High Street of Pera—Dangers and Donkeys—Travelling in an
Araba—Fondness of the Orientals for their Cemeteries—Singular
Spectacle—Moral Supineness of the Armenians—M. Nubar—The
Fair—Armenian Dance—Anti-Exclusives—Water Venders—Being à
la Franka—Wrestling Rings—The Battle of the Sects.
The araba was already at the door when we arrived at home; and, weary
with mounting the steep ascent to Pera, I gladly threw myself upon the
crimson mattress, and among the yielding cushions, and prepared to
become a spectator of this new festival in luxurious inaction.
Let no one venture either on foot, on horseback, or in a carriage, along
the all-but-interminable High Street of Pera, on a fête-day, if he be in
a hurry! In the first place, two moderately-sized individuals who chance
to be opposite neighbours may shake hands from their own doors without
moving an inch forward—and in the next, there is no other road from
Topphannè or Galata (the principal landing-places) to the Great
Cemetery. And then the natives of the East have a very sociable, but
extremely inconvenient habit of walking with their arms about each
other’s necks, or holding hands like children in parties of five or
six, although they are obliged, from the narrowness of the thoroughfare,
to move along sideways; but, nevertheless, they will not slacken their
hold until the necessity for so doing becomes sufficiently imperative to
admit no alternative.
[Illustration: A STREET IN PERA]
Another peculiarity attending an Eastern mob is its utter disregard of
being run over, or knocked down: an Oriental will see your horse’s nose
resting on his shoulder, and even then he will not move out of the way
until you compel him; and when your arabajhe warns him that he is almost
under the wheel of the carriage, he looks at him as though he wondered
at the wanton waste of words bestowed upon so insignificant a piece of
information.
But, if the bipeds are difficult of management, the quadrupeds are
altogether unmanageable! Let those whose nerves are shattered by the
rattle of the London carts come here, and have their temper tried by the
donkeys of Constantinople. You have scarcely turned the corner of the
street, and forced your way among the clinging, chattering, lounging
mob, ere you come upon a gang of donkeys—your horse is restless, he
champs the bit, paws with his foreleg, and backs among the crowd, in his
impatience to get on; you must be contented to allow him the privilege
of champing, pawing, and backing, for there is no contending against a
string of a dozen donkeys, laden with tiles.
While you are trying to look amused at your dilemma, and endeavouring
with “favour and fair words” to induce their owner to arrange them in
regular line in order to enable you to pass, you hear a portentous
clatter a hundred yards a-head:—you look forward with foreboding, and
your fears have not misled you: it is, indeed, “the meeting of the
donkeys;” and another gang, heavily charged with earth, or bricks, or
unhewn stone, are gravely approaching to entangle themselves among your
first favourites, and to be dislodged only with blows and kicks very
ill-calculated to pacify either you or your horse.
In an araba your case is still more hopeless; for a horse _must_ get on
at last, by dint of intruding upon the pavement, and impudently poking
his nose into every window; applying his shoulder to the back of one
individual, and whisking his long tail into the face of another—but a
carriage following a carriage must be satisfied to travel at the pace
which may chance to be agreeable to its leader—while a carriage meeting
a carriage is pushed one way, lifted another, driven against the walls
of the houses, and shoved into the kennel, until you begin to consider
it very doubtful whether you possess sufficient strength of wrist and
tenacity of finger, to enable you to remain within, while such violent
proceedings are taking place without. And when to these difficulties are
superadded the inconvenience of a dense, reckless, pleasure-seeking mob,
it must be conceded on all hands that the progress along the High Street
of Pera on a festival day is by no means “easy travelling.”
On the occasion of which I am about to speak we encountered three
detachments of donkeys, four arabas, six horses laden with timber, and a
flock of sheep—fortunately, we were by no means pressed for time;
though how we escaped victimizing a few of the supine subjects of his
Sublime Highness, I cannot take upon me to explain.
