The Golden Horn and its Scenery—The Sultan’s Wives and
Arabians—The Valley of Sweet Waters—Beauty of the Turkish
Minarets—The Mosque of Sulymanye—Mussulmans at their
Devotions—The Muezzin—The Bazaar of the Opium-eaters—The Mad
House of Constantinople, and Description of its Inmates—Their
Wretched Treatment—The Hippodrome and the Mosque of Sultan
Achmet—The Janizaries—Reflections on the Past, the Present,
and the Future.
The “Golden Horn” is a curved arm of the sea, the broadest extremity
meeting the Bosphorus and forming the harbour of Constantinople, and the
other tapering away till it is lost in the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” It
curls through the midst of the “seven-hilled” city, and you cross it
whenever you have an errand in old Stamboul. Its hundreds of shooting
caïques, its forests of merchantmen and men-of-war, its noise and its
confusion, are exchanged in scarce ten minutes of swift pulling for the
breathless and Eden-like solitude of a valley that has not its parallel,
I am inclined to think, between the Mississippi and the Caspian. It is
called in Turkish _khyat-khana_. Opening with a gentle curve from the
Golden Horn, it winds away into the hills toward Belgrade, its long and
even hollow thridded by a lively stream, and carpeted by a broad belt of
unbroken green sward swelling up to the enclosing hills, with a grass so
verdant and silken that it seems the very floor of faëry. In the midst
of its longest stretch to the eye (perhaps two miles of level meadow)
stands a beautiful serai of the sultan’s, unfenced and open, as if it
had sprung from the lap of the green meadow like a lily. The stream runs
by its door, and over a mimic fall whose lip is of scalloped marble, is
built an oriental kiosk, all carving and gold, that is only too delicate
and fantastical for reality.
Here, with, the first grass of spring, the sultan sends his fine-footed
Arabians to pasture; and here come the ladies of his harem (chosen,
women and horses, for much the same class of qualities), and in the long
summer afternoon, with mounted eunuchs on the hills around, forbidding
on pain of death, all approach to the sacred retreat, they venture to
drop their jealous veils and ramble about in their unsunned beauty.
After a gallop of three or four miles over the broad waste table plains,
in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, we checked our horses suddenly
on the brow of a precipitous descent, with this scene of beauty spread
out before us. I had not yet approached it by water, and it seemed to me
as if the earth had burst open at my feet, and revealed some realm of
enchantment. Behind me, and away beyond the valley to the very horizon,
I could see only a trackless heath, brown and treeless, while a hundred
feet below lay a strip of very Paradise, blooming in all the verdure and
heavenly freshness of spring. We descended slowly, and crossing a bridge
half hidden by willows, rode in upon the elastic green sward (for
myself) with half a feeling of profanation. There were no eunuchs upon
the hills, however, and our spirited Turkish horses threw their wild
heads into the air, and we flew over the verdant turf like a troop of
Delhis, the sound of the hoofs on the yielding carpet scarcely audible.
The fair palace in the centre of this domain of loveliness was closed,
and it was only after we had walked around it that we observed a small
tent of the prophet’s green couched in a small dell on the hill-side,
and containing probably the guard of its imperial master.
