LETTER XXXVII.
The Grand Bazaar of Constantinople, and its infinite Variety of Wonders—Silent Shopkeepers—Female Curiosity—Adventure with a Black-eyed Stranger—The Bezestein—The Stronghold of Orientalism—Picture of a Dragoman—The Kibaub-Shop—A Dinner without Knives, Forks, or Chairs—Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns.
The Grand Bazaar of Constantinople, and its infinite Variety of Wonders—Silent Shopkeepers—Female Curiosity—Adventure with a Black-eyed Stranger—The Bezestein—The Stronghold of Orientalism—Picture of a Dragoman—The Kibaub-Shop—A Dinner without Knives, Forks, or Chairs—Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns.
Bring all the shops of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, around the City Hall, remove their fronts, pile up all their goods on shelves facing the street, cover the whole with a roof, and metamorphose your trim clerks into bearded, turbaned, and solemn old Mussulmans, smooth Jews, and calpacked and rosy Armenians, and you will have something like the grand bazaar of Constantinople. You can scarcely get an idea of it, without having been there. It is a city under cover. You walk all day, and day after day, from one street to another, winding and turning, and trudging up hill and down, and never go out of doors. The roof is as high as those of our three-story houses, and the dim light, so favourable to shop-keepers, comes struggling down through skylights, never cleaned except by the rains of heaven.
Strolling through the bazaar is an endless amusement. It is slow work, for the streets are as crowded as a church-aisle after service; and, pushed aside one moment by a bevy of Turkish ladies, shuffling along in their yellow slippers, muffled to the eyes, the next by a fat slave carrying a child, again by akervasarmed to the teeth, and clearing the way for some coming dignitary, you find your only policy is to draw in your elbows, and suffer the motley crowd to shove you about at their pleasure.
Each shop in this world of traffic may be two yards wide. The owner sits cross-legged on the broad counter below, the height of a chair from the ground, and hands you all you want without stirring from his seat. One broad bench counter runs the length of the street, and the different shops are only divided by the slight partition of the shelves. The purchaser seats himself on the counter, to be out of the way of the crowd, and the shopman spreads out his goods on his knees, never condescending to open his lips except to tell you the price. If he exclaims “bono,” or “calo,” (the only words a real Turk ever knows of another language), he is stared at by his neighbours as a man would be in Broadway who should break out with an Italian bravura. Ten to one, while you are examining his goods, the bearded trader creeps through the hole leading to his kennel of a dormitory in the rear, washes himself, and returns to his counter, where, spreading his sacred carpet in the direction of Mecca, he goes through his prayers and prostrations, perfectly unconscious of your presence, or that of the passing crowd. No vocation interferes with his religious duty. Five times a day, if he were running from the plague, the Mussulman would find time for prayers.
The Frank purchaser attracts a great deal of curiosity. As he points to an embroidered handkerchief, or a rich shawl, or a pair of gold-worked slippers, Turkish ladies of the first rank, gathering theiryashmackssecurely over their faces, stop close to his side, not minding if they push him a little to get nearer the desired article. Feeling not the least timidity, except for their faces, these true children of Eve examine the goods in barter, watch the stranger’s countenance, and if he takes off his glove, or pulls out his purse, take it up and look at it, without even saying “by your leave.” Their curiosity often extends to your dress, and they put out their little henna-stained fingers and pass them over the sleeve of your coat with a gurgling expression of admiration at its fineness, or if you have rings or a watch-guard, they lift your hand or pull out your watch with no kind of scruple, I have met with several instances of this in the course of my rambles. But a day or two ago I found myself rather more than usual a subject of curiosity. I was alone in the street of embroidered handkerchiefs (every minute article has its peculiar bazaar), and wishing to look at some of uncommon beauty, I called one of the many Jews always near a stranger to turn a penny by interpreting for him, and was soon up to the elbows in goods that would tempt a female angel out of Paradise. As I was selecting one for a purchase, a woman plumped down on the seat beside me, and fixed her great, black, unwinking eyes upon my face, while an Abyssinian slave and another white woman, both apparently her dependents, stood respectfully at her back. A small turquoise ring (the favourite colour in Turkey), first attracted her attention. She took up my hand in her soft, fat fingers, and dropped it again without saying a word. I looked at my interpreter, but he seemed to think it nothing extraordinary, and I went on with my bargain. Presently my fine-eyed friend pulled me by the sleeve, and as I leaned toward her, rubbed her forefinger very quickly over my cheek, looking at me intently all the while. I was a little disturbed with the lady’s familiarity, and asked my Jew what she wanted. I found that my rubicund complexion was something uncommon among these dark-skinned orientals, and she wished to satisfy herself that I was not painted! I concluded my purchase, and putting the parcel into my pocket, did my prettiest at an oriental salaam, but to my mortification, the lady only gathered up heryashmack, and looked surprised out of her great eyes at my freedom. My Constantinople friends inform me that I am to lay no “unction to my soul” from her notice, such liberties being not at all particular. The husband exacts from his half-dozen wives only the concealment of their faces, and they have no other idea of impropriety in public.
