When in your caïque upon the Bosphorus you have passed the Tower of
Leander,[6] you see opposite Scutari an immense, unfinished palace
that bathes its white feet in the blue and rapid waters. There is a
superstition in the East, supported by the architects, that no one
dies while the house he is having built is uncompleted; therefore the
Sultans always take care to have some palace on hand.
As a rare instance among the Turks, who consecrate solid and precious
materials to the house of God and erect for the transitory habitation
of man only wooden kiosks hardly more enduring than himself, this
palace is all of marble and built for eternity. It is composed of one
great body and two wings. To say to what order of architecture it
belongs would be difficult; it is not Greek, nor Roman, nor Gothic, nor
Renaissance, nor Saracen, nor Arab, nor Turkish; it approaches that
style which the Spaniards call _plateresco_, and which makes the
façade of a building resemble a great piece of goldsmith’s work owing
to the complicated wealth of its ornaments and the maddening mass of
the details.
[Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE BOSPHORUS, TURKEY.]
Windows with open-work balconies, small enwreathed columns, ribbed
trefoils, festooned frames, and intervening spaces crowded with
sculpture and arabesques, recall the Lombard style and make you think
of the ancient palaces of Venice; only there is the same difference
between the Palace Dario or Casa d’oro and the Sultan’s Palace as
between the Grand Canal and the Bosphorus.
This enormous building of Marmora marble, of a bluish white that seems
a little cold owing to the sharp glitter from its newness, produces a
very majestic effect between the blue of the sky and the blue of the
sea; it will produce a better one when the warm sun of Asia shall have
gilded it with its rays which are received direct and at first-hand.
Vignola, doubtless, would not know what to make of this hybrid façade
where the styles of all periods and all countries form a composite
order which he did not foresee. But one cannot deny that this multitude
of flowers, foliage, and rose-work, carved like jewels of precious
material possesses a tufted and complicated appearance, gorgeous and
delightful to the eye. It is a palace that might have been made by an
ornament-worker who was not an architect, and who spared neither the
work of his hands, nor time, nor money. Such as it is, I prefer it
to those horrid, classic reproductions, so beastly, so flat, so cold
and so tiresome, such as are built by pedants and those who like to
be conventional, and I greatly prefer these gay, ornamental masses of
foliage interlacing with fantastic elegance, to a triangular pediment
or a horizontal attic, resting on six or eight lean columns.
This naïve ignorance displayed upon so gigantic a scale has its charm;
it is probable that the bold builders of our cathedrals knew little
more, and their works are not the less admirable for that.
Along the whole length of the palace, there runs a platform, bordered
on the side of the Bosphorus with monumental pillars linked together by
grilles of beautiful and charming wrought-iron, where the iron curves
in a thousand flowered arabesques, resembling the flourishes of a bold
pen sweeping the paper. These gilded grilles form an extremely rich
balustrade.
The two wings, built at a different period, are very much too low for
the body of the principal dwelling, with which they have, moreover, no
harmony of style or form. Imagine a double row of Odéons or Chambers of
Deputies in miniature, following each other in wearisome alternation
and presenting to the eye a line of slender little columns that seem to
be of wood, although they are of marble.
In passing and repassing before this palace, the desire to visit it
had come to me many times. In Italy nothing would have been simpler;
but to bring your caïque to an imperial landing-place in Turkey, would
be a grave performance that might bring serious consequences. Happily,
through the agency of a friend, I was put into communication with the
architect, M. Balyan, a young Armenian of great intelligence, and who
spoke French.
M. Balyan had the kindness to take me in his boat of three pairs of
oars, and made me enter first an old kiosk, a remnant of the former
palace, where we were served with pipes, coffee, and sherbet flavoured
with rose; then he conducted me himself through the apartments with a
kindness and charming politeness for which I thank him here, hoping
that one day his eye will fall upon these lines.
The interior has not been entirely finished yet, but, nevertheless, you
can get an idea of the future splendour of the whole. The religious
ideas of the Turks debar from their ornamentation a host of happy
motives and restrict considerably the fancy of the artist, who must
carefully abstain from mingling with his arabesques the representation
of any living objects:--thus, there are no statues, no bas-reliefs, no
masks, no chimæras, no griffins, no dolphins, no birds, no sphinxes, no
serpents, no butterflies, no little figures half-woman and half-flower,
no heraldic monsters, and none of those strange creatures that compose
the fabulous zoölogy of ornamentation, and of which Raphael has made
such marvellous use in the galleries of the Vatican.
The Arabian style, with its interruptions, distortions and its
broken lines, its lace of stucco cut out with a punch, its ceilings
of stalactites, its bee-hive niches, its marble perforated like the
lid of a perfume-box, its mottos in florid Cufic, and its colourings
of green, white and red, discretely enhanced with gold, would have
afforded natural resources for the decoration of an oriental palace;
but the Sultan, with the same caprice that makes us build Alhambras in
Paris, wished to have a palace in the modern taste. One is astonished
at first at his caprice, but, upon reflection, nothing is more natural.
