CONSTANTINOPLE (1909)
I arrived at Constantinople in May 1909, on the same day that the Sultan
Abdul Hamid left the city. A revolution had just occurred. The Young Turk
party had dethroned the Sultan. The revolution was a military one.
When I arrived, the surface life of Constantinople was unchanged. The
only traces of the crisis were a few marks, and some slight damage done
by shells and bullets on the walls of the houses. The streets were
crowded with soldiers. The tram-cars and the cabs were full of dusty men,
stained with the marks of campaigning: Albanians with rifles slung across
their shoulders, Macedonian gendarmes in light blue uniforms. The mosques
were crowded with soldiers. Shots were sometimes heard, but none of the
soldiery except the marines gave any trouble.
I lived at the Little Club at Pera. My bedroom looked out on to the
Golden Horn. In the foreground were dark cypresses. Across the water I
could see Stamboul, soft as a soap-bubble in the haze, milky-white and
filmy with a hundred faint rainbow hues. The Club was a centre of gossip
and mild gambling. Enver Pasha used to frequent it, and one evening a man
called Assiz Bey walked in to play cards, with a piece of a rope which
had just served to hang a man.
I attended the Selamlik of the new Sultan. It was a casual ceremony.
Most of the troops were drawn up in places where it was impossible for
the Sultan to pass, and up to the last all were in doubt as to what the
Sultan’s route would be. At the last minute the whole cortège was stopped
by a large hay wagon which leisurely took its way along the road which
had been cleared for the Sultan. In Stamboul the brightest of crowds
swarmed—men and women of every colour, dressed in all colours, chirruping
like sparrows, hanging out of wooden balconies beside broken Byzantine
arches, where one caught sight of trailing wistaria and sometimes of a
Judas tree in blossom. The Sultan had no military escort and only one
_sais_, dressed in blue and gold, as an outrider. There was no pomp
about the ceremony, which passed off well. The Turkish Parliament was
sitting not a stone’s throw from St. Sophia, and not far from the site
where Justinian’s Palace once stood. The crowd wandered and lolled
about, smoking cigarettes by the gates of the Parliament; the fickle,
opportunist, supple-minded, picturesque crowd of Stamboul, was, I think,
akin to that which fought for the “Blues” or the “Greens” in the days of
Justinian and Theodora.
One night, I was invited to meet the leading men of the Young Turk party,
Talaat Bey and others. They all drank water at the meal, but before the
meal began, we were all offered a stiff glass of whisky to show that the
new Government had discarded the old-fashioned Mohammedan principles. But
though the hosts drank the whisky they did not appear to enjoy it.
The heat at Constantinople, and the atmosphere of the place, sapped
one’s energy. The manifold activities of the human machine seemed to
exhaust themselves in the acts of drinking coffee and in having one’s
boots cleaned. You had your boots finished off out of doors after they
had been preliminarily cleaned indoors. You sat on a chair and a man in
a shirt and a fez, rubbed them, waxed them, greased them, kneaded them
with his bare hand, brushed them, dusted them, polished them with a silk
handkerchief, and painted the edges of them with a spirit. And during
this process you looked on at the shifting crowd, sipped your coffee, and
thought long thoughts which led nowhere.
One morning streams of people were walking briskly from Pera to Stamboul,
in the same direction. They were making for the Galata Bridge, for there
was news in the air that they had been hanging some Turkish Danny Deevers
in the morning. Nobody quite knew whether they had been hanged yet or
not. Some people said they had been hanged at dawn; others, that they
were about to be hanged; others, that they had just been hanged. They
had, as a matter of fact, been hanged at dawn: three of them at the end
of the bridge, three of them opposite St. Sophia, four, I think, opposite
the House of Parliament, and three somewhere else—making thirteen in all.
They were soldiers, and one of them was an officer. They were hanged for
having taken part in a recent mutiny in the cause of Abdul Hamid, and for
having murdered some men.
