, just between the ruins of the old mediaeval castle—built by Sultan Mahomet the Conqueror before he laid siege to Byzance—and the Imperial Kiosks of Chiok Soo, a real jewel. Further to the right—that low, rambling white building is the yali of the family of Mahmoud Pasha. They entertain a great deal and have asked us to tea next Sunday. Now we pass again without realizing it to the European shores; the old castle on the hill is the Castle of Europe, the first stronghold of the Turks on this side of the Bosphorus, and the big building next to it is the famous Robert College, the American College for Boys.
The view is so gorgeous that it cannot be described. I wish I had a canvas and the technique of Courbet, the talent of Turner and the daring of Whistler to paint in all its splendour the clear sky of the Bosphorus, so clear and so blue that the eyes can almost see that it is endless—the red and gold flakes of its dark-green vegetation,so luxuriant that it speaks of centuries of loving care—the peaceful atmosphere of its old houses, so restful that you can feel that generations of thinkers and philosophers have meditated behind their walls—the harmonious outline of its hills, so smilingly round that only immemorial age can have so smoothly curved them—the mystery of its always running currents, running so continuously that they should have long ago emptied the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. I wish I was endowed with enough insight to understand the mischievous whisper of its always dancing, always running little waves. I believe they want to tell us that although the winds have pushed them south ever since time began and will continue to push them south until the end of the world, although they seem to follow the wind in an endless mad rush, they still are there. They mischievously laugh because they will always remain there, despite the wind and all its strength. I believe they want to give the Turks an object lesson as to how nothing can be swept away against its will.
Our first evening in Emirghian passed very quietly. The Turks being very reserved by nature it always takes some time before the ice is broken, even among members of the same family. We passed the time sitting around and talking, giving a chance to our hosts and to my wife to know each other.
But for every day thereafter Madame Ismet Bey and her son had arranged some special entertainment for us. Quietly, unostentatiously and with the characteristic lack of show with which well-bred Turks entertain their guests, they succeeded in giving us, without our being aware that it had all been pre-arranged, a different distraction every afternoon. Friends and neighbours would drop in for tea one evening and a little dance or a little bridge game would be organized as on the spur of the moment. Another afternoon they would take us in their rowboat for an outing on the Bosphorus and we would stop either to call on some friends or to walk around or take some refreshments in the casino of the park at Beikos, which at this season is quiet and pleasant. Once we had a small picnic at the Sweet Waters of Asia. We went in the rowboat up this little stream—a miniature Bosphorus, with old tumbled-down houses by the water, big trees leaning their branches covered with autumnal golden leaves over old walls covered with vines, here and there a ramshackle wooden bridge spanning the stream and giving it the appearance of a Turkish Venice, and then large meadows on both sides, where groups of people were, like us, taking advantage of the last few days of summery sunshine of the year. Old Turkish women in black dusters, their hair covered with a white veil arranged Sphinx fashion, were sitting cross-leggednear the water in silent and impassible contemplation, while younger women—their daughters or granddaughters—were sitting a few steps away on chairs, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and chattering away their time. Small boys in vividly coloured shirts, knickers hanging loose below their knees, wearing shapeless fezzes with a small blue bead—against the evil eye—would be running around and prancing with little girls clad in Kate Greenaway skirts coloured with the brightest shades of the rainbow, their loosened hair flapping over their narrow shoulders. Simple folk all, neither peasants or city folk—just the families of small village traders—the kind of people whose pictures foreign newspapermen find a malign pleasure in publishing as representative Turks. They might as well publish pictures of tenement house dwellers of New York and London as being representative Americans or Britishers. Many gypsies were there, going from group to group to tell fortunes, to sing or to dance, gypsy women of all ages and of suspicious cleanliness, who can always be detected in Constantinople by the fact that they are the only ones to wear coloured bloomers, while some old Greek and Armenian women wear black bloomers. By the way, another conception of foreigners which my wife shared but which she lost after a short stay in Constantinople was this very one of bloomers: in all ourstay in Turkey she did not see a single Turkish woman wearing them.
A little further up on the shores of the stream was a group of Kurdish porters, big, athletic fellows, watching a bout of wrestling: two of their companions stripped to the waist, their legs and feet bare, their bodies soaked in oil, engaged in a bout of cat-as-catch-can, while further up some Laze sailors of the Black Sea were dancing their slow rhythmic national dance to the sound of weird flutes and tambourines.