In the centre of the bazaar, occupying about as much space as the body of the City Hall in New York, is what is called thebezestein. You descend into it from four directions by massive gates which are shut, and all persons excluded, except between seven and twelve of the forenoon. This is the core of Constantinople—the soul and citadel of orientalism. It is devoted to the sale of arms and to costly articles only. The roof is loftier, and the light more dim than on the outer bazaars, and the merchants who occupy its stalls are old and of established credit. Here are subjects for the pencil! If you can take your eye from those Damascus sabres, with their jewelled hilts and costly scabbards, or from those gemmed daggers and guns inlaid with silver and gold, cast a glance along that dim avenue and see what a range there is of glorious old grey beards, with their snowy turbans! These are the Turks of the oldrégime, before Sultan Mahmoud disfigured himself with a coat like a “dog of a Christian,” and broke in upon the customs of the Orients. These are your opium-eaters, who smoke even in their sleep, and would not touch wine if it were handed to them by houris! These are your fatalists, who would scarce take the trouble to get out of the way of a lion, and who are as certain of the miracle of Mohammed’s coffin as of the length of the pipe, or of the quality of the tobacco of Shiraz!
I have spent many an hour in the bezestein, steeping my fancy in its rich orientalism, and sometimes trying to make a purchase for myself or others. It is curious to see with what perfect indifference these old cross-legs attend to the wishes of a Christian. I was idling round one day with an English traveller, whom I had known in Italy, when a Persian robe of singular beauty hanging on one of the stalls arrested my companion’s attention. He had with him his Turkish dragoman, and as the old merchant was smoking away and looking right at us, we pointed to the dress over his head, and the interpreter asked to see it. The Mussulman smoked calmly on, taking no more notice of us than of the white clouds curling through his beard. He might have sat for Michael Angelo’s Moses. Thin, pale, calm, and of a statue-like repose of countenance and posture, with a large old-fashioned turban, and a curling beard half mingled with grey, his neck bare, and his fine bust enveloped in the flowing and bright coloured drapery of the East—I had never seen a more majestic figure. He evidently did not wish to have anything to do with us. At last I took out my snuff-box, and addressing him with “effendi!” the Turkish title of courtesy, laid my hand on my breast and offered him a pinch. Tobacco in this unaccustomed shape is a luxury here, and the amber mouth-piece emerged from his moustache, and putting his three fingers into my box, he said “pekkhe!” the Turkish ejaculation of approval. He then made room for us on his carpet, and with a cloth measure took the robe from its nail, and spread it before us. My friend bought it unhesitatingly for a dressing-gown, and we spent an hour in looking at shawls, of prices perfectly startling, arms, chalices for incense, spotless amber for pipes, pearls, bracelets of the time of Sultan Selim, and an endless variety of things “rich and rare.” The closing of the bezestein gates interrupted our agreeable employment, and our old friend gave us the parting salaam very cordially for a Turk. I have been there frequently since, and never pass without offering my snuff-box, and taking a whiff or two from his pipe, which I cannot refuse, though it is not out of his mouth, except when offered to a friend, from sunrise to midnight.
One of the regular “lions” of Constantinople is akibaub shop, or Turkish restaurant. In a ramble with our consul, the other day, in search of the newly-discovered cistern of a “thousand and one columns,” we found ourselves, at the hungry hour of twelve, opposite a famous shop near the slave-market. I was rather staggered at the first glance. A greasy fellow, with his shirt rolled to his shoulders, stood near the door, commending his shop to the world by slapping on the flank a whole mutton that hung beside him, while, as a customer came in, he dexterously whipped out a slice, had it cut in a twinkling into bits as large as a piece of chalk (I have stopped five minutes in vain, to find a better comparison), strung upon a long iron skewer, and laid on the coals. My friend is an old Constantinopolitan, and had eaten kibaubs before. He entered without hesitation, and the adroit butcher, giving his big trowsers a fresh hitch, and tightening his girdle, made a new cut for his “narrow-legged” customers, and wished us a good appetite (the Turks look with great contempt on our tight pantaloons, and distinguish us by this epithet). We got up on the platform, crossed our legs under us as well as we could, and I cannot deny that the savoury missives that occasionally reached my nostrils, bred a gradual reconciliation between my stomach and my eyes.
In some five minutes, a tin platter was set between us, loaded with piping hot kibaubs, sprinkled with salad, and mixed with bits of bread; our friend the cook, by way of making the amiable, stirring it up well with his fingers as he brought it along. As Modely says in the play, “In love or mutton, I generally fall to without ceremony,” but, spite of its agreeable flavour, I shut my eyes, and selected a very small bit, before I commenced upon the kibaubs. It was very good eating, I soon found out, and, my fingers once greased (for we are indulged with neither knife, fork, nor skewer, in Turkey), I proved myself as good a trencherman as my friend.
The middle and lower classes of Constantinople live between these shops and the cafés. A dish of kibaubs serves them for dinner, and they drink coffee, which they get for about half a cent a cup, from morning till night. We paid for our mess (which was more than any two men could eat at once, unlessveryhungry), twelve cents.
