WAR TIME, 1912-1913 459
MASTERS OF CONSTANTINOPLE 545
A CONSTANTINOPLE BOOK-SHELF 549
INDEX 555
ILLUSTRATIONS
Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror _Frontispiece_
From the portrait by Gentile Bellini in the
Layard Collection
PAGE
A Stamboul street 5
From an etching by Ernest D. Roth
Divan Yolou 9
A house in Eyoub 11
A house at Aya Kapou 12
The house of the pipe 13
That grape-vine is one of the most decorative elements of
Stamboul streets 21
A waterside coffee-house 23
“Drinking” a _nargileh_ 26
Fez-presser in a coffee-house 27
Playing _tavli_ 29
The plane-tree of Chengel-kyöi 31
The yard of Hekim-zadeh Ali Pasha 35
“The Little Mosque” 37
From an etching by Ernest D. Roth
Entrance to the forecourt of Sultan Baïezid II 40
Detail of the Süleïmanieh 41
Yeni Jami 43
Tile panel in Rüstem Pasha 50
The _mihrab_ of Rüstem Pasha 51
In Rüstem Pasha 52
Tiles in the gallery of Sultan Ahmed 53
The tomb of Sultan Ahmed I 57
In Roxelana’s tomb 59
The _türbeh_ of Ibrahim Pasha 63
The court of the Conqueror 64
The main entrance to the court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha 65
The interior of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha 67
The court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha 69
Doorway in the _medresseh_ of Feïzoullah Effendi 70
Entrance to the _medresseh_ of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha 71
The _medresseh_ of Hassan Pasha 72
St. Sophia 77
From an etching by Frank Brangwyn
The Myrelaion 83
The House of Justinian 86
The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus 90
Interior of the Studion 93
Kahrieh Jami 97
Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: Theodore Metochites offering his
church to Christ 98
Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: the Massacre of the Innocents 101
Giotto’s fresco of the Massacre of the Innocents, in the Arena
chapel, Padua 101
Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: the Marriage at Cana 104
The Golden Gate 109
Outside the land walls 111
A last marble tower stands superbly out of the blue 112
The Golden Horn 115
From the _Specchio Marittimo_ of Bartolommeo Prato
Lighters 118
Sandals 119
Caïques 121
Sailing caïques 122
Galleons that might have sailed out of the Middle Ages anchor
there now 123
The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus 125
From a Persian miniature in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_
The _mihrab_ of Pialeh Pasha 131
Old houses of Phanar 133
The outer court of Eyoub 135
Eyoub 137
The cemetery of Eyoub 141
Kiat Haneh 145
Lion fountain in the old Venetian quarter 153
Genoese archway at Azap Kapou 155
The mosque of Don Quixote and the fountain of Sultan Mahmoud I 165
Interior of the mosque of Don Quixote 167
The admiral’s flag of Haïreddin Barbarossa 169
Drawn by Kenan Bey
Grande Rue de Pera 180
The Little Field of the Dead 181
The fountain of Azap Kapou 183
Fountain near Galata Tower 185
The Kabatash breakwater 187
Fresco in an old house in Scutari 191
The Street of the Falconers 199
Fountain in the mosque yard of Mihrîmah 201
Tiles in the mosque of the Valideh Atik 203
Chinili Jami 204
The fountains of the Valideh Jedid 205
Interior of the Valideh Jedid 207
The Ahmedieh 209
Shemsi Pasha 211
The bassma haneh 213
Hand wood-block printing 215
The Bosphorus from the heights of Scutari 217
Gravestones 221
Scutari Cemetery 223
In a Turkish garden 230
A Byzantine well-head 232
A garden wall fountain 233
A jetting fountain in the garden of Halil Edhem Bey 235
A _selsebil_ at Kandilli 236
A _selsebil_ of Halil Edhem Bey 237
In the garden of Ressam Halil Pasha 239
The garden of the Russian embassy at Büyük Dereh 241
The upper terrace of the French embassy garden at Therapia 243
The Villa of the Sun, Kandilli 249
An eighteenth-century villa at Arnaout-kyöi 252
The golden room of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha 253
In the harem of the Seraglio 261
The “Cage” of the Seraglio 263
A Kara-gyöz poster 271
Wrestlers 275
The imperial cortège poured from the palace gate 281
From a drawing by E. M. Ashe
Baïram sweets 289
The open spaces of the Mohammedan quarters are utilised for fairs 295
Sheep-market at Yeni Jami 299
Church fathers in the Sacred Caravan 305
Housings in the Sacred Caravan 306
The sacred camel 307
The palanquin 308
Tied with very new rope to the backs of some thirty mules
... were the quaint little hair trunks 309
A Persian miniature representing the death of Ali 311
Valideh Han 313
Blessing the Bosphorus 321
The dancing Epirotes 325
Bulgarians dancing 336
Greeks dancing to the strains of a _lanterna_ 337
The mosque and the Greek altar of Kourou Cheshmeh 348
Wall fountain in the Seraglio 354
_Selsebil_ in Bebek 355
The goose fountain at Kazlî 356
The wall fountain of Chinili-Kyöshk 357
_Shadrîvan_ of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha 359
_Shadrîvan_ of Ramazan Effendi 360
_Shadrîvan_ of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha 361
The Byzantine fountain of Kîrk Cheshmeh 365
The two fountains of Ak Bîyîk 368
Street fountain at Et Yemez 371