We had to go well upstream to find a place where we could enjoy our picnic peacefully and without onlookers. But I must say that we enjoyed it thoroughly, quite as much as the spectacle we had on our way up and down the river. I could not help however realizing how much a few years had changed the general aspect of the Sweet Waters of Asia. Before my departure it used to be the smartest place to go to during the good season on Friday and Sunday afternoons. You would meet all your friends there and the place used to be congested with the most graceful “caiks” and rowboats of the Bosphorus.
On Sunday we went to tea at the house of Mahmoud Pasha. It was a big affair, almost an official reception, as are all entertainments given by the family of Mahmoud Pasha. This family is what might be called another great and old Turkish clan. At present it is probably themost socially prominent Turkish family of Constantinople and the reason underlying its social activities is quite well known among the other Turkish families who, while possibly not entirely approving them, hold the family of Mahmoud Pasha in great respect for the utterly unselfish manner in which all its members live up to their convictions. Its social activities are looked upon as having a political reason or significance. In the first place the family was one of the first and bitterest enemies of the Committee of Union and Progress which, after engineering most marvellously the Turkish Revolution, had instituted a most objectionable sort of plural dictatorship conducted by its own members. Mahmoud Pasha's family who, like all the other old Turkish families, did not approve of this dictatorship of the few, became very active in the Liberal Party organized in opposition to the Committee. So far, so good! But with the extreme enthusiasm which is a characteristic of all the family, it carried on its war against the Committee by taking a firm and active stand against any and all of its policies. It fought the Committee on every ground, not so much because it was opposed in principle to this or that other policy but just because this or that other policy emanated from the Committee. For this purpose it joined hands with every party that was formed against the Committee. It kept up this war for years and years and one of its members—a mostbrilliant specimen of young Turkish manhood—sacrificed his life on the altar of his convictions during this long-drawn feud. It was quite natural that when the Committee embraced a pro-German policy Mahmoud Pasha's family would automatically become anti-Germans. But instead of being satisfied with fighting this nefarious pro-German policy by an exclusive pro-Turkish policy—as was done by most of the other prominent Turkish families—Mahmoud Pasha's family had to go one better and ever since the armistice has actively embraced a pro-British policy. Therefore, it feels that it can perfectly well entertain and lead a social life even under the present conditions in Constantinople. The second reason which moves this family to participate so actively in the social life of Constantinople is its belief that after all social life in the Turkish capital should be led by the Turks themselves and rather than abandon the functions of society leaders to some foreigners, or worse still to some Greeks, Armenians or Levantines, the family makes every sacrifice needed to hold and prolong its leadership. Therefore it gives large entertainments and weekly teas amounting to real functions.
The Sunday we called on them the immense rooms of their magnificent house were crowded to full capacity. Foreign officers of high rank in resplendent uniforms, members of the different high commissions and distinguished visitors of allnations were elbowing each other and alas! also quite a few Levantine, Greek and Armenian business men whose standing in the business community had forcibly made a place for them in this cosmopolitan clique of Constantinople. Of course the crowd here was not representative of Turkish society, but rather of the cosmopolitan society that one meets in every principal center of Europe. Only a very few Turks were present, mostly old friends of the family who had come more with a desire to show their esteem and respect for the charming hostesses than mixing with the international crowd they were sure to meet there. The three daughters of the family were doing the honours with a tact and courtesy only possible in scions of old families whose breeding in etiquette has extended to so many generations that it has finally become second nature. They were assisted in their duties by two granddaughters of Mahmoud Pasha, two young Turkishdébutantes, who were so earnestly endeavouring to overcome their natural shyness and act like their elders that their charming awkwardness was really delightful to watch. It amused my wife greatly to make a mental comparison between this refreshing shyness of the Turkishdébutantesand the self-confidence and forwardness of their American sisters. To this day I don't know which of the two schools my wife really approved of!
Of course the brothers and husbands of ourhostesses were also there, circulating from group to group and introducing the guests to each other. And to me the most humorous note of the whole afternoon was given when the husband of one of our hostesses' a middle-aged gentleman, very-serious and very widely learned—confided to me that for him entertainments and social functions of this kind were terrible bores but that he had to go through with them just to please his wife. Husbands are the same all over the world!... As I did not contradict him he took me in the quietest corner we could find and we had a long and interesting talk on subjects which took us far away from our surroundings.
Nevertheless I could not help but agree entirely with my wife when she told us, on our return to Emirghian, that she had found the whole thing “somewhat too stiff,” and I believe Madame Ismet Bey was also of our opinion and felt that we were sincere when we told her that we much preferred her own small at-homes and the unpretentious little parties to which she had taken us on the previous days.