We started again with fresh courage, in search of the cistern. We soon found the old one, which is an immense excavation, with a roof, supported by five hundred granite columns, employed now as a place for twisting silk, and escaping from its clamorous denizens, who rushed up after us to the daylight, beggingparas, we took one of the boys for a guide, and soon found the object of our search.
Knocking at the door of a half-ruined house, in one of the loneliest streets of the city, an old, sore-eyed Armenian, with shabby calpack, and every mark of extreme poverty, admitted us, pettishly demanding our entrance money, before he let us pass the threshold. Flights of steps, dangerously ruinous, led us down, first into a garden, far below the level of the street, and thence into a dark and damp cavern, the bottom of which was covered with water. As the eye became accustomed to the darkness, we could distinguish tall and beautiful columns of marble and granite, with superb Corinthian capitals, perhaps thirty feet in height, receding as far as the limits of our obscured sight. The old man said there were a thousand of them. The number was doubtless exaggerated, but we saw enough to convince us, that here was covered up, almost unknown, one of the most costly and magnificent works of the Christian emperors of Constantinople.
LETTER XXXVIII.
Belgrade—The Cottage of Lady Montagu—Turkish Cemeteries—Natural Taste of the Moslems for the Picturesque—A Turkish Carriage—Washerwomen Surprised—Gigantic Forest Trees—The Reservoir—Return to Constantinople.
Belgrade—The Cottage of Lady Montagu—Turkish Cemeteries—Natural Taste of the Moslems for the Picturesque—A Turkish Carriage—Washerwomen Surprised—Gigantic Forest Trees—The Reservoir—Return to Constantinople.
I left Constantinople on horseback with a party of officers, and two American travellers in the East, early on one of nature’s holiday mornings, for Belgrade. We loitered a moment in the small Armenian cemetery, the only suburb that separates the thickly crowded street from the barren heath that stretches away from the city on every side to the edge of the horizon. It is singular to gallop thus from the crowded pavement, at once into an uncultivated and unfenced desert. We are so accustomed to suburban gardens that the traveller wonders how the markets of this overgrown and immense capital are supplied. A glance back upon the Bosphorus, and toward the Asian shore, and the islands of the sea of Marmora, explains the secret. The waters in every direction around this sea-girdled city are alive with boats, from the largerkachambasandsandalsto the egg-shell caique, swarming into the Golden Horn in countless numbers, laden with every vegetable of the productive East. It is said, however, that it is dangerous to thrive too near the eye of the sultan. The summary mode for rewarding favourites and providing for the residence of ambassadors, by the simple confiscation of the prettiest estate desirably situated, is thought to have something to do with the barrenness of the immediate neighbourhood.
The Turks carry their contempt of the Christian even beyond the grave. The funereal cypress, so singularly beautiful in its native East, is permitted to throw its dark shadows only upon turbaned tombstones. The Armenianrayah, the oppressed Greek, and the more hated Jew, slumber in their unprotected graves on the open heath. It almost reconciles one to the haughtiness and cruelty of the Turkish character, however, to stand on one of the “seven hills” of Stamboul, and look around upon their own beautiful cemeteries. On every sloping hill-side, in every rural nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a dark necropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so thickly by the close growing cypresses, that the light of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape. And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in more civilised countries; the humblest headstone lettered with gold, and the more costly sculptured into forms the most sumptuous, and fenced and planted with flowers never neglected.
In the East, the grave-yard is not, as with us, a place abandoned to its dead. Occupying a spot of chosen loveliness, it is resorted to by women and children, and on holidays by men, whose indolent natures find happiness enough in sitting on the green bank around the resting-place of their relatives and friends. Here, while their children are playing around them, they smoke in motionless silence, watching the gay Bosphorus or the busier curve of the Golden Horn, one of which is visible from every cemetery in the Stamboul. Occasionally you see large parties of twenty or thirty, sitting together, their slight feast of sweetmeats and sherbet spread in some grassy nook, and the surrounding head-stones serving as leaning-places for the women, or bounds for the infant gambols of the gaily-dressed little Mussulmans.
Whatever else we may deny the Turk, we must allow him to possess a genuine love for rural beauty. The cemeteries we have described, the choice of his dwelling on the Bosphorus, and his habit of resorting, whenever he has leisure, to some lovely scene to sit the livelong day in the sunshine, are proof enough. And then all over the hills, both in Anatolia and Roumelia, wherever there is a finer view or greener spot than elsewhere, you find the smallsairgah, the grassy platform on which he spreads his carpet, and you may look in vain for a spot better selected for his purpose.
Things are sooner seen than described (I wish it were as agreeable to describe as to see them!) and all this digression, and much more which I spare the reader, is the fruit of five minutes’ reflection while the suridjee tightens his girths in the Armenian burying-ground. The turbaned Turk once more in his saddle, then we will canter on some three miles, if you please, over as naked a heath as the sun looks upon, to the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” I have described this, I think, before. We five to learn, and my intelligent friend tells me, as we draw rein, and wind carefully down the steep descent, that the site of the Sultan’s romantic serai, in the bosom of the valley, was once occupied by the first printing-press established in Turkey—the fruit of an embassy to the Court of Louis the Fifteenth, by Mehemet Effendi, in the reign of Achmet the Third. And thus having delivered myself of a fact, a thing for which I have a natural antipathy in writing, let us gallop up the velvet brink of the Barbyses.