Fountain of Ahmed III in the park at Kiat Haneh 373
Detail of the fountain of Mahmoud I at Top Haneh 374
Fountain of Abd ül Hamid II 375
_Sebil_ behind the tomb of Sultan Mehmed III 377
_Sebil_ of Sultan Ahmed III 379
Cut-Throat Castle from the water 384
The castle of Baïezid the Thunderbolt 385
The north tower of the castle 387
The village boatmen and their skiffs 397
In the market-place 399
Badge of the revolution: “Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Equality” 405
Cartoon representing the exodus of the Palace camarilla 412
Soldiers at Chatalja, April 20 428
Macedonian volunteers 437
A Macedonian Blue 439
Taxim artillery barracks, shelled April 24 441
They were, in fact, reserves posted for the afternoon attack
on Tash Kîshla 443
Burial of volunteers, April 26 446
Deputies leaving Parliament after deposing Abd ül Hamid, April 27 447
Mehmed V driving through Stamboul on his accession day, April 27 451
Mehmed V on the day of sword-girding, May 10 453
Arriving from Asia 460
Reserves 461
Recruits 462
Hand in hand 463
Demonstration in the Hippodrome 465
Convalescents 480
Stuck in the mud 482
The aqueduct of Andronicus I 484
Fleeing from the enemy 485
Cholera 498
Joachim III, Patriarch of Constantinople 501
The south pulpit of the Pantocrator 503
Portrait of John VII Palæologus as one of the Three Wise Men,
by Benozzo Gozzoli. Riccardi Chapel, Florence 505
Church of the All-Blessed Virgin (Fetieh Jami) 515
The lantern-bearers 517
The dead Patriarch 519
Exiles 523
Lady Lowther’s refugees 526
Peasant embroidery 532
Young Thrace 533
CONSTANTINOPLE OLD AND NEW
I, a Persian and an Ispahani, had ever been accustomed to hold my native
city as the first in the world: never had it crossed my mind that any
other could, in the smallest degree, enter into competition with it, and
when the capital of Roum was described to me as finer, I always laughed
the describer to scorn. But what was my astonishment, and I may add
mortification, on beholding, for the first time, this magnificent city! I
had always looked upon the royal mosque, in the great square at Ispahan,
as the most superb building in the world; but here were a hundred finer,
each surpassing the other in beauty and in splendour. Nothing did I ever
conceive could equal the extent of my native place; but here my eyes
became tired with wandering over the numerous hills and creeks thickly
covered with buildings, which seemed to bid defiance to calculation. If
Ispahan was half the world, this indeed was the whole. And then this
gem of cities possesses this great advantage over Ispahan, that it is
situated on the borders of a beautiful succession of waters, instead of
being surrounded by arid and craggy mountains; and, in addition to its
own extent and beauty, enjoys the advantage of being reflected in one
never-failing mirror, ever at hand to multiply them.... “Oh! this is a
paradise,” said I to those around me; “and may I never leave it!”
—J. J. MORIER, “_The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan_.”
CONSTANTINOPLE OLD AND NEW
I
STAMBOUL
If literature could be governed by law—which, very happily, to the
despair of grammarians, it can not—there should be an act prohibiting
any one, on pain of death, ever to quote again or adapt to private use
Charles Lamb and his two races of men. No one is better aware of the
necessity of such a law than the present scribe, as he struggles with the
temptation to declare anew that there are two races of men. Where, for
instance, do they betray themselves more perfectly than in Stamboul? You
like Stamboul or you dislike Stamboul, and there seems to be no half-way
ground between the two opinions. I notice, however, that conversion
from the latter rank to the former is not impossible. I cannot say that
I ever really belonged, myself, to the enemies of Stamboul. Stamboul
entered too early into my consciousness and I was too early separated
from her to ask myself questions; and it later happened to me to fall
under a potent spell. But there came a day when I returned to Stamboul
from Italy. I felt a scarcely definable change in the atmosphere as
soon as we crossed the Danube. Strange letters decorated the sides of
cars, a fez or two—shall I be pedantic enough to say that the word is
really _fess_?—appeared at car windows, peasants on station platforms had
something about them that recalled youthful associations. The change grew
more and more marked as we neared the Turkish frontier. And I realised
to what it had been trending when at last we entered a breach of the old
Byzantine wall and whistled through a long seaside quarter of wooden
houses more tumble-down and unpainted than I remembered wooden houses
could be, and dusty little gardens, and glimpses of a wide blue water
through ruinous masonry, and people as out-at-elbow and down-at-the-heel
as their houses, who even at that shining hour of a summer morning found
time to smoke hubble-bubbles in tipsy little coffee-houses above the
Marmora or to squat motionless on their heels beside the track and watch
the fire-carriage of the unbeliever roll in from the West.
