happy if the compelling party to it had left her fondness of adventure
and variety at the wedding threshold; but her constancy was only
assumed, like the Turkish veil, for an occasion; lovers were not
wanting, and after the birth of three children, two sons and a daughter,
she deserted her husband and went to live with a young Turk, who has
since held high office in the government of the Sultan. It was in her
character of Madame Mehemet Pasha that she wrote (or one of her sons
wrote for her) a book well known in the West, entitled “Thirty Years
in a Harem.” But her intriguing spirit was not extinct even in a
Turkish harem; she attempted to palm off upon the pasha, as her own, a
child that she had bought; her device was detected by one of the palace
eunuchs, and at the same time her amour with a Greek of the city came
to light. The eunuch incurred her displeasure for his officiousness, and
she had him strangled and thrown into the Bosphorus! Some say that the
resolute woman even assisted with her own hands. For these breaches of
decorum, however, she paid dear; the pasha banished her to Kutayah, with
orders to the guard who attended her to poison her on the way; but
she so won upon the affection of the officer that he let her escape at
Broussa. There her beauty, if not her piety, recommended her to an Imam
of one of the mosques, and she married him and seems for a time to have
led a quiet life; at any rate, nothing further was heard of her until
just before the famous cholera season, when news came of the death
of her husband, the Moslem priest, and that she was living in extreme
poverty, all her beauty gone forever, and consequently her ability to
procure another husband.
The pasha, Mehemet, lived in a beautiful palace on the eastern shore of
the Bosphorus, near Kandili. During the great cholera epidemic of 1865,
the pasha was taken ill. One day there appeared at the gate an unknown
woman, who said that she had come to cure the pasha; no one knew her,
but she spoke with authority, and was admitted. It was our adventuress.
She nursed the pasha with the most tender care and watchful skill, so
that he recovered; and, in gratitude for the preservation of his life,
he permitted her and her daughter to remain in the palace. For some time
they were contented with the luxury of such a home, but one day—it was
the evening of Wednesday—neither mother nor daughter was to be found;
and upon examination it was discovered that a large collection of
precious stones and some ready money had disappeared with them. They had
departed on the French steamer, in order to transfer their talents to
the fields of Europe. The fate of the daughter I do not know; for some
time she and her mother were conspicuous in the dissipation of Paris
life; subsequently the mother lived with a son in London, and, since I
heard her story in Constantinople, she has died in London in misery and
want.
The further history of the doctor and his family may detain our
curiosity for a moment. When his wife left him for the arms of
the pasha, he experienced so much difficulty in finding any one in
Constantinople to take care of his children that he determined to send
them to Scotland to be educated, and intrusted them, for that purpose,
to a friend who was returning to England. They went by way of Rome. It
happened that the mother and sister of the doctor had some time before
that come to Rome, for the sake of health, and had there warmly embraced
the Roman Catholic faith. Of course the three children were taken to see
their grandmother and aunt, and the latter, concerned for their eternal
welfare, diverted them from their journey, and immured the boys in a
monastery and the girl in a convent. The father, when he heard of this
abduction, expressed indignation, but, having at that time only such
religious faith as may be floating in the Oriental air and common to
all, he made no vigorous effort to recover his children. Indeed, he
consoled himself, in the fashion of the country, by marrying again; this
time a Greek lady, who died, leaving two boys. The doctor was successful
in transporting the offspring of his second marriage to Scotland, where
they were educated; and they returned to do him honor,—one of them as
the eloquent and devoted pastor of a Protestant church in Pera, and the
other as a physician in the employment of the government.
After the death of his second wife, the doctor—I can but tell the
story as I heard it—became a changed man, and—married again;
this time a Swiss lady, of lovely Christian character. In his changed
condition, he began to feel anxious to recover his children from the
grasp of Rome. He wrote for information, but his sister refused to tell
where they were, and his search could discover no trace of them. At
length the father obtained leave of absence from the Seraglio, and armed
with an autograph letter from Abdul Aziz to Pius IX., he went to Rome.