We had kept our small Turkish horses to their speed for a mile, with the enraged suridjee crying after us at the top of his voice, “Ya-wash! ya-wash!” (slowly, slowly!) when, at a bend of the valley, right through the midst of its velvet verdure, came rolling along anaruba, loaded with ladies. This pretty word signifies in Turkish a carriage, and the thing itself reminds you directly of the fantastic vehicles in which fairy queens come upon the stage. First appear two grey oxen, with their tails tied to a hoop bent back from the bend of the pole, their heads and horns and the long curve of the hoop decked with red and yellow tassels so profusely, that it looks at a distance like a walking clump of hollyhocks. As you pass the poor oxen (almost lifted off their hind legs by the straining of the hoop upon their tails), a four-wheeled vehicle makes its appearance, the body and wheels carved elaborately and gilt all over, and the crimson cover rolled up just so far as to show a cluster of veiled women, cross-legged upon cushions within, and ridingin perfect silence.[17]A eunuch or averyold Turk walks at the side, and thus the Moslem ladies “take kaif,” as it is called—in other wordsgo a pleasuring. But a prettier sight than this gay affair rolling noiselessly over the pathless greensward of the Valley of Sweet Waters, you may not see in a year’s travel.
A beautiful Englishwoman, mounted (if I may dare to write it) on amorebeautiful Arabian, came flying toward us as we approached the head of the valley, the long feathers in her riding cap all but brushing our admiring eyes out as she passed, and other living thing met we none till we drew up in the edge of the forest of Belgrade. A half hour brought us to a bold descent, and through the openings in the wood we caught a glimpse of the celebrated retreat of Lady Montagu, a village, tossed into the lap of as bright a dell as the sun looks upon in his journey. A lively brook, that curls about in the grass like a silver flower worked into the green carpet, overcomes at last its unwillingness to depart, and vanishes from the fair scene under a clump of willows; and, as if it knew it was sitting for its picture, there must needs be a group of girls with their trowsers tucked up to the knee, washing away so busily in the brook, that they did not see that half a dozen Frank horsemen were upon them, and their forgotten yashmacks all fallen about their shoulders!
We dismounted, and finding (what I never saw before) ared-headed Frenchman, walking about in his slippers, we inquired for the house of Lady Montagu. He had never heard of her! A cottage, a little separated from the village, untenanted, and looking as if it should be hers, stood on a swell of the valley, and we found by the scrawled names and effusions of travellers upon the gates, that we were not mistaken in selecting it for the shrine of our sentiment.
I am sorry to be obliged to add, that in the romantic forest of Belgrade, we listened to the calls of mortal hunger. With some very sour wine, however, we did drink to the memory of Lady Mary and the “fair Fatima,” washing down with the same draught as brown bread as ever I saw, and some very indifferent filberts.
We mounted once more, and followed our silent guide across the brook, politely taking it below the spot where our naiads of the stream were washing, and following its slender valley for a mile, arrived at one of the gigantic bendts, for which the place is famous. To give romance its proper precedence over reality, however, I must first mention, that on the soft bank of the artificial lake, which I shall presently describe, Constantine Ghika, disguised as a shepherd, stole an interview with the fair Veronica, and in the wild forest to the right, they wandered till they lost their way; an adventure of which they only regretted the sequel, finding it again! If you have not read “The Armenians,” this pretty turn in my travels is thrown away upon you.
The valley of Belgrade widens and rounds into a lake-shaped hollow just here, and across it, to form a reservoir for the supply of the city by the aqueducts of Valens and Justinian, is built a gigantic marble wall. There is no water just now, which, for a lake, is rather a deficiency; but the vast white wall only stands up against the sky, bolder and more towering, and coming suddenly upon it in that lonely place, you might take it, if the “fine phrensy” were on you, for the barrier of some enchanted demesne.
We passed on into the forest, winding after an almost invisible path, up hill and down dale, till we came to the second bendt. This, and the third, which is near by, are larger and of more ornamental architecture than the first, and the forest around them is one in which, if he turned his back on the lofty walls, a wild Indian would feel himself at home. I have not seen such trees since I left America; clear of all underwood, and the long vistas broken only by the trunk of some noble oak, fallen aslant, it has for miles the air of a grand old wilderness, unprofaned by axe or fire. In the midst of such scenery as this, to ride up to the majestic bendt, faced with a front like a temple, and crowned by a marble balustrade, with a salient and raised crescent in the centre, like a throne for some monarch of the forest, it must be a more staid imagination than mine that would not feel a touch of the knight of La Mancha, and spur up to find a gate, and a bugle to blow a blast for the warder! It is just the looking place I imagined for an enchanted castle, when reading my first romances.
Farther on in the forest we found several circular structures, like baths, sunk in the earth, with flights of steps winding to the bottom, but with the same gigantic trees growing at their very rim, and nothing near them to show the purpose of their costly masonry. We stopped to form a conjecture or two with the aid of thegenus loci; but the surly suridjee, probably at a loss to comprehend the object of looking into a hole full of dead leaves, chose to put his horse to a gallop; and having no Veronica to make a romance of a lost path, we left our conjectures to gallop after.