I have never forgotten—nor do successive experiences seem to dull the
sharpness of the impression—that abysmal drop from the general European
level of spruceness and solidity. Yet Stamboul, if you belong to the
same race of men as I, has a way of rehabilitating herself in your eyes,
perhaps even of making you adopt her point of view. Not that I shall try
to gloss over her case. Stamboul is not for the race of men that must
have trimness, smoothness, regularity, and modern conveniences, and the
latest amusements. She has ambitions in that direction. I may live to see
her attain them. I have already lived to see half of the Stamboul I once
knew burn to the ground and the other half experiment in Haussmannising.
But there is still enough of the old Stamboul left to leaven the new. It
is very bumpy to drive over. It is ill-painted and out of repair. It is
somewhat intermittently served by the scavenger. Its geography is almost
past finding out, for no true map of it, in this year of grace 1914,
as yet exists, and no man knows his street or number. What he knows is
the fountain or the coffee-house near which he lives, and the quarter in
which both are situated, named perhaps Coral, or Thick Beard, or Eats No
Meat, or Sees Not Day; and it remains for you to find that quarter and
that fountain. Nevertheless, if you belong to the race of men that is
amused by such things, that is curious about the ways and thoughts of
other men and feels under no responsibility to change them, that can see
happy arrangements of light and shade, of form and colour, without having
them pointed out and in very common materials, that is not repelled by
things which look old and out of order, that is even attracted by things
which do look so and therefore have a mellowness of tone and a richness
of association—if you belong to this race of men you will like Stamboul,
and the chances are that you will like it very much.
You must not make the other mistake, however, of expecting too much in
the way of colour. Constantinople lies, it is true, in the same latitude
as Naples; but the steppes of Russia are separated from it only by the
not too boundless steppes of the Black Sea. The colour of Constantinople
is a compromise, therefore, and not always a successful one, between
north and south. While the sun shines for half the year, and summer rain
is an exception, there is something hard and unsuffused about the light.
Only on certain days of south wind are you reminded of the Mediterranean,
and more rarely still of the autumn Adriatic. As for the town itself, it
is no white southern city, being in tone one of the soberest. I could
never bring myself, as some writers do, to speak of silvery domes. They
are always covered with lead, which goes excellently with the stone of
the mosques they crown. It is only the lesser minarets that are white;
and here and there on some lifted pinnacle a small half-moon makes a
flash of gold. While the high lights of Stamboul, then, are grey, this
stone Stamboul is small in proportion to the darker Stamboul that fills
the wide interstices between the mosques—a Stamboul of weathered wood
that is just the colour of an etching. It has always seemed to me,
indeed, that Stamboul, above all other cities I know, waits to be etched.
Those fine lines of dome and minaret are for copper rather than canvas,
while those crowded houses need the acid to bring out the richness of
their shadows.
Stamboul has waited a long time. Besides Frank Brangwyn and E. D. Roth,
I know of no etcher who has tried his needle there. And neither of those
two has done what I could imagine Whistler doing—a Long Stamboul as
seen from the opposite shore of the Golden Horn. When the archæologists
tell you that Constantinople, like Rome, is built on seven hills, don’t
believe them. They are merely riding a hobby-horse so ancient that I, for
one, am ashamed to mount it. Constantinople, or that part of it which is
now Stamboul, lies on two hills, of which the more important is a long
ridge dominating the Golden Horn. Its crest is not always at the same
level, to be sure, and its slopes are naturally broken by ravines. If
Rome, however, had been built on fourteen hills it would have been just
as easy to find the same number in Constantinople. That steep promontory
advancing between sea and sea toward a steeper Asia must always have been
something to look at. But I find it hard to believe that the city of
Constantine and Justinian can have marked so noble an outline against the
sky as the city of the sultans. For the mosques of the sultans, placed
exactly where their pyramids of domes and lance-like minarets tell most
against the light, are what make the silhouette of Stamboul one of the
most notable things in the world.