I must say that we met most interesting and charming people at all these small parties. It is of course easier to get to know people when you meet them a few at a time than when you meet them in a big gathering. Madame Ismet Bey's friends and neighbours were exceptionally interesting people. During our stay in Emirghian we met for instance Ihsan Pasha, the Turkish general who, being taken prisoner by the Russians during the war, and having refused to give his word of honour that he would not attempt to escape, was exiled to the innermost part of Siberia. He told us in the most vivid manner how he ran away from his captors in the middle of a stormy night, disguised as a peasant; how, for three long months he had to walk—hunted and tracked by the Cossacks and travelling only by night—to reach the Chinese border; how he arrived, half-starved and completely exhausted in Mukden, in Mandchouria, where a community of rich Chinese Moslems gave him hospitality and, after he had recovered from his three months' walk across the steppes of Siberia, gave him money to continue his trip. He told us—but with much less detail—the difficulties he had had to elude the Allied Secret Service which were on the lookout for him when he crossed Japan and the United States, although America had not yet entered the war at that time. However, he did not tell us how he succeeded in crossing the Atlantic despite the severe surveillance of England and how he succeeded in running the Allied blockade of Turkey and popped out one day in Constantinople after every one had entirely given up hope of ever seeing him alive again. Under the most difficult and trying circumstances he had thus succeeded in getting over seemingly unsurmountable obstacles and accomplishing in war time, tracked by enemies on all sides, a complete loop around the world in less than ten months. We could not help thinking how terrible those long months must have been for his wife, a charming young lady, who seemed now to have forgotten all the horror of these interminable weeks of suspense and who confided to us that she had never given up hope as she had an entire trust in the ability of her husband and an immovable faith in God. She said that she had passed most of her time in prayer.
We also met in Emirghian Captain Hassan Bey and his wife who lived with her family in a beautiful villa on the hills of Bebek, but a villa in the old style, in complete harmony with the surroundings and nestling in a park of old trees which did not, however shut out the gorgeous view of the Bosphorus. From the top of these hills the Bosphorus looks more like a chain of small lakes than like a continuous waterway, the sinuous capes of both continents cutting the view of the water in different places. It is like looking at the lakes of Switzerland from the peak of a mountain, only one is much nearer the water and the panorama has no sharp or rugged outlines but presents a continuous aspect of smoothly rounded hills, covered with forests, with mosques here and there, and with little patches of blue water. On Fridays all the ships, barges and rowboats and all the houses owned by the Turks are adorned with Turkish flags, red with the white crescent and star, fluttering in the wind and it gives to the country a cheerful and gay aspect which reminds you at a distance of a gorgeous field of poppies.
Living with Madame Hassan Bey was her young sisters, a Turkish sub-débutante, but somewhat less shy than the granddaughters of Mahmoud Pasha, as she is a student of the American College for Girls. In the course of time it became one of our greatest pleasures to call on them at Bebek, where they give once in a while a small informal tea. They live there all the year round as it is at an easy distance from the city.
AT last we settled in Stamboul. It took us a long time to arrange everything as we wanted, as it is hard to get upholsterers, carpet men and all the rest to do their work properly and rapidly here in Constantinople. Constantinople is not much different in this than any other city I know. There is possibly this difference that it is less difficult to explain what you want and how you want it to decorators who, like those in western Europe or in America, have already had experience in putting up a modern home, than to those in Constantinople who have had none or very little experience in this line. But anyhow there is always a way to get things done by working people, and the Turkish workingmen respond to good treatment in a most willing manner: they are anxious to learn and have much aptitude for learning.