Having so few motives at his disposition, M. Balyan has needed a rare
fertility of imagination in order to decorate in different ways more
than three hundred halls or chambers.
The general arrangement is very simple: the rooms follow each other in
succession, or open upon a large corridor; the harem, among others,
is so arranged. The apartment of each woman opens by a single door
into a vast passage, like the cells of nuns in a cloister. At each
end, a guard of eunuchs, or _bostangis_, can be posted. From the
threshold, I threw a glance over this retreat of secret pleasure, which
resembles a convent or a boarding-school much more than one would
imagine. Here are extinguished, without having shone upon the outside
world, the stars of beauty unknown, but the eye of the master has
rested upon them, for one minute perhaps, and that is enough.
The apartment of the Sultana-Validé, composed of lofty rooms looking
upon the Bosphorus, is remarkable for its ceilings painted in fresco
with an incomparable elegance and freshness. I do not know who are
the workmen that made these marvels, but Diaz would not find upon
his palette finer, more vaporous, more tender and, at the same time,
richer tones. Sometimes they are skies of turquoise sown with light
clouds floating in incredible depths, sometimes immense lace veils of
marvellous figures, then a great shell of mother-of-pearl irised with
all the hues of the prism, or still again of imaginary flowers hanging
their corollas and leaves upon golden trellises; other chambers are
similarly ornamented; sometimes a casket whose jewels are scattered
about in playful disorder, necklaces whose pearls have broken from
their strings and roll about like raindrops, a rillet of diamonds,
sapphires and rubies forming the _motif_ of the decoration; golden
boxes painted upon the cornices allow the bluish smoke of perfumes
to escape and compose a ceiling with their transparent haze. Here
Phingari through a rift in the cloud shows his silver crescent, so
dear to the Mussulman; there modest Aurora colours a morning sky with
rose, like the cheeks of virgin; farther away a large piece of brocade
streaked with light glittering like cloth of gold, and held up by a
clasp of carbuncles, reveals a corner of blue. Arabesques with infinite
interlacings, sculptured compartments, golden rose-work, and bouquets
of imaginary or real flowers, blue lilies of Iran, or roses of Schiraz,
come to vary these themes, the chief of which I have cited, without
attempting to enter into impossible details, and which the imagination
of the reader must supplement.
The Sultan’s apartments are in the style of Louis XIV. Orientalized,
where one feels an intentional imitation of the splendours of
Versailles, the doors, the windows, and their frames are of cedar,
mahogany, massive violet-ebony, exquisitely carved, and fastening
by rich bolts gilded in ormoulu. From the windows you have the most
marvellous view in the world: a panorama without a rival, and such as
never sovereign had before in front of his palace. The coast of Asia,
where upon an immense curtain of black cypress Scutari stands out, with
its picturesque landing-place crowded with vessels, its pink houses,
its white mosques among which are distinguished Buyuck-Djami and
Sultan-Selim; and the Bosphorus with its rapid and transparent waters
furrowed with the perpetual going and coming of the sailing-vessels,
steam-boats, feluccas, prames, boats from Ismid and Trebizond, with
antique shapes, peculiar sails, canoes, and caïques, above which fly
the familiar swarms of sea-mews and gulls. If you lean out a little,
you can discern upon the two shores a succession of summer homes and
kiosks, painted in flesh colours that form a double key of palaces
for this marvellous marine river. Add to this the thousand accidents
of lights, the effects of sun and moon, and you will have a spectacle
which imagination could not surpass.
One of the peculiarities of the palace is a large hall roofed with a
dome of red glass. When the sun shines through this dome of rubies,
everything assumes strange hues; the air seems to be in flames, and you
seem to breathe fire; the columns seem like torch-lights, the marble
pavement reddens into a floor of lava; a pink fire devours the walls;
you fancy yourself in the reception-hall of a palace of salamanders
built of metal in fusion; your eyes glitter like red spangles and your
clothes become vestments of purple. An operatic hell, lighted with
Bengal fire, can alone give an idea of this peculiar effect, of a
questionable taste, perhaps, but very striking, nevertheless.
A little marvel which would not mar the most fairy-like architecture of
the Thousand and One Nights, is the Sultan’s hall of baths. It is in
the Moorish style, of veined Egyptian alabaster, and seems to have been
cut out of one block of precious stone, with its columns, its splayed
capitals, its heart-shaped arcades, and its ceiling constellated with
crystal eyes that shine like diamonds. To what luxury might the body
abandon itself upon these flags, transparent as agates, surrendering
its flexible limbs to the skilful manipulations of the _tellacks_
in the midst of a cloud of perfumed vapour and under a shower of
rose-water and balsam!
Tired of these marvels and fatigued with admiration, I thanked M.
Balyan, who made me come out through the court of honour, the gate
of which is a kind of triumphal arch of white marble of a very
rich and florid ornamentation, and which forms on the land side an
entrance quite worthy of this sumptuous palace. Then, as I was dying
of hunger, I went into a fruiterer’s shop and was served with two
_brochettes_ of _kabobs_, wrapped in a thick pancake, which
I moistened with a glass of sherbet,--a very sober and entirely local
repast.