[Illustration: A Stamboul street
From an etching by Ernest D. Roth]
Of the many voyagers who have celebrated the panorama of Constantinople,
not a few have recorded their disappointment on coming to closer
acquaintance. _De gustibus_ ... I have small respect, however, for the
taste of those who find that the mosques will not bear inspection. I
shall presently have something more particular to say in that matter.
But since I am now speaking of the general aspects of Stamboul I can
hardly pass over the part played by the mosques and their dependencies.
A grey dome, a white minaret, a black cypress—that is the group which,
recurring in every possible composition, makes up so much of the colour
of the streets. On the monumental scale of the imperial mosques it ranks
among the supreme architectural effects. On a smaller scale it never
lacks charm. One element of this charm is so simple that I wonder it has
not been more widely imitated. Almost every mosque is enclosed by a wall,
sometimes of smooth ashler with a pointed coping, sometimes of plastered
cobblestones tiled at the top, often tufted with snapdragon and camomile
daisies. And this wall is pierced by a succession of windows which are
filled with metal grille work as simple or as elaborate as the builder
pleased. For he knew, the crafty man, that a grille or a lattice is
always pleasant to look through, and that it somehow lends interest to
the barest prospect.
There is hardly a street of Stamboul in which some such window does not
give a glimpse into the peace and gravity of the East. The windows do
not all look into mosque yards. Many of them open into the cloister of
a _medresseh_, a theological school, or some other pious foundation.
Many more look into a patch of ground where tall turbaned and lichened
stones lean among cypresses or where a more or less stately mausoleum,
a _türbeh_, lifts its dome. Life and death seem never very far apart in
Constantinople. In other cities the fact that life has an end is put out
of sight as much as possible. Here it is not only acknowledged but taken
advantage of for decorative purposes. Even Divan Yolou, the Street of
the Council, which is the principal avenue of Stamboul, owes much of its
character to the tombs and patches of cemetery that border it. Several
sultans and grand viziers and any number of more obscure persons lie
there neighbourly to the street, from which he who strolls, if not he who
runs, may read—if Arabic letters be familiar to him—half the history of
the empire.
Of the houses of the living I have already hinted that they are less
permanent in appearance. Until very recently they were all built of wood,
and they all burned down ever so often. Consequently Stamboul has begun
to rebuild herself in brick and concrete. I shall not complain of it,
for I admit that it is not well for Stamboul to continue burning down.
I also admit that Stamboul must modernise some of her habits. It is a
matter of the greatest urgency if Stamboul wishes to continue to exist.
Yet I am sorry to have the old wooden house of Stamboul disappear. It
is not merely that I am a fanatic in things of other times. That house
is, at its best, so expressive a piece of architecture, it is so simple
and so dignified in its lines, it contains so much wisdom for the modern
decorator, that I am sorry for it to disappear and leave no report of
itself. If I could do what I like, there is nothing I should like to
do more than to build, and to set a fashion of building, from less
perishable materials, and fitted out with a little more convenience,
a _konak_ of Stamboul. They are descended, I suppose, from the old
Byzantine houses. There is almost nothing Arabic about them, at all
events, and their interior arrangement resembles that of any _palazzo_ of
the Renaissance.
[Illustration: Divan Yolou]
The old wooden house of Stamboul is never very tall. It sits roomily
on the ground, seldom rising above two storeys. Its effect resides in
its symmetry and proportion, for there is almost no ornament about it.
The doorway is the most decorative part of the façade. Its two leaves
open very broad and square, with knockers in the form of lyres, or
big rings attached to round plates of intricately perforated copper.
Above it there will often be an oval light filled with a fan or star of
swallow-tailed wooden radii. The windows in general make up a great
part of the character of the house, so big and so numerous are they.
They are all latticed, unless Christians happen to live in the house;
but above the lattices is sometimes a second tier of windows, for
light, whose small round or oval panes are decoratively set in broad
white mullions of plaster. For the most original part of its effect,
however, the house counts on its upper storey, which juts out over the
street on stout timbers curved like the bow of a ship. Sometimes these
corbels balance each other right and left of the centre of the house,
which may be rounded on the principle of a New York “swell front,” only
more gracefully, and occasionally a third storey leans out beyond the
second. This arrangement gives more space to the upper floors than the
ground itself affords and also assures a better view. If it incidentally
narrows and darkens the street, I think the passer-by can only be
grateful for the fine line of the curving brackets and for the summer
shade. He is further protected from the sun by the broad eaves of the
house, supported, perhaps, by little brackets of their own. Under them
was stencilled of old an Arabic invocation, which more rarely decorated a
blue-and-white tile and which nowadays is generally printed on paper and
framed like a picture—“O Protector,” “O Conqueror,” “O Proprietor of all
Property.” And over all is a low-pitched roof, hardly ever gabled, of the
red tiles you see in Italy.