As we had foreseen the hard work we had ahead of us, we took the precaution of taking possession of the house only after we had secured the servants we needed so that we might count on their help. As far as servants are concerned the Turkshave surely solved this problem by adapting to it the same kind of tradition which they maintain so jealously in their family relations. I mean to say that it is the custom for generations of servants to serve the same family of masters, so that as a rule servants and masters are so attached to each other that they never think of parting. Whenever one needs or desires a servant all one has to do is to look up some of the old servants of the family who are sure to find a son, a daughter, a niece or a cousin of theirs who is only too glad to perpetuate the traditions of his or her family by serving the family of its old masters. We, therefore, did not have any difficulty in securing ours, as we took as valet a young man who was born in my father's house where his father had been employed for over thirty years, and our cook was the daughter of my mother's nurse. She also helped the maid in keeping the house in order. In this way we could at any time leave home in peace as we were confident that our people would look after our interests, even if we were absent, possibly better than we could ourselves and to this day we have never had any occasion for regretting the trust we placed in them. Of course for these very reasons servants in Turkey have a totally different standing from servants in any other country. They always know their place, they never dare to take liberties or to take the slightest advantage of theirspecial standing: it is not in their code. But they consider themselves, and are considered by their masters, almost as members of the family—second class members, if that expression could be used. Our relations with our own people were typical of these principles and in order to do full justice to them and to give an accurate idea of what I mean, I am going to confess that during a period of our last stay in Constantinople I had to consider seriously the possibility of closing our establishment and of living more cheaply in some other quarter. I therefore notified our people that they would have to look for other positions and that I could only help them until they found some place elsewhere. They received the news with an emotion which I could only hope to find in my own brothers or sisters, and left the room with tears in their eyes. Next day they asked to be heard, the three together, and they informed me that after having given due consideration to the situation they had come to the conclusion that now more than ever they had the opportunity to show their attachment and devotion to us, that now more than ever we needed them; therefore they had decided to stay with us. Do what I could I could not persuade them to leave. I found them better paying positions with some friends or relatives; they refused to go and for three months, until I could to some extent overcome the crisis in my business, they steadily refused to accept any pay on the ground that if I paid them we would have to leave the house, and if we left the house we could not find another place where we could all live together. Needless to say that such people cannot be treated as servants in the western sense of the word, and that they in turn must have no cause of complaint in regard to the treatment they receive from their masters. Of course we made good to them their sacrifices as soon as we could, and naturally they knew that we would do so, but I doubt that in any other place in the world such real devotion could be found even if those who made the sacrifice had every reason to be sure that they would eventually be adequately compensated.
Needless to say that right from the beginning the manner in which we treated our people was the friendly manner usual in Turkey. My wife adapted herself very quickly to this as she is from the South and I believe that the southern states of America are the only place where the relations between masters and servants are anything like those prevailing in Turkey. Our people of course had each his own room. The cook, who was a widow, had with her her little daughter, a child about three years old, whom we took care of almost like our adopted child. It happens frequently in Turkey that a child like this is taken with the mother into a home, the mother doing some housework and the child becoming whatis called in Turkish the “child of Heaven” of the masters of the house—that is, the masters of the house take care of the child, bringing it up and educating it just as if it were their own, but without, however, adopting it legally. In two years we hope to put our own “child of Heaven” into the English School for Girls which has the advantage of a kindergarten over the American School for Girls. Our people can go out when they want, but they never do it without asking us and they never come home a minute later than they say they will. As they are all very ambitious to learn and improve themselves we ask them into our rooms after dinner about once a week and we talk to them of the world in general and of interesting topics just as if they were friends.
They were of course of great help to us when we were settling down in our house in Stamboul. Ours was a large stone house with nine good-sized rooms, one on the ground floor and four on each other floor. It had a large brick-covered entrance hall with two separate stairways which in the old days were used, one as the Harem stairway and the other as the Selamlik stairway, but of course we modernized this by using one of them for service. The walls and ceilings had been all replastered and with the exception of the entrance hall which was painted in Turkish blue, were all calsomined in gray. Of course we had electriclight throughout and a telephone. The real innovation for Constantinople, however, was that we changed the kitchen from the basement, where it generally is located, to the first floor, near the dining-room where we had a regular American kitchenette built. Then we had a shower put in the spacious bathroom. So really the house is as comfortable as possible. As for the furniture, we had mostly some of the antique furniture collected by my father and myself in Western Europe, with here and there some Turkish embroideries, old pieces that have been in the family for many generations, and of course Turkish and Persian carpets. Despite our western furniture and some pictures we have on the walls we endeavoured to keep throughout the Oriental atmosphere of the house—not the kind of Turkish interior one sees in exhibitions, adorned with a lot of bric-a-brac and hangings, but the simple Oriental interior. This has been rather an easy task as our house is typically Turkish with large rooms of perfect proportions and big latticed windows. Therefore, by just placing a very few pieces of furniture in each room, by having straight hangings of pale Oriental colours in the windows, and by placing the few really valuable Turkish antiques in the most prominent place in each room, we have tried to keep the Turkish atmosphere which has so much charm and without which it would be sacrilegious to live in Stamboul, especially in a house like the one we have. Our friends and our guests have told us that we have succeeded in our endeavours and I believe this to be true, as an American lady with whom we have grown to be very good friends since; confided us that the first day she called on us bringing with her a letter of introduction from a mutual friend she was struck by the severe Turkish atmosphere of our house and—it being her first day in Constantinople and her imagination being full of all the horrid things she had heard about the Turks in America—she was rather nervous until she met my wife who breezed in to greet her in a perfectly American way. Needless to say that a short while after she was laughing with us at the reputation of being “terrible” which the Turks have abroad.
