“By some o’er-hasty angel was misplaced,In Fate’s eternal volume.”
“By some o’er-hasty angel was misplaced,In Fate’s eternal volume.”
“By some o’er-hasty angel was misplaced,In Fate’s eternal volume.”
“By some o’er-hasty angel was misplaced,
In Fate’s eternal volume.”
And yet it is very possible she would eat pies, too!
We left the slave-market, and wishing to buy a piece of Brusa silk for a dressing-gown, my friend conducted me to a secluded khan in the neighbourhood of the far-famed “burnt column.” Entering by a very mean door, closed within by a curtain, we stood on fine Indian mats in a large room, piled to the ceiling with silks enveloped in the soft satin-paper of the East. Here again coffee must be handed round before a single fold of the old Armenian’s wares could see the light, and fortunate it is, since one may not courteously refuse it, that Turkish coffee is very delicious, and served in acorn cups for size. A handsome boy took away the little filagree holders at last, and the old trader, setting his huge calpack firmly on his shaven head, began to reach down his costly wares. I had never seen such an array. The floor was soon like a shivered rainbow, almost paining the eye with the brilliancy and variety of beautiful fabrics. And all this to tempt the taste of a poor description-monger, who wanted but a plain robe de chambre to conceal from a chance visitor the poverty of an unmade toilet! There were stuffs of gold for a queen’s wardrobe; there were gauze-like fabrics interwoven with flowers of silver; and there was no leaf in botany, nor device in antiquity, that was not imitated in their rich borderings. I laid my hand on a plain pattern of blue and silver, and half-shutting my eyes to imagine how I should look in it, resolved upon the degree of depletion which my purse could bear, and inquired the price. As “green door and brass knocker” says of his charges in the farce, it was “ridiculously trifling.” It is a cheap country, the East! A beautiful Circassian slave for a hundred dollars (if you are a Turk), and an emperor’s dressing-gown for three! The Armenian laid his hand on his breast, as if he had made a good sale of it, the coffee-bearer wanted but a sous, and that was charity; and thus, by a mere change of place, that which were but a gingerbread expenditure becomes a rich man’s purchase.
LETTER XXXIV.
The Bosphorus—Turkish Palaces—The Black Sea—Buyukdere.
The Bosphorus—Turkish Palaces—The Black Sea—Buyukdere.
We left the ship with two caïques, each pulled by three men, and carrying three persons, on an excursion to the Black Sea. We were followed by the captain in his fast-pulling gig with six oars, who proposed to beat the feathery boats of the country in a twenty miles’ pull against the tremendous current of the Bosphorus.
The day was made for us. We coiled ourselvesà la Turque, in the bottom of the sharp caique, and as our broad-brimmed pagans, after the first mile, took off their shawled turbans, unwound their cashmere girdles, laid aside their gold-broidered jackets, and with nothing but the flowing silk shirt and ample trowsers to embarrass their action, commenced “giving way,” in long energetic strokes—I say, just then, with the sunshine and the west wind attempered to half a degree warmer than the blood (which I take to be the perfection of temperature), and a long, long autumn day, or two, or three, before us, and not a thought in the company that was not kindly and joyous—just then, I say, I dropped a “white stone” on the hour, and said, “Here is a moment, old Care, that has slipped through your rusty fingers! You have pinched me the past somewhat, and you will doubtless mark your cross on the future—but the present, by a thousand pulses in this warm frame laid along in the sunshine, is care-free, and the last hour of Eden came not on a softer pinion!”
We shot along through the sultan’s fleet (some eighteen or twenty lofty ships-of-war, looking, as they lie at anchor in this narrow strait, of a supernatural size), and then, nearing the European shore to take advantage of the counter-current, my kind friend, Mr. H., who is at home on these beautiful waters, began to name to me the palaces we were shooting by, with many a little history of their occupants between, to which in a letter, written with a traveller’s haste, and in moments stolen from fatigue, or pleasure, or sleep, I could not pretend to do justice.
The Bosphorus is quite—there can be no manner of doubt of it—the most singularly beautiful scenery in the world. From Constantinople to the Black Sea, a distance of twenty miles, the two shores of Asia and Europe, separated by but half a mile of bright blue water, are lined by lovely villages, each with its splendid palace or two, its mosque and minarets, and its hundred small houses buried in trees, each with its small dark cemetery of cypresses and turbaned head-stones, and each with its valley stretching back into the hills, of which every summit and swell is crowned with a fairy kiosk. There is no tide, and the palaces of the sultan and his ministers, and of the wealthier Turks and Armenians, are built half over the water, and the ascending caique shoots beneath his window, within the length of the owner’s pipe; and with his own slender boat lying under the stairs, the luxurious oriental makes but a step from the cushions of his saloon to those of a conveyance, which bears him (so built on the water’s edge is this magnificent capital) to almost every spot that can require his presence.
A beautiful palace is that of the “Marble Cradle,” or Beshiktash, the sultan’s winter residence. Its bright gardens with latticed fences (through which, as we almost touched in passing, we saw the gleam of the golden orange and lemon-trees, and the thousand flowers, and heard the splash of fountains, and the singing of birds) lean down to the lip of the Bosphorus, and declining to the south, and protected from everything but the sun by an enclosing wall, enjoy, like the terrace of old King René, a perpetual summer. The brazen gates open on the water, and the palace itself, a beautiful building, painted in the oriental style, of a bright pink, stands between the gardens, with its back to the wall.