[Illustration: A house in Eyoub]
[Illustration: A house at Aya Kapou]
The inside of the house is almost as simple as the outside—or it used to
be before Europe infected it. A great entrance hall, paved with marble,
runs through the house from street to garden, for almost no house in
Stamboul lacks its patch of green; and branching or double stairways
lead to the upper regions. Other big halls are there, with niches
and fountains set in the wall. The rooms opening out on either hand
contain almost no furniture. The so-called Turkish corner which I fear
is still the pride of some Western interiors never originated anywhere
but in the diseased imagination of an upholsterer. The beauty of an old
Turkish room does not depend on what may have been brought into it by
chance, but on its own proportion and colour. On one side, covering the
entire wall, should be a series of cupboards and niches, which may be
charmingly decorated with painted flowers and gilt or coloured moulding.
The ceiling is treated in the same way, the strips of moulding being
applied in some simple design. Of real wood-carving there is practically
none, though the doors are panelled in great variety and the principle
of the lattice is much used. There may also be a fireplace, not set off
by a mantel, but by a tall pointed hood. And if there is a second tier
of windows they may contain stained glass or some interesting scheme of
mullioning. But do not look for chairs, tables, draperies, pictures, or
any of the thousand gimcracks of the West that only fill a room without
beautifying it. A long low divan runs under the windows, the whole length
of the wall, or perhaps of two, furnished with rugs and embroidered
cushions. Other rugs, as fine as you please, cover the floor. Of wall
space there is mercifully very little, for the windows crowd so closely
together that there is no room to put anything between them, and the
view is consciously made the chief ornament of the room. Still, on the
inner walls may hang a text or two, written by or copied from some great
calligraphist. The art of forming beautiful letters has been carried to
great perfection by the Turks, who do not admit—or who until recently did
not admit—any representation of living forms. Inscriptions, therefore,
take with them the place of pictures, and they collect the work of
famous calligraphs as Westerners collect other works of art. While a
real appreciation of this art requires a knowledge which few foreigners
possess, any foreigner should be able to take in the decorative value
of the Arabic letters. There are various systems of forming them, and
there is no limit to the number of ways in which they may be grouped.
By adding to an inscription its reverse, it is possible to make a
symmetrical figure which sometimes resembles a mosque, or the letters
may be fancifully made to suggest a bird or a ship. Texts from the
Koran, invocations of the Almighty, the names of the caliphs and of the
companions of the Prophet, and verses of Persian poetry are all favourite
subjects for the calligrapher. I have also seen what might very literally
be called a word-picture of the Prophet. To paint a portrait of him would
contravene all the traditions of the cult; but there exists a famous
description of him which is sometimes written in a circle, as it were the
outline of a head, on an illuminated panel.
[Illustration: The house of the pipe]
However, I did not start out to describe the interior of Stamboul, of
which I know as little as any man. That, indeed, is one element of
the charm of Stamboul—the sense of reserve, of impenetrability, that
pervades its Turkish quarters. The lattices of the windows, the veils of
the women, the high garden walls, the gravity and perfect quiet of the
streets at night, all contribute to that sense. From the noisy European
quarter on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, where life is a thing
of shreds and patches, without coherent associations and without roots,
one looks over to Stamboul and gets the sense of another, an unknown
life, reaching out secret filaments to the uttermost parts of the earth.
Strange faces, strange costumes, strange dialects come and go, on errands
not necessarily too mysterious, yet mysterious enough for one who knows
nothing of the literature of the East, its habits, its real thought and
hope and belief. We speak glibly of knowing Turkey and the Turks—we
who have lived five or ten or fifty years among them; but very few of
us, I notice, have ever known them well enough to learn their language
or read their books. And so into Stamboul we all go as outsiders. Yet
there are aspects of Stamboul which are not so inaccessible. Stamboul
at work, Stamboul as a market-place, is a Stamboul which welcomes the
intruder—albeit with her customary gravity: if a man buttonholes you in
the street and insists that you look at his wares you may be sure that
he is no Turk. This is also a Stamboul which has never been, which never
can be, sufficiently celebrated. The Bazaars, to be sure, figure in all
the books of travel, and are visited by every one; but they are rather
sighed over nowadays, as having lost a former glory. I do not sigh over
them, myself. I consider that by its very arrangement the Grand Bazaar
possesses an interest which can never disappear. It is a sort of vast
department store, on one floor though not on one level, whose cobbled
aisles wander up hill and down dale, and are vaulted solidly over with
stone. And in old times, before the shops or costumes of Pera were, and
when the _beau monde_ came here to buy, a wonderful department store
it must have been. In our economic days there may be less splendour,
but there can hardly be less life; and if Manchester prints now largely
take the place of Broussa silk and Scutari velvet, they have just as
much colour for the modern impressionist. They also contribute to
the essential colour of Constantinople, which is neither Asiatic nor
European, but a mingling of both.