The Pope gave him an order for the restoration of his children. He drove
first to the convent to see his daughter. In place of the little
girl whom he had years ago parted with, he found a young lady of
extraordinary beauty, and a devoted Romanist. At first she refused to go
with him, and it was only upon his promise to allow her perfect liberty
of conscience, and never to interfere with any of the observances of her
church, that she consented. Not daring to lose sight of her, he waited
for her to pack her trunk, and then, putting her into a carriage, drove
to the monastery where he heard, after many inquiries, that his boys
were confined. The monk who admitted him denied that they were there,
and endeavored to lock him into the waiting-room while he went to call
the Superior. But the doctor anticipated his movements, and as soon as
the monk was out of sight, started to explore the house. By good luck
the first door he opened led into a chamber where a sick boy was lying
on a bed. The doctor believed that he recognized one of his sons; a few
questions satisfied him that he was right. “I am your father,” he
said to the astonished lad, “run quickly and call your brother and
come with me.” Monastic discipline had not so many attractions for the
boys as convent life for the girl, and the child ran with alacrity and
brought his brother, just as the abbot and a score of monks appeared
upon the scene. As the celerity of the doctor had given no opportunity
to conceal the boys, opposition to the order of the Pope was useless,
and the father hastened to the gate where he had left the carriage.
Meantime the aunt had heard of the rescue, and followed the girl from
the convent; she implored her, by tears and prayers, to reverse her
decision. The doctor cut short the scene by shoving his sons into the
carriage and driving rapidly away. Nor did he trust them long in Rome.
The subsequent career of the boys is not dwelt on with pleasure. One of
them enlisted in the Turkish army, married a Turkish wife, and, after
some years, deserted her, and ran away to England. His wife was taken
into a pasha's family, who offered to adopt her only child, a boy of
four years; but the mother preferred to bring him to his grandfather.
None of the family had seen her, but she established her identity, and
begged that her child might be adopted by a good man, which she knew
his grandfather to be, and receive a Christian training. The doctor,
therefore, adopted the grandchild, which had come to him in such a
strange way, and the mother shortly after died.
The daughter, whose acquired accomplishments matched her inherited
beauty, married, in time, a Venetian Count of wealth; and the idler
in Venice may see on the Grand Canal, among those mouldy edifices that
could reveal so many romances, their sumptuous palace, and learn, if he
cares to learn, that it is the home of a family happy in the enjoyment
of most felicitous fortune. In the gossip with which the best Italian
society sometimes amuses itself, he might hear that the Countess was the
daughter of a slave of the Sultan's harem. I have given, however,
the true version of the romantic story; but I am ignorant of the
social condition or the race of the mother of the heroine of so many
adventures. She may have been born in the Caucasus.
XXVII.—FROM THE GOLDEN HORN TO THE ACROPOLIS.
OUR last day in Constantinople was a bright invitation for us to remain
forever. We could have departed without regret in a rain-storm, but it
was not so easy to resolve to look our last upon this shining city and
marvellous landscape under the blue sky of May. Early in the morning we
climbed up the Genoese Tower in Galata and saw the hundred crescents of
Stamboul sparkle in the sun, the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, shifting
panoramas of trade and pleasure, the Propontis with its purple islands,
and the azure and snowy mountains of Asia. This massive tower is now
a fire-signal station, and night and day watchmen look out from its
battlemented gallery; the Seraskier Tower opposite in Stamboul, and
another on the heights of the Asiatic shore, keep the same watch over
the inflammable city. The guard requested us not to open our parasols
upon the gallery for fear they would be hailed as fire-signals.
The day was spent in last visits to the bazaars, in packing and
leave-takings, and the passage of the custom-house, for the government
encourages trade by an export as well as an import duty. I did not see
any of the officials, but Abd-el-Atti, who had charge of shipping our
baggage, reported that the eyes of the customs inspector were each just
the size of a five-franc piece. Chief among our regrets at setting our
faces toward Europe was the necessity of parting with Abd-el-Atti and
Ahmed; the former had been our faithful dragoman and daily companion for
five months, and we had not yet exhausted his adventures nor his stores
of Oriental humor; and we could not expect to find elsewhere a character
like Ahmed, a person so shrewd and obliging, and of such amusing
vivacity. At four o'clock we embarked upon an Italian steamer
for Salonica and Athens, a four days' voyage. At the last moment
Abd-el-Atti would have gone with us upon the least encouragement, but
we had no further need of dragoman or interpreter, and the old man sadly
descended the ladder to his boat. I can see him yet, his red fez in
the stern of the caique, waving his large silk handkerchief, and slowly
rowing back to Pera,—a melancholy figure.
As we steamed out of the harbor we enjoyed the view we had missed on
entering: the Seraglio Point where blind old Dandolo ran his galley
aground and leaped on shore to the assault; the shore of Chalcedon; the
seven towers and the old wall behind Stamboul, which Persians, Arabs,
Scythians, and Latins have stormed; the long sweeping coast and its
minarets; the Princes' Islands and Mt. Olympus,—all this in a
setting sun was superb; and we said, “There is not its equal in the
world.” And the evening was more magnificent,—a moon nearly full, a
sweet and rosy light on the smooth water, which was at first azure blue,
and then pearly gray and glowing like an amethyst.
