Constantinople—An Adventure with the Dogs of Stamboul—The
Sultan’s Kiosk—The Bazaars—Georgians—Sweetmeats—Hindoostanee
Fakeers—Turkish Women and their Eyes—The Jews—A Token of
Home—The Drug Bazaar—Opium Eaters.
The invariable “_Where am I?_” with which a traveller awakes at morning
was to me never more agreeably answered. _At Constantinople!_ The early
ship-of-war summons to “turn out,” was obeyed with alacrity, and with
the first boat after breakfast I was set ashore at Tophana, the landing
place of the Frank quarter of Stamboul.
A row of low-built cafés, with a latticed enclosure and a plentiful
shade of plane-trees on the right; a large square, in the centre of
which stood a magnificent Persian fountain, as large as a church,
covered with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in Turkish;
a mosque buried in cypresses on the left; a hundred indolent-looking,
large-trousered, moustached, and withal very handsome men, and twice the
number of snarling, wolfish, and half-starved dogs, are some of the
objects which the first glance, as I stepped on shore, left on my
memory.
I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew and hated a Christian.
By the time I had reached the middle of the square, a wretched puppy at
my heels had succeeded in announcing the presence of a stranger. They
were upon me in a moment from every heap of garbage, and every hole and
corner. I was beginning to be seriously alarmed, standing perfectly
still, with at least a hundred infuriated dogs barking in a circle
around me, when an old Turk, selling sherbet under the shelter of the
projecting roof of the Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A
stone or two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have since tried in
vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry wretches, and I took a glass of
the old man’s raising water, and pursued my way up the street. The
circumstance, however, had discoloured my anticipations; nothing looked
agreeably to me for an hour after it.
I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between rows of small wooden
houses, miserably built and painted, to the main street of the quarter
of Pera. Here live all Christians and Christian ambassadors, and here I
found our secretary of legation, Mr. H., who kindly offered to accompany
me to old Stamboul.
We descended to the water-side, and stepping into an egg-shell caique,
crossed the Golden Horn, and landed on a pier between the sultans green
kiosk and the seraglio. I was fortunate in a companion who knew the
people and spoke the language. The red-trousered and armed kervas, at
the door of the kiosk, took his pipe from his mouth, after a bribe and a
little persuasion, and motioned to a boy to show us the interior. A
circular room, with a throne of solid silver embraced in a double
colonnade of marble pillars, and covered with a roof laced with lapis
lazuli and gold, formed the place from which Sultan Mahmoud formerly
contemplated, on certain days, the busy and beautiful panorama of his
matchless bay. The kiosk is on the edge of the water, and the poorest
caikjee might row his little bark under its threshold, and fill his
monarch’s eye, and look on his monarch’s face with the proudest. The
green canvass curtains, which envelop the whole building, have, for a
long time, been unraised, and Mahmoud is oftener to be seen on
horseback, in the dress of a European officer, guarded by troops in
European costume and array. The change is said to be dangerously
unpopular.
We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its large area was crowded
with the buyers and sellers of a travelling fair—a sort of Jews’ market
held on different days in different parts of this vast capital. In
Turkey every nation is distinguished by its dress, and almost as
certainly by its branch of trade. On the right of the gate, under a huge
plane-tree, shedding its yellow leaves among the various wares, stood
the booths of a group of Georgians, their round and rosy-dark faces (you
would know their sisters must be half houris) set off with a tall black
cap of curling wool, their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded
with silk buttons, and their waist with a voluminous silken sash, whose
fringed ends fell over their heels as they sat cross-legged, patiently
waiting for custom. Hardware is the staple of their shops, but the
cross-pole in front is fantastically hung with silken garters and
tasselled cords, and their own Georgian caps, with a gay crown of
cashmere, enrich and diversify the shelves. I bought a pair or two of
blushing silk garters of a young man, whose eyes and teeth should have
been a woman’s, and we strolled on to the next booth.
Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad brass waiter, on which
was displayed a tempting array of mucilage, white and pink, something of
the consistency of blanc-mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded saucers,
and long-handled, flat, brass spoons, with a vase of rose-water,
completed his establishment. The grave Mussulman cut, sugared, and
scented the portions for which we asked, without condescending to look
at us or open his lips, and, with a glass of mild and pleasant sherbet
from his next neighbour, as immovable a Turk as himself, we had lunched,
extremely to my taste, for just five cents American currency.
A little farther on I was struck with the appearance of two men, who
stood bargaining with a Jew. My friend knew them immediately as
_fakeers_, or religious devotees from Hindoostan. He addressed them in
Arabic, and, during their conversation of ten minutes, I studied them
with some curiosity. They were singularly small, without any appearance
of dwarfishness, their limbs and persons slight, and very equally and
gracefully proportioned. Their features were absolutely regular, and,
though small as a child’s of ten or twelve years, were perfectly
developed. They appeared like men seen through an inverted opera-glass.
An exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a kind of glittering
black, quite unlike in texture and colour any I have ever before seen;
large, brilliant, intense black eyes, and lips (the most peculiar
feature of all), of lustreless black,[14] completed the portraits of two
as remarkable-looking men as I have anywhere met. Their costume was
humble, but not unpicturesque. A well-worn sash of red silk enveloped
the waist in many folds, and sustained trowsers tight to the legs, but
of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. Their small feet, which seemed
dried up to the bone, were bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind
of arabesque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high quilted cap,
with a rim of curling wool, was pressed down closely over the forehead.