We reached the waste plains above the city at sunset, and turned a little out of our way to enter through the Turkish cemetery (poetically called by Mr. MacFarlane “death’s coronal”), on the summit and sides of the hill behind Pera. Broad daylight, as it was still without, it was deep twilight among its thick-planted cypresses; and our horses, starting at the tall, white tombstones, hurried through its damp hollows and emerged on a brow overlooking the bright and crowded Bosphorus, bathed at the moment in a flood of sunset glory. I said again, as I reined in my horse and gazed down upon those lovely waters, there is no such scene of beauty in the world! And again I say, “poor Slingsby” never was here!
[17]
Whether the difficulty of talking through theyashmack, which is drawn tight over the mouth and nose, may account for it, or whether they have another race of the sex in the East, I am not prepared to say, but Turkish women are remarkable for their taciturnity.
LETTER XXXIX.
Scutari—Tomb of the Sultana Valide—Mosque of the Howling Dervishes—A Clerical Shoemaker—Visit to a Turkish Cemetery—Bird’s-Eye View of Stamboul and its Environs—Seraglio-Point—The Seven Towers.
Scutari—Tomb of the Sultana Valide—Mosque of the Howling Dervishes—A Clerical Shoemaker—Visit to a Turkish Cemetery—Bird’s-Eye View of Stamboul and its Environs—Seraglio-Point—The Seven Towers.
Pulled over to Scutari in a caique, for a day’s ramble. The Chrysopolis, the “golden city” of the ancients, forms the Asian side of the bay, and though reckoned, generally, as a part of Constantinople, is in itself a large and populous capital. It is built on a hill, very bold upon the side washed by the sea of Marmora, but leaning toward the seraglio, on the opposite shore, with the grace of a lady (Asia) bowing to her partner (Europe). You will find the simile very beautifully elaborated in the first chapter of “The Armenians.”
We strolled through the bazaar awhile, meeting, occasionally, a caravan of tired and dusty merchants, coming in from Asia, some with Syrian horses, and some with dusky Nubian slaves, following barefoot, in their blankets; and, emerging from the crowded street upon a square, we stopped a moment to look at the cemetery and gilded fountains of a noble mosque. Close to the street, defended by a railing of gilt iron, and planted about closely with cypresses, stands a small temple of airy architecture, supported on four slender columns, and enclosed by a net of gilt wire, forming a spacious aviary. Within sleeps the Sultana Valide. Her costly monument, elaborately inscribed in red and gold, occupies the area of this poetical sepulchre; small, sweet-scented shrubs half bury it in their rich flowers, and birds of the gayest plumage flutter and sing above her in their beautiful prison. If the soul of the departed Sultana is still susceptible of sentiment, she must look down with some complacency upon the disposition of her “mortal coil.” I have not seen so fanciful a grave in my travels.
We ascended the hill to the mosque of the Howling Dervishes. It stands in the edge of the great cemetery of Scutari, the favourite burial-place of the Turks. The self-torturing worship of this singular class of devotees takes place only on a certain day of the week, and we found the gates closed. A small café stood opposite, sheltered by large plane-trees, and on a bench at the door sat a dervish, employed in the unclerical vocation of mending slippers. Calling for a cup of the fragrant Turkish coffee, we seated ourselves on the matted bench beside him, and, entering into conversation, my friend and he were soon upon the most courteous terms. He laid down his last, and accepted a proffered narghilé, and, between the heavily-drawn puff’s of the bubbling vase, gave us some information respecting his order, of which the peculiarity that most struck me was a law compelling them to follow some secular profession. In this point, at least, they are more apostolic than the clergy of Christendom. Whatever may be the dervish’s excellence as a “mender of souls,” thought I, as I took up the last, and looked at the stitching of the bright new patch, (may I get well out of this sentence without a pun!) I doubt whether there is a divine within the Christian pale who could turn out so pretty a piece of work in any corresponding calling. Our coffee drunk and our chibouques smoked to ashes, we took leave of our papoosh-mending friend, who laid his hand on his breast, and said, with the expressive phraseology of the East, “You shall be welcome again.”
We entered the gloomy shadow of the vast cemetery, and found its cool and damp air a grateful exchange for the sunshine. The author of “Anastasius” gives a very graphic description of this place, throwing in some horrors, however, for which he is indebted to his admirable imagination. I never was in a more agreeable place for a summer-morning’s lounge, and, as I sat down on a turbaned headstone, near the tomb of Mohammed the Second’s horse, and indulged in a train of reflections arising from the superior distinction of the brute’s ashes over those of his master, I could remember no place, except Plato’s Academy at Athens, where I had mused so absolutely at my ease.