We mounted again and rode up the valley for two or three miles,
following the same level and verdant curve, the soft carpet broken only
by the silver thread of the Barbyses, loitering through it on its way to
the sea. A herd of buffaloes, tended by a Bulgarian boy, stretched on
his back in the sunshine, and a small caravan of camels bringing wood
from the hills, and keeping to the soft valley as a relief to their
spongy feet, were the only animated portions of the landscape. I think I
shall never form to my mind another picture of romantic rural beauty (an
employment of the imagination I am much given to when out of humour with
the world) that will not resemble the “Valley of Sweet Waters”—the
_khyat-khana_ of Constantinople. “Poor Slingsby” never was here.[15]
The lofty mosque of Sulymanye, the bazaars of the opium-eaters, and the
_Timar-hané_, or mad-house of Constantinople, are all upon one square in
the highest part of the city. We entered the vast court of the mosque
from a narrow and filthy street, and the impression of its towering
plane-trees and noble area, and of the strange, but grand and costly
pile in its centre, was almost devotional. An inner court, enclosed by a
kind of romanesque wall, contained a sacred marble fountain of light and
airy architecture, and the portico facing this was sustained by some of
those splendid and gigantic columns of porphyry and jasper, the spoils
of the churches of Asia Minor.[16]
I think the most beautiful spire that rises into the sky is the Turkish
minaret. If I may illustrate an object of such magnitude by so trifling
a comparison, it is exactly the shape and proportions of an ever-pointed
pencil-case—the silver bands answering to the encircling galleries, one
above another, from which the muezzin calls out the hour of prayer. The
minaret is painted white, the galleries are fantastically carved, and
rising to the height of the highest steeples in our country (four and
sometimes six to a single mosque), these slender and pointed fingers of
devotion seem to enter the very sky. Remembering, dear reader, that
there are two hundred and twenty mosques and three hundred chapels in
Constantinople, raising, perhaps, in all, a thousand minarets to heaven,
you may get some idea of the magnificence of this seven-hilled capital
of the East.
It was near the hour of prayer, and the devout Mussulmans were thronging
into the court of Sulymanye by every gate. Passing the noble doors, with
their strangely-carved arches of arabesque, which invite all to enter
but the profaning foot of the Christian, the turbaned crowd repaired
first to the fountains. From the walls of every mosque, by small
conduits pouring into a marble basin, flow streams of pure water for the
religious ablutions of the faithful. The Mussulman approaches, throws
off his flowing robe, steps out of his yellow slippers, and unwinds his
voluminous turban with devout deliberateness. A small marble step, worn
hollow with pious use, supports his foot while he washes from the knee
downward. His hands and arms, with the flowing sleeve of his silk shirt
rolled to the shoulder, receive the same lavation, and then, washing his
face, he repeats a brief prayer, resumes all but his slippers, and
enters the mosque, barefooted. The _mihrab_ (or niche indicating the
side toward the tomb of the prophet), fixes his eye. He folds his hands
together, prays a moment standing, prostrates himself flat on his face
toward the hallowed quarter, rises upon his knees, and continues praying
and prostrating himself for perhaps half an hour. And all this process
is required by the mufti, and performed by every good Mussulman five
times a day! A rigid adherence to it is almost universal among the
Turks. In what an odour of sanctity would a Christian live, who should
make himself thus “familiar with heaven!”
As the muezzin from the minaret was shouting his last “mash-allah!” with
a voice like a man calling out from the clouds, we left the court of the
majestic mosque, with Byron’s reflection:—
“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”
and, having delivered ourselves of this scrap of poetical philosophy, we
crossed over the square to the opium-eaters.
A long row of half-ruined buildings, of a single story, with porticoes
in front, and the broad, raised platform beneath, on which the Turks sit
cross-legged at public places, is the scene of what was once a
peculiarly oriental spectacle. The mufti has of late years denounced the
use of opium, and the devotees to its sublime intoxication have either
conquered the habit, or what is more probable, indulge it in more secret
places. The shops are partly ruinous, and those that remain in order are
used as cafés, in which, however, it is said that the dangerous drug may
still be procured. My companion inquired of a good-humoured-looking
caféjee whether there was any place at which a confirmed opium-eater
could be seen under its influence. He said there was an old Turk, who
was in the habit of frequenting his shop, and, if we could wait an hour
or two, we might see him in the highest state of intoxication. We had no
time to spare, if the object had been worth our while.
And here, thought I, as we sat down and took a cup of coffee in the
half-ruined café, have descended upon the delirious brains of these
noble drunkards, the visions of Paradise so glowingly described in
books—visions, it is said, as far exceeding the poor invention of the
poet, as the houris of the prophet exceed the fair damsels of this
world. Here men, otherwise in their senses, have believed themselves
emperors, warriors, poets; these wretched walls and bending roof, the
fair proportions of a palace; this gray old caféjee, a Hylas or a
Ganymede. Here men have come to cast off, for an hour, the dull thraldom
of the body; to soar into the glorious world of fancy at a penalty of a
thousand times the proportion of real misery; to sacrifice the
invaluable energies of health, and deliberately poison the very fountain
of life, for a few brief moments of magnificent and phrensied
blessedness. It is powerfully described in the “Opium Eater” of De
Quincy.
