ascending as far as Bebek, where we had been invited to spend the night
by Dr. Washburne, the President of Roberts College. I shall not soon
forget the animation of the harbor, crowded with shipping, amid which
the steamers and caïques were darting about like shuttles, the first
impression made by the palaces and ravishingly lovely shores of this
winding artery between two seas. Seven promontories from Asia and seven
promontories from Europe project into the stream, creating as many
corresponding bays; but the villages are more numerous than bays and
promontories together, for there are over forty in the fourteen miles
from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea; on the shores is an almost
unbroken line of buildings, many of them palaces of marble; the heights
are crowned with cottages and luxurious villas, and abodes of taste and
wealth peep out along the slopes. If you say that we seem to be sailing
in the street of a city, I can only answer that it is not so; nature is
still supreme here, and the visible doweress of the scene. These lovely
hills rising on both sides, these gracious curves are hers, as are these
groves and gardens of fruits and flowers, these vines and the abundant
green that sometimes conceals and always softens the work of man.
Before we reached the Sultan's palace at Beshiktash, our steamer
made a détour to the east bank, outside of the grim ironclads that lie
before the imperial residence. No steamers are permitted to approach
nearer, lest the smoke should soil the sparkling white marble of the
palace, or their clamor and dangerous freight of men should disturb
the serenity of the harem. The palace, which is a beautiful building,
stretches for some distance along the water, with its gardens and
conservatories, and seems to be a very comfortable home for a man who
has no more ready money than the Sultan.
We landed at Bebek and climbed the steep hill, on whose slope
nightingales were singing in the forest, just in time to see the sunset.
Roberts College occupies the most commanding situation on the strait,
and I do not know any view that surpasses in varied beauty that to be
enjoyed from it. I shall make myself comprehended by many when I say
that it strongly reminded me of the Hudson at West Point; if nature
could be suspected of copying herself, I should say that she had the one
in mind when she made the other. At that point the Hudson resembles the
Bosphorus, but it wants the palaces, the Yale of the Heavenly Water into
which we looked from this height, and some charming mediaeval towers,
walls, and castles.
The towers and walls belong to the fortress built in 1451 by Mohammed
II., and are now fallen into that decrepitude in which I like best to
see all fortresses. But this was interesting before it was a ruin. It
stands just above the college, at Roomeli Hissar, where the Bosphorus
is narrowest,—not more than half a mile broad,—and with the opposite
fortress of Anatolia could perfectly close the stream. Two years before
the capture of the city, Mohammed built this fort, and gave it the most
peculiar form of any fortress existing. His idea was that the towers
and the circuit of the walls should spell the name of the Prophet, and
consequently his own. As we looked down upon it, my friend read for me
this singular piece of caligraphy, but I could understand it no further
than the tower which stands for the Arabic ring in the first letter. It
was at this place that Darius threw a bridge across the Bosphorus, and
there is a tradition of a stone seat which he occupied here while his
Asiatics passed into Europe.
So far as I know, there is no other stream in the world upon which the
wealth of palaces and the beauty of gardens may be so advantageously
displayed. So far as I know, there is no other place where nature and
art have so combined to produce an enchanting prospect. As the situation
and appearance of Constantinople are unequalled, so the Bosphorus is
unique.
Whatever may be the political changes of the Turkish Empire, I do not
believe that this pleasing picture will be destroyed; rather let us
expect to see it more lovely in the rapidly developing taste of a new
era of letters and refinement. It was a wise forethought that planted
the American College just here. It is just where it should be to mould
the new order of things. I saw among its two hundred pupils scholars
of all creeds and races, who will carry from here living ideas to every
part of the empire, and I learned to respect that thirst for knowledge
and ability to acquire it which exist in the neighboring European
provinces. If impatient men could wait the process of education, the
growth of schools, and the development of capacity now already most
promising, the Eastern question might be solved by the appearance on
the scene in less than a score of years, of a stalwart and intelligent
people, who would not only be able to grasp Constantinople, but to
administer upon the decaying Turkish Empire as the Osmanli administered
upon the Greek.
On Friday the great business of everybody is to see the Sultan go to
pray; and the eagerness with which foreigners crowd to the spectacle
must convince the Turks that we enjoy few religious privileges at home.
