The visions of the morning have disappeared, and Constantinople, that
dream of light and beauty, turns out to be a huge city, cut up into
a succession of hills and valleys, a labyrinth of human anthills,
cemeteries, ruins, and desert-places--a mixture without parallel of
civilization and barbarism, reflecting something of every city in
the world, gathering within its borders every aspect of human life.
That comparatively small part enclosed within the walls forms, as it
were, the skeleton of a mighty city; as for the rest, it is a vast
aggregation of barracks, an enormous Asiatic encampment, in which
swarms a population of every race and religion under the sun. It is
a great city in a state of transformation, composed of ancient towns
falling into decay, of new ones built but yesterday, and of still
others in process of erection. Everything is topsy-turvy; on all
sides are seen the traces of some gigantic undertaking--mountains
tunnelled through, hills levelled, suburbs razed to the ground, great
thoroughfares laid out, heaps of stone, and the traces of disastrous
fires, portions of the earth’s surface for ever undergoing some
alteration at the hand of man. The disorder and confusion and the
never-ending succession of strange and unexpected sights make one dizzy.
Walk down a stately street, and you find it ends in a precipice; come
out of a theatre, and you are surrounded by tombs; climb to the summit
of a hill, beneath your feet you discover a forest, while a new city
confronts you from some neighboring hilltop; the street you have this
moment left suddenly winds away from you through a deep valley half
hidden by trees; walk around a house, you discover a bay; descend a
lane, farewell to the city: you find yourself in a lonely defile, with
nothing to be seen but the sky above you; towns appear and disappear
continually. They start into view over your head, beneath your feet,
over your shoulder, far off, near by, in sun and shadow, on the tops
of mountains and on the shore below. Take a step forward, an immense
panorama is spread out before you; backward, and you see nothing at
all; lift your head, and the points of a thousand minarets flash before
your eyes; turn it, and not one is in sight. The network of streets
winds in and out among the hills, overtopping terraces, grazing the
edges of precipices, passing beneath aqueducts, to break up suddenly
in footpaths leading down some grassy incline to the water’s edge, or
else, skirting piles of ruins, meanders away among rocks and sand to
the open country. Here and there the huge metropolis stops, as it
were, to take breath in the solitude of the country, then recommences,
more crowded, gay, noisy, bewildering, than before; here it spreads
out flat and monotonous, there scales the hillside, disappears over
the summit, disperses; then once more gathers itself together. In one
section it ferments with life, noise, movement; in another there is
the stillness of death; one quarter is all red, another white, a third
shines with gilding, a fourth looks like a mountain of flowers: stately
city, village, country, garden, harbor, wilderness, market, cemetery,
in endless succession, rear themselves, one above another, in such a
manner that certain heights command in a single view all the aspects of
life which are usually found embraced in an entire province. In every
direction a series of strange and unfamiliar shapes is outlined against
the sea and sky, so close together and so indented and broken up by
the extraordinary variety of architectural forms that the eye becomes
confused and the various objects seem to melt one into another.
In among the Turkish dwelling-houses European palaces rise suddenly up,
spires overtop the minarets, and cupolas crown the garden-terraces,
with battlemented walls behind them; roofs of Chinese kiosks appear
above the façade of a theatre; barred and grated harems face rows of
glazed windows; side by side with open balconies and terraces are found
Moorish buildings with recessed windows and small forbidding doorways.
Shrines to the Madonna are set up beneath Arabian archways; tombs stand
in the courtyards; towers arise amid the hovels; mosques, synagogues,
Greek, Catholic, Armenian churches, crowd one upon the other, as though
each were striving for the mastery, and, from every spot unoccupied by
buildings, cypress and pine, fig and plane trees stretch forth their
branches and tower above the surrounding roofs.
An indescribable architecture of expedients, following the infinite
caprices of the soil, portions of buildings cut up into sections,
triangular, upright, prone, surrounded and connected by bridges, props,
and defiles, heaped up in confused masses, like huge fragments detached
from a mountain-side.
At every hundred steps the scene changes. Now you are in a suburb of
Marseilles; turn, and it becomes an Asiatic village; another turn, and
it is a Greek settlement; still another, a suburb of Trebizond. The
language and dress, the faces you meet, the look of the houses in the
various quarters, all suggest a different country from the one you
have just left; they are bits of France, slices of Italy, samples of
England, scraps of Russia. One sees depicted in vivid colors on the
great surface of the city that battle which is here being waged between
the various groups of Christians on the one hand fighting to repossess
themselves of, and Islamism on the other defending with all its
remaining strength, the sacred soil of Constantinople. Stambul,
once entirely Turkish, is assailed on all sides by settlements of
Christians, before whose advance it is slowly giving way all along the
banks of the Golden Horn and the shores of the Sea of Marmora; in other
directions the conquest is proceeding much more rapidly: churches,
hospitals, palaces, public gardens, schools, and factories are rending
asunder the Mussulman’s quarters, encroaching upon his cemeteries, and
advancing from one height to another, until already, on the dismayed
soil, there are sketched the vague outlines of another European city,
as large as the one now covering the banks of the Golden Horn, and
destined one day to embrace the European shore of the Bosphorus.
[Illustration: Ancient Fountain.]
But from such general observations as these the attention is distracted
at every step by some fresh object of interest: on one street it is
the monastery of the dervishes, in another a great Moorish building,
a Turkish café, a bazâr, a fountain, an aqueduct. In the course of a
quarter of an hour, too, one is obliged to alter his gait at least a
dozen times. You must descend, mount, climb down some steep incline or
up by stairs cut out of the rock, wade through the mud and surmount a
thousand different obstacles, threading your way now through crowds
of people, then in and out among shrubbery; here stooping to avoid
lines of clothes hung out to dry; at one moment obliged to hold your
breath, at the next inhaling a hundred delicious odors. From a
terrace flooded with light and commanding a magnificent view of the
Bosphorus, Asia, and the blue arch of heaven one step will bring you
to a network of narrow alley-ways, leading in and out among wretched,
half-ruined houses and choked up with heaps of stone and rubbish;
from some delicious retreat filled with verdure and bloom you emerge
on a dry, dusty waste littered with débris; from a thoroughfare
glowing with life, movement, and color you step into some sepulchral
recess, where it seems as though the silence had never been broken
by the sound of a human voice; from the glorious Orient of one’s
dreams to quite another Orient, forbidding, oppressive, falling into
decay, and suggestive of all that is mournful and depressing. After
walking about for a few hours amid this medley of strange sights,
one’s brain becomes completely confused. Were any one to suddenly
put the question to you, “What sort of a place is Constantinople?”
you would only stare at him vacantly, quite incapable of giving any
intelligible reply. Constantinople is a Babylon, a world, a chaos.--Is
it beautiful?--Marvellously.--Ugly?--Horribly so.--Do you like it?--It
fascinates me.--Shall you remain?--How on earth can I tell? Can any one
tell how long he is likely to stay on another planet?
You return at last to your lodgings, enthusiastic, disappointed,
enchanted, disgusted, stunned, stupefied, your head whirling around
like that of a person in the first stages of brain fever. This
condition gradually gives way to one of complete prostration, utter
exhaustion of mind and body; you have lived years in the course of a
few hours, and feel yourself aged.
And the population of this huge city?