The summer palace, where the “unmuzzled lion,” as his flatterers call him, resides at present, is just above on the Asian side, at a village called Beylerbey. It is an immense building, painted yellow, with white cornices, and has an extensive terrace-garden, rising over the hill behind. The harem has eight projecting wings, each occupied by one of the sultan’s lawful wives.
Six or seven miles from Constantinople, on the European shore, stands the serai of the sultan’s eldest sister. It is a Chinese-looking structure, but exceedingly picturesque, and like everything else on the Bosphorus, quite in keeping with the scene. There is not a building on either side, from the Black Sea to Marmora, that would not be ridiculous in other countries; and yet, here, their gingerbread balconies, imitation perspectives, lattices, bird-cages, and kiosks, seem as naturally the growth of the climate as the pomegranate and the cypress. The old maid sultana lives here with a hundred or two female slaves of condition, a little empress in an empire sufficiently large (for a woman); seeing no bearded face, it is presumed, except her black eunuchs’ and her European physician’s, and having, though a sultan’s sister, less liberty than she gives even her slaves, whom she permits to marry if they will. She can neither read nor write, and is said to be fat, indolent, kind, and childish.
A little farther up, the sultan is repairing a fantastical little palace for his youngest sister, Esmeh Sultana, who is to be married to Haleil Pacha, the commander of the artillery. She is about twenty, and, report says, handsome and spirited. Her betrothed was a Georgian slave, bought by the sultan when a boy, and advanced by the usual steps of favouritism. By the laws of imperial marriages in this empire, he is to be banished to a distant pachalick after living with his wife a year, his connexion with blood-royal making him dangerously eligible to the throne. His bride remains at Stamboul, takes care of her child (if she has one), and lives the remainder of her life in a widow’s seclusion, with an allowance proportioned to her rank.Hisconsolation is provided for by the Mussulman privilege of as many more wives as he can support. Heaven send him resignation—if he needs it notwithstanding.
The hakim, or chief physician to the sultan, has a handsome palace on the same side of the Bosphorus; and the Armenian seraffs, or bankers, though compelled, like all rayahs, to paint their houses of a dull lead colour (only a Mussulman may live in a red house in Constantinople), are said, in those dusky-looking tenements, to maintain a luxury not inferior to that of the sultan himself. They have a singular effect, those black, funereal houses, standing in the foreground of a picture of such light and beauty!
We pass Orta-keni, the Jew village; the Arnaout-keni, occupied mostly by Greeks; and here, if you have read “The Armenians,” you are in the midst of its most stirring scenes. The story is a true one, not much embellished in the hands of the novelist; and there, on the hill opposite, in Anatolia, stands the house of the heroine’s father, the old seraff Oglou, and, behind the garden, you may see the small cottage, inhabited, secretly, by the enamoured Constantine; and here, in the pretty village of Bebec, lives, at this moment, the widowed and disconsolate Veronica, dressed ever in weeds, and obstinately refusing all society but her own sad remembrance. I must try to see her. Her “husband of a night” was compelled to marry again by the hospidar, his father (but this is not in the novel, you will remember), and there is late news that his wife is dead, and the lovers of romance in Stamboul are hoping he will return and make a happier sequel than the sad one in the story. The “orthodox catholic Armenian, broker and money-changer to boot,” who was to have been her forced husband, is a very amiable and good-looking fellow, now in the employ of ourchargé d’affairesas second dragoman.
We approach Roumeli Hissar, a jutting point almost meeting a similar projection from the Asian shore, crowned, like itsvis-a-vis, with a formidable battery. The Bospborus here is but half an arrow-flight in width, and Europe and Asia, here at their nearest approach, stand looking each other in the face, like boxers, with foot forward, fist doubled, and a most formidable row of teeth on either side. The current scampers through between the two castles, as if happy to get out of the way, and, up-stream, it is hard pulling for a caique. They are beautiful points, however, and I am ashamed of my coarse simile, when I remember how green was the foliage that half-enveloped the walls, and how richly picturesque the hills behind them. Here, in the European castle, were executed the greater part of the janisaries, hundreds in a day, of the manliest frames in the empire, thrown into the rapid Bosphorus, headless and stripped, to float, unmourned and unregarded, to the sea.
Above Roumeli-Hissar, the Bosphorus spreads again, and a curving bay, which is set like a mirror, in a frame of the softest foliage and verdure, is pointed out as a spot at which the crusaders, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Raymond of Toulouse, encamped on their way to Palestine. The hills beyond this are loftier, and the Giant’s Mountain, upon which the Russian army encamped at their late visit to the Porte, would be a respectable eminence in any country. At its foot, the Strait expands into quite a lake; and on the European side, in a scoop of the shore, exquisitely placed, stand the diplomatic villages of Terapia and Buyukdere. The English, French, Russian, Austrian and other flags were flying over half-a-dozen of the most desirable residences I have seen since Italy.