We strolled on. A slender and elegantly-carved slab, capped with a small turban, fretted and gilt, arrested my attention. “It is the tomb,” said my companion, “of one of the ichoglans or sultan’s pages. The peculiar turban is distinctive of his rank, and the inscription says, he died at eighteen, after having seen enough of the world! Similar sentiments are to be found on almost every stone. Close by stood the ambitious cenotaph of a former pacha of Widin, with a swollen turban, crossed with folds of gold, and a footstone painted and carved, only less gorgeously than the other; and under his name and titles was written, “I enjoyed not the world.” Farther on, we stopped at the black-banded turban of a cadi, and read again, underneath, “I took no pleasure in this evil world.” You would think the Turks a philosophising people, judging by these posthumous declarations; but one need not travel to learn that tombstones are sad liars.
The cemetery of Scutari covers as much ground as a city. Its black cypress pall spreads away over hill and dale, and terminates, at last, on a long point projecting into Marmora, as if it would pour into the sea the dead it could no longer cover. From the Armenian village, immediately above, it forms a dark, and not unpicturesque foreground to a brilliant picture of the gulf of Nicomedia and the clustering Princes’ Islands. With the economy of room which the Turks practise in their burying-grounds, laying the dead, literally, side by side, and the immense extent of this forest of cypresses, it is probable that on no one spot on the earth are so many of the human race gathered together.
We wandered about among the tombs till we began to desire to see the cheerful light of day, and crossing toward the height of Bulgurlu, commenced its ascent, with the design of descending by the other side to the Bosphorus, and returning, by caique, to the city. Walking leisurely on between fields of the brightest cultivation, we passed, half way up, a small and rural serai, the summer residence of Esmeh Sultana, the younger sister of the sultan, and soon after stood, well breathed, on the lofty summit of Bulgurlu. The constantly-occurring sairgahs, or small grass platforms, for spreading the carpet and “taking kaif,” show how well the Turks appreciate the advantages of a position commanding, perhaps, views unparalleled in the world for their extraordinary beauty. But let us take breath and look around us.
We stood some three miles back from the Bosphorus, perhaps a thousand feet above its level. There lay Constantinople! The “temptation of Satan” could not have been more sublime. It seemed as if all the “kingdoms of the earth” were swept confusedly to the borders of the two continents. From Seraglio Point, seven miles down the coast of Roumelia, the eye followed a continued wall; and from the same point, twenty miles up the Bosphorus, on either shore, stretched one crowded and unbroken city! The star-shaped bay in the midst, crowded with flying boats; the Golden Horn sweeping out from behind the hills, and pouring through the city like a broad river, studded with ships; and, in the palace-lined and hill-sheltered Bosphorus, the sultan’s fleet at anchor, the lofty men-of-war flaunting their blood-red flags, and thrusting their tapering spars almost into the balconies of the fairy dwellings, and among the bright foliage of the terraced gardens above them. Could a scene be more strangely and beautifully mingled?
But sit down upon this silky grass, and let us listen to my polyglot friend, while he explains the details of the panorama.
First, clear over the sea of Marmora, you observe a snow-white cloud resting on the edge of the horizon. That is Olympus. Within sight of his snowy summit, and along toward the extremity of this long line of eastern hills, lie Bithynia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, and the whole scene of the apostles’ travels in Asia Minor; and just at his feet, if you will condescend to be modern, lies Brusa, famous for its silks, and one of the most populous and thriving of the sultan’s cities. Returning over Marmora by the Princes’ Islands, at the western extremity of Constantinople, stands the Fortress of the Seven Towers, where fell the Emperor Constantine Palæologus, where Othman the Second was strangled, where refractory ambassadors are left to come to their senses and the sultan’s terms, and where, in short, that “zealous public butcher,” the seraskier, cuts any Gordian knot that may tangle his political meshes; and here was the famous “Golden Gate,” attended no more by its “fifty porters with white wands,” and its crowds of “ichoglansand mutes, turban-keepers, nail-cutters, and slipper-bearers,” as in the days of the Selims.
Between the Seven Towers and the Golden Horn you may count the “seven hills” of ancient Stamboul, the towering arches of the aqueduct of Valens, crossing from one to the other, and the swelling dome and gold-tipped minarets of a hundred imperial mosques crowning and surrounding their summits. What an Orient look do those gallery-bound and sky-piercing shafts give to the varied picture!
There is but one “Seraglio Point” in the world. Look at that tapering cape, shaped like a lady’s foot, projecting from Stamboul toward the shore of Asia, and dividing the bay from the sea of Marmora. It is cut off from the rest of the city, you observe, by a high wall, flanked with towers, and the circumference of the whole seraglio may be three miles. But what a gem of beauty it is! In what varied foliage its unapproachable palaces are buried, and how exquisitely gleam from the midst of the bright leaves its gilded cupolas, its gay balconies, its airy belvideres, and its glittering domes! And mark the height of those dark and arrowy cypresses, shooting from every corner of its imperial gardens, and throwing their deep shadows on every bright cluster of foliage, and every gilded lattice of the sacred enclosure. They seem to remind one, that amid all its splendour, and with all its secluded retirement, this gorgeous sanctuary of royalty, has been stained, from its first appropriation by the monarchs of the East till now, with the blood of victims to the ambition of its changing masters. The cypresses are still young over the graves of an uncle and a brother, whose cold murder within those lovely precincts prepared the throne for the present sultan. The seraglio, no longer the residence of Mahmoud himself, is at present occupied by his children, two noble boys, of whom one, by the usual system, must fall a sacrifice to the security of the other.