A crescent-shaped tin vessel, suspended by a leather strap to the waist,
and serving the two purposes of a charity-box, and a receptacle for
bread and vegetables, seemed a kind of badge of their profession. They
were lately from Hindoostan, and were begging their way still farther
into Europe. They received our proffered alms without any mark of
surprise or even pleasure, and laying their hands on their breasts, with
countenances perfectly immoveable, gave us a Hindoostanee blessing, and
resumed their traffic. They see the world, these rovers on foot! And I
think, could I see it myself in no other way, I would e’en take sandal
and scrip, and traverse it as a dervish or beggar!
The alleys between the booths were crowded with Turkish women, who
seemed the chief purchasers. The effect of their enveloped persons, and
eyes peering from the muslin folds of the _yashmack_, is droll to a
stranger. It seemed to me like a masquerade, and the singular sound of
female voices, speaking through several thicknesses of a stuff, bound so
close on the mouth as to show the shape of the lips exactly, perfected
the delusion. It reminded me of the half-smothered tones beneath the
masks in carnival-time. A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have
about as much form, and might be walked about with as much grace as a
Turkish woman. Their fat hands, the finger-nails dyed with henna, and
their unexceptionably magnificent eyes, are all that the stranger is
permitted to peruse. It is strange how universal is the beauty of the
eastern eye. I have looked in vain hitherto, for a small or inexpressive
one. It is quite startling to meet the gaze of such large liquid orbs,
bent upon you from their long silken fringes, with the unwinking
steadiness of look common to the females of this country. Wrapped in
their veils, they seem unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and
look you full in the face, while you seek in vain for a pair of lips to
explain by their expression the meaning of such particular notice.
The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople than elsewhere. He is
compelled to wear the dress of his tribe (and its “badge of sufferance,”
too), and you will find him, wherever there is trafficking to be done,
in a small cap, not ungracefully shaped, twisted about with a peculiar
handkerchief of a small black print, and set back so as to show the
whole of his national high and narrow forehead. He is always good
humoured and obsequious, and receives the curse with which his officious
offers of service are often repelled, with a smile, and a hope that he
may serve you another time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called
our attention to some newly-opened bales, bearing the stamp, “TREMONT
MILL, LOWELL, MASS.” It was a long distance from home to meet such
familiar words!
We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered a street of
_confectioners_. The East is famous for its sweetmeats, and truly a more
tempting array never visited the Christmas dream of a schoolboy. Even
Felix, the _patissier nonpareil_ of Paris, might take a lesson in
jellies. And then for “candy” of all colours of the rainbow (not shut
enviously in with pitiful glass cases, but piled up to the ceiling in a
shop all in the street, as it might be in Eutopia, with nothing to pay),
it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. The last part of the
parenthesis is almost true, for with a small coin of the value of two
American cents, I bought of a certain kind called, in Turkish, “peace to
your throat” (they call things by such poetical names in the East), the
quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in my best “days of sugar
candy.” The women of Constantinople, I am told, almost live on
confectionery. They eat incredible quantities. The sultan’s eight
hundred wives and women employ five hundred cooks, and consume _two
thousand five hundred pounds of sugar daily_! It is probably the most
expensive item of the seraglio kitchen.
A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long dark passage, of
about the architecture of a covered bridge in our country. A place
richer in the oriental and picturesque could scarce be found between the
Danube and the Nile. It is the bazaar of _drugs_. As your eye becomes
accustomed to the light, you distinguish vessels of every size and
shape, ranged along the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to the
uncovered brim with the various productions of the Orient. The edges of
the baskets and jars are turned over with rich coloured papers (a
peculiar colour to every drug), and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed
on the top. There is the _henna_, in a powder of deep brown, with an
envelope of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious gums in their jars,
golden-leafed, and spices and dyes and medicinal roots, and above hang
anatomies of curious monsters, dried and stuffed, and in the midst of
all, motionless as the box of sulphur beside him, and almost as yellow,
sits a venerable Turk, with his beard on his knees, and his pipe-bowl
thrust away over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his only sign of
life. This class of merchants is famous for opium eaters, and if you
pass at the right hour, you find the large eye of the silent smoker
dilated and wandering, his fingers busy in tremulously counting his
spice-wood beads, and the roof of his stall wreathed with clouds of
smoke, the vent to every species of eastern enthusiasm. If you address
him, he smiles, and puts his hand to his forehead and breast, but
condescends to answer no question till it is thrice reiterated, and then
in the briefest word possible, he answers wide of your meaning, strokes
the smoke out of his moustache, and slipping the costly amber between
his lips, abandons himself again to his exalted revery. I write this
after being a week at Constantinople, during which the Egyptian bazaar
has been my frequent and most fancy-stirring lounge. Of its forty
merchants, there is not one whose picturesque features are not imprinted
deeply in my memory. I have idled up and down in the dim light, and
fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense-wood for my
pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old
Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and (what
will be better understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable
odours of the thousand spices. Where are the painters, that they have
never found this mine of admirable studies? There is not a corner of
Constantinople, nor a man in its streets, that were not a novel and a
capital subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr. Cole, leave things that have
been painted so often, as aqueducts and Italian ruins (though you _do_
make delicious pictures, and could never waste time or pencils on
_anything_), and come to the East for one single book of sketches! How I
have wished I was a painter since I have been here!
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[14] I have since met many of them in the streets of Constantinople, and
I find it a distinguishing feature of their race. They look as if their
lips were dead—as if the blood had dried beneath the skin.
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