I have already spoken elsewhere of the indifference, if not absolute
enjoyment, with which the inhabitants of the East frequent their
burying-grounds; but on the occasion of this festival I was more
impressed than ever by the extent to which it is carried. The whole of
the Christian Cemetery had assumed the appearance of a fair—nor was
this all, for the very tombs of the dead were taxed to enhance the
comforts of the living; and many was the tent whose centre table,
covered with a fringed cloth, and temptingly spread with biscuits,
sweetmeats, and sherbet, was the stately monument of some departed
Armenian! Grave-stones steadied the poles which supported the
swings—divans, comfortably overlaid with cushions, were but
chintz-covered sepulchres—the step that enabled the boy to reach his
seat in the merry-go-round was the earth which had been heaped upon the
breast of the man whose course was run—the same trees flung their long
shadows over the sports of the living and the slumbers of the dead—the
kibaub merchants had dug hollows to cook their dainties under the
shelter of the tombs—and the smoking booths were amply supplied with
seats and counters from the same wide waste of death.
On one side, a slender train of priests were committing a body to the
earth, and mingling their lugubrious chant with the shrill instruments
of a party of dancers; on the other, a patrol of dismounted lancers were
threading among the many-coloured tents, in order to maintain an order
which the heavy-witted Armenians lacked all inclination to break.
I never saw a set of people who bore so decidedly the stamp of having
been born to slavery as the Armenians: they seem even to love the rattle
of their chains; they have no high feeling, no emulation, no enthusiasm,
no longing for “a place among the nations;” no aspirations after the
bright and the beautiful; no ideas, in short, beyond a pitiful imitation
of their Moslem masters, whom they consider as the _ne plus ultra_ of
all perfection.
The appearance of the upper class of Armenians I have already described.
Give them a more becoming head-dress, and their costume is surpassingly
graceful; but their advantages are all external; their dreams are all of
piastres; they have no soul. If you talk to them of their subjection to
the Osmanli, what do they reply? “All that you say may be very true, but
it does not concern me—my affairs are in a most prosperous condition.”
It is impossible to make them sensible of their own social position;
they listen, twirl their mustachioes, flourish their white
handkerchiefs, replenish their chibouks, utter from time to time
“_pekké,_” (very well), with an inane smile, and ultimately walk away,
as well satisfied with themselves and with their tyrants as though the
subject were one of the most irrelevant nature.
From this sweeping accusation of apathy and self-depreciation, even
after many months passed in the East, I can except only one individual;
but that one is indeed a rare and a bright example to the rest of his
countrymen. To those travellers who have visited Constantinople, and who
have had the pleasure and advantage of his acquaintance, I need scarcely
say that I allude to M. Nubar, the eminent merchant of Galata, whose
extensive information, sound judgment, and habitual courtesy, render his
friendship extremely valuable to those who are fortunate enough to
secure it.
To return, however, to the festival of the Champ des Morts, from which I
have digressed. Every hundred yards that we advanced, the scene became
more striking. One long line of diminutive tents formed a temporary
street of eating-houses; there were kibaubs, pillauf, fritters, pickled
vegetables, soups, rolls stuffed with fine herbs, sausages, fried fish,
bread of every quality, and cakes of all dimensions. Escaping from this
too savoury locality, we found ourselves among the sherbet venders,
whose marquees, lined with blue or crimson, were pitched with more
precision and regard to comfort and convenience than those of the
_restaurateurs_. Mirrors, bouquets, and a display of goblets of all
shapes and sizes, were skilfully set forth in many of them; some even
indulged in the luxury of pictures, which were universally-glaring and
highly-coloured French prints of female heads, of the most common
description; and in these tents chairs and cushions were alike provided
for the guests; while in one corner stood the mangal, ready to supply
the necessary fragment of live coal for igniting the chibouk.
Scattered among these more assuming establishments were the stands of
the itinerant merchants, whose little cupolaed fountains threw up a
slender thread of water to the accompaniment of a tinkling sound,
produced by the contact of half a dozen thin plates of metal; while a
circle of sherbet glasses, filled with liquids of different colours, and
interspersed with green boughs, and suspended lemons, looked so cool and
refreshing that they were more tempting by far than the aristocratic
establishments of the marquee owners. Here and there a flat tomb,
fancifully covered with gold-embroidered handkerchiefs, was overspread
with sweetmeats and preserved fruits; while, in the midst of these rival
establishments, groups of men were seated in a circle, wherever a little
shade could be obtained, smoking their long pipes in silence, with
their diminutive coffee-cups resting on the ground beside them. The
wooden kiosk overhanging the Bosphorus was crowded; and many a party was
snugly niched among the acacias, with their backs resting against the
tombs, and the sunshine flickering at their feet.