It is not known beforehand, even to the inmates of the palace, to what
mosque the Sultan will go, nor whether he will make a street progress
on horseback, or embark upon the water, for the chosen place of prayer.
Before twelve o'clock we took carriage and drove down the hill, past
the parade-ground and the artillery barracks to the rear of the palace
of Beshiktash; crowds on foot and in carriages were streaming in
that direction; regiments of troops were drifting down the slopes
and emptying into the avenue that leads between the palace and the
plantation of gardens; colors were unfurled, drums beaten, trumpets
called from barrack and guard-house; gorgeous officers on caparisoned
horses, with equally gaudy attendants, cantered to the rendezvous; and
all the air was full of the expectation of a great event. At the great
square of the palace we waited amid an intense throng; four or five
lines of carriages stretched for a mile along; troops were in marching
rank along the avenue and disposed in hollow square on the place; the
palace gates were closed, and everybody looked anxiously toward the
high and gilded portal from which it was said the announcement of the
Sultan's intention would be made. From time to time our curiosity was
fed by the arrival of a splendid pasha, who dismounted and walked about;
and at intervals a gilded personage emerged from the palace court and
raised our expectation on tiptoe. We send our dragoman to interrogate
the most awful dignities, especially some superb beings in yellow silk
and gold, but they know nothing of the Sultan's mind. At the last
moment he might, on horseback, issue from the gate with a brilliant
throng, or he might depart in his caïque by the water front. In either
case there would be a rush and a scramble to see and to accompany
him. More regiments were arriving, bands were playing, superb officers
galloping up and down; carriages, gilded with the arms of foreign
embassies, or filled with Turkish ladies, pressed forward to the great
gate, which still gave no sign. I have never seen such a religious
excitement. For myself, I found some compensation in the usual Oriental
crowd and unconscious picturesqueness; swart Africans in garments of
yellow, sellers of sherbet clinking their glasses, venders of faint
sweetmeats walking about with trays and tripods, and the shifting
kaleidoscope of races, colors, and graceful attitudes.
Suddenly, I do not know how, or from what quarter, the feeling—for I
could not call it information—was diffused that the successor of the
Prophet would pray at the mosque in Ortakeui, and that he would go
by caïque; and we all scampered up the road, a mile or two, racing
carriages, troops and foot men, in eager outset, in order to arrive
before the pious man. The mosque stands upon the Bosphorus, where its
broad marble steps and pillared front and dome occupy as conspicuous
a position as the Dogana at Venice. We secured a standing-place on the
dock close to the landing, but outside the iron railing, and waited. A
cordon of troops in blue regimentals with red facings was drawn around
the streets in the rear of the mosque, and two companies of soldiers in
white had stacked their guns on the marble landing, and were lounging
about in front of the building.
The scene on the Bosphorus was as gay as a flower-garden. The water
was covered with graceful caiques and painted barges and every sort of
craft, mean and splendid, that could be propelled by oars or sails. A
dozen men-of-war were decked with flags from keel to maintop; on every
yard, and from bowsprit to stern, stood a line of sailors sharply
defined against the blue sky. At one o'clock a cannon announced that
the superior devotee had entered his caique, and then from every vessel
of war in the harbor salute answered salute in thunder that awoke the
echoes of two continents; until on all the broad water lay a thick
battle-smoke, through which we could distinguish only the tops of the
masts, and the dim hulks spouting fire.
In the midst of this earthquake of piety, there was a cry, “He comes,
he comes!” The soldiers grasped their arms and drew a line each side
of the landing, and the officials of the mosque arranged themselves on
the steps. Upon the water, advancing with the speed of race-horses, we
saw two splendid gilded caïques, the one containing the Sultan, the
other his attendants. At the moment, a light carriage with two bay
horses, unattended, dashed up to the side door, and there descended from
it and entered the mosque the imperial heir, the son of the late Sultan
and the nephew of the present, a slender, pale youth of apparently
twenty-five or thirty years. We turn (not knowing how soon he is to
become Sultan Murad V.) our eyes to him only for a moment, for the
Sultan's caique comes with imperious haste, with the rush as it were
of victory,—an hundred feet long, narrow, rising at the stern like the
Venetian Bucentaur, carved and gilded like the golden chariot in which
Alexander entered Babylon,—propelled by fifty-two long sweeps, rising
and falling in unison with the bending backs of twenty-six black rowers,
clad in white and with naked feet. The Sultan is throned in the high
stern, hung with silk, on silken cushions, under a splendid canopy on
the top of which glisten his arms and a blazing sun. The Sultan, who is
clad in the uniform of a general, steps quickly out, walks up the
steps over a carpet spread for his royal feet,—the soldiers saluting,
everybody with arms crossed bending the body,—and disappears in the
mosque. The second caique lands immediately, and the imperial ministers
step from it and follow their master.