Certainly no one who has lived in Stamboul can even conceive where this reputation originated. Stamboul is the Turkish section of the city and is peopled exclusively by Turks. Its streets are so quiet, its crowds are so calm, that they really deserve much more the adjective of “peaceful” than that of “terrible.” Anyone who has been in Constantinople prefers Stamboul to any other section of the city with the possible exception of some parts of Nishantashe which are also exclusively inhabited by Turks and have therefore the same atmosphere of peace and quiet one finds in Stamboul.
Stamboul has the dignity of a queen. It has the same refinement, the same poise, the same nobility that a great lady always has no matter what her circumstances. Many of the houses are tumbling down. Alas! too many of the people living there are shabbily dressed—nay even some of them are now in rags. But her smallest streets, her humblest shacks have an inexpressible dignity which is at once apparent. Stamboul is a thoroughbred. Despite her misery and her intense sufferings, despite all her ruins and the poverty of her inhabitants, Stamboul is a queen. She has a soul of her own, very much alive and very compassionate—a soul which appeals to foreigners and to the Turks alike—perhaps because of the feeling of love and compassion which emanates from her and wins for her the hearts of Turks and foreigners. She loves her children: more than thirty thousand families have in the last ten years seen their houses destroyed by fire but somehow or other not one member of those thirty thousand families has remained without shelter. Stamboul has provided them with a roof and there they are, all her children, somewhat crowded it is true, but all living within her hospitable walls. She loves the foreigners and receives them with the greatest hospitality, she adopts those who can understand her and treats them even better than her own children: she has named, two of her streets afterPierre LotiandClaude Farrère, hergreat French friends, so that their names will remain forever alive within her walls. All who come to her fall in love with her, and my wife and myself fell immediately under her spell: she is so good, so sad, so peaceful!
Our house is on one of her principal streets, a wide avenue which leads to the Sublime Porte and then on to the Mausoleum of Sultan Mahmoud. The avenue, like most of the principal streets of Stamboul, is bordered with old plane trees where pigeons, and nightingales, have made their home. From our windows we see the court of the Sublime Porte, a big tumbled-down building where all the principal government departments are concentrated. The gates of the Sublime Porte are night and day guarded by Turkish soldiers and policemen, clean-cut young Turks, tanned from the sun and the invigorating air of their birthplace in Anatolia. Every hour of the day or of the night two of them tramp before the gate opposite our house, in rain or in sunshine, in snow or in fog. At the corner of the court there is a little mosque built especially for their use so that they can go five times a day to prayer. Five times a day the “muezzin” appears atop the slender minaret and in his soulful chant calls the soldiers and the neighbourhood to prayer and they all pray: when the sun rises and when it goes down, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the afternoon and in the middle ofthe night. Five times a day they give thanks to the Almighty, fervently confirm their faith that there is no god but God, and beg Him to assist them in following the straight path, the path to salvation. Can people of this kind be as black as they are represented abroad? Is it not monstrous to accuse them of so many dark crimes? Is it not criminal to even give credence—without investigating—to all of the deeds they are represented as doing by people who must have an ulterior motive? For my part I can't believe these people capable of even hurting a fly or of killing a wolf, unless it be in self-defense and I can truthfully say that my belief is not based on sentimental reasons or influenced by patriotic motives. I know the people, I have watched them for days and months from our windows in Stamboul, these Turkish peasant soldiers of Anatolia; I have read in their eyes only resignation, passivity, and love. I have seen how they treat little children, how they take care of poor stray dogs. No, they cannot possibly harm anyone unless it be in self-defense.
From the upper story of our house we can see the entrance of the Bosphorus, that enchanting piece of blue water which lures all that have seen it once. We see it through the branches of trees, between the Sublime Porte and a brick building on the left, the headquarters of some newspaper. Towering above it are the houses of Galata andPera forming an amphitheatre much more pleasing to the eye at a distance than from nearby. We also see the dark-green trees of the park of the Old Seraglio, where a few slender towers, a few slanting gray roofs mark the position of its imperial buildings. Truly our house is situated in the heart of Stamboul, that is why we can feel it throbbing so plainly, that is why we can learn to know her so well.