We soon pulled the remaining mile or two, and our spent caikjees drew breath, and lay on their oars in the Black Sea. The waves were breaking on the “blue Symplegades,” a mile on our left; and, before us, toward the Cimmerian, Bosphorus; and, south, toward Colchis and Trebizond, spread one broad, blue waste of waters, apparently as limitless as the ocean. TheBlackSea is particularlyblue.
We turned our prow to the west, and I sighed to remember that I had reached my farthest step into the East. Henceforth I shall be on the return. I sent a long look over the waters to the bright lands beyond, so famed in history and fiction, and wishing for even a metamorphosis into the poor sea-bird flying above us (whose travelling expenses Nature pays), I lay back in the boat with a “change in the spirit of my dream.”
We stopped on the Anatolian shore to visit the ruins of a fine old Genoese castle, which looks over the Black Sea, and after a lunch upon grapes and coffee, at a small village at the foot of the hill on which it stands, we embarked and followed our companions. Running down with the current to Buyukdere, we landed and walked along the thronged and beautiful shore to Terapia, meeting hundreds of fair Armenians and Greeks (allbeautiful, it seemed to me), issuing forth for their evening promenade, and, with a call of ceremony on the English ambassador, for whom I had letters, we again took to the caique, and fled down with the current like a bird. Oh what a sunset was there!
We were to dine and pass the night at the country-house of an English gentleman at Bebec, a secluded and lovely village, six or eight miles from Constantinople. We reached the landing as the stars began to glimmer, and, after one of the most agreeable and hospitable entertainments I remember to have shared, we took an early breakfast with our noble host, and returned to the ship. I could wish my friends no brighter passage in their lives than such an excursion as mine to the Black Sea.
LETTER XXXV.
The Golden Horn and its Scenery—The Sultan’s Wives and Arabians—The Valley of Sweet Waters—Beauty of the Turkish Minarets—The Mosque of Sulymanye—Mussulmans at their Devotions—The Muezzin—The Bazaar of the Opium-eaters—The Mad House of Constantinople, and Description of its Inmates—Their Wretched Treatment—The Hippodrome and the Mosque of Sultan Achmet—The Janizaries—Reflections on the Past, the Present, and the Future.
The Golden Horn and its Scenery—The Sultan’s Wives and Arabians—The Valley of Sweet Waters—Beauty of the Turkish Minarets—The Mosque of Sulymanye—Mussulmans at their Devotions—The Muezzin—The Bazaar of the Opium-eaters—The Mad House of Constantinople, and Description of its Inmates—Their Wretched Treatment—The Hippodrome and the Mosque of Sultan Achmet—The Janizaries—Reflections on the Past, the Present, and the Future.
The “Golden Horn” is a curved arm of the sea, the broadest extremity meeting the Bosphorus and forming the harbour of Constantinople, and the other tapering away till it is lost in the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” It curls through the midst of the “seven-hilled” city, and you cross it whenever you have an errand in old Stamboul. Its hundreds of shooting caïques, its forests of merchantmen and men-of-war, its noise and its confusion, are exchanged in scarce ten minutes of swift pulling for the breathless and Eden-like solitude of a valley that has not its parallel, I am inclined to think, between the Mississippi and the Caspian. It is called in Turkishkhyat-khana. Opening with a gentle curve from the Golden Horn, it winds away into the hills toward Belgrade, its long and even hollow thridded by a lively stream, and carpeted by a broad belt of unbroken green sward swelling up to the enclosing hills, with a grass so verdant and silken that it seems the very floor of faëry. In the midst of its longest stretch to the eye (perhaps two miles of level meadow) stands a beautiful serai of the sultan’s, unfenced and open, as if it had sprung from the lap of the green meadow like a lily. The stream runs by its door, and over a mimic fall whose lip is of scalloped marble, is built an oriental kiosk, all carving and gold, that is only too delicate and fantastical for reality.
Here, with, the first grass of spring, the sultan sends his fine-footed Arabians to pasture; and here come the ladies of his harem (chosen, women and horses, for much the same class of qualities), and in the long summer afternoon, with mounted eunuchs on the hills around, forbidding on pain of death, all approach to the sacred retreat, they venture to drop their jealous veils and ramble about in their unsunned beauty.
After a gallop of three or four miles over the broad waste table plains, in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, we checked our horses suddenly on the brow of a precipitous descent, with this scene of beauty spread out before us. I had not yet approached it by water, and it seemed to me as if the earth had burst open at my feet, and revealed some realm of enchantment. Behind me, and away beyond the valley to the very horizon, I could see only a trackless heath, brown and treeless, while a hundred feet below lay a strip of very Paradise, blooming in all the verdure and heavenly freshness of spring. We descended slowly, and crossing a bridge half hidden by willows, rode in upon the elastic green sward (for myself) with half a feeling of profanation. There were no eunuchs upon the hills, however, and our spirited Turkish horses threw their wild heads into the air, and we flew over the verdant turf like a troop of Delhis, the sound of the hoofs on the yielding carpet scarcely audible. The fair palace in the centre of this domain of loveliness was closed, and it was only after we had walked around it that we observed a small tent of the prophet’s green couched in a small dell on the hill-side, and containing probably the guard of its imperial master.