As you walked farther along the bridge the crowd grew denser, and
right at the end of the bridge it was a seething mass, kept back by
soldiers from the actual spot where the victims were hanging—the crowd,
not a London-like crowd, all drab and grey, but a living kaleidoscope
of startling colours—the colours of tulips and Turkey carpets and
poppy-fields, red, blue, and yellow. The gallows, which were in line
along the side of the street beyond the bridge, were primitive tripods
of wood. Each victim was strung up by a rope fixed to a pulley. The men
were hanged by being made to stand on a low chair. The chair was kicked
away and the sharp jerk killed them. They were hanging not far above the
ground. They were each covered by a white gown, and to the breast of each
one his sentence was affixed, written in Turkish letters. They looked
neither like felons nor like murderers, but rather like happy martyrs (in
a sacred picture), calm, with an inscrutable content. I had but a glimpse
of them, and then I was carried away by the swaying crowd, which soldiers
were prodding with the butts of their rifles. The dead soldiers were to
hang there all day. I did not go any farther.
As I was trying to make my way back through the crowd, a Hodja (a Moslem
priest) passed, and he was roughly handled by the soldiers, and given
a few sharp blows in the back with their rifles. I heard fragments of
conversation, English and French. Some people were saying that the
exhibition would have a satisfactory effect on the populace. I saw a
Kurd, a fierce-looking man who was gnashing his teeth—not at the victims,
to be sure, but at the sight of three Moslems who had died for their
faith, and for having defended it against those who they were told were
its enemies, being made into a spectacle after their death for the
unbeliever and the alien.
The following afternoon I was wandering about the streets of Stamboul
when, amongst the indolent crowd, I noticed several men who were
peculiar. Firstly, they were walking in a hurry. Secondly, they were
dressed like Russians, in long, grey, shabby redingotes, what the
Russians call _padevki_, and their hair, allowed to grow long, was
closely cropped at the ends just over the neck, where it hung in a bunch.
They wore high boots. I knew they were Russians, and paid but little
attention to them, since Constantinople is not a place, like London,
where the appearance of an obvious foreigner is a remarkable sight. But
I met an English friend, who said: “Have you seen the Russian pilgrims?”
This led me to run after them. I soon caught them up, for they were
delayed under an arch by some soldiers who were escorting some prisoners
(soldiers also).
“Are you Russian?” I asked one of the pilgrims—a tall, fair man.
“Yes,” he answered; “I am from Russia.”
“You are a pilgrim?”
“Yes; I come from Jerusalem.”
The man was walking in a great hurry, and by this time we had reached the
Galata Bridge.
“Who were those men the soldiers were leading?” the pilgrim asked me.
“Those were prisoners—soldiers who mutinied.”
Here two others, a grey-bearded man, and a little, dark man, joined in;
the grey-bearded man had a medicine bottle sticking out of his coat
pocket. I am certain it contained an intoxicating spirit.
“Some soldiers were hanged here,” I added.
“Where?” said the man.
“There,” I answered, showing him the exact spot. “They stayed there all
day.”
“For all the people to see,” said the pilgrim, much impressed. “Why were
they hanged?”
“They mutinied.”
“Ah, just like in our own country!” said the pilgrim.
“But,” joined in the dark man, “have not you sent away your _Gosudar_?”
(Sovereign).
“I am not from here; I am an Englishman.”
“Ah, but did the people here send away their _Gosudar_?”
“They did.”
“And was it done,” asked the grey-haired pilgrim, “with God favouring and
assisting (_Po Bozhemu_) or not?”
I hesitated. The brown man thought I did not understand.
“Was it right or wrong?” he asked.
“They said,” I answered, “that their Sultan had not kept his word; that
he had given a ‘Duma’ and was acting against it.”
“Ah!” said the brown-haired man. “So now they have a ‘Duma’!”
“Yes,” I said; “they have liberty now.”