Smoothly sailing all night, we came at sunrise to the entrance of the
Dardanelles, and stopped for a couple of hours at Chanak Kalessi, before
the guns of the Castle of Asia. The wide-awake traders immediately
swarmed on board with their barbarous pottery, and with trays of cooked
fish, onions, and bread for the deck passengers. The latter were mostly
Greeks, and men in the costume which one sees still in the islands and
the Asiatic coasts, but very seldom on the Grecian mainland; it consists
of baggy trousers, close at the ankles, a shawl about the waist, an
embroidered jacket usually of sober color, and, the most prized part
of their possessions, an arsenal of pistols and knives in huge leathern
holsters, with a heavy leathern flap, worn in front. Most of them wore
a small red fez, the hair cut close in front and falling long behind the
ears. They are light in complexion, not tall, rather stout, and without
beauty. Though their dress is picturesque in plan, it is usually very
dirty, ragged, and, the last confession of poverty, patched. They were
all armed like pirates; and when we stopped a cracking fusillade along
the deck suggested a mutiny; but it was only a precautionary measure
of the captain, who compelled them to discharge their pistols into the
water and then took them from them.
Passing out of the strait we saw the Rabbit Islands and Tene-dos, and
caught a glimpse of the Plain of Troy about as misty as its mythic
history; and then turned west between Imbros and Lemnos, on whose bold
eastern rock once blazed one of the signal-fires which telegraphed the
fall of Troy to Clytemnestra. The first women of Lemnos were altogether
beautiful, but they had some peculiarities which did not recommend
them to their contemporaries, and indeed their husbands were accustomed
occasionally to hoist sail and bask in the smiles of the damsels of the
Thracian coast. The Lemnian women, to avoid any legal difficulties, such
as arise nowadays when a woman asserts her right to slay her partner,
killed all their husbands, and set up an Amazonian state which they
maintained with pride and splendor, permitting no man to set foot on the
island. In time this absolute freedom became a little tedious, and when
the Argonauts came that way, the women advanced to meet the heroes
with garlands, and brought them wine and food. This conduct pleased the
Argonauts, who made Lemnos their headquarters and celebrated there
many a festive combat. Their descendants, the Minyæ, were afterwards
overcome by the Pelasgians, from Attica, who, remembering with regret
the beautiful girls of their home, returned and brought back with them
the willing and the lovely. But the children of the Attic women took on
airs over their superior birth, which the Pelasgian women resented, and
the latter finally removed all cause of dispute by murdering all the
mothers of Attica and their offspring. These events gave the ladies
of Lemnos a formidable reputation in the ancient world, and furnish an
illustration of what society would be without the refining and temperate
influence of man.
To the northward lifted itself the bare back of Samothrace, and beyond
the dim outline of Thasos, ancient gold-island, the home of the
poet Archilochus, one of the few Grecian islands which still retains
something of its pristine luxuriance of vegetation, where the songs of
innumerable nightingales invite to its deep, flowery valleys. Beyond
Thasos is the Thracian coast and Mt. Pangaus, and at the foot of it
Philippi, the Macedonian town where republican Rome fought its last
battle, where Cassius leaned upon his sword-point, believing everything
lost. Brutus transported the body of his comrade to Thasos and raised
for him a funeral pyre; and twenty days later, on the same field, met
again that spectre of death which had summoned him to Philippi. It
was only eleven years after this victory of the Imperial power that
a greater triumph was won at Philippi, when Paul and Silas, cast into
prison, sang praises unto God at midnight, and an earthquake shook the
house and opened the prison doors.
In the afternoon we came in sight of snowy Mt. Athos, an almost
perpendicular limestone rock, rising nearly six thousand four hundred
feet out of the sea. The slender promontory which this magnificent
mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth
of four miles. The ancient canal of Xerxes quite severed it from the
mainland. The peninsula, level at the canal, is a jagged stretch of
mountains (seamed by chasms), which rise a thousand, two thousand, four
thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos,
the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire
promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic
ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty
great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek
church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the
Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by
the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents, yearly,
from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these religious
houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an almost
complete independence, and preserved in their primitive simplicity the
manners and usages of the earliest foundations. Here, as nowhere else in
Europe or Asia, can one behold the architecture, the dress, the habits
of the Middle Ages. The good devotees have been able to keep themselves
thus in the darkness and simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion
of the sex always impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of
the world are due. No woman, from the beginning till now, has ever
been permitted to set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female
animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose,
though I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose
inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to
detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the
monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise
occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their
pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to a point
that destroys their value even as spiritual tabernacles. The united
community is permitted to keep a guard of fifty Christian soldiers,
and the only Moslem on the island is the solitary Turkish officer who
represents the Sultan; his position cannot be one generally coveted
by the Turks, since the society of women is absolutely denied him. The
libraries of Mt. Athos are full of unarranged manuscripts, which are
probably mainly filled with the theologic rubbish of the controversial
ages, and can scarcely be expected to yield again anything so valuable
as the Tischendorf Scriptures.