We mounted again and rode up the valley for two or three miles, following the same level and verdant curve, the soft carpet broken only by the silver thread of the Barbyses, loitering through it on its way to the sea. A herd of buffaloes, tended by a Bulgarian boy, stretched on his back in the sunshine, and a small caravan of camels bringing wood from the hills, and keeping to the soft valley as a relief to their spongy feet, were the only animated portions of the landscape. I think I shall never form to my mind another picture of romantic rural beauty (an employment of the imagination I am much given to when out of humour with the world) that will not resemble the “Valley of Sweet Waters”—thekhyat-khanaof Constantinople. “Poor Slingsby” never was here.[15]
The lofty mosque of Sulymanye, the bazaars of the opium-eaters, and theTimar-hané, or mad-house of Constantinople, are all upon one square in the highest part of the city. We entered the vast court of the mosque from a narrow and filthy street, and the impression of its towering plane-trees and noble area, and of the strange, but grand and costly pile in its centre, was almost devotional. An inner court, enclosed by a kind of romanesque wall, contained a sacred marble fountain of light and airy architecture, and the portico facing this was sustained by some of those splendid and gigantic columns of porphyry and jasper, the spoils of the churches of Asia Minor.[16]
I think the most beautiful spire that rises into the sky is the Turkish minaret. If I may illustrate an object of such magnitude by so trifling a comparison, it is exactly the shape and proportions of an ever-pointed pencil-case—the silver bands answering to the encircling galleries, one above another, from which the muezzin calls out the hour of prayer. The minaret is painted white, the galleries are fantastically carved, and rising to the height of the highest steeples in our country (four and sometimes six to a single mosque), these slender and pointed fingers of devotion seem to enter the very sky. Remembering, dear reader, that there are two hundred and twenty mosques and three hundred chapels in Constantinople, raising, perhaps, in all, a thousand minarets to heaven, you may get some idea of the magnificence of this seven-hilled capital of the East.
It was near the hour of prayer, and the devout Mussulmans were thronging into the court of Sulymanye by every gate. Passing the noble doors, with their strangely-carved arches of arabesque, which invite all to enter but the profaning foot of the Christian, the turbaned crowd repaired first to the fountains. From the walls of every mosque, by small conduits pouring into a marble basin, flow streams of pure water for the religious ablutions of the faithful. The Mussulman approaches, throws off his flowing robe, steps out of his yellow slippers, and unwinds his voluminous turban with devout deliberateness. A small marble step, worn hollow with pious use, supports his foot while he washes from the knee downward. His hands and arms, with the flowing sleeve of his silk shirt rolled to the shoulder, receive the same lavation, and then, washing his face, he repeats a brief prayer, resumes all but his slippers, and enters the mosque, barefooted. Themihrab(or niche indicating the side toward the tomb of the prophet), fixes his eye. He folds his hands together, prays a moment standing, prostrates himself flat on his face toward the hallowed quarter, rises upon his knees, and continues praying and prostrating himself for perhaps half an hour. And all this process is required by the mufti, and performed by every good Mussulman five times a day! A rigid adherence to it is almost universal among the Turks. In what an odour of sanctity would a Christian live, who should make himself thus “familiar with heaven!”
As the muezzin from the minaret was shouting his last “mash-allah!” with a voice like a man calling out from the clouds, we left the court of the majestic mosque, with Byron’s reflection:—
“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”
“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”
“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”
“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”
and, having delivered ourselves of this scrap of poetical philosophy, we crossed over the square to the opium-eaters.
A long row of half-ruined buildings, of a single story, with porticoes in front, and the broad, raised platform beneath, on which the Turks sit cross-legged at public places, is the scene of what was once a peculiarly oriental spectacle. The mufti has of late years denounced the use of opium, and the devotees to its sublime intoxication have either conquered the habit, or what is more probable, indulge it in more secret places. The shops are partly ruinous, and those that remain in order are used as cafés, in which, however, it is said that the dangerous drug may still be procured. My companion inquired of a good-humoured-looking caféjee whether there was any place at which a confirmed opium-eater could be seen under its influence. He said there was an old Turk, who was in the habit of frequenting his shop, and, if we could wait an hour or two, we might see him in the highest state of intoxication. We had no time to spare, if the object had been worth our while.
And here, thought I, as we sat down and took a cup of coffee in the half-ruined café, have descended upon the delirious brains of these noble drunkards, the visions of Paradise so glowingly described in books—visions, it is said, as far exceeding the poor invention of the poet, as the houris of the prophet exceed the fair damsels of this world. Here men, otherwise in their senses, have believed themselves emperors, warriors, poets; these wretched walls and bending roof, the fair proportions of a palace; this gray old caféjee, a Hylas or a Ganymede. Here men have come to cast off, for an hour, the dull thraldom of the body; to soar into the glorious world of fancy at a penalty of a thousand times the proportion of real misery; to sacrifice the invaluable energies of health, and deliberately poison the very fountain of life, for a few brief moments of magnificent and phrensied blessedness. It is powerfully described in the “Opium Eater” of De Quincy.