“Ah! Liberty! Eh! Eh! Eh!” said the grey-haired man, and he chuckled to
himself. Oh, the scepticism of that chuckle!—as much as to say, we know
what _that_ means.
“And you have a Sovereign?” asked the brown-haired man.
“Yes; we have a King.”
“But your Queen, who was so old, and ruled everybody, she is dead.”
“Yes; she is dead.”
“Ah, she was wise, very wise!” (_mudraya_).
We had now crossed the bridge. The pilgrims had hastened on to their
steamer, which was alongside the quay. They were going back to Russia.
But one of them lagged behind and almost bought a suit of clothes. I
say almost, because it happened like this: A clothes-seller—Greek, or
Armenian, or Heaven knows what!—was carrying a large heap of clothes:
striped trousers, black waistcoats, and blue serge coats. The brown
pilgrim chose a suit. The seller asked five roubles. The pilgrim offered
three. All the steps of the bargain were gone through at an incredible
speed, because the pilgrim was in a great hurry. The seller asked him
among other things if he would like my blue serge jacket. The pilgrim
said certainly not; it was not good enough. Finally, after looking at
all the clothes and trying on one coat, which was two sizes too small,
he made his choice and offered three roubles and a half. The bargain was
just going to be closed when the pilgrim suddenly said the stuff was bad
and went away as fast as he could, bidding me good-bye. He was a native
of Voronezh.
After a short spell of cold weather the spring came back once more and
opened “her young adventurous arms” to greet the day of the “Coronation”
of the new Sultan. There was that peculiar mixture of warmth and
freshness in the air, that intoxicating sweetness, which you only get in
the South; and after a recent rainfall the green foliage in which the
red-tiled houses of the city are embedded, like red bricks in moss,
gleamed with a new freshness. The streets were early crowded with people
eager to make their way towards Eyoub, to the mosque where the Sultan is
invested with the Sword of Osman.
I drove with Aubrey Herbert across the old bridge into the straggling
Jewish quarter on the other side of the Golden Horn. The houses there
are square and wooden, rickety and crooked, top-heavy, bending over the
narrow street as though they were going to fall down, squalid, dirty,
dusty, and rotten; they are old, and sometimes you come across a stone
house with half-obliterated remains of beautiful Byzantine window arches
and designs. Every now and then you got glimpses of side streets as
steep as Devonshire lanes and as narrow as London slums, with wistaria
in flower trailing across the street from roof to roof. All along the
road people were at their doorsteps, and people and carriages were
moving in the direction of Eyoub. After a time, progress, which up to
then had been easy and rapid, came to a dead stop, and the coachman who
was driving Herbert and myself dived into a side lane and began driving
in the opposite direction, back, as it seemed, towards Constantinople.
Then he all at once took a turning to the right, and we began to climb
a steep and stony track until we reached the walls of Constantinople.
These walls, which were built, I believe, by the Emperor Theodosius, are
enormously thick and broad. As we reached them, people were climbing up
on to the top of them.
Soon we came to a crowd, which was being kept back by soldiers, and the
intervention of an officer was necessary to let us drive through the
Adrianople Gate into the road along which the Sultan was to pass on his
way back to Constantinople after the ceremony. We drove through the gate,
right on to the route of the procession, which was stony, rough, and
steep. We were at the top of a high hill. To the right of us were the
huge broad walls, as thick as the towers of our English castles, grassy
on the top, and dotted with a thick crowd of men dressed in colours as
bright as the plumage of tropical birds. At this moment, as I write,
the colour of one woman’s dress flashes before me—a brilliant cerulean,
bright as the back of a kingfisher, gleaming in the sun like a jewel.
To the left was a vista of trees, delicate spring foliage, cypresses,
mosques, green slopes, and blue hills. Both sides of the road were lined
with a many-coloured crowd—some sitting on chairs, some in tents, some on
primitive wooden stands. Lines of soldiers kept the people back. The road
itself was narrow. It was a crowd of poor people, but it was none the
less picturesque on that account. Vendors of lemonade and water-carriers
walked up and down in front of the people. Some of the spectators hung
small carpets from their seats. The tents varied in size and quality,
some boasting of magnificent embroideries and others were such as gipsies
pitch near a race-course. We drove on and on through this double line of
coloured people and troops, down the narrow cobbled way, until we reached
the level, and there, after a time, we were obliged to leave the carriage
and go on foot.