At the side entrance an immense closed baggage-wagon, drawn by four
horses and said to contain the sacred wardrobe, was then unlocked
and unloaded, and out of it came trunks, boxes, carpetbags, as if the
imperial visitor had come to stay a week. After a half-hour of prayer he
came out, his uniform concealed under his overcoat, got quickly into a
plain carriage, drawn by four magnificent gray horses, and drove rapidly
away, attended by a dozen outriders. His heir followed in the carriage
in which he came. We had a good view of the chief of Islam. He was a
tall, stout man, with a full gray beard, and on the whole a good face
and figure. All this parade is weekly enacted over one man going to
pray. It is, after all, more simple than the pageantry that often
attends the public devotion of the vicegerent of Christ in St.
Peter's.
Upon our return we stopped at the tekkeb, in Pera, to see the
performance of the Turning Darwishes. I do not know that I have anything
to add to the many animated descriptions which have been written of
it. It is not far from the Little Field of the Dead, and all about
the building are tombs of the faithful, in which were crowds of people
enjoying that peculiar Oriental pleasure, graveyard festivity. The
mosque is pleasant, and has a polished dancing-floor, surrounded by a
gallery supported on columns. I thought it would be a good place for a
“hop.” Everybody has seen a picture of the darwishes, with closed
eyes, outstretched arms, and long gowns inflated at the bottom like an
old-fashioned churn, turning smoothly round upon their toes, a dozen
or twenty of them revolving without collision. The motion is certainly
poetic and pleasing, and the plaintive fluting of the Arab nay adds
I know not what of pathos to the exercise. I think this dance might
advantageously be substituted in Western salons for the German, for it
is graceful and perfectly moral.
Constantinople is a city of the dead as much as of the living, and one
encounters everywhere tombs and cemeteries sentinelled by the mournful
dark-green cypress. On our way to take boat for the Sweet Waters of
Europe we descended through the neglected Little Field of the Dead. It
is on a steep acclivity, and the stones stand and lean thickly there,
each surmounted by a turban in fashion at the period of the occupant's
death, and with inscription neatly carved. That “every man has his
date” strikes Abd-el-Atti as a remarkable fact. The ground is netted
by haphazard paths, and the careless living tread the graves with
thoughtless feet, as if the rights of the dead to their scanty bit of
soil were no longer respected. We said to the boatman that this did not
seem well. There was a weary touch of philosophy in his reply: “Ah,
master, the world grows old!”
It is the fashion for the world to go on Friday to the Sweet Waters of
Europe, the inlet of the Golden Horn, flowing down between two ranges of
hills. This vale, which is almost as celebrated in poetry as that of
the Heavenly Water on the Asiatic shore, is resorted to by thousands, in
hundreds of carriages from Fera, in thousands of caïques and barges. On
the water, the excursion is a festival of the people, of strangers, of
adventurers of both sexes; the more fashionable though not moral part of
society, who have equipages to display, go by land. We chose the water,
and selected a large four-oared caïque, in the bottom of which we
seated ourselves, after a dozen narrow escapes from upsetting the
tottlish craft, and rowed away, with the grave Abd-el-Atti balanced
behind and under bonds to preserve his exact equilibrium.
