network of dark corridors, secret stairways, low, ponderous doors
secured with heavy bars and beams, beneath which many a haughty head
of pasha or chamberlain, governor or imperial prince, has bent for the
last time, hurled in the flower and vigor of youth from the height of
power and success to a dark and ignominious death, their life-blood
often staining the castle-walls, while their wives, arrayed in their
richest robes, wondered as they sat expectantly amid the splendors
of the harem why their lord delayed his coming. Along those narrow
passage-ways reeking with moisture, down those steep, uneven stairs,
soldiers and executioners with blood-stained hands have passed by
night, guided by the uncertain rays of a lantern, or messengers from
the Seraglio bringing a faint tantalizing gleam of hope to some poor
wretch or else the final “No” of the Sultan, and dead bodies with
staring eyes and the horrible silken cord still hanging from the neck
been carried in the arms of panting sciaus, exhausted with their long
silent struggle in the dim, uncertain light with the fury born of
despair.
[Illustration: View from Interior of the Seven Towers.]
At the opposite end from Stambul, on the Seraglio Hill, was that
terrible Tribunal of the Court, and hard by it the huge executioner’s
machine, surmounted by seven great stone gallows, to which living
victims were transported by sea and land to be offered up beneath the
moon, and brought forth again into the sunlight, mere heads and trunks;
from the heights of the tower beside it, in which he was to die, the
lonely prisoner could see by night the brilliant lights of the Seraglio
where the imperial kiosks were all illuminated for a fête. It gives
one a positive sensation of pleasure to see that infamous pile so
transformed, as though all its victims, unable to revenge themselves
on man, had come to life again on purpose to rend and tear it with
teeth and nails. The mighty monster, decrepit and disarmed, gapes with
its hundred mouths of ruined doorways and disused loopholes, a mere
empty scarecrow, while rats, snakes, and yellow scorpions eat like
worms at its very vitals and swarm through its great spent body, and
an insolent vegetation decks it out as if in mockery with leafy
garlands and radiant bloom. After glancing in through several doorways,
and seeing nothing but flying troops of rats, I mounted a grass-grown
stair leading to one of the curtains on the western side, whence a view
can be had of the entire building--a vast extent of ruined towers and
battlements, stairways and ramparts, dark red or blackened with age,
surrounding a mass of vivid green, and beyond them more towers and
battlements, stretching on, on, on, belonging to the eastern walls of
Stambul; so that by half closing the eyes one seems to be looking out
over one prodigious abandoned fortress outlined against the blue waters
of the Sea of Marmora: to the left a large part of Stambul is visible,
cut up into long, winding streets, disappearing from view in the
direction of the ancient triumphal way of the Byzantine emperors, which
led from the Golden Gate by the forums of Arcadius and Constantine
all the way to the royal palace. This broad and smiling view threw
the dark, forbidding pile at my feet into sharp contrast. Leaning
there against one of the battlements, warmed by the sun, bathed in the
flood of vivid light, I gazed for a long time at the great uncovered
sepulchre below with something of the same hesitating curiosity with
which one looks at the scene of a recently-committed crime: everywhere
there reigned a profound stillness; big lizards slid across the walls;
below, in the ditch, a toad might occasionally be seen hopping about,
and above the tower ravens were flying and cawing to each other.
Clouds of insects rose from the damp ruins and buzzed around my head,
and presently, as a light breeze stirred the air, my nostrils were
saluted with the horrible odor of a dead horse thrown in the moat
outside. A feeling of loathing and abhorrence seized me, yet I seemed
rooted to the spot, as though detained there by magic. A dull sense of
drowsiness crept over me; through the death-like noonday hush and the
monotonous buzzing of the insects I seemed to hear the splash of each
head as it fell into the Well of Blood; muffled dying cries rose from
the dungeons, and the voice of Brancovano’s younger son shrieking,
“My father! my father!” as he felt the halter about his neck; and,
being weary and half blinded by the glare, my eyes gradually closed,
and as I lost consciousness for a moment all these frightful fancies
crowded into my brain with terrifying distinctness. Fortunately, at
that instant I was aroused by a clear, piercing cry, and looking down I
saw the muezzin of the castle mosque standing upon the balcony of the
little minaret. That voice, so solemnly sweet, so tranquil, speaking
to man of his God, heard in that spot and at that moment, stirred me
to the very depths of my being: it seemed to proclaim in the name of
all who had died within those walls that their sufferings had not been
for nothing; that their tears had been caught, their miseries been
rewarded; that since they had forgiven it became us to do the same;
and that prayer and utter trust in God, even though the whole world
may forsake you, are indeed the only paths to peace, while all outside
the infinite love and pity is but worse than vain. And then, moved and
touched, I left the castle.
