A walk of ten minutes brought us once more into real Turkey, the great
Mussulman suburb of Kassim Pasha, a city in itself, filled with mosques
and dervishes’ monasteries, which, with its kitchen-gardens and
shaded grounds, covers an entire hill and valley, and, extending
all the way to the Golden Horn, includes all of the ancient bay of
Mandsacchio, from the cemetery of Galata quite to the promontory
which overlooks the Balata quarter on the other shore. From the
heights of Kassim Pasha a most exquisite view is to be had. Beneath,
on the water’s edge, stands the enormous arsenal of Tersâne; beyond
it extends for more than a mile a labyrinth of dry-docks, workshops,
open squares, storehouses, and barracks, skirting all that part of the
Golden Horn which serves as a port of war. The admiralty building,
airy and graceful, seeming to float upon the surface of the water,
stands out clearly against the dark-green background of the Galata
cemetery; in the harbor innumerable small steamboats and käiks, crowded
with people, shoot in and out among the stationary iron-clads and old
frigates of the Crimea; on the opposite bank lie Stambul, the aqueduct
of Valens, bearing aloft its mighty arches into the blue heavens above,
the great mosques of Muhammad and Suleiman, and innumerable houses
and minarets. In order to take in all the details of this scene we
seated ourselves in front of a Turkish café and sipped the fourth or
fifth of the dozen or more cups of coffee which, whether you wish to
or not, you are bound to imbibe in the course of every day of your
stay in Constantinople. This café was a very unpretending place, but,
like all such establishments--Turkish ones, that is--most original,
probably differing but little from those very first ones started in
the time of Suleiman the Great, or those others into which the fourth
Murad used to burst so unexpectedly, cimeter in hand, when he made his
nocturnal rounds for the purpose of wreaking summary vengeance upon
venders of the forbidden beverage. What numbers of imperial edicts,
theological disputes, and bloody quarrels has this “enemy of sleep and
fruitfulness,” as it has been termed by ulemas of the strict school,
“genius of dreams and quickener of the mind,” as the more liberal sects
have it, been the cause of! And now, after love and tobacco, it is the
most highly prized of all luxuries in the estimation of every poor
Osman. To-day coffee is drunk on the summits of the Galata and Serasker
towers; you find it on the steamboats, in the cemeteries, in the
barber-shops, the baths, the bazârs. In whatever part of Constantinople
you may happen to be, if you merely call out, “Café-gi!” without taking
the trouble to leave your seat, in three minutes a cup is steaming
before you.