At the extremity of this line of buildings, by a natural proximity, stands theTimar-hané. We passed the porter at the gate without question, and entered a large quadrangle, surrounded with the grated windows of cells on the ground-floor. In every window was chained a maniac. The doors of the cells were all open, and, descending by a step upon the low stone floor of the first, we found ourselves in the presence of four men chained to rings in the four corners by massy iron collars. The man in the window sat crouched together, like a person benumbed (the day was raw and cold as December), the heavy chain of his collar hanging on his naked breast, and his shoulders imperfectly covered with a narrow blanket. His eyes were large and fierce, and his mouth was fixed in an expression of indignant sullenness. My companion asked him if he were ill. He said he should be well, if he were out—that he was brought there in a fit of intoxication, two years ago, and was no more crazy than his keeper. Poor fellow! It might easily be true! He lifted his heavy collar from his neck as he spoke, and it was not difficult to believe that misery like his for two long years would, of itself, destroy reason. There was a better dressed man in the opposite corner, who informed us, in a gentlemanly voice, that he had been a captain in the sultan’s army, and was brought there in the delirium of a fever. He was at a loss to know, he said, why he was imprisoned still.
We passed on to a poor, half-naked wretch in the last stage of illness and idiocy, who sat chattering to himself, and, though trembling with the cold, interrupted his monologue continually with fits of the wildest laughter. Farther on sat a young man of a face so full of intellectual beauty, an eye so large and mild, a mouth of such mingled sadness and sweetness, and a forehead so broad, and marked so nobly, that we stood, all of us, struck with a simultaneous feeling of pity and surprise. A countenance more beaming with all that is admirable in human nature, I have never seen, even in painting. He might have sat to Da Vinci for the “beloved apostle.” He had tied the heavy chain by a shred to a round of the grating, to keep its weight from his neck, and seemed calm and resigned, with all his sadness. My friend spoke to him, but he answered obscurely, and seeing that our gaze disturbed him, we passed unwillingly on. Oh what room there is in the world for pity! If that poor prisoner be not a maniac (as he may not be), and if nature has not falsified in the structure of his mind the superior impress on his features, what Prometheus-like agony has he suffered! The guiltiest felon is better cared for. And, allowing his mind to be a wreck, and allowing the hundred human minds, in the same cheerless prison, to be certainly in ruins, oh what have they done to be weighed down with iron on their necks, and exposed, like caged beasts, shivering and naked, to the eye of pitiless curiosity? I have visited lunatic asylums in France, Italy, Sicily, and Germany, but, culpably neglected as most of them are, I have seen nothing comparable to this in horror.
“Is he never unchained?” we asked. “Never!” And yet from the ring to the iron collar there was just chain enough to permit him to stand upright! There were no vessels near them, not even a pitcher of water. Their dens were cleansed and the poor sufferers fed at appointed hours, and, come wind or rain, there was neither shutter nor glass to defend them from the inclemency of the weather.
We entered most of the rooms, and found in all the same dampness, filth, and misery. One poor wretch had been chained to the same spot for twenty years. The keeper said he never slept. He talked all the night long. Sometimes at mid-day his voice would cease, and his head nod for an instant, and then with a start as if he feared to be silent, he raved on with the same incoherent rapidity. He had been a dervish. His collar and chain were bound with rags, and a tattered coat was fastened up on the inside of the window, forming a small recess in which he sat, between the room and the grating. He was emaciated to the last degree. His beard was tangled and filthy, his nails curled over the ends of his fingers, and his appearance, save only an eye of the keenest lustre, that of a wild beast.
In the last room we entered, we found a good-looking young man, well-dressed, healthy, composed, and having every appearance of a person in the soundest state of mind and body. He saluted us courteously, and told my friend that he was a renegade Greek. He had turned Mussulman a year or two ago, had lost his reason, and so was brought here. He talked of it quite as a thing of course, and seemed to be entirely satisfied that the best had been done for him. One of the party took hold of his chain. He winced as the collar stirred on his neck, and said the lock was on the outside of the window (which was true), and that the boys came in and tormented him by pulling it sometimes, “There they are,” he said, pointing to two or three children who had just entered the court, and were running round from one prisoner to another. We bade him good morning, and he laid his hand to his breast, and bowed with a smile. As we passed toward the gate, the chattering lunatic on the opposite side screamed after us, the old dervish laid his skinny hands on the bars of his window, and talked louder and faster, and the children, approaching close to the poor creatures, laughed with delight at their excitement.
It was a relief to escape the common sights and sounds of the city. We walked on to the Hippodrome. The only remaining beauty of this famous square is the unrivalled mosque of Sultan Achmet, which, though inferior in size to the renowned Santa Sophia, is superior in elegance both within and without. Its six slender and towering minarets are the handsomest in Constantinople. The wondrous obelisk in the centre of the square, remains perfect as in the time of the Christian emperors, but the brazen tripod is gone from the twisted column, and the serpent-like pillar itself is leaning over with its brazen folds to its fall.
Here stood the barracks of the powerful Janisaries, and from the side of Sultan Achmet the cannon were levelled upon them, as they rushed from the conflagration within. And here, when Constantinople was “the second Rome,” were witnessed the triumphal processions of Christian conquest, the march of the crusaders, bound for Palestine, and the civil tumults which Justinian, walking among the people with the Gospel in his hand, tried in vain to allay ere they burnt the great edifice built of the ruins of the temple of Solomon. And around this now neglected area, the captive Gelimer followed in chains the chariot of the conquering Belisarius, repeating the words of Solomon, “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!” while the conqueror himself, throwing aside his crown, prostrated himself at the feet of the beautiful Theodora, raised from a Roman actress to be the Christian empress of the East. From any elevated point of the city, you may still see the ruins of the palace of the renowned warrior, and read yourself a lesson on human vicissitudes, remembering the school-book story of “an obolon for Belisarius!”
