Often, while gazing at Constantinople from the bridge of the Sultan
Validéh, I would be confronted by the question, “What is to become
of this city in one or two centuries, even if the Turks are not
driven out of Europe?” Alas! there is but little doubt that the great
holocaust of beauty at the hands of civilization will have been already
accomplished. I can see that Constantinople of the future, that
Oriental London, rearing itself in mournful and forbidding majesty upon
the ruins of the most radiant city in the world. Her hills will be
levelled, her woods and groves cut down, her many-colored houses razed
to the ground; the horizon will be shut in on all sides by long rows of
palatial dwellings, factories, and workshops, broken here and there by
huge business-houses and pointed spires; long, straight streets will
divide Stambul into ten thousand square blocks like a checker-board;
telegraph-wires will interlace like some monster spider-web above
the roofs of the noisy city; across the bridge of the Sultan Validéh
will pour a black torrent of stiff hats and caps; the mysterious
retreats of the Seraglio will become a zoological garden, the Castle
of the Seven Towers a penitentiary, the Hebdomon Palace a museum of
natural history; everything will be solid, geometrical, useful, gray,
hideous, and a thick black cloud of smoke will hide the blue Thracian
heavens, to which no more ardent prayers will be addressed nor poets’
songs nor longing eyes of lovers. At such thoughts as these I could
not help feeling my heart sink within me, but then quickly there came
the consoling fancy that possibly--who knows?--some charming Italian
bride of the next century, coming here on her wedding journey, may
be heard to exclaim, “What a pity! what a dreadful pity it is that
Constantinople has changed so from what it was at the period of that
old torn book of the nineteenth century I found in the bottom of my
grandmother’s clothes-press!”