But the leading feature of the festival was the Armenian dance, that was
going forward in every direction, and which was so perfectly
characteristic of the people that it merits particular mention. A large
circle was formed, frequently consisting of between forty and fifty
individuals, (chance comers falling in as they pleased without question
or hindrance) holding each other by the hand, or round the neck, and
wedged closely together so as to form a compact body; the leader of the
dance being the only one who detached himself from the rest, and held
the person next to him at arm’s length. In the centre of the ring stood,
and sometimes danced, the musician, whose instrument was either a
species of small, cracked guitar, with wire strings, which he struck
with very slender regard to either time or tune; or a bagpipe precisely
similar to that of Scotland, but not played in the same spirit-stirring
style, the Armenian performer making no attempt at any thing beyond
noise, and never by any accident forming three consecutive notes which
harmonized; but his hearers were not fastidious, and the music was, at
least, in good keeping with the dance. Beside the minstrel, such as I
have described him, moved the buffoon of the company, who also, by some
extraordinary and perfectly Armenian concatenation of ideas, acted as
Master of the Ceremonies.
The leader flourished a painted muslin handkerchief, while he lifted up
first one foot and then the other, as fowls do sometimes in a farmyard;
poising the body on one leg for an instant, and then changing the
position. This movement was followed by the whole of the party with more
or less awkwardness; and thus hopping, balancing, and shifting their
feet, they slowly worked round and round the circle, without changing
either the time or the movement for several consecutive hours; the
different individuals falling in and out of the ring as their
inclination prompted, without disturbing in the slightest degree the
economy of the dance. There was nothing exclusive in these Terpsichorean
circles, where the smart serving-man’s neck was clasped by the sinewy
hand of the street-porter, and where the embroidered Albanian legging
and European shoe were placed in juxtaposition with the bare limb and
heelless slipper. There must have been at least a dozen of these dances
going forward in the fair, (for such I may truly call it), with a
perseverance and solemnity perfectly astonishing, when it is remembered
that many of the individuals thus engaged had walked five and six
leagues to share in the festival, and would have no resting-place but
the earth whereon to sleep away their fatigue.
Great was the commerce of the water-venders, who traversed the crowd in
every direction, with their classically formed earthen jars upon their
shoulders, and their crystal goblets in their hands, who, for a couple
of _paras_, poured forth a draught of sparkling water, which almost made
one thirsty to look at it; and were as particular and punctilious in
cleansing the glass after every customer, as though they were under the
_surveillance_ of his successor.
A few, a very few, of the revellers had indulged in deeper potations,
and were exhibiting proofs of their inebriety in their unsteady gait and
uncertain utterance; but intemperance is not _yet_ the common vice of
the East; although it bids fair in time to become such. A very talented
and distinguished individual, with whom I was lately conversing on the
subject of the different degrees of civilization attained by particular
nations, said of the Russians that they had commenced with champagne and
ballet-dancers. Glorious was it, therefore, for the half dozen Armenians
who were staggering among the crowd, to have profited as far as they
could by so brilliant an example. Being intoxicated is, according to
the Eastern phraseology, being _à la Franka_.
Apart from the crowd were wrestling-rings, where the combatants
exhibited their prowess precisely after the fashion of the Ancient
Romans; and on all sides were bands of Bohemians, as dark-eyed and as
voluble as the gipsies of Europe.
The festival lasted three days, and not a single hand nor voice was
raised in violence during the whole period; when, as if resolved to
vindicate themselves from the aspersion of utter insensibility, the
Catholic and Schismatic sects terminated their sports with a regular
fight, in front of an Armenian church in Galata. The Schismatic party
were returning to the place of embarkation in order to pass over to
Constantinople, and singing at the pitch of their voices, at the precise
moment when a priest of the opposite sect was performing mass in the
church. A messenger was despatched to the revellers to enforce silence
until they had quitted the precincts of the chapel; but his errand was a
vain one; the Schismatics were not to be controlled; a crowd
collected—the merits of the case were explained—the Catholics became
furious, and insisted on the instant departure of the intruders—the
Schismatics waxed valiant, and refused to move—and, finally, after a
fight in which many blows were given and received, the Turks stepped in
as mediators, and carried off a score of the combatants to Stamboul,
where they were detained for the night, fined a few piastres, and
dismissed like a set of lubberly schoolboys, who had wound up a holyday
with a boxing-match!