A last fragment of old Stamboul is walled in the heart of this maze,
a square enclosure of deeper twilight which is called the _Bezesten_.
Tradition has it that the shopkeepers of the _Bezesten_ originally served
God as well as mammon, and were required to give a certain amount of
time to their mosques. Be that as it may, they still dress in robe and
turban, and they keep shorter hours than their brethren of the outer
bazaar. They sit at the receipt of custom, not in shops but on continuous
platforms, grave old men to whom it is apparently one whether you come or
go, each before his own shelf and cupboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl;
and they deal only in old things. I do not call them antiques, though
such things may still be picked up—for their price—in the _Bezesten_ and
out of it, and though the word is often on the lips of the old men. I
will say for them, however, that on their lips it merely means something
exceptional of its kind. They could recommend you an egg or a spring lamb
no more highly than by calling it _antika_. At any rate, the _Bezesten_
is almost a little too good to be true. It might have been arranged
by some Gérôme who studied the exact effect of dusty shafts of light
striking down from high windows on the most picturesque confusion of old
things—stuffs, arms, rugs, brasses, porcelain, jewelry, silver, odds and
ends of bric-à-brac. In that romantic twilight an antique made in Germany
becomes precious, and the most abominable modern rug takes on the tone of
time.
The real rug market of Constantinople is not in the Bazaars nor yet in
the _hans_ of Mahmoud Pasha, but in the Stamboul custom-house. There
the bales that come down from Persia and the Caucasus, as well as from
Asia Minor and even from India and China, are opened and stored in great
piles of colour, and there the wholesale dealers of Europe and America
do most of their buying. The rugs are sold by the square metre in the
bale, so that you may buy a hundred pieces in order to get one or two
you particularly want. Burly Turkish porters or black-capped Persians
are there to turn over the rugs for you, shaking out the dust of Asia
into the European air. Bargaining is no less long and fierce than in
the smaller affairs of the Bazaars, though both sides know better what
they are up to. Perhaps it is for this reason that the sale is often
made by a third party. The referee, having first obtained the consent
of the principals to abide by his decision—“Have you content?” is what
he asks them—makes each sign his name in a note-book, in which he then
writes the compromise price, saying, “Sh-sh!” if they protest. Or else
he takes a hand of each between both of his own and names the price as
he shakes the hands up and down, the others crying out: “_Aman_! Do not
scorch me!” Then coffees are served all around and everybody departs
happy. As communications become easier the buyers go more and more to
the headquarters of rug-making, so that Constantinople will not remain
indefinitely what it is now, the greatest rug market in the world. But it
will long be the chief assembling and distributing point for this ancient
trade.
There are two other covered markets, both in the vicinity of the Bridge,
which I recommend to all hunters after local colour. The more important,
from an architectural point of view, is called Mîssîr Charshî, Corn
or Egyptian Market, though Europeans know it as the Spice Bazaar. It
consists of two vaulted stone streets that cross each other at right
angles. It was so badly damaged in the earthquake of 1894 that many
of its original tenants moved away, giving place to stuffy quilt and
upholstery men. Enough of the former are left, however, to make a museum
of strange powders and electuaries, and to fill the air with the aroma of
the East. And the quaint woodwork of the shops, the dusty little ships
and mosques that hang as signs above them, the decorative black frescoing
of the walls, are quite as good in their way as the _Bezesten_. The Dried
Fruit Bazaar, I am afraid, is a less permanent piece of old Stamboul. It
is sure to burn up or to be torn down one of these days, because it is
a section of the long street—almost the only level one in the city—that
skirts the Golden Horn. I hope it will not disappear, however, before
some etcher has caught the duskiness of its branching curve, with squares
of sky irregularly spaced among the wooden rafters, and corresponding
squares of light on the cobblestones below, and a dark side corridor or
two running down to a bright perspective of water and ships. All sorts of
nuts and dried fruits are sold there, in odd company with candles and the
white ribbons and artificial flowers without which no Greek or Armenian
can be properly married.
This whole quarter is one of markets, and some of them were old in
Byzantine times. The fish market, one of the richest in the world, is
here. The vegetable market is here, too, at the head of the outer bridge,
where it can be fed by the boats of the Marmora. And all night long
horse bells jingle through the city, bringing produce which is sold in
the public square in the small hours of the morning. Provisions of other
kinds, some of them strange to behold and stranger to smell, are to be
had in the same region. In the purlieus of Yeni Jami, too, may be admired
at its season a kind of market which is a specialty of Constantinople.