The Hippodome was, until late years, the constant scene of the games of the jereed. With the destruction of the Janisaries, and the introduction of European tactics, this graceful exercise has gone out of fashion. The East is fast losing its picturesqueness. Dress, habits, character, everything seems to be undergoing a gradual change, and when, as the Turks themselves predict, the Moslem is driven into Asia, this splendid capital will become another Paris, and with the improvements in travel, a summer in Constantinople will be as little thought of as a tour in Italy. Politicians in this part of the world predict such a change as about to arrive.
[15]
Irving says, in one of his most exquisite passages—“He who has sallied forth into the world like poor Slingsby, full of sunny anticipations, finds too soon how different the distant scene becomes when visited. The smooth place roughens as he approaches; the wild place becomes tame and barren; the fairy teints that beguiled him on, still fly to the distant hill, or gather upon the land he has left behind, and every part of the landscape is greener than the spot he stands on.” Full of merit and beautiful expression as this is, I, for one, have not found it true. Bright as I had imagined the much-sung lands beyond the water, I have found many a scene in Italy and the East that has more than answered the craving for beauty in my heart. Val d’Arno, Vallombrosa, Venice, Terni, Tivoli, Albano, the Isles of Greece, the Bosphorus, and the matchless valley I have described, have, with a hundred other spots less famous, far outgone in their exquisite reality, even the brightest of my anticipations. The passage is not necessarily limited in its meaning to scenery, however, and ofmoraldisappointment it is beautifully true. There is many a “poor Slingsby,” the fate of whose sunny anticipations of life it describes but too faithfully.
[16]
Sulymanye was built of the ruins of the church St. Euphemia, at Chalcedonia.
LETTER XXXVI.
Sultan Mahmoud at his Devotions—Comparative Splendour of Papal, Austrian, and Turkish Equipages—The Sultan’s Barge or Caïque—Description of the Sultan—Visit to a Turkish Lancasterian School—The Dancing Dervishes—Visit from the Sultan’s Cabinet—The Seraskier and the Capitan Pacha—Humble Origin of Turkish Dignitaries.
Sultan Mahmoud at his Devotions—Comparative Splendour of Papal, Austrian, and Turkish Equipages—The Sultan’s Barge or Caïque—Description of the Sultan—Visit to a Turkish Lancasterian School—The Dancing Dervishes—Visit from the Sultan’s Cabinet—The Seraskier and the Capitan Pacha—Humble Origin of Turkish Dignitaries.
I had slept on shore, and it was rather late before I remembered that it was Friday (the Moslem Sunday), and that Sultan Mahmoud was to go in state to mosque at twelve. I hurried down the precipitous street of Pera, and, as usual, escaping barely with my life from the Christian-hating dogs of Tophana, embarked in a caique, and made all speed up the Bosphorus. There is no word in Turkish for faster, but I was urging on my caikjees by a wave of the hand and the sight of a bishlik (about the value of a quarter of a dollar), when suddenly a broadside was fired from the three-decker, “Mahmoudier,” the largest ship in the world, and to the rigging of every man-of-war in the fleet through which I was passing, mounted, simultaneously, hundreds of blood-red flags, filling the air about us like a shower of tulips and roses. Imagine twenty ships of war, with yards manned, and scarce a line in their rigging to be seen for the flaunting of colours! The jar of the guns, thundering in every direction close over us, almost lifted our light boat out of the water, and the smoke rendered our pilotage between the ships and among their extending cables rather doubtful. The white cloud lifted after a few minutes, and, with, the last gun, down went the flags altogether, announcing that the “Brother of the Sun” had left his palace.
He had but crossed to the mosque of the small village on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, and was already at his prayers when I arrived. His body-guard was drawn up before the door, in their villainous European dress, and, as their arms were stacked, I presumed it would be some time before the sultan reappeared, and I improved the interval in examining the handja-bashes or state-caïques, lying at the landing. I have arrived at my present notions of equipage by three degrees. The pope’s carriages at Rome rather astonished me. The emperor of Austria’s sleighs diminished the pope in my admiration, and the sultan’s caïques, in their turn, “pale the fires” of the emperor of Austria. The handja-bash is built something like the ancient galley, very high at the prow and stem, carries some fifty oars, and has a roof over her poop, supported by four columns, and loaded with the most sumptuous ornaments, the whole gilt brilliantly. The prow is curved over, and wreathed into every possible device that would not affect the necessary lines of the model; her crew are dressed in the beautiful costume of the country, rich and flowing, and with the costly and bright-coloured carpets hanging over her side, and the flashing of the sun on her ornaments of gold, she is really the most splendid object of state equipage (if I may be allowed the misnomer) in the world.