All the city seems to be upon the water; the stream is alive with the
slender, swift caïques; family parties, rollicking midshipmen from some
foreign vessel, solitary beauties reclining in selfish loveliness,
grave fat Turks, in stupid enjoyment. No voyage could be gayer than this
through the shipping, with the multitudinous houses of the city rising
on either hand. As we advance, the shore is lined with people, mostly
ladies in gay holiday apparel, squatting along the stream; as on a
spring day in Paris, those who cannot afford carriages line the avenues
to the Bois de Boulogne to watch the passing pageant. The stream grows
more narrow, at length winds in graceful turns, and finally is only a
few yards wide, and the banks are retained by masonry. The vale narrows
also, and the hills draw near. The water-way is choked with
gayly painted caiques, full of laughing beauties and reckless
pleasure-seekers, and the reader of Egyptian history might think himself
in a saturnalia of the revel-makers in the ancient fête of Bubastis on
the Nile. The women are clad in soft silks,—blue, red, pink, yellow,
and gray,—some of them with their faces tied up as if they were
victims of toothache, others wearing the gauze veils, which enhance
without concealing charms; and the color and beauty that nature has
denied to many are imitated by paint and enamel.
We land and walk on. Singers and players on curious instruments sit
along the bank and in groups under the trees, and fill the festive air
with the plaintive and untrained Oriental music. The variety of costumes
is infinite; here we meet all that is gay and fantastic in Europe and
Asia. The navigation ends at the white marble palace and mosque which
we now see shining amid the trees, fresh with May foliage. Booths and
tents, green and white, are erected everywhere, and there are many
groups of gypsies and fortune-tellers. The olive-complexioned,
black-eyed, long-haired women, who trade in the secrets of the Orient
and the vices of the Occident, do a thriving business with those
curious of the future, or fascinated by the mysterious beauty of the
soothsayers. Besides the bands of music, there are solitary bagpipers
whose instrument is a skin, with a pipe for a mouthpiece and another
at the opposite end having graduated holes for fingering; and I noticed
with pleasure that the fingering and the music continued long after the
musician had ceased to blow into the inflated skin. Nothing was wanting
to the most brilliant scene; ladies in bright groups on gay rugs and
mats, children weaving head-dresses from leaves and rushes, crowds of
carriages, fine horses and gallant horsemen, sellers of refreshments
balancing great trays on their heads, and bearing tripod stools, and all
degrees of the most cosmopolitan capital enjoying the charming spring
holiday.
In the palace grounds dozens of peacocks were sunning themselves, and
the Judas-trees were in full pink bloom. Above the palace the river
flows in walled banks, and before it reaches it tumbles over an
artificial fall of rocks, and sweeps round the garden in a graceful
curve. Beyond the palace, also on the bank of the stream, is a grove of
superb trees and a greensward; here a military band plays, and this is
the fashionable meeting-place of carriages, where hundreds were circling
round and round in the imitated etiquette of Hyde Park.
We came down at sunset, racing swiftly among the returning caïques,
passing and passed by laughing boatsful, whose gay hangings trailed in
the stream, as in a pageant on the Grand Canal of Venice, and watching
with the interest of the philosopher only, the light boat of beauty and
frailty pursued by the youthful caique of inexperience and desire. The
hour contributed to make the scene one of magical beauty. To our right
lay the dark cypresses of the vast cemetery of Eyoub (or Ayub) and the
shining mosque where, at their inauguration, the Osmanli Sultans are
still girt with the sword of their founder. At this spot, in the
first siege of Constantinople by the Arabs, fell, amid thirty thousand
Moslems, slain outside the Golden Gate, the Aboo Ayub, or Job, one
of the last companions of the Prophet. He was one of the immortal
auxiliaries; he had fought at Beder and Obud side by side with Abubeker,
and he had the honor to be one of the first assailants of the Christian
capital, which Mohammed had predicted that his followers should one
day possess. The site of his grave, forgotten for seven centuries, was
revealed to the conqueror of the city by a fortunate vision, and the
spot was commemorated by a mosque, and a gathering congregation of the
dead.
Clouds had collected in the west, and the heavy smoke of innumerable
steamers lay dark upon the Bosphorus. But as we came down, the sun broke
out and gave us one of those effects of which nature is sparing. On the
heights of Stamboul, a dozen minarets, only half distinct, were touched
by the gold rays; the windows of both cities, piled above each other,
blazed in it; the smooth river and the swift caiques were gilded by it;
and behind us, domes and spires, and the tapering shafts of the Muezzin,
the bases hid by the mist, rose into the heaven of the golden sunset
and appeared like mansions, and most unsubstantial ones, in the sky. And
ever the light caiques flew over the rosy water in a chase of pleasure,
in a motion that satisfied the utmost longing for repose, while the
enchantment of heaven seemed to have dropped upon the earth.