Keeping on toward the Black Sea, we cross the Golden Horn to Pera, the European and diplomatic quarter of the city. The high hill on which it stands overlooks all Constantinople; and along its ridge toward the beautiful cemetery on the brow, runs the principal street of the Franks, the promenade of the dragoman exquisites, and the Broadway of shops and belles. Here meet, on the narrowpavé, the veiled Armenian, who would die with shame to show her chin to a stranger, and the wife of the European merchant, in a Paris hat and short petticoats, mutually each other’s sincere horror. Here the street is somewhat cleaner, the dogs somewhat less anti-Christian, and hat and trowsers somewhat less objects of contempt. It is a poor abortion of a place, withal, neither Turkish nor Christian; and nobody who could claim a shelter for his head elsewhere, would take the whole of its slate-coloured and shingled palaces as a gift.
Just beyond is the mercantile suburb of Galatan, which your dainty diplomatist would not write on his card for an embassy, but for which, as being honestly what it calls itself, I entertain a certain respect, wanting in my opinion of its mongrel neighbour. Heavy gates divide these different quarters of the city, and if you would pass after sunset, you must anoint the hinges with a piastre.
LETTER XL.
Beauties of the Bosphorus—Summer-Palace of the Sultan—Adventure with an old Turkish Woman—The Feast of Bairam—The Sultan his own Butcher—His evil Propensities—Visit to the Mosques—A formidable Dervish—Santa Sophia—Mosque of Sultan Achmet—Traces of Christianity.
Beauties of the Bosphorus—Summer-Palace of the Sultan—Adventure with an old Turkish Woman—The Feast of Bairam—The Sultan his own Butcher—His evil Propensities—Visit to the Mosques—A formidable Dervish—Santa Sophia—Mosque of Sultan Achmet—Traces of Christianity.
From this elevated point, the singular effect of a desert commencing from the very streets of the city is still more observable. The compact edge of the metropolis is visible even upon the more rural Bosphorus, not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing to protrude beyond the closely pressed limit. To repeat the figure, it seems, with the prodigious mass of habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of both Europe and Asia were swept to their respective borders, or as if the crowded masses upon the long extending shores were the deposit of some mighty overflow of the sea.
From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly light and fantastic architecture to the never-wearying Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, upon that silver link between the two seas, there are fifty valleys and thirty rivers, and an imperial palace on every loveliest spot from the Black Sea to Marmora. The Italians say, “See Naples and die!” but forNaplesI would readStamboul and the Bosphorus.
Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, we entered a long glen, closed at the water’s edge by the Sultan’s summer-palace, and present residence of Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a Wordsworthian passion for all things humble and simple, gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and inquired her business at the village. She had been to Stavros, to sell ten paras’ worth of herbs—aboutone centof our currency. He put a small piece of silver into her hand, while, with the still strong habit of Turkish modesty, she employed the other in folding her tatteredyashmackso as to conceal her features from the gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity. “What is this for?” she asked, looking at it with some surprise. “To buy bread for your children, mother!” “Effendi!” said the poor old creature, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, “My children are all dead!There is no one now between me and Allah!” It were worth a poet’s while to live in the East. Like the fairy in the tale, they never open their lips but they “speak pearls.”
We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, at Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial palace. Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and long blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the court-yard of the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly at the fine lattices above, concealing so many of the picked beauties of the empire. A mandolin, very indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings, betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and there was a single moment when we could see, by the relief of a corner window, the outline of a female figure; but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for their reward. As we approached the central façade the polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on the terrace beneath the palace-windows, announcing, in their first flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust his fingers into hispilaw, and his subjects were at liberty to dine. Not finding their music much to our taste, we ordered the caikjees to assist the current a little, and shooting past Stavros, we cut across the Strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the vizier, and, in a few minutes, I was once more in my floating home, under the “star-spangled banner.”
Constantinople was in a blaze last night, with the illumination for the approach of the Turkish feast of Bairam. The minarets were extremely beautiful, their encircling galleries hung with coloured lamps, and illuminated festoons suspended from one to the other. The ships of the fleet were decked also with thousands of lamps, and the effect was exceedingly fine, with the reflection in the Bosphorus, and the waving of the suspended lights in the wind. The Sultan celebrates the festa by taking a virgin to his bed, and sacrificing twenty sheep with his own hand. I am told by an intelligent physician here, that this playing the butcher is an every-day business with the “Brother of the Sun,” every safe return from a ride, or an excursion in hissultanethe caique, requiring him to cut the throat of his next day’s mutton. It may account partly for the excessive cruelty of character attributed to him.
Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be very avaricious. It is related of his youth, that he was permitted occasionally, with his brother (who was murdered to make room for him on the throne), to walk out in public on certain days with their governor; and that, upon these occasions, each was intrusted with a purse to be expended in charity. The elder brother soon distributed his piastres, and borrowed of his attendants to continue his charities; while Mahmoud quietly put the purse in his pocket, and added it to his private hoard on his return. It is said, too, that he has a particular passion for upholstery, and in his frequent change from one serai to another, allows no nail to be driven without his supervision. Add to this a spirit of perverse contradiction, so truculent that none but the most abject flatterers can preserve his favour, and you have a pretty handful of offsets against a character certainly not without some royal qualities.
