Punishment of Conjugal Infidelity—Drowning in the
Bosphorus—Frequency of its occurrence accounted for—A Band of
Wild Roumeliotes—Their Picturesque Appearance—Ali Pacha, of
Yanina—A Turkish Funeral—Fat Widow of Sultan Selim—A Visit to
the Sultan’s Summer Palace—A Travelling Moslem—Unexpected
Token of Home.
A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the Bosphorus this morning. I
was idling away the day in the bazaar and did not see her. The ward-room
steward of the “United States,” a very intelligent man, who was at the
pier when she was brought down to the caique, describes her as a young
woman of twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful; and with the
exception of a short quick sob in her throat, as if she had wearied
herself out with weeping, she was quite calm and submitted composedly to
her fate. She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress, her
yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off to the mouth of the bay,
where the sack was drawn over her without resistance. The plash of her
body in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had followed her to
the water.
It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions, knowing as we do,
that the poor victim is taken before the judge, upon the least jealous
whim of her husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspicion, and
hurried instantly from the tribunal to this violent and revolting death.
Any suspicion of commerce with a Christian particularly, is, with or
without evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants of
Arnaout-keni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus, were shocked with the
spectacle of a Turkish woman and a young Greek, hanging dead from the
shutters of a window on the water’s side. He had been detected in
leaving her house at daybreak, and in less than an hour the unfortunate
lovers had met their fate. They are said to have died most heroically,
embracing and declaring their attachment to the last.
Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople, and it is not
wonderful, considering the superiority of the educated and picturesque
Greek to his brutal neighbour, or the daring and romance of Europeans in
the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The liberty of going and coming,
which the Turkish women enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by
their secrecy, is temptingly favourable to intrigue, and the
self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is concerned, shows
itself here in proportion to the demand for it.
An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of the sultan’s sister,
consisting of a great number of women, tells me that their time is
principally occupied in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers,
with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These platonic passions for
persons whom they have only seen from their gilded lattices, are their
only amusement, and they are permitted by the sultana, who has herself
the reputation of being partial to Franks, and, old as she is, ingenious
in contrivances to obtain their society. My intelligent informant thinks
the Turkish women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat
remarkable for their sentiment of character.
With two English travellers, whom I had known in Italy, I pulled out of
the bay in a caique, and ran down under the wall of the city, on the
side of the sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath the wall
of the seraglio, whose small water-gates, whence so many victims have
found
“Their way to Marmora without a boat,”
are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with the _dramatis
personæ_ of a thousand tragedies. One smiles to detect himself gazing on
an old postern, with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end,
in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of September!
We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven Towers, and dismissed our
boat to walk across to the Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the
triple walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers look as if
they were toppling after an earthquake, and are overgrown superbly with
ivy. Large trees, rooted in the crevices, and gradually bursting the
thick walls, overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for the
whole length of the five or six miles across, it is one splendid picture
of decay. I have seen in no country such beautiful ruins.
At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of horsemen, armed in the
wild manner of the East, who had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the
mountains. They were not allowed to enter the city, and, with their
horses picketed upon the plain, were lying about in groups, waiting till
their leader should conclude his audience with the seraskier. They were
as cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see. The extreme
richness of eastern arms, mounted showily in silver, and of shapes so
cumbersome, yet picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged
capotes, and torn leggings, and their way-worn and weary countenances.
Yet they were almost without exception fine-featured, and with a
resolute expression of face, and they had flung themselves, as savages
will, into attitudes that art would find it difficult to improve.
Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs, indicating the
spots in which are buried the heads of Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three
sons and grandson. The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head
for having dared to aspire to independence. He was a brave old
barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief of the most warlike people
of modern times, one stands over his grave with regret. It would have
been a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event in his
travels made more impression on his mind than the pacha’s detecting his
rank by the beauty of his hands. His fine description of the wild court
of Yanina, in “Childe Harold,” has already made the poet’s return of
immortality, but had he survived the revolution in Greece, with his
increased knowledge of the Albanian soldier and his habits, and his
esteem for the old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have
been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen whether the age or
the language will produce another Byron to take up the broken thread.