Taking the road again and skirting the walls of Stambul, I walked
toward the sea, passing close by the Adrianopolis station. Here
several railroad lines cross each other, and I found myself among a
number of long strings of dusty, travel-stained-looking cars. No one
was in sight, and had I been one of those fanatic Turks hostile to
all European innovations, I might easily have set fire, one after
another, to all those cars, and then proceeded leisurely on my way
quite unmolested. Starting to walk along the track, I expected every
moment to hear the cry of some guard or other warning me off the
premises, but nothing of the sort happened, and before long I reached
the end of the land-walls, where I supposed I would be able to enter
Stambul. In this, however, I was doomed to disappointment. The sea- and
land-walls join each other on the shore without any sign of gateway;
so, climbing a ruined mole which runs out into the water at this point,
I seated myself on a large stone and proceeded to look about me. In
front lay the Sea of Marmora, beyond which rose the mountains of Asia,
and farther still the blue heights of Skutari, looking very far away
indeed. The shore was utterly deserted, and I seemed to occupy the
universe alone. The waves broke at my feet, dashing their spray up into
my face. I sat there for some time, turning over all manner of vague
fancies in my mind: first, I saw myself come out of the Caligarian
Gate and proceed slowly down the deserted road between the towers and
cemeteries--a lonely figure, which I followed with some curiosity as
though it had been some one else; then I amused myself with trying to
trace out Yunk through the mazes of the great city; then I watched the
waves as one after another they broke upon the shore with a murmuring
sound, and one after another melted away in silence, seeing in them
a figure of all those peoples and armies which from age to age had
successfully hurled themselves against the walls of Byzantium. The
phalanxes of Pausanius and Alcibiades, the legions of Maximus and
Severus, the Persian bands and hordes of Avars, and the Sclavs, Arabs,
Bulgarians, and Croats, the armies of Michael Palæologus and Comnenus,
and those of Bayezid Ilderim, of the second Murad, and of Muhammad the
Conqueror, vanished one after another into the infinite silence of
death, until I felt the same vague, oppressed sensation of melancholy
as that which swept over the soul of Leopardi in the “_Sera del di’
di Festa_” when the solitary song of the laborer died away little
by little, speaking to him with the voice of the ancient peoples,
reminding him that everything on earth must pass away like the shadow
of a dream.
Returning thence by the way I had come, I entered the city through the
gate of the Seven Towers, in order to skirt along the entire outer edge
of Stambul on the shore of the Sea of Marmora. To tell the truth, I
was pretty well tired out by this time, but on these long excursions
which have some settled object a kind of dogged obstinacy usually comes
to the rescue and revives one’s flagging energies. I can see myself
now, walking, walking, walking along that lonely high-road, beneath
the burning sun, in a sort of waking dream crowded with familiar Turin
friends, characters in novels, views of distant countries, and vague
reflections upon human life and the immortality of the soul, and,
crowning them all, the round dinner-table of the Hôtel de Byzance,
brilliant with crystal and lights, afar off on the heights of a city
many times the size of Stambul, and already half buried in the shades
of evening. Crossing a large Mussulman quarter, apparently uninhabited,
and which breathed something still of the sadness and desolation of the
Castle of Seven Towers, I came to the vast Psamatia quarter, inhabited
by Greeks and Armenians, also quite deserted and forlorn. A long,
winding, wretched-looking street, from which the black battlemented
walls could be seen below on the right standing out against the water’s
vivid blue, brought me to the Psamatia Gate, emerging from which I
again found myself in a Mussulman quarter, among grated windows,
closed doors, little mosques, walled gardens, moss-grown cisterns,
and abandoned fountains. I crossed the open space formerly the Cattle
Forum: below me, on the right, was the same unbroken line of wall
and tower, tower and wall, around me the same solitude and apparent
desertion; occasionally a dog would stop and eye me suspiciously, or a
youngster seated on the ground stare at me round-eyed, revolving some
piece of impertinence in his mind, or the sudden opening and shutting
of a window close by reveal for an instant a hand or the edge of a
woman’s sleeve. Making a circuit around the large Vlanga gardens, which
surrounded the ancient Theodosian Gate, I came upon a vast tract of
desolate-looking ground showing traces of a recent fire. Then the city
seemed to fade and die away in spots and melt into country. Dervish
convents, Greek churches, and queer little open squares broke up the
line of the streets; occasionally an old Turk would be seated beneath
the shade of a great plane tree, dozing with the mouthpiece of the
narghileh clasped between his fingers. Proceeding on my way, I came to
a Turkish café, and stopped to get a glass of the water which I could
see displayed in the window, but, after calling and knocking for some
time in vain, I gave it up and went on.