The makeshift stands, the extemporary decorations, the untidy crowd,
proved that in the East no elaboration and no complicated arrangements
are necessary to make a pageant. Nature and the people provide colours
more gorgeous than any wealth of panoplies, banners, and gems could
display, and the people seem to be part of nature herself and to share
her brightness.
We walked through a cordon of cavalry until we reached the mosque of
Eyoub. The Sultan had already arrived and his carriage was waiting at the
gate. The carriages of other dignitaries were standing in a side street.
A small street of wooden houses led up to the mosque. We were beckoned to
the ground floor of one of these houses by a brown personage in a yellow
turban. We were shown on to a small platform divided into two tiers,
crowded with Turkish men and women; others were standing on the floor.
Some of the spectators were officers; some wore uniform; among those on
the lower tier were some soldiers, a policeman, and a postman. We were
welcomed with great courtesy and given seats. But whenever we asked
questions, every question—no matter what it was about—was taken to mean
that we were anxious to know when the Sultan was coming. And to every
question the same answer was made gently by these kind and courteous
people, as though they were dealing with children: “Have patience, my
lamb, the Sultan will soon be here.”
Immediately in front of us stood the large French barouche of the
Sultan, drawn by four bay horses, the carriage glittering with gilding
and lined with satin. We waited about an hour, the people every now
and then continuing to reassure us that the Sultan would soon be there.
Then we heard the band. Two men spread a small carpet on the steps of
the carriage, into which the Sultan immediately stepped, and drove off,
headed by a _sais_ dressed in blue and gold and mounted on a bay horse.
As this large gilded barouche passed, with the Sultan in uniform inside
it, the spirit of the Second Empire seemed for one moment to hover in the
air, and I half expected the band to play:
“Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre,
Voici le sabre, le sabre de mon père,”
which, as far as the words go, would have been appropriate, as the Sultan
had just been girded with the sword of his predecessors. This sudden
ghost of the Second Empire contrasted sharply with the spectators with
whom I was standing. They belonged to the Arabian Nights, to infinitely
old and far-off things, like the Old Testament. They became solemn when
the Sultan passed, and murmured words of blessing. But there was no
outward show of enthusiasm and no cheering nor even clapping.
I wondered whether the ghost of the Second Empire, which had seemed to be
present, were an omen or not, and whether the ceremony which marked the
inauguration, not only of a new reign but also of a new régime—a totally
different order of things, a fresh era and epoch—were destined to see its
hope fulfilled, or whether under the gaiety and careless lightness it was
in reality something terribly solemn and fatal of quite another kind,
namely, the funeral procession of the Ottoman Empire.
Towards the end of my stay I was taken by the British Ambassador and Lady
Lowther in their yacht to Brusa, where we spent three nights. Brusa in
spring is one of the most lovely places in the world. It is nested high
on a hill, which you reach after a long drive from the coast, and before
you towers Mount Olympus. Brusa is a place of roses and streams and
elegant mosques, and baths built of seaweed-coloured marbles. The cool
rivulets flow down the hill like the little streams described by Dante:
“Li ruscelletti che de’ verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno,
Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli,”
The water of the springs and streams at Brusa seemed to have a secret
freshness of their own. The roses were in full bloom; nightingales sang
all day; and the cool sound of running water was always in one’s ears.
I left Constantinople in the middle of June, convinced of one thing,
that the new Turkish régime was not unlike the old one, and that what a
man who had lived for years in Constantinople had told me was true. When
I had mentioned the Young Turks to him, he said: “Qui sont les jeunes
Turcs? Il n’y a que les Turcs.”