As we were poring over the Turkish inscription, four men, apparently
quite intoxicated, came running and hallooing from the city gate,
bearing upon their shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the
cemetery, they went stumbling on over the foot-stones, tossing the
corpse about so violently, that the helpless limbs frequently fell
beyond the limits of the rude barrow, while the grave-digger, the only
sober person, save the dead man, in the company, followed at his best
speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These extraordinary bearers set
down their burden not far from the gate, and, to my surprise, walked
laughing off like men who had merely engaged in a moment’s frolic by the
way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed a little the posture
of the disordered body, and sat down to get breath for his task.
My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran blesses him who
carries a dead body forty paces on its way to the grave. The poor are
thus carried out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after they
have completed their prescribed paces, change with the first individual
whose reckoning with heaven may be in arrears.
The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last journey, was, or had
been, a middle-aged Turk. He had neither shroud nor coffin, but
“Lay like a gentleman taking a snooze,”
in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his bosom the only
token that he was dressed for any particular occasion. We had not time
to stay and see his grave dug, and “his face laid toward the tomb of the
prophet.”
We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the triangle, which old
Stamboul nearly forms, by a line approaching its hypothenuse. Though in
a city so thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks
conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a street; and the
perfect silence, and the cheerless look of the Turkish houses, with
their jealously closed windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by
the plague. The population of Constantinople is only seen in the bazaars
or in the streets bordering on the Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter
occupied by dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy
apartments opening on their secluded gardens, or are hidden from the
gaze of the street by their fine dull-coloured lattices. It strikes one
with melancholy after the gay balconies and open doors of France and
Italy!
We passed the Eskai Serai, the palace in which the imperial widows wear
their chaste weeds in solitude; and, weary with our long walk, emerged
from the silent streets at the bazaar of wax-candles, and took caique
for the _Argentopolis_ of the ancients, the _Silver City_ of Galatia.
* * * * *
The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman fleet in the Bosphorus
announced, some days since, that the sultan had changed his summer for
his winter serai, and the commodore received yesterday a firman to visit
the deserted palace of Beylerbey.
We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party of officers
increased by the captain of the “Acteon,” sloop-of-war, some gentlemen
of the English ambassador’s household, and several strangers who took
advantage of the commodore’s courtesy to enjoy a privilege granted so
very rarely.
As we pulled up the Strait, some one pointed out the residence, on the
European shore, of the once favourite wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan
Selim. She is called by the Turks, the “boneless sultana,” and is the
model of shape by the oriental standard. The poet’s lines,
“Who turned that little waist with so much care,
And shut perfection in so small a ring?”
though a very neat compliment in some countries, would be downright
rudeness in the East. Near this jelly in weeds lives a venerable Turk,
who was once ambassador to England. He came back too much enlightened,
and the mufti immediately procured his exile, for infidelity. He passes
his day, we are told, in looking at a large map hung on the wall before
him, and wondering at his own travels.
We were received at the shining brazen gate of Beylerbey, by Hamik Pacha
(a strikingly elegant man, just returned from a mission to England),
deputed by the sultan to do the honours. A side-door introduced us
immediately to the grand hall upon the lower floor, which was separated
only by four marble pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at will, from
the gravel walk of the garden in the rear. We ascended thence by an open
staircase of wood, prettily inlaid, to the second floor, which was one
long suite of spacious rooms, built entirely in the French style, and
thence to the third floor, the same thing over again. It was quite like
looking at lodgings in Paris. There was no furniture, except, an
occasional ottoman turned with its face upon another, and a prodigious
quantity of French musical clocks, three or four in every room, and all
playing in our honour with an amusing confusion. One other article, by
the way—a large, common, American rocking-chair! The poor thing stood
in a great gilded room all alone, looking pitiably home-sick. I seated
myself in it, _malgré_ a thick coat of dust upon the bottom, as I would
visit a sick countryman in exile.
The harem was locked, and the polite pacha regretted that he had no
orders to open it. We descended to the gardens, which rise by terraces
to a gimcrack temple and orangery, and having looked at the sultan’s
poultry, we took our leave. If his pink palace in Europe is no finer
than his yellow palace in Asia, there is many a merchant in America
better lodged than the padishah of the Ottoman empire. We have not seen
the _old_ seraglio, however, and in its inaccessible recesses, probably,
moulders that true oriental splendour which this upholsterer monarch
abandons in his rage, for the novel luxuries of Europe.
* * * * *
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