Beauties of the Bosphorus—Summer-Palace of the
Sultan—Adventure with an old Turkish Woman—The Feast of
Bairam—The Sultan his own Butcher—His evil Propensities—Visit
to the Mosques—A formidable Dervish—Santa Sophia—Mosque of
Sultan Achmet—Traces of Christianity.
From this elevated point, the singular effect of a desert commencing
from the very streets of the city is still more observable. The compact
edge of the metropolis is visible even upon the more rural Bosphorus,
not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing to protrude beyond the
closely pressed limit. To repeat the figure, it seems, with the
prodigious mass of habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of
both Europe and Asia were swept to their respective borders, or as if
the crowded masses upon the long extending shores were the deposit of
some mighty overflow of the sea.
From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated only by name, which
form a fringe of peculiarly light and fantastic architecture to the
never-wearying Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, upon that
silver link between the two seas, there are fifty valleys and thirty
rivers, and an imperial palace on every loveliest spot from the Black
Sea to Marmora. The Italians say, “See Naples and die!” but for _Naples_
I would read _Stamboul and the Bosphorus_.
Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, we entered a long
glen, closed at the water’s edge by the Sultan’s summer-palace, and
present residence of Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old
woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a Wordsworthian passion
for all things humble and simple, gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and
inquired her business at the village. She had been to Stavros, to sell
ten paras’ worth of herbs—about _one cent_ of our currency. He put a
small piece of silver into her hand, while, with the still strong habit
of Turkish modesty, she employed the other in folding her tattered
_yashmack_ so as to conceal her features from the gaze of strangers. She
had not expected charity. “What is this for?” she asked, looking at it
with some surprise. “To buy bread for your children, mother!” “Effendi!”
said the poor old creature, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming
from her eyes, “My children are all dead! _There is no one now between
me and Allah!_” It were worth a poet’s while to live in the East. Like
the fairy in the tale, they never open their lips but they “speak
pearls.”
We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, at Beylerbey, and
floated slowly past the imperial palace. Five or six eunuchs, with their
red caps and long blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the
court-yard of the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly at the fine
lattices above, concealing so many of the picked beauties of the empire.
A mandolin, very indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings,
betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and there was a single
moment when we could see, by the relief of a corner window, the outline
of a female figure; but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our
busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for their reward. As we
approached the central façade the polished brazen gates flew open, and a
band of thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on the terrace
beneath the palace-windows, announcing, in their first flourish, that
Sultan Mahmoud had thrust his fingers into his _pilaw_, and his subjects
were at liberty to dine. Not finding their music much to our taste, we
ordered the caikjees to assist the current a little, and shooting past
Stavros, we cut across the Strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the
vizier, and, in a few minutes, I was once more in my floating home,
under the “star-spangled banner.”
* * * * *
Constantinople was in a blaze last night, with the illumination for the
approach of the Turkish feast of Bairam. The minarets were extremely
beautiful, their encircling galleries hung with coloured lamps, and
illuminated festoons suspended from one to the other. The ships of the
fleet were decked also with thousands of lamps, and the effect was
exceedingly fine, with the reflection in the Bosphorus, and the waving
of the suspended lights in the wind. The Sultan celebrates the festa by
taking a virgin to his bed, and sacrificing twenty sheep with his own
hand. I am told by an intelligent physician here, that this playing the
butcher is an every-day business with the “Brother of the Sun,” every
safe return from a ride, or an excursion in his _sultanethe caique_,
requiring him to cut the throat of his next day’s mutton. It may account
partly for the excessive cruelty of character attributed to him.
Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be very avaricious. It is
related of his youth, that he was permitted occasionally, with his
brother (who was murdered to make room for him on the throne), to walk
out in public on certain days with their governor; and that, upon these
occasions, each was intrusted with a purse to be expended in charity.
The elder brother soon distributed his piastres, and borrowed of his
attendants to continue his charities; while Mahmoud quietly put the
purse in his pocket, and added it to his private hoard on his return. It
is said, too, that he has a particular passion for upholstery, and in
his frequent change from one serai to another, allows no nail to be
driven without his supervision. Add to this a spirit of perverse
contradiction, so truculent that none but the most abject flatterers can
preserve his favour, and you have a pretty handful of offsets against a
character certainly not without some royal qualities.
* * * * *
With one of the reis effendi’s and one of the seraskier’s officers,
followed by four _kervasses_ in the Turkish military dress, and every
man a pair of slippers in his pocket, we accompanied the commodore,
to-day, on a visit to the principal mosques.
Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we entered the court of the
new mosque built by the present sultan, whose elegant exterior of white
marble and two freshly-gilded minarets we had admired daily, lying at
anchor without sound of the muezzin. The morning prayers were just over,
and the retiring Turks looked, with lowering brows at us, as we pulled
off our boots on the sacred threshold.
