In no other city of Europe do the sites and monuments, either legendary
or historical, act so forcibly upon the imagination as at Stambul,
because in no other spot do they record events at once so recent and so
picturesque. Elsewhere, in order to get away from the prose of modern
every-day life, one is obliged to go back for several centuries; at
Stambul a few years suffice. Legend, or what has all the character
and force of legend, dates from yesterday. It is not many years since,
in the square of Et-Meidan, the celebrated massacre of the Janissaries
took place; not many years since the waters of the Sea of Marmora
cast up upon the banks of the imperial gardens those twenty sacks
containing each the body of a beauty of Mustafa’s harem; not long since
Brancovano’s family was executed in the Castle of the Seven Towers, or
European ambassadors were pinioned between two _kapuji-basci_ in the
presence of the Grand Seigneur, upon whose half-averted countenance
there glowed a mysterious light; or within the walls of the old
Seraglio that life--so extraordinary--a mingling of horrors, love, and
folly, ceased finally to exist, which now seems to belong to such a
far-distant past. Wandering about the streets of Stambul and reflecting
upon all these things, you cannot help a feeling of astonishment at the
calm, cheerful aspect of the city, gay with color and vegetation. “Ah,
traitoress!” you cry, “what have you done with all those mountains of
heads, those lakes of blood? How is it possible that everything has
been so cleverly concealed, so wiped out and obliterated, that not a
trace remains?”
On the Bosphorus, beneath the Seraglio walls and just opposite
Leander’s Tower, which rises from the water like a lover’s monument,
you may still behold the inclined plane down which the bodies of
the unfaithful beauties of the harem were rolled into the sea;
in the middle of the Et-Meidan the serpentine column still bears
witness to the force of Muhammad the Conqueror’s famous sabre; on the
Mahmûd bridge the spot is still pointed out on which the fiery sultan
annihilated at a single blow the adventurous dervish who had dared to
fling an anathema in his face; in the Holy Well of the Balukli church
the miraculous fish still swim about which foretold the fall of the
City of the Palæologi; beneath the trees of the Sweet Waters of Asia
you can visit those shady retreats where a dissolute sultana was wont
to bestow upon the favorite of the hour that fatal love whose certain
sequence was death. Every doorway, every tower, every mosque and park
and open square, records some strange event--a tragedy, a love-story,
a mystery, the absolutism of a padishah or the reckless caprice of a
sultana; everything has a history of its own, and wherever you turn the
near-by objects, the distant view, the balmy perfumed air, the silence,
all unite to transport him whose mind is stored with these histories
of the past out of himself, his era, and the city of to-day, so that
not infrequently, when suddenly confronted with the suggestion that
it is high time to think of returning to the hotel, he asks himself
confusedly what it means, how can there be a “hotel.”
[Illustration: Serpentine Column of Delphi.]