“The world has lost its gloss for us,
Since we went boating on the Bosphorus.”
Constantinople enjoys or suffers the changeable weather appropriate
to its cosmopolitan inhabitants and situation, and we waited for a day
suitable to cross to Scutari and obtain the view from Boolgoorloo. We
finally accepted one of alternate clouds and sunshine. The connection
between the European city and its great suburb is maintained by frequent
ferry-steamers, and I believe that no other mile-passage in the world
can offer the traveller a scene more animated or views so varied and
magnificent. Near the landing at Scutari stands a beacon-tower ninety'
feet high, erected upon a rock; it has the name of the Maiden's Tower,
but I do not know why, unless by courtesy to one of the mistresses
of Sultan Mohammed, who is said to have been shut up in it.
Scutari,—pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, a
corruption of the Turkish name Uskudar,—the site of the old Greek and
Persian Chrysopolis, is a town sprawling over seven hills, has plenty
of mosques, baths, and cemeteries,—the three Oriental luxuries,—but
little to detain the traveller, already familiar with Eastern towns of
the sort. The spot has been in all ages an arriving and starting point
for Asiatic couriers, caravans, and armies; here the earliest Greek
sea-robbers hauled up their venturous barks; here Xenophon rested
after his campaign against Cyrus; here the Roman and then the Byzantine
emperors had their hunting-palaces; here for a long time the Persians
menaced and wrung tribute from the city they could not capture.
We took a carriage and ascended through the city to the mountain of
Boolgoorloo. On the slopes above the town are orchards and vineyards
and pretty villas. The last ten minutes of the climb was accomplished on
foot, and when we stood upon the summit the world was at our feet. I
do not know any other view that embraces so much and such variety. The
swelling top was carpeted with grass, sprinkled with spring flowers,
and here and there a spreading pine offered a place of shade and repose.
Behind us continued range on range the hills of the peninsula; to the
south the eye explored Asia Minor, the ancient Bithynia and Mysia, until
it rested on the monstrous snowy summits of Olympus, which rears itself
beyond Broussa, city famed for its gauzy silk and the first capital
of the Osman dynasty. There stretches the blue Sea of Marmora, bearing
lightly on the surface the nine enchanting Princes' Islands, whose
equable climate and fertile soil have obtained for them the epithet of
the Isles of the Blest. Opposite, Stamboul rises out of the water on
every side; in the distance a city of domes and pinnacles and glass, the
dark-green spires of cypress tempering its brilliant lustre; there
the Golden Horn and its thronged bridges and its countless masts and
steamers' funnels; Galata and Pera, also lifted up into nobility,
and all their shabby details lost, and the Bosphorus, its hills, marble
palaces, mosques, and gardens, on either side. I do not know any scene
that approaches this in beauty except the Bay of Naples, and the charm
of that is so different from this that no comparison is forced upon
the mind. The Bay of New York has many of the elements of this charming
prospect, on the map. But Constantinople and its environs can be seen
from many points in one view, while one would need to ascend a balloon
to comprehend in like manner the capital of the Western world. It is
the situation of Constantinople, lifted up into a conspicuousness that
permits no one of its single splendors to be lost in the general view,
that makes it in appearance the unrivalled empress of cities.
In the foreground lay Scutari, and in a broad sweep the heavy mass of
cypress forest that covers the great cemetery of the Turks, which they
are said to prefer to Eyoub, under the prophetic impression that they
will one day be driven out of Europe. The precaution seems idle. If
in the loss of Constantinople the Osmanli sultans still maintain the
supremacy of Islam, the Moslem capital could not he on these shores, and
the caliphate in its migrations might again he established on the Nile,
on the Euphrates, or in the plains of Guta on the Abana. The iron-clads
that lie in the Bosphorus, the long guns of a dozen fortresses that
command every foot of the city and shore, forbid that these contiguous
coasts should fly hostile flags.