The better part of it is installed in the mosque yard, where cloth and
girdles and shoes and other commodities meet for the raiment of man and
woman are sold under awnings or big canvas umbrellas. But other sections
of it, as the copper market and the flower market, overflow beyond the
Spice Bazaar. The particularity of this Monday market is that it is gone
on Tuesday, being held in a different place on every day of the week.
Then this is a district of _hans_, which harbour a commerce of their own.
Some of these are hotels, where comers from afar camp out in tiers of
stone galleries about an open court. Others are places of business or of
storage and, as the latter, are more properly known by the name _kapan_.
The old _Fontego_ or _Fondaco dei Turchi_ in Venice, and the _Fondaco
dei Tedeschi_, are built on the same plan and originally served the same
purpose. The Italian word _fondaco_ comes from the Arabic _fîndîk_,
which in turn was derived from the πανδοχεῖον of Constantinople. But
whether any of these old stone buildings might trace a Byzantine or
Venetian ancestry I cannot say. The habit of Stamboul to burn up once
in so often made them very necessary, and in spite of the changes that
have taken place in business methods they are still largely used. And all
about them are the headquarters of crafts—wood-turning, basket-making,
amber-cutting, brass-beating—in alleys which are highly profitable to
explore.
One of the things that make those alleys not least profitable is the
grape-vine that somehow manages to grow in them. It is no rarity, I am
happy to report. That grape-vine is one of the most decorative elements
of Stamboul streets; and to me, at least, it has a whole philosophy to
tell. It was never planted for the profit of its fruit. Vines allowed
to grow as those vines grow cannot bear very heavily, and they are too
accessible for their grapes to be guarded. They were planted, like the
_traghetto_ vines in Venice, because they give shade and because they are
good to look upon. Some of them are trained on wires across the street,
making of the public way an arbour that seduces the passer-by to stop
and taste the taste of life.
Fortunately there are special conveniences for this, in places where
there are vines and places where there are not. Such are the places
that the arriving traveller sees from his train, where meditative
citizens sit cross-legged of a morning over coffee and tobacco. The
traveller continues to see them wherever he goes, and never without a
meditative citizen or two. The coffee-houses indeed are an essential
part of Stamboul, and in them the outsider comes nearest, perhaps, to
intimacy with that reticent city. The number of these institutions
in Constantinople is quite fabulous. They have the happiest tact for
locality, seeking movement, strategic corners, open prospects, the
company of water and trees. No quarter is so miserable or so remote as to
be without one. Certain thoroughfares carry on almost no other form of
business. A sketch of a coffee-shop may often be seen in the street, in
a scrap of sun or shade, according to the season, where a stool or two
invite the passer-by to a moment of contemplation. And no _han_ or public
building is without its facilities for dispensing the indispensable.
[Illustration: That grape-vine is one of the most decorative elements of
Stamboul streets]
I know not whether the fact may contribute anything to the psychology
of prohibition, but it is surprising to learn how recent an invention
coffee-houses are, as time goes in this part of the world, and what
opposition they first encountered. The first coffee-shop was opened in
Stamboul in 1554, by one Shemsi, a native of Aleppo. A man of his race it
was, an Arab dervish of the thirteenth century, who is supposed to have
discovered the properties of the coffee berry. Shemsi returned to Syria
in three years, taking with him some five thousand ducats and little
imagination of what uproar his successful enterprise was to cause.
The beverage so quickly appreciated was as quickly looked upon by the
orthodox as insidious to the public morals—partly because it seemed to
merit the prohibition of the Koran against intoxicants, partly because it
brought the faithful together in places other than mosques. “The black
enemy of sleep and of love,” as a poet styled the Arabian berry, was
variously denounced as one of the Four Elements of the World of Pleasure,
one of the Four Pillars of the Tent of Lubricity, one of the Four
Cushions of the Couch of Voluptuousness, and one of the Four Ministers
of the Devil—the other three being tobacco, opium, and wine. The name of
the drug may have had something to do with the hostility it encountered.
_Kahveh_, whence _café_ and coffee, is a slight modification of an
Arabic word—literally meaning that which takes away the appetite—which is
one of the names of wine.
[Illustration: A waterside coffee-house]
Süleïman the Magnificent, during whose reign the _kahveji_ Shemsi made
his little fortune, took no notice of the agitation against the new
drink. But some of his successors pursued those who indulged in it with
unheard-of severity. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
coffee-drinkers were persecuted more rigorously in Constantinople than
wine-bibbers have ever been in England or America. Their most unrelenting
enemy was the bloody Mourad IV—himself a drunkard—who forbade the use
of coffee or tobacco under pain of death. He and his nephew Mehmed IV
after him used to patrol the city in disguise, _à la_ Haroun al Rashid,
in order to detect and punish for themselves any violation of the law.