Next I came to the Greek quarter of Yeni Kapu, then to another
Mussulman quarter, then back again among the Greeks and Armenians of
the Kuni Kapu quarter, but all the time never losing sight of the dark
battlements and blue sea on my right, and never meeting any living
creatures but dogs, beggars, and boys. At last the voice of the muezzin
sounded through the lonely streets announcing the hour of sunset, and
before long the shadows began to deepen and evening set in, but still
the never-ending succession of little houses, melancholy mosques,
ugly, deserted streets, and the dark openings of side lanes and byways
continued, until I began to feel my strength giving out, and was just
on the point of deciding to throw myself down on the mat before the
next café I came to, when, quite unexpectedly, the huge mass of St.
Sophia loomed up before me through the gloom. Oh joyful sight! My
spirits rose at once, my strength revived, and, quickening my steps, I
soon reached the harbor, crossed the bridge, and, behold! there before
the brightly illuminated entrance to the principal café of Galata, were
Yunk, Rosasco, Santoro, all my little Italy, coming to meet me with
beaming faces and outstretched hands; and I heaved as long and deep a
sigh of satisfaction as ever filled the lungs of a tired, hungry man.
THE OLD SERAGLIO.
At Granada one feels as though his sightseeing had hardly begun until
he has been to the Alhambra, and it is the same way at Constantinople
so long as the interior of the Old Seraglio has not been explored.
Twenty times a day, wherever you may be on sea or land, that hillside
covered with vivid green starts into view, tantalizing you with
suggestions of what it has to disclose, forcing itself upon your
attention, riveting the mind upon itself when you would fain think of
other things--an unsolved enigma, a haunting mystery, which gives you
no peace until at last you yield and go there before the appointed day,
more to have done with it than for the purpose of enjoying the sight.
There is, in fact, not another spot of earth in Europe whose mere
name calls into life such an extraordinary mixture of awful and
pleasing associations, about which so much has been talked and thought
and written and guessed, which has given rise to so many vague and
contradictory rumors--been the object of so much insatiate curiosity,
of so many stupid mistakes and extravagant tales. Now-a-days any one
can go there, and many who do so come away quite unimpressed; but of
one thing we may be quite certain, and that is that when centuries
shall have elapsed, when possibly the Ottoman power will be only a
memory in Europe, and that exquisite hill be crowned by the busy
streets of a new and populous city, no traveller will pass through them
without seeing again, in fancy, the imperial kiosks of former days,
and thinking enviously of us in the nineteenth century who can still
behold the speaking, breathing records of that storied habitation of
the Ottomans. Who knows how many archæologists will concentrate their
painstaking research upon the identification of a doorway or portion of
a wall discovered in the courtyard of some modern building--how many
poets will break forth into verse over a few heaps of stones scattered
along the shore? On the other hand, it may be that hundreds of years
from now those walls will still be jealously preserved, and scholar,
lover, and artist, flocking to see them, that strange picturesque
life which was led there for four hundred years be resuscitated and
spread over the entire surface of the globe in hundreds of volumes and
pictures.