I was still examining the principal barge, when the troops stood to their arms, and preparation was made for the passing out of the sultan. Thirty or forty of his highest military officers formed themselves into two lines from the door of the mosque to the landing, and behind them were drawn up single files of soldiers. I took advantage of the respect paid to the rank of Commodore Patterson, and obtained an excellent position, with him, at the side of the caique. First issued from the door two Georgian slaves, bearing censers, from which they waved the smoke on either side, and the sultan immediately followed, supported by the capitan-pacha, the seraskier, and Haleil Pacha (who is to marry the Sultana Esmeh). He walked slowly down to the landing, smiling and talking gaily with the seraskier, and, bowing to the commodore in passing, stepped into his barge, seated himself on a raised sofa, while his attendants coiled their legs on the carpet below, and turned his prow across the Bosphorus.
I have perhaps never set my eyes on a handsomer man than Sultan Mahmoud. His figure is tall, straight, and manly, his air unembarrassed and dignified, and his step indicative of the well-known firmness of his character. A superb beard of jetty blackness, with a curling moustache, conceals all the lower part of his face; the decided and bold lines of his mouth just marking themselves when he speaks. It is said he both paints and dyes his beard, but a manlier brown upon a cheek, or a richer gloss upon a beard, I never saw. His eye is described by writers as having adoomed darknessof expression, and it is certainly one that would well become a chief of bandits—large, steady, and overhung with an eyebrow like a thunder cloud. He looks the monarch. The child of a seraglio (where mothers are chosen for beauty alone) could scarce escape being handsome. The blood of Circassian upon Circassian is in his veins, and the wonder is, not that he is the handsomest man in his empire, but that he is not the greatest slave. Our “mother’s humour,” they say, predominates in our mixtures. Sultan Mahmoud, however, was marked by nature for a throne.
I accompanied Mr. Goodell and Mr. Dwight, American missionaries at Constantinople, to visit a Lancasterian school established with their assistance in the Turkish barracks. The building stands on the ascent of one of the lovely valleys that open into the Bosphorus, some three miles from the city, on the European side. We were received by the colonel of the regiment; a young man of fine appearance, with the diamond crescent and star glittering on the breast of his military frock, and after the inevitable compliment of pipes and coffee, the drum was beat and the soldiers called to school.
The Sultan has an army of boys. Nine-tenths of those I have seen are under twenty. They marched in, in single file, and facing about, held up their hands at the word of command, while a subaltern looked that each had performed the morning ablution. They were healthy-looking lads, mostly from the interior provinces, whence they are driven down likes cattle to fill the ranks of their sovereign. Duller-looking subjects for an idea it has not been my fortune to see.
The Turkish alphabet hung over the teacher’s desk (the colonel is the schoolmaster, and takes the greatest interest in his occupation), and the front seats are faced with a long box covered with sand, in which the beginners write with their fingers. It is fitted with a slide that erases the clumsy imitation when completed, and seemed to me an ingenious economy of ink and paper. (I would suggest to the mind of the benevolent, a school on the same principle for beginners in poetry. It would save the critics much murder, and tend to the suppression of suicide.) The classes having filed into their seats, the school opened with a prayer by the colonel. The higher benches then commenced writing, on slates and paper, sentences dictated from the desk, and I was somewhat surprised at the neatness and beauty of the characters.
We passed afterward into another room where arithmetic and geography were taught, and then mounted to an apartment on the second story occupied by students in military drawing. The proficiency of all was most creditable, considering the brief period during which the schools have been in operation—something less than a year. Prejudiced as the Turks are against European innovation, this advanced step towards improvement tells well. Our estimable and useful missionaries appear, from the respect everywhere shown them, to be in high esteem, and with the Sultan’s energetic disposition for reform, they hope everything in the way of an enlightened change in the moral condition of the people.
We went to the chapel of the dancing dervishes. It is a beautiful marble building, with a court-yard ornamented with a small cemetery shaded with cypresses, and a fountain enclosed in a handsome edifice, and defended by gilt gratings from the street of the suburb of Pera, in which it stands. They dance here twice a week. We arrived before the hour, and were detained at the door by a soldier on guard, who would not permit us to enter without taking off our boots—a matter about which, between straps and their very muddy condition, we had some debate. The dervishes began to arrive before the question was settled, and one of them, a fine-looking old man, inviting us to enter, Mr. H. explained the difficulty. “Go in,” said he, “go in!” and turning to the more scrupulous Mussulman with the musket, as he pushed us within the door, “Stupid fellow!” said he, “if you had been less obstinate, they would have given you abakshish” (Turkish for afee). He should have said lessreligious—for the poor fellow looked horror-struck as our dirty boots profaned the clean white Persian matting of the sacred floor. One would think “the nearer the church the farther from God,” were as true here as it is said to be in some more civilised countries.
It was a pretty, octagonal interior, with a gallery, themihrabor niche indicating the direction of the prophet’s tomb, standing obliquely from the front of the building. Hundreds of small lamps hung in the area, just out of the reach of the dervishes’ tall caps, and all around between the gallery; a part of the floor was raised, matted, and divided from the body of the church by a balustrade. It would have made an exceedingly pretty ball-room.