At the extremity of this line of buildings, by a natural proximity,
stands the _Timar-hané_. We passed the porter at the gate without
question, and entered a large quadrangle, surrounded with the grated
windows of cells on the ground-floor. In every window was chained a
maniac. The doors of the cells were all open, and, descending by a step
upon the low stone floor of the first, we found ourselves in the
presence of four men chained to rings in the four corners by massy iron
collars. The man in the window sat crouched together, like a person
benumbed (the day was raw and cold as December), the heavy chain of his
collar hanging on his naked breast, and his shoulders imperfectly
covered with a narrow blanket. His eyes were large and fierce, and his
mouth was fixed in an expression of indignant sullenness. My companion
asked him if he were ill. He said he should be well, if he were
out—that he was brought there in a fit of intoxication, two years ago,
and was no more crazy than his keeper. Poor fellow! It might easily be
true! He lifted his heavy collar from his neck as he spoke, and it was
not difficult to believe that misery like his for two long years would,
of itself, destroy reason. There was a better dressed man in the
opposite corner, who informed us, in a gentlemanly voice, that he had
been a captain in the sultan’s army, and was brought there in the
delirium of a fever. He was at a loss to know, he said, why he was
imprisoned still.
We passed on to a poor, half-naked wretch in the last stage of illness
and idiocy, who sat chattering to himself, and, though trembling with
the cold, interrupted his monologue continually with fits of the wildest
laughter. Farther on sat a young man of a face so full of intellectual
beauty, an eye so large and mild, a mouth of such mingled sadness and
sweetness, and a forehead so broad, and marked so nobly, that we stood,
all of us, struck with a simultaneous feeling of pity and surprise. A
countenance more beaming with all that is admirable in human nature, I
have never seen, even in painting. He might have sat to Da Vinci for the
“beloved apostle.” He had tied the heavy chain by a shred to a round of
the grating, to keep its weight from his neck, and seemed calm and
resigned, with all his sadness. My friend spoke to him, but he answered
obscurely, and seeing that our gaze disturbed him, we passed unwillingly
on. Oh what room there is in the world for pity! If that poor prisoner
be not a maniac (as he may not be), and if nature has not falsified in
the structure of his mind the superior impress on his features, what
Prometheus-like agony has he suffered! The guiltiest felon is better
cared for. And, allowing his mind to be a wreck, and allowing the
hundred human minds, in the same cheerless prison, to be certainly in
ruins, oh what have they done to be weighed down with iron on their
necks, and exposed, like caged beasts, shivering and naked, to the eye
of pitiless curiosity? I have visited lunatic asylums in France, Italy,
Sicily, and Germany, but, culpably neglected as most of them are, I have
seen nothing comparable to this in horror.
“Is he never unchained?” we asked. “Never!” And yet from the ring to the
iron collar there was just chain enough to permit him to stand upright!
There were no vessels near them, not even a pitcher of water. Their dens
were cleansed and the poor sufferers fed at appointed hours, and, come
wind or rain, there was neither shutter nor glass to defend them from
the inclemency of the weather.
We entered most of the rooms, and found in all the same dampness, filth,
and misery. One poor wretch had been chained to the same spot for twenty
years. The keeper said he never slept. He talked all the night long.
Sometimes at mid-day his voice would cease, and his head nod for an
instant, and then with a start as if he feared to be silent, he raved on
with the same incoherent rapidity. He had been a dervish. His collar and
chain were bound with rags, and a tattered coat was fastened up on the
inside of the window, forming a small recess in which he sat, between
the room and the grating. He was emaciated to the last degree. His beard
was tangled and filthy, his nails curled over the ends of his fingers,
and his appearance, save only an eye of the keenest lustre, that of a
wild beast.