We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I should have taken for
rather a superb ball-room. An unencumbered floor carpeted gaily, a small
arabesque gallery over the door quite like an orchestra, chandeliers and
lamps in great profusion, and walls painted of the brightest and most
varied colours, formed an interior rather wanting in the “dim religious
light” of a place of worship. We were shuffling around in our slippers
from one side to the other, examining the marble _mihrab_ and the narrow
and towering pulpit, when a ragged and decrepid dervish, with his
papooshes in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from a very
dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers, and began walking
backward and forward, eyeing us ferociously and muttering himself into
quite a passion. His charity for infidels was evidently at a low ebb.
Every step we took upon the holy floor seemed to add to his fury. The
kervasses observed him, but his sugar-loaf cap carried some respect with
it, and they evidently did not like to meddle with him. He followed us
to the door, fixing his hollow grey eyes with a deadly glare upon each
one as he went out, and the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry
us out of his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mounted a
handsome marble staircase to a suite of apartments above, communicating
with the sultan’s private gallery. The carpets here were richer, and the
divans with which the half dozen saloons were surrounded, were covered
with the most costly stuffs of the East. The gallery was divided from
the area of the mosque by a fine brazen grating curiously wrought, and
its centre occupied by a rich ottoman, whereon the imperial legs are
crossed in the intervals of his prostrations. It was about the size and
had the air altogether of a private box at the opera.
We crossed the Golden Horn, and passing the eunuch’s guard, entered the
gardens of the seraglio on our way to Santa Sophia. An inner wall still
separated us from the gilded kiosks, at whose latticed windows peering
above the trees, we might have clearly perused the features of any
peeping inmate; but the little cross-bars revealed nothing but their own
provoking eye of the size of a rose-leaf in the centre, and we reached
the upper gate without even a glimpse of a waved handkerchief to stir
our chivalry to the rescue.
A confused mass of buttresses without form or order, is all that you are
shown for the exterior of that “wonder of the world,” the mosque of
mosques, the renowned Santa Sophia. We descended a dark avenue, and
leaving our boots in a vestibule that the horse of Mohammed the Second,
if he was lodged as ambitiously living as dead, would have disdained for
his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A long breath and an admission
of its almost attributable supernatural grandeur, followed our too hasty
disappointment. It is indeed a “vast and wondrous dome!” Its dimensions
are less than those of St. Peter’s at Rome, but its effect, owing to its
unity and simplicity of design, is, I think, superior. The numerous
small galleries let into its sides add richness to it without impairing
its apparent magnitude, and its vast floor, upon which a single
individual is almost lost, the sombre colours of its walls untouched
probably for centuries, and the dim sepulchral light that struggles
through the deep-niched and retiring windows, form altogether an
interior from which the imagination returns, like the dove to the ark,
fluttering and bewildered.
Our large party separated over its wilderness of a floor, and each might
have had his hour of solitude, had the once Christian spirit of the spot
(or the present pagan demon) affected him religiously. I found, myself,
a singular pleasure in wandering about upon the elastic mats (laid four
or five thick all over the floor), examining here a tattered banner hung
against the wall, and there a rich cashmere which had covered the tomb
of the prophet; on one side a slab of transparent alabaster from the
temple of Solomon (a strange relic for a Mohammedan mosque!) and on the
other, a dark mihrab surrounded by candles of incredible proportions,
looking like the marble columns of some friezeless portico. The four
“six-winged cherubim” on the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace as
they are of the religion to which the building was first dedicated, had
better been left to the imagination. They are monstrous in mosaic. It is
said that the whole interior of the mosque is cased beneath its dusky
plaster with the same costly mosaic which covers the ceiling. To make a
Mohammedan mosque of a Christian church, however, it was necessary to
erase Christian emblems from the walls; besides which the Turks have a
superstitious horror of all imitative arts, considering the painting of
the Iranian features particularly, as a mockery of the handiwork of
Allah.
We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sultan Achmet, which is in
imitation of Santa Sophia within, but its own beautiful prototype in
exterior. Its spacious and solemn court, its six heaven-piercing
minarets, its fountains, and the mausoleums of the sultans, with their
gilded cupolas and sarcophagi covered with cashmeres (the murdering
sultan and his murdered brothers lying in equal splendour side by
side!), are of a style of richness peculiarly oriental and imposing. We
visited in succession Sultan Bajazet, Sulymanye, and Sultana Valide, all
of the same arabesque exterior, and very similar within. The description
of one leaves little to be said of the other, and, with the exception of
Santa Sophia, of which I should like to make a lounge when I am in love
with my own company, the mosques of Constantinople are a kind of “lion”
well killed in a single visit.
* * * * *
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