None but the dervishes entered within the paling, and they soon began to enter, each advancing first toward the mihrab, and going through fifteen or twenty minutes’ prostrations and prayers. Their dress is very humble. A high, white felt cap, without a rim, like a sugar-loaf enlarged a little at the smaller end, protects the head, and a long dress of dirt-coloured cloth, reaching quite to the heels and bound at the waist with a girdle, completes the costume. They look like men who have made up their minds toseemreligious, and though said to be a set of very good fellows, they have a Mawworm expression of face generally, which was very repulsive. I must except the chief of the sect, however, who entered when all the rest had seated themselves on the floor, and after a brief genuflexion or two took possession of a rich Angora carpet placed for him near the mihrab. He was a small old man, distinguished in his dress only by the addition of a green band to his cap (the sign of his pilgrimage to Mecca) and the entire absence of the sanctimonious look. Still he was serious, and there was no mark in his clear, intelligent eye and amiable features, of any hesitancy or want of sincerity in his devotion. He is said to be a learned man, and he is certainly a very prepossessing one, though he would be taken up as a beggar in any city in the United States. It is a thing one learns in “dangling about the world,” by the way, to form opinions of men quite independently of their dress.
After sitting a while in quaker meditation, the brotherhood rose one by one (there were ten of them I think), and marched round the room with their toes turned in, to the music of a drum and a Persian flute, played invisibly in some part of the gallery. As they passed the carpet of the cross-legged chief, they twisted dexterously and made three salaams, and then raising their arms, which they held out straight during the whole dance, they commenced twirling on one foot, using the other after the manner of a paddle to keep up the motion. I forgot to mention that they laid aside their outer dresses before commencing the dance. They remained in dirty white tunics reaching to the floor, and very full at the bottom, so that with the regular motion of their whirl, the wind blew them out into a circle, like what the girls in our country call “making cheeses.” They twisted with surprising exactness and rapidity, keeping clear of each other, and maintaining their places with the regularity of machines. I have seen a great deal of waltzing, but I think the dancing dervishes for precision and spirit, might give a lesson even to the Germans.
We left them twisting. They had been going for half an hour, and it began to look very like perpetual motion. Unless their brains are addled, their devotion, during this dizzy performance at least, must be quite suspended. A man who could think of his Maker, while revolving so fast that his nose is indistinct, must have some power of abstraction.
The frigate was visited to-day by the sultan’s cabinet. Theseraskier pachacame alongside first, in his state caique, and embraced the commodore as he stepped upon the deck, with great cordiality. He is a short, fat old man, with a snow-white beard, and so bow-legged as to be quite deformed. He wore the red Fez cap of the army, with a long blue frock-coat, the collar so tight as nearly to choke him, and the body not shaped to the figure, but made to fall around him like a sack. The red, bloated skin of his neck fell over, so as to almost cover the gold with which the collar was embroidered. He was formerly capitan pacha, or admiral-in-chief of the fleet, and though a good-humoured, merry-looking old man, has shown himself, both in his former and present capacity, to be wily, cold, and a butcher in cruelty. He possesses unlimited influence over the sultan, and though nominally subordinate to the grand vizier, is really the second if not the first person in the empire. He was originally a Georgian slave.
The seraskier was still talking with the commodore in the gangway, when the present capitan pacha mounted the ladder, and the old man, who is understood to be at feud with his successor, turned abruptly away and walked aft. The capitan pacha is a tall, slender man, of precisely that look and manner which we call gentlemanly. His beard grows untrimmed in the Turkish fashion, and is slightly touched with gray. His eye is anxious, but resolute, and he looks like a man of resource and ability. His history is as singular as that of most other great men in Turkey. He was a slave of Mohammed Ali, the rebellious Pacha of Egypt. Being intrusted by his master with a brig and cargo for Leghorn, he sold the vessel and lading, lived like a gentleman in Italy for some years with the proceeds, and as the best security against the retribution of his old master, offered his services to the sultan, with whom Ali was just commencing hostilities. Naval talent was in request, and he soon arrived at his present dignity. He is said to be the only officer in the fleet who knows anything of his profession.
Haleil Pacha arrived last. The sultan’s future son-in-law is a man of perhaps thirty-five. He is light-complexioned, stout, round-faced, and looks like a respectable grocer, “well to do in the world.” He has commanded the artillery long enough to have acquired a certain air of ease and command, and carries the promise of good fortune in his confident features. He is to be married almost immediately. He, too, was a Georgian, sent as a present to the sultan.
The three dignitaries made the rounds of the ship and then entered the cabin, where the pianoforte (a novelty to the seraskier and Haleil Pacha, and to most of the attendant officers), and the commodore’s agreeable society and champagne, promised to detain them the remainder of the day. They were like children with a holiday. I was engaged to dine on shore, and left them aboard.
In a country where there is no education and no rank, except in the possession of present power, it is not surprising that men should rise from the lowest class to the highest offices, or that they should fill those offices to the satisfaction of the sultan. Yet it is curious to hear their histories. An English physician, who is frequently called into the seraglio, and whose practice among all the families in power gives him the best means of information, has entertained me not a little with these secrets. I shall make use of them when I have more leisure, merely mentioning here, in connexion with the above accounts, that the present grand vizier was a boatman on the Bosphorus, and the commander of the sultan’s body-guard, a shoemaker. The latter still employs all his leisure in making slippers, which he presents to the sultan and his friends, not at all ashamed of his former vocation. So far, indeed, are any of these mushroom officers from blushing at their origin, that it is common to prefix the name of their profession to the title of pacha, and they are addressed by it as a proper name. This is one respect in which their European education will refine them to their disadvantage.