It is not owing to any architectural beauty that the interest of the
whole world is directed toward the Seraglio. Unlike the Alhambra, it
is not a great artistic monument: the Court of the Lions alone in the
Arabian palace is worth all the kiosks and towers of the Turkish one
put together. No, the value of the Seraglio lies wholly in its great
historic interest: it illustrates and gives life to almost the entire
history of the Ottoman dynasty; upon its walls and the trunks of its
century-old trees are engraved the most secret and intimate records
of the empire. Nothing but the period covered by the past thirty[E]
years and the two centuries preceding the conquest of Constantinople
are wanting to complete the chronicle. From Muhammad II., who laid
its foundations, to Abdul-Megid, who abandoned it to take up his
residence in the palace of Dolmabâghcheh, twenty-five sultans have
dwelt there. Hardly had the dynasty conquered its European metropolis
when it planted its foot upon this spot; here it climbed to the apex
of its glory, and here its decadence began. It was at once a palace,
a fortress, and a sanctuary; here was the brain of the empire and
the heart of Islamism; it was a city within a city, an imposing
and magnificent stronghold, inhabited by a people, guarded by an
army, embracing within its walls an infinite variety of buildings,
pleasure-grounds, and prisons, city, country, palaces, arsenals,
schools, offices, and mosques, where fêtes, executions, religious
ceremonies, love affairs, state functions, and wild revels succeeded
one another with startling rapidity; here sultans were born, elevated
to the throne, deposed, imprisoned, strangled; here were woven the
tangled webs of every conspiracy that threatened the empire; here
resounded the hoarse cry of every popular tumult; hither flowed the
purest gold and bluest blood of the Turkish dominions; here was
wielded that shining blade that flashed above the heads of a hundred
different peoples; and upon this spot, for nearly three centuries, was
concentrated the gaze of uneasy Europe, suspicious Asia, and cowering
Africa, as upon some smoking crater which threatened at any moment to
overflow and engulf the whole earth.
[E] This was written in 1874.--TRANS.
This huge royal residence is situated upon the most eastern of
Stambul’s seven hills, the one which inclines gently to the edge of
the Sea of Marmora, the mouth of the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn.
It is the site formerly occupied by the Acropolis of Byzantium, a part
of the ancient city and one wing of the great imperial palace, and
is by far the most beautiful hill in Constantinople, as well as the
promontory most favored by nature of the whole European shore. Here
converge as to a common centre two seas and two straits; to this spot
led all the great military and commercial high-roads of Eastern Europe;
torrents of water poured into it through the aqueducts constructed by
the Byzantine emperors; the hills of Thracia protect it from the north
winds; the sea bathes it on three sides; Galata watches over it from
the harbor; Skutari mounts guard from across the Bosphorus; and
the snow-crowned heights of Bithynia close in the Asiatic horizon.
Standing alone at the extreme end of the great metropolis in an almost
isolated position, in its beauty and strength it seems formed by nature
to act as the pedestal of a great monarchy, and to encircle and screen
the life of those princes who were half gods.
[Illustration: Panorama of the Seraglio.]
The entire hill is surrounded at its base by a high battlemented wall
flanked by massive towers. On the sides toward the Sea of Marmora and
the Golden Horn this is identical with the city wall. On the land side
it was erected by Muhammad II., and shuts the Seraglio Hill off from
that one on which the mosque of Nûri Osmaniyeh stands. Describing a
right angle near the Sublime Porte, it passes in front of St. Sophia,
and then, making a wide outward curve, joins the walls of Stambul
on the shore. This is the outer enclosure of the Seraglio. Properly
speaking, what is meant by the Seraglio is only that part which
occupies the summit of the hill, shut in behind high walls of its
own--the central redoubt, as it were, of the great fortress of the hill.
It would be, however, nothing but wasted time and energy to enter into
a detailed description of this spot such as it is at present. The
railroad crosses its outer walls; a disastrous fire destroyed many of
the buildings in 1865; the gardens are largely despoiled of their
beauty; hospitals, barracks, and military schools have been established
within its precincts; and of the old buildings which are still standing
many have been either so altered or their original function so changed
that, although the most salient features still remain, and one finds
the outline of the Old Seraglio clearly defined, yet the number and
nature of the minor alterations and the abandonment and neglect of the
past thirty years have so changed the character of the whole place that
it would be impossible to render a faithful description of it as it now
appears without disappointing even the most modest expectations.