But the Greek taverns only became the more popular. And the latter sultan
was the means of extending the habit to Europe—which, for the rest, he no
doubt considered its proper habitat. To be sure, it was merely during his
reign that the English made their first acquaintance of our after-dinner
friend. It was brought back from Smyrna in 1652 by a Mr. Edwards, member
of the Levant Company, whose house was so besieged by those curious to
taste the strange concoction that he set up his Greek servant in the
first coffee-house in London. There, too, coffee was soon looked upon
askance in high places. A personage no more strait-laced than Charles
II caused a court to hand down the following decision: “The Retayling
of Coffee may be an innocente Trayde; but as it is used to nourysshe
Sedition, spredde Lyes, and scandalyse Greate Menne, it may also be a
common Nuisaunce.” In the meantime an envoy of Mehmed IV introduced
coffee in 1669 to the court of Louis XIV. And Vienna acquired the
habit fourteen years later, when that capital was besieged by the same
sultan. After the rout of the Turks by John Sobiesky, a vast quantity
of the fragrant brown drug was found among the besiegers’ stores. Its
use was made known to the Viennese by a Pole who had been interpreter to
a company of Austrian merchants in Constantinople. For his bravery in
carrying messages through the Turkish lines he was given the right to
establish the first coffee-house in Vienna.
The history of tobacco in Turkey was very much the same. It first
appeared from the West in 1605, during the reign of Ahmed I. Under Mourad
IV a famous pamphlet was written against it by an unconscious forerunner
of modernity, who also advocated a mediæval Postum made of bean pods.
Snuff became known in 1642 as an attempt to elude the repressive laws
of Sultan Ibrahim. But the habit of smoking, like the taste for coffee,
gained such headway that no one could stop it. Mahmoud I was the last
sultan who attempted to do so, when he closed the coffee-houses for
political reasons in 1730.
There is, it is true, a coffee habit, whose abuse is no less demoralising
than that of any other drug. But it is so rare, and Stamboul
coffee-houses are so different from American or even most European cafés,
that it is hard to imagine their causing so much commotion. Nothing
stronger than coffee is dispensed in them—unless I except the _nargileh_,
the water-pipe, whose effect is wonderfully soothing and innocent at
first, though wonderfully deadly in the end to the novice. The tobacco
used is not the ordinary weed but a much coarser and stronger one, called
_toumbeki_. Smoking is the more germane to coffee-shops, because in the
Turkish idiom you drink tobacco. You may also drink tea, in little
glasses, as the Persians do. And to desecrate it, or coffee either, with
the admixture of milk is an unheard-of sacrilege. But you may content
yourself with so mild a refreshment as a bit of _rahat locoum_, more
familiar to you, perhaps, as Turkish Delight, and a glass of water.
[Illustration: “Drinking” a _nargileh_]
[Illustration: Fez-presser in a coffee-house]
The etiquette of the coffee-house, of those coffee-houses which have not
been too much infected by Europe, is one of their most characteristic
features. I have seen a newcomer salute one after another each person in
a crowded coffee-room, once on entering the door, and again on taking
his seat, and be so saluted in return—either by putting the right hand
on the heart and uttering the greeting _merhaba_, or by making the
_temenna_, that triple sweep of the hand which is the most graceful of
salutes. I have also seen the entire company rise on the entrance of
an old man, and yield him the corner of honour. As for the essential
function of the coffee-house, it has its own traditions. A glass of water
comes with the coffee, and a foreigner can usually be detected by the
order in which he takes them. A Turk sips his water first. He lifts his
coffee-cup, whether it possess a handle or no, by the saucer, managing
the two in a dexterous way of his own. And custom favours a rather noisy
enjoyment of the cup that cheers, as expressing appreciation and general
well-being. The current price for a coffee, in the heart of Stamboul, is
ten _para_—something like a penny—for which the waiter will say: “May God
give you blessing.” Mark, too, that you do not tip him. I have often
been surprised to be charged no more than the tariff, although I gave a
larger piece to be changed, and it was perfectly evident that I was a
foreigner. That is an experience which rarely befalls a traveller even in
his own land. It has further happened to me to be charged nothing at all,
nay, to be steadfastly refused when I persisted in attempting to pay,
simply because I was a traveller, and therefore a “guest.”
Altogether the habit of the coffee-house is one that requires a certain
leisure. Being a passion less violent and less shameful than others, I
suppose, it is indulged in with more of the humanities. You do not bolt
coffee as you bolt the fire-waters of the West, without ceremony, in
retreats withdrawn from the public eye. Neither, having taken coffee,
do you leave the coffee-house. On the