In the last room we entered, we found a good-looking young man,
well-dressed, healthy, composed, and having every appearance of a person
in the soundest state of mind and body. He saluted us courteously, and
told my friend that he was a renegade Greek. He had turned Mussulman a
year or two ago, had lost his reason, and so was brought here. He talked
of it quite as a thing of course, and seemed to be entirely satisfied
that the best had been done for him. One of the party took hold of his
chain. He winced as the collar stirred on his neck, and said the lock
was on the outside of the window (which was true), and that the boys
came in and tormented him by pulling it sometimes, “There they are,” he
said, pointing to two or three children who had just entered the court,
and were running round from one prisoner to another. We bade him good
morning, and he laid his hand to his breast, and bowed with a smile. As
we passed toward the gate, the chattering lunatic on the opposite side
screamed after us, the old dervish laid his skinny hands on the bars of
his window, and talked louder and faster, and the children, approaching
close to the poor creatures, laughed with delight at their excitement.
It was a relief to escape the common sights and sounds of the city. We
walked on to the Hippodrome. The only remaining beauty of this famous
square is the unrivalled mosque of Sultan Achmet, which, though inferior
in size to the renowned Santa Sophia, is superior in elegance both
within and without. Its six slender and towering minarets are the
handsomest in Constantinople. The wondrous obelisk in the centre of the
square, remains perfect as in the time of the Christian emperors, but
the brazen tripod is gone from the twisted column, and the serpent-like
pillar itself is leaning over with its brazen folds to its fall.
Here stood the barracks of the powerful Janisaries, and from the side of
Sultan Achmet the cannon were levelled upon them, as they rushed from
the conflagration within. And here, when Constantinople was “the second
Rome,” were witnessed the triumphal processions of Christian conquest,
the march of the crusaders, bound for Palestine, and the civil tumults
which Justinian, walking among the people with the Gospel in his hand,
tried in vain to allay ere they burnt the great edifice built of the
ruins of the temple of Solomon. And around this now neglected area, the
captive Gelimer followed in chains the chariot of the conquering
Belisarius, repeating the words of Solomon, “Vanity of vanities! all is
vanity!” while the conqueror himself, throwing aside his crown,
prostrated himself at the feet of the beautiful Theodora, raised from a
Roman actress to be the Christian empress of the East. From any elevated
point of the city, you may still see the ruins of the palace of the
renowned warrior, and read yourself a lesson on human vicissitudes,
remembering the school-book story of “an obolon for Belisarius!”
The Hippodome was, until late years, the constant scene of the games of
the jereed. With the destruction of the Janisaries, and the introduction
of European tactics, this graceful exercise has gone out of fashion. The
East is fast losing its picturesqueness. Dress, habits, character,
everything seems to be undergoing a gradual change, and when, as the
Turks themselves predict, the Moslem is driven into Asia, this splendid
capital will become another Paris, and with the improvements in travel,
a summer in Constantinople will be as little thought of as a tour in
Italy. Politicians in this part of the world predict such a change as
about to arrive.
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[15] Irving says, in one of his most exquisite passages—“He who has
sallied forth into the world like poor Slingsby, full of sunny
anticipations, finds too soon how different the distant scene becomes
when visited. The smooth place roughens as he approaches; the wild place
becomes tame and barren; the fairy teints that beguiled him on, still
fly to the distant hill, or gather upon the land he has left behind, and
every part of the landscape is greener than the spot he stands on.” Full
of merit and beautiful expression as this is, I, for one, have not found
it true. Bright as I had imagined the much-sung lands beyond the water,
I have found many a scene in Italy and the East that has more than
answered the craving for beauty in my heart. Val d’Arno, Vallombrosa,
Venice, Terni, Tivoli, Albano, the Isles of Greece, the Bosphorus, and
the matchless valley I have described, have, with a hundred other spots
less famous, far outgone in their exquisite reality, even the brightest
of my anticipations. The passage is not necessarily limited in its
meaning to scenery, however, and of _moral_ disappointment it is
beautifully true. There is many a “poor Slingsby,” the fate of whose
sunny anticipations of life it describes but too faithfully.
[16] Sulymanye was built of the ruins of the church St. Euphemia, at
Chalcedonia.
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