It will, then, be better for his sake who writes, as well as his who
reads, to describe this famous Seraglio such as it was at the most
glorious period of the Ottoman power.
Any one who in those old days--say from a lofty tower or one of the
minarets of St. Sophia--could take in the entire Seraglio Hill must
have enjoyed a sight of extraordinary beauty. Framed by the deep blue
of the sea, the Bosphorus, and the harbor, with their semicircle of
white sails, arose the great green mass of the hill, girdled by walls
and towers and crowned by guns and sentinels. From the centre of this
forest of lofty trees, through which innumerable footpaths glistened
and flower-beds flaunted their gay colors, rose the vast rectangle
of the Seraglio buildings, divided into three large courtyards, or
rather little towns, built around three irregular squares, whose roofs
showed in a confused, many-colored mass--terraces filled with flowers,
gilded cupolas, white minarets, airy pinnacles of kiosks, great arched
doorways, alternating with gardens and groves, and half buried in
foliage. It was a little white metropolis, glittering, irregular, light
as an encampment of tents, through which there breathed a spirit at
once voluptuous, pastoral, and warlike. In one part it was all life and
movement, in another silent and deserted as a necropolis; here open and
bathed in sunlight, there plunged in perpetual gloom and hidden from
human gaze. A thousand zephyrs fanned it, while its unending succession
of contrasting lights and shadows, its brilliant coloring, and subdued
tints of blue and gray were alike reflected in its marble buildings and
tiny lakes, above which soared flocks of doves and swallows.
Such was the external aspect of the imperial city, not, perhaps, so
very large to the eye of one overlooking it from above, but within
so divided and subdivided, so intricate and irregular, that servants
familiar with its inner courts for upward of fifty years would still
grow confused and take the wrong turn, and the Janissaries when they
invaded it for the third time again lost their way.
The principal entrance then, as now, was the Bâb-i-Humayûn, or Imperial
Gate, opening on the little square in which stands the fountain
of Sultan Ahmed, back of St. Sophia. It is a lofty portal of white
and black marble, richly adorned with arabesques and crowned by a
high superstructure with eight windows and a spreading roof, the
architecture being that mixture of the Arabian and Persian styles by
which almost everything erected by the Turks in the years immediately
following the conquest can be so readily distinguished, before they
began to copy the Byzantine architecture around them. Above the
entrance, on a marble scroll, are the inscriptions of Muhammad II.:
“May Allah preserve the glory of its possessor for ever! May Allah
strengthen its buildings! May Allah establish its foundations!”[F]
Before this gate the populace of Stambul used to assemble in the
morning to see which of the great men of the court or state might have
been decapitated during the previous night, it being customary in such
cases to either suspend the heads in the niches which may still be seen
almost intact to right and left of the entrance, or else place them in
a silver basin, with the accusation and sentence exhibited alongside,
the bodies of those victims who were sentenced to be strangled being
thrown out into the square. Here detachments of troops from far-off
armies awaited the necessary permission to enter the outer court
bearing their victorious trophies and heaping on the imperial threshold
arms, flags, the skulls of vanquished enemies, and magnificent uniforms
stained with blood.
[F] The present gate is built upon the site of (but is not) the
original gate of Muhammad II.--TRANS.
The entrance was guarded by a powerful band of _kapuji_, the sons of
beys and pashas, gorgeously arrayed, who, from the windows and summits
of the towers overlooked the continual procession of people coming and
going below, or held back with their great cimeters the silent curious
throng collected without in the hope of catching, through some crack, a
fleeting glimpse of the courtyard, a brief view of the second gateway,
a suggestion at least of that enormous and mysterious abode which was
the object of so much conjecture and dread. Passing by, the devout
Mussulman would pause to murmur a prayer for his sublime lord; the
poor and ambitious youth picture to himself the day when he too might
possibly cross that threshold to receive the horse-tail; the pretty
ragged little maid of the street dream gorgeous dreams, not unmixed
with hope, of the splendid existence of a kadyn; and the relatives
of state victims avert their heads and shudder; while throughout the
entire square a strict silence was observed, broken only three times a
day by the muezzin’s voice on St. Sophia.