With one of the reis effendi’s and one of the seraskier’s officers, followed by fourkervassesin the Turkish military dress, and every man a pair of slippers in his pocket, we accompanied the commodore, to-day, on a visit to the principal mosques.
Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we entered the court of the new mosque built by the present sultan, whose elegant exterior of white marble and two freshly-gilded minarets we had admired daily, lying at anchor without sound of the muezzin. The morning prayers were just over, and the retiring Turks looked, with lowering brows at us, as we pulled off our boots on the sacred threshold.
We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I should have taken for rather a superb ball-room. An unencumbered floor carpeted gaily, a small arabesque gallery over the door quite like an orchestra, chandeliers and lamps in great profusion, and walls painted of the brightest and most varied colours, formed an interior rather wanting in the “dim religious light” of a place of worship. We were shuffling around in our slippers from one side to the other, examining the marblemihraband the narrow and towering pulpit, when a ragged and decrepid dervish, with his papooshes in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from a very dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers, and began walking backward and forward, eyeing us ferociously and muttering himself into quite a passion. His charity for infidels was evidently at a low ebb. Every step we took upon the holy floor seemed to add to his fury. The kervasses observed him, but his sugar-loaf cap carried some respect with it, and they evidently did not like to meddle with him. He followed us to the door, fixing his hollow grey eyes with a deadly glare upon each one as he went out, and the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry us out of his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mounted a handsome marble staircase to a suite of apartments above, communicating with the sultan’s private gallery. The carpets here were richer, and the divans with which the half dozen saloons were surrounded, were covered with the most costly stuffs of the East. The gallery was divided from the area of the mosque by a fine brazen grating curiously wrought, and its centre occupied by a rich ottoman, whereon the imperial legs are crossed in the intervals of his prostrations. It was about the size and had the air altogether of a private box at the opera.
We crossed the Golden Horn, and passing the eunuch’s guard, entered the gardens of the seraglio on our way to Santa Sophia. An inner wall still separated us from the gilded kiosks, at whose latticed windows peering above the trees, we might have clearly perused the features of any peeping inmate; but the little cross-bars revealed nothing but their own provoking eye of the size of a rose-leaf in the centre, and we reached the upper gate without even a glimpse of a waved handkerchief to stir our chivalry to the rescue.
A confused mass of buttresses without form or order, is all that you are shown for the exterior of that “wonder of the world,” the mosque of mosques, the renowned Santa Sophia. We descended a dark avenue, and leaving our boots in a vestibule that the horse of Mohammed the Second, if he was lodged as ambitiously living as dead, would have disdained for his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A long breath and an admission of its almost attributable supernatural grandeur, followed our too hasty disappointment. It is indeed a “vast and wondrous dome!” Its dimensions are less than those of St. Peter’s at Rome, but its effect, owing to its unity and simplicity of design, is, I think, superior. The numerous small galleries let into its sides add richness to it without impairing its apparent magnitude, and its vast floor, upon which a single individual is almost lost, the sombre colours of its walls untouched probably for centuries, and the dim sepulchral light that struggles through the deep-niched and retiring windows, form altogether an interior from which the imagination returns, like the dove to the ark, fluttering and bewildered.
Our large party separated over its wilderness of a floor, and each might have had his hour of solitude, had the once Christian spirit of the spot (or the present pagan demon) affected him religiously. I found, myself, a singular pleasure in wandering about upon the elastic mats (laid four or five thick all over the floor), examining here a tattered banner hung against the wall, and there a rich cashmere which had covered the tomb of the prophet; on one side a slab of transparent alabaster from the temple of Solomon (a strange relic for a Mohammedan mosque!) and on the other, a dark mihrab surrounded by candles of incredible proportions, looking like the marble columns of some friezeless portico. The four “six-winged cherubim” on the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace as they are of the religion to which the building was first dedicated, had better been left to the imagination. They are monstrous in mosaic. It is said that the whole interior of the mosque is cased beneath its dusky plaster with the same costly mosaic which covers the ceiling. To make a Mohammedan mosque of a Christian church, however, it was necessary to erase Christian emblems from the walls; besides which the Turks have a superstitious horror of all imitative arts, considering the painting of the Iranian features particularly, as a mockery of the handiwork of Allah.
We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sultan Achmet, which is in imitation of Santa Sophia within, but its own beautiful prototype in exterior. Its spacious and solemn court, its six heaven-piercing minarets, its fountains, and the mausoleums of the sultans, with their gilded cupolas and sarcophagi covered with cashmeres (the murdering sultan and his murdered brothers lying in equal splendour side by side!), are of a style of richness peculiarly oriental and imposing. We visited in succession Sultan Bajazet, Sulymanye, and Sultana Valide, all of the same arabesque exterior, and very similar within. The description of one leaves little to be said of the other, and, with the exception of Santa Sophia, of which I should like to make a lounge when I am in love with my own company, the mosques of Constantinople are a kind of “lion” well killed in a single visit.