Happening to be in Constantinople in the month of Ramazân, the ninth
month in the Turkish calendar, in which the twenty-eight days’ fast
falls, I was able to enjoy every evening a spectacle so exceedingly
comical that I think it merits a description. Throughout the entire
fast the Turks are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke from sunrise to
sunset. Most of them make it up by feasting all night, but as long as
the sun is shining the rule is very generally observed, and no one
dares, in public at any rate, to transgress it.
One morning my friend and I went to call upon a friend of ours, a young
aide-de-camp of the Sultan, who prided himself upon his liberal views.
We found him in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the imperial
palace with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Why,” said Yunk, “how do
you dare to drink coffee hours after sunrise?” The young man shrugged
his shoulders, and remarked carelessly that he did not care a fig for
Ramazân or the fast; but just at that moment, a door near by suddenly
opening, he was in such a hurry to hide the telltale cup that half
its contents were spilled at his feet. One can readily imagine from
this incident how rigorously all those must abstain whose entire day
is passed beneath the public eye, the boatmen for instance. To get a
really good idea of it one should stand on the Sultan Validéh bridge at
about sunset. What with the boats at the landings and those which are
going from one place to another, the ones near at hand and those in the
distance, there must be very nearly a thousand in sight. Every boatman
has fasted since sunrise, and by this time is ravenously hungry. His
supper is all ready in the käik, and his eyes travel constantly from
it to where the sun is nearing the horizon, and then back again, while
he has the restless, uneasy air of a wild animal who paces about his
cage as the feeding-hour approaches. Sunset is announced by the firing
of a gun, and until that signal is heard not so much as a crumb of
bread or drop of water crosses the lips of one of them. Sometimes in a
retired spot in the Golden Horn we would try to induce our boatman to
eat something, but the invariable answer was, “Jok! jok! jok!” (No! no!
no!), accompanied by an uneasy gesture toward the western horizon. When
the sun gets about halfway down behind the mountains the men begin to
finger their pieces of bread, inhaling its smell voluptuously. Then it
gets so low that nothing can be seen but a golden arc, and the rowers
lay down their oars. Those who are busy and those who are idle, some
midway across the Golden Horn, some lying in retired inlets, others on
the Bosphorus, others over near the Asiatic shore, others, again, who
are plying on the Sea of Marmora, one and all, turning toward the west,
remain immovable, their eyes fixed on the fast-disappearing disk with
mouth open, kindling eye, and bread firmly clasped in the right hand.
Now nothing can be seen but a tiny point of fire: a thousand hunks
of bread are held close to a thousand mouths, and then the fiery eye
drops out of sight, the cannons thunders, and on the instant thirty-two
thousand teeth tear a thousand huge mouthsful from a thousand loaves!
But why say a thousand, when in every house and café and restaurant a
similar scene is being enacted at precisely the same moment, and for a
short time the Turkish city is nothing but a huge monster whose hundred
thousand jaws are all tearing and devouring at once?