another. In its beauty I was disappointed. It is a dense and gloomy
cypress forest; as a place of sepulture, without the architectural
pretensions of Père-la-Chaise, and only less attractive than that. Its
dark recesses are crowded with gravestones, slender at the bottom and
swelling at the top, painted in lively colors,—green, red, and gray, a
necessary relief to the sombre woods,—having inscriptions in gilt and
red letters, and leaning at all angles, as if they had fallen out in a
quarrel over night. The graves of the men are distinguished by stones
crowned with turbans, or with tarbooshes painted red,—an imitation, in
short, of whatever head-dress the owner wore when alive, so that perhaps
his acquaintances can recognize his tomb without reading his name. Some
of the more ancient have the form of a mould of Charlotte Busse. I saw
more than one set jauntily on one side, which gave the monument a rakish
air, singularly débonnaire for a tombstone.
In contrast to this vast assembly of the faithful is the pretty English
cemetery, dedicated to the fallen in the Crimean war,—a well-kept
flower-garden, which lies close to the Bosphorus on a point opposite the
old Seraglio. We sat down on the sea-wall in this quiet spot, where the
sun falls lovingly and the undisturbed birds sing, and looked long
at the shifting, busy panorama of a world that does not disturb this
repose; and then walked about the garden, noting the headstones of
soldiers,—this one killed at Alma, that at Inkermann, another at
Balaklava, and the tall, graceless granite monument to eight thousand
nameless dead; nameless here, but not in many a home and many a heart,
any more than the undistinguished thousands who sleep at Gettysburg or
on a hundred other patriot fields.
Near by is the great hospital which Florence Nightingale controlled,
and in her memory we asked permission to enter its wards and visit its
garden. After some delay this was granted, but the Turkish official said
that the hospital was for men, that there was no woman there, and as
for Miss Nightingale, he had never heard of her. But we persevered and
finally found an officer who led us to the room she occupied,—a large
apartment now filled with the beds of the sick, and, like every other
part of the establishment, neat and orderly. But our curiosity to
see where the philanthropist had labored was an enigma to the Turkish
officials to the last. They insisted at first that we must be relations
of Miss Nightingale,—a supposition which I saw that Abd-el-Atti, who
always seeks the advantage of distinction, was inclined to favor. But we
said no. Well, perhaps it was natural that Englishmen should indulge
in the sentiment that moved us. But we were not Englishmen, we were
Americans,—they gave it up entirely. The superintendent of the
hospital, a courtly and elderly bey, who had fought in the Crimean war,
and whom our dragoman, dipping his hand to the ground, saluted with the
most profound Egyptian obeisance, insisted upon serving us coffee in
the garden by the fountain of gold-fish, and we spent an hour of quiet
there.
On Sunday at about the hour that the good people in America were
beginning to think what they should wear to church, we walked down to
the service in the English Memorial Church, on the brow of the hill in
Pera, a pointed Gothic building of a rich and pleasing interior. Only
once or twice in many months had we been in a Christian church, and
it was, at least, interesting to contrast its simple forms with the
elaborate Greek ritual and the endless repetitions of the Moslem
prayers. A choir of boys intoned or chanted a portion of the service,
with marked ability, and wholly relieved the audience of the necessity
of making responses. The clergymen executed the reading so successfully
that we could only now and then catch a word. The service, so far as we
were concerned, might as well have been in Turkish; and yet it was not
altogether lost on us. We could distinguish occasionally the Lord's
Prayer, and the name of Queen Victoria, and we caught some of the
Commandments as they whisked past us. We knew also when we were in the
Litany, from the regular cadence of the boys' responses. But as the
entertainment seemed to be for the benefit of the clergymen and boys, I
did not feel like intruding beyond the office of a spectator, and I soon
found myself reflecting whether a machine could not be invented
that should produce the same effect of sound, which was all that the
congregation enjoyed.
Rome has been until recently less tolerant of the Protestant faith than
Constantinople; and it was an inspiration of reciprocity to build here
a church in memory of the Christian soldiers who fell in the crusade to
establish the Moslem rule in European Turkey.
Of the various views about Constantinople we always pronounced that
best which we saw last, and at the time we said that those from Seraglio
Point, from Boolgoorloo, and from Roberts College were crowned by that
from Giant's Grave Mountain, a noble height on the Asiatic side of the
Bosphorus near the Black Sea.
One charming morning, we ascended the strait in a steamboat that calls
at the landings on the eastern shore. The Bosphorus, if you will have it
in a phrase, is a river of lapis lazuli lined with marble palaces. As we
saw it that morning, its sloping gardens, terraces, trees, and vines in
the tender bloom of spring, all the extravagance of the Oriental
poets in praise of it was justified, and it was easy to believe the
nature-romance with which the earliest adventurers had clothed it.
There, at Beshiktash, Jason landed to rest his weary sailors on the
voyage to Colchis; and above there at Koroo Ghesmeh stood a laurel-tree
which Medea planted on the return of the Argonauts. Tradition has placed
near it, on the point, the site of a less attractive object, the pillar
upon which Simeon Stylites spent forty years of a life which was just
forty years too long; but I do not know by what authority, for I believe
that the perch of the Syrian hermit was near Antioch, where his noble
position edified thousands of Christians, who enjoyed their piety in
contemplating his, and took their pleasures in the groves of Daphne.
Our steamer was, at this moment, a craft more dangerous to mankind
than an iron-clad; it was a sort of floating harem; we sat upon the
awning-covered upper deck; the greater part of the lower deck was
jealously curtained off and filled with Turkish ladies. Among them we
recognized a little flock of a couple of dozen, the harem of Mustapha
Pasha, the uncle of the Khedive of Egypt. They left the boat at his
palace in Chenguel Keuy, and we saw them, in silk gowns of white, red,
blue, and yellow, streaming across the flower-garden into the marble
portal,—a pretty picture. The pasha was transferring his household to
the country for the summer, and we imagined that the imprisoned troop
entered these blooming May gardens with the elation of freedom, which
might, however, be more perfect if eunuchs did not watch every gate and
foot of the garden wall. I suppose, however, that few of them would be
willing to exchange their lives of idle luxury for the misery and
chance of their former condition, and it is said that the maids of the
so-called Christian Georgia hear with envy of the good fortune of their
sisters, who have brought good prices in the Turkish capital.
When the harem disappeared we found some consolation in a tall Croat,
who strutted up and down the deck in front of us, that we might sicken
with envy of his splendid costume. He wore tight trousers of blue cloth,
baggy in the rear but fitting the legs like a glove, and terminating
over the shoes in a quilled inverted funnel; a brilliant scarf of Syrian
silk in loose folds about his loins; a vest stiff with gold-em broidery;
a scarlet jacket decked with gold-lace, and on his head a red fez. This
is the costly dress of a Croatian gardener, who displays all his wealth
to make a holiday spectacle of himself.
We sailed close to the village of Kandili and the promontory under
which and upon which it lies, a site which exhausts the capacity of the
loveliness of nature and the skill of art. From the villas on its height
one commands, by a shifted glance, the Euxine and the Marmora, and
whatever is most lovely in the prospect of two continents; the purity
of the air is said to equal the charm of the view. Above this promontory
opens the valley down which flows the river Geuksoo (sky-water), and
at the north of it stands a white marble kiosk of the Sultan, the most
beautiful architectural creation on the strait. Near it, shaded by great
trees, is a handsome fountain; beyond the green turf in the tree-decked
vale which pierces the hill were groups of holiday-makers in gay attire.
I do not know if this Valley of the Heavenly Water is the loveliest in
the East, but it is said that its charms of meadow, shade, sweet water,
and scented flowers are a substantial foretaste of the paradise of the
true believer. But it is in vain to catalogue the charming villages,
the fresh beauties of nature and art to which each revolution of the
paddle-wheel carried us. We thought we should be content with a summer
residence of the Khedive, on the European side below the lovely bay of
Terapea, with its vast hillside of gardens and orchards and the long
line of palaces on the water. Fanned by the invigorating breezes from
the Black Sea, its summer climate must be perfect.
We landed at Beicos, and, in default of any conveyance, walked up
through the straggling village, along the shore, to a verdant, shady
meadow, sweet with clover and wild-flowers. This is in the valley
of Hun-Kiar Iskelesi, a favorite residence of the sultans; here on a
projecting rocky point is a reddish palace built and given to the Sultan
by the Khedive. The meadow, in which we were, is behind a palace of old
Mohammed Ali, and it is now used as a pasture for the Sultan's horses,
dozens of which were tethered and feeding in the lush grass and clover.
The tents of their attendants were pitched on the plain, and groups
of Turkish ladies were picnicking under the large sycamores. It was a
charming rural scene. I made the silent acquaintance of an old man, in
a white turban and flowing robes, who sat in the grass knitting and
watching his one white lamb feed; probably knitting the fleece of his
lamb of the year before.
We were in search of an araba and team to take us up the mountain; one
stood in the meadow which we could hire, but oxen were wanting, and we
despatched a Greek boy in search of the animals. The Turkish ladies of
fashion delight in the araba when they ride into the country, greatly
preferring it to the horse or donkey, or to any other carriage. It is
a long cart of four wheels, without springs, but it is as stately in
appearance as the band-wagon of a circus; its sloping side-boards and
even the platform in front are elaborately carved and gilded. While we
waited the motions of the boy, who joined to himself two others even
more prone to go astray than himself, an officer of the royal stables
invited us to take seats under the shade of his tent and served us with
coffee. After an hour the boy returned with two lean steers. The rude,
hooped top of the araba was spread with a purple cloth, a thick bedquilt
covered the bottom, and by the aid of a ladder we climbed into the ark
and sat or lay as we could best stow ourselves. A boy led the steers by
a rope, another walked at the side gently goading them with a stick, and
we rumbled along slowly through the brilliant meadows. It became evident
after a time that we were not ascending the mountain, but going into
the heart of the country; the cart was stopped and the wild driver
was interrogated. I never saw a human being so totally devoid of a
conscience. We had hired him to take us up to Giant's Grave Mountain.
He was deliberately cheating us out of it. At first he insisted that
he was going in the right direction, but upon the application of the
dragoman's fingers to his ear, he pleaded that the mountain road was
bad and that it was just as well for us to visit the Sultan's farm up
the valley. We had come seven thousand miles to see the view from the
mountain, but this boy had not the least scruple in depriving us of it.
We turned about and entered a charming glen, thoroughly New England in
its character, set with small trees and shrubs and carpeted with a
turf of short sweet grass. One needs to be some months in the Orient to
appreciate the delight experienced by the sight of genuine turf.
As we ascended, the road, gullied by the spring torrents, at last became
impassable for wheels, and we were obliged to abandon the araba and
perform the last half-mile of the journey on foot. The sightly summit
of the mountain is nearly six hundred feet above the water. There, in
a lovely grove, we found a coffeehouse and a mosque and the
Giant's Grave, which the Moslems call the grave of Joshua. It is a
flower-planted enclosure, seventy feet long and seven wide, ample for
any hero; the railing about it is tagged with bits of cloth which pious
devotees have tied there in the expectation that their diseases, perhaps
their sins, will vanish with the airing of these shreds. From the
minaret is a wonderful view,—the entire length of the Bosphorus, with
all its windings and lovely bays enlivened with white sails, ships at
anchor, and darting steamers, rich in villages, ancient castles, and
forts; a great portion of Asia Minor, with the snow peaks of Olympus;
on the south, the Islands of the Blest and the Sea of Marmora; on the
north, the Cyanean rocks and the wide sweep of the Euxine, blue as
heaven and dotted with a hundred white sails, overlooked by the ruin of
a Genoese castle, at the entrance of the Bosphorus, built on the site of
a temple of Jupiter, and the spot where the Argonauts halted before they
ventured among the Symplegades; and immediately below, Terapea and the
deep bay of Buyukdereh, the summer resort of the foreign residents of
Constantinople, a paradise of palaces and gardens, of vales and stately
plane-trees, and the entrance to the interior village of Belgrade, with
its sacred forest unprofaned as yet by the axe.
The Cyanean rocks which Jason and his mariners regarded as floating
islands, or sentient monsters, vanishing and reappearing, are harmlessly
anchored now, and do not appear at all formidable, though they disappear
now as of old when the fierce Euxine rolls in its storm waves. Por a
long time and with insatiable curiosity we followed with the eye the
line of the coast of the Pontus Euxinus, once as thickly set with
towns as the Riviera of Italy,—cities of Ionian, Dorian, and Athenian
colonies, who followed the Phoenicians and perhaps the Egyptians,—in
the vain hope of extending our vision to Trebizond, to the sea fortress
of Petra, renowned for its defence by the soldiers of Chosroes against
the arms of Justinian, and, further, to the banks of the Pliasis, to
Colchis, whose fabulous wealth tempted Jason and his sea-robbers. The
waters of this land were so impregnated with particles of gold that
fleeces of sheep were used to strain out the yellow metal. Its palaces
shone with gold and silver, and you might expect in its gardens the
fruit of the Hesperides. In the vales of the Caucasus, we are taught,
our race has attained its most perfect form; in other days its men were
as renowned for strength and valor as its women were for beauty,—the
one could not be permanently subdued, the others conquered, even in
their slavery. Early converts to the Christian faith, they never
adopted its morals nor comprehended its metaphysics; and perhaps a more
dissolute and venal society does not exist than that whose business for
centuries has been the raising of maids for the Turkish harems. And the
miserable, though willing, victims are said to possess not even beauty,
until after a training in luxury by the slave-dealers.
We made our way, not without difficulty, down the rough, bush-grown
hillside, invaded a new Turkish fortification, and at length found a
place where we could descend the precipitous bank and summon a boat to
ferry us across to Buyukdereh. This was not easy to obtain; but finally
an aged Greek boatman appeared with a caique as aged and decayed as
himself. The chances seemed to be that it could make the voyage, and
we all packed ourselves into it, sitting on the bottom and filling it
completely. There was little margin of boat above the water, and any
sudden motion would have reduced that to nothing. We looked wise and sat
still, while the old Greek pulled feebly and praised the excellence of
his craft. On the opposite slope our attention was called to a pretty
cottage, and a Constantinople lady, who was of the party, began to tell
us the story of its occupant. So dramatic and exciting did it become
that we forgot entirely the peril of our frail and overloaded boat.
The story finished as we drew up to the landing, which we instantly
comprehended we had not reached a moment too soon. Eor when we arose our
clothes were soaked; we were sitting in water, which was rapidly filling
the boat, and would have swamped it in five minutes. The landing-place
of Buyukdereh, the bay, the hills and villas, reminded us of Lake Como,
and the quay and streets were rather Italian than Oriental. The most
soaked of the voyagers stood outside the railing of the pretty garden
of the café to dry in the sun, while the others sat inside, under the
vines, and passed out to the unfortunates, through the iron bars, tiny
cups of coffee, and fed them with rahat-al-lacoom and other delicious
sweetmeats, until the arrival of the steamer. The ride down was lovely;
the sun made the barracks and palaces on the east shore a blaze of
diamonds; and the minarets seen through the steamer's smoke
which, transfused with the rosy light, overhung the city, had a
phantasmagorical aspect.
Constantinople shares with many other cities the reputation of being the
most dissolute in the world. The traveller is not required to decide
the rival claims of this sort of pre-eminence, which are eagerly put
forward; he may better, in each city, acquiesce in the complaisant
assumption of the inhabitants. But when he is required to see in the
moral state of the Eastern capital signs of its speedy decay, and the
near extinction of the Othman rule, he takes a leaf out of history and
reflects. It is true, no doubt, that the Turks are enfeebled by luxury
and sensuality, and have, to a great extent, lost those virile qualities
which gave to their ancestors the dominion of so many kingdoms in
Asia, Africa, and Europe; in short, that the race is sinking into an
incapacity to propagate itself in the world. If one believes what he
hears, the morals of society could not be worse. The women, so many of
whom have been bought in the market, or are daughters of slaves,
are educated only for pleasure; and a great proportion of the male
population are adventurers from all lands, with few domestic ties. The
very relaxation of the surveillance of the harem (the necessary prelude
to the emancipation of woman) opens the door to opportunity, and gives
freer play to feminine intrigue. One hears, indeed, that even the
inmates of the royal harem find means of clandestine intercourse
with the foreigners of Pera. The history of the Northern and Western
occupation of the East has been, for fifteen centuries, only a
repetition of yielding to the seductive influences of a luxurious
climate and to soft and pleasing invitation.
But, heighten as we may the true and immoral picture of social life in
Constantinople, I doubt if it is so loose and unrestrained as it was
for centuries under the Greek Emperors; I doubt if the imbecility, the
luxurious effeminacy of the Turks has sunk to the level of the Byzantine
Empire; and when we are asked to expect in the decay of to-day a speedy
dissolution, we remember that for a period of over a thousand years,
from the partition of the Roman Empire between the two sons of
Theodosius to the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II., the empire
subsisted in a state of premature and perpetual decay. These Oriental
dynasties are a long time in dying, and we cannot measure their
decrepitude by the standards of Occidental morality.
The trade and the commerce of the city are largely in the hands of
foreigners; but it has nearly always been so, since the days of the
merchants and manufacturers of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. We might draw
an inference of Turkish insecurity from the implacable hatred of the
so-called Greek subjects, if the latter were not in the discord of a
thousand years of anarchy and servitude. The history of the islands of
the Eastern Mediterranean has been a succession of Turkish avarice and
rapacity, horrible Greek revenge and Turkish wholesale devastation and
massacre, repeated over and over again; but there appears as yet no
power able either to expel the Turks or unite the Greeks. That the
leaven of change is working in the Levant is evident to the most
superficial observation, and one sees everywhere the introduction of
Western civilization, of business habits, and, above all, of schools.
However indifferent the Osmanlis are to education, they are not
insensible to European opinion; and in reckoning up their bad qualities,
we ought not to forget that they have set some portions of Christendom
a lesson of religious toleration,—both in Constantinople and Jerusalem
the Christians were allowed a freedom of worship in their own churches
which was not permitted to Protestants within the sacred walls of
Pontifical Rome.
One who would paint the manners or the morals of Constantinople might
adorn his theme with many anecdotes, characteristic of a condition of
society which is foreign to our experience. I select one which has
the merit of being literally true. You who believe that modern romance
exists only in tales of fiction, listen to the story of a beauty of
Constantinople, the vicissitudes of whose life equal in variety if not
in importance those of Theodora and Athenais. For obvious reasons, I
shall mention no names.
There lives now on the banks of the Bosphorus an English physician, who,
at the entreaty of Lord Byron, went to Greece in 1824 as a volunteer
surgeon in the war of independence; he arrived only in time to see
the poet expire at Missolonghi. In the course of the war, he was taken
prisoner by the Egyptian troops, who in their great need of surgeons
kept him actively employed in his profession. He did not regain his
freedom until after the war, and then only on condition that he should
reside in Constantinople as one of the physicians of the Sultan,
Mohammed II.
We may suppose that the Oriental life was not unpleasant, nor the
position irksome to him, for he soon so far yielded to the temptations
of the capital as to fall in love with a very pretty face which he
saw daily in a bay-window of the street he traversed on the way to the
Seraglio. Acquaintance, which sometimes precedes love, in this case
followed it; the doctor declared his passion and was accepted by the
willing maid. But an Oriental bay-window is the opportunity of the
world, and the doctor, becoming convinced that his affianced was a
desperate flirt, and yielding to the entreaties of his friends, broke
off the engagement and left her free, in her eyry, to continue her
observations upon mankind. This, however, did not suit the plans of the
lovely and fickle girl. One morning, shortly after, he was summoned to
see two Turkish ladies who awaited him in his office; when he appeared,
the young girl (for it was she) and her mother threw aside their
disguise, and declared that they would not leave the house until the
doctor married the daughter, for the rupture of the engagement had
rendered it impossible to procure any other husband. Whether her own
beauty or the terrible aspect of the mother prevailed, I do not know,
but the English chaplain was sent for; he refused to perform the
ceremony, and a Greek priest was found who married them.