At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the
buildings of the Laura Convent, amid the woods beneath the frowning
cliff. And now was produced the apparition of a sunset, with this
towering mountain cone for a centre-piece, that surpassed all our
experience and imagination. The sea was like satin for smoothness,
absolutely waveless, and shone with the colors of changeable silk, blue,
green, pink, and amethyst. Heavy clouds gathered about the sun, and from
behind them he exhibited burning spectacles, magnificent fireworks, vast
shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across
the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that
spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along
the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The
whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in
a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge
walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes,—one a
gigantic cat with a preternatural tail, a cat of doom four degrees long.
All this was piled about Mt. Athos, with its sharp summit of snow, its
dark sides of rock.
It is a pity that the sounding and somewhat sacred name of Thessalonica
has been abbreviated to Salonica; it might better have reverted to its
ancient name of Therma, which distinguished the Macedonian capital up
to the time of Alexander. In the early morning we were lying before the
city, and were told that we should stay till midnight, waiting for the
mail. From whence a mail was expected I do not know; the traveller
who sails these seas with a cargo of ancient history resents in these
classic localities such attempts to imitate modern fashions. Were the
Dardanians or the Mesians to send us letters in a leathern bag? We
were prepared for a summons from Calo-John, at the head of his wild
barbarians, to surrender the city; and we should have liked to see
Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat and King of Thessalonica, issue from the
fortress above the town, the shields and lances of his little band of
knights shining in the sun, and answer in person the insolent demand. We
were prepared to see the troop return, having left the head of Boniface
in the possession of Calo-John; and if our captain had told us that the
steamer would wait to attend the funeral of the Bulgarian chief himself,
which occurred not long after the encounter with Boniface, we should
have thought it natural.
The city lies on a fine bay, and presents an attractive appearance from
the harbor, rising up the hill in the form of an amphitheatre. On all
sides, except the sea, ancient walls surround it, fortified at the
angles by large round towers and crowned in the centre, on the hill,
by a respectable citadel. I suppose that portions of these walls are
of Hellenic and perhaps Pelasgic date, but the most are probably of
the time of the Latin crusaders' occupation, patched and repaired by
Saracens and Turks. We had come to Thessalonica on St. Paul's
account, not expecting to see much that would excite us, and we were
not disappointed. When we went ashore we found ourselves in a city of
perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, commonplace in aspect, although
its bazaars are well filled with European goods, and a fair display of
Oriental stuffs and antiquities, and animated by considerable briskness
of trade. I presume there are more Jews here than there were in Paul's
time, but Turks and Greeks, in nearly equal numbers, form the bulk of
the population.
In modern Salonica there is not much respect for pagan antiquities, and
one sees only the usual fragments of columns and sculptures worked into
walls or incorporated in Christian churches. But those curious in early
Byzantine architecture will find more to interest them here than in any
place in the world except Constantinople. We spent the day wandering
about the city, under the guidance of a young Jew, who was without
either prejudices or information. On our way to the Mosque of St.
Sophia, we passed through the quarter of the Jews, which is much cleaner
than is usual with them. These are the descendants of Spanish Jews, who
were expelled by Isabella, and they still retain, in a corrupt form, the
language of Spain. In the doors and windows were many pretty Jewesses;
banishment and vicissitude appear to agree with this elastic race, for
in all the countries of Europe Jewish women develop more beauty in form
and feature than in Palestine. We saw here and in other parts of the
city a novel head-dress, which may commend itself to America in the
revolutions of fashion. A great mass of hair, real or assumed, was
gathered into a long slender green bag, which hung down the back and
was terminated by a heavy fringe of silver. Otherwise, the dress of the
Jewish women does not differ much from that of the men; the latter wear
a fez or turban, and a tunic which reaches to the ankles, and is bound
about the waist by a gay sash or shawl.