The famous Santa Sophia, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed with its six slender minarets, the Square of the Hippodrome, where the decadent emperors of Byzance held horse races nearly six centuries ago, even the famous bazaars are all within our range, almost within view of our house and we pass our first weeks after we have settled in visiting all these places, not as tourists, but for the purpose of knowing them, of communing with them so that we will feel that we have become one with our surroundings. We go time and again to the Old Seraglio, whose nooks and corners become as familiar to us as if we had lived there, the Old Seraglio whose every building, every kiosk, every room is still alive with the history of Turkey's past grandeur, whose garden still glows with the life of all the great Sultans and of their courtiers who lived and died there. From its outer court with its long alley of tall cypresses and poplars gently swaying to the breeze as if bewailing past splendours, from its outer Council Roomwhere generations of grave Pashas robed in sable furs covered with silk brocades and with bejeweled turbans have discussed affairs of State and international policies while powerful Sultans were listening from behind the golden lattices of a small balcony, from the informal audience room from which a Sultan chased the Ambassador of Louis XIV, King of France, for having dared to sit in his presence, to the court where another Sultan was murdered by his Janissaries, to the Kiosk of the Lilacs to the laboratory where learned doctors prepared drugs for their august masters, to the very trunk of the old plane tree in the shade of which a resentful Sultan signed the decree condemning to death one of his generals who had failed to capture Vienna, and to the marble terrace of the Badgad kiosk where a poet Sultan improvised his immortal verses to his Sultana, the place seems to be full of living shadows and remembrances. It seems as if it were only asleep and semi-consciously waiting a signal to people again all its buildings and its gardens with Princes and soldiers continuing their interrupted earthly existence.
We go time and again to all the different mosques of the neighbourhood, places renowned the world over for their architecture and which are so impregnated by the prayers Which generations of faithful believers have made within their walls five times a day for centuries and centuries, thatthey vibrate with spirituality and force you to meditation—not a sad meditation with visions of everlasting fires to expiate earthly sins, but encouraging meditation which whispers into your ears that God who has created such beautiful surroundings for a city like Constantinople, God who has given the power to human beings to conceive and construct such cheerful and elevating temples of worship and prayer cannot and will not create another life where the miseries of this one are continued and multiplied eternally. A meditation which makes you realize that if winter comes, spring cannot be far behind!
Then again we go often to the Bazaars, not necessarily to hunt for antiques or to purchase things, but to get acquainted with the little old shopkeepers, the second-hand booksellers with white beards and turbans, sitting placidly in their small stores surrounded by books—hand-written books in Turkish, Arabic or Persian, illuminated with delicate multi-hued designs and covered with priceless old leather bindings; little old shopkeepers who receive you as a guest and as a friend, offer you tea and talk with you for hours on such and such a book, this or the other school of philosophy, this or the other Arabic, Persian or Turkish writer—without even thinking of selling you a book. In our visits to the Bazaars we carefully avoid the Jew, Armenian or Greek antique dealers hunting in the covered streets of theplace for foreigners and other easy prey. After a visit or two we are known even by them and we can freely wander in the streets without being molested by their employees who try to induce strangers to visit their shops. We make friends with two or three dealers in the Bedesten, the central hall of the Bazaars, a huge circular place covered with a round dome where stands are like wide shelves and where shopkeepers sit cross-legged surrounded by genuine works of art, jewels and furniture piled in a beautiful disorder one on top of the other. We make friends with a few of these vendors—old men who have kept their stands since their early youth, people who knew my father, or an uncle or a cousin of mine, who adopt us as if we were one of them. Thereafter we have no more need of worrying; if we want to purchase something we have only to tell them and they will get it for us if it exists in Stamboul, if we see something that we want in one of the antique stores and are afraid that it is not genuine or that the storekeeper will ask us a price above its real value, we just have to speak of it to one of our friends and he will expertise it for us and purchase it for us at its real value. You see we are related to the late Reshad Bey—may the Mercy of God be on his soul—and all these old merchants were friends of his, and he had through their offices and with their cooperation made the most precious collection of Turkish antiquities thatexists to this day in Constantinople and for the peace of Reshad Bey's soul, for friendship to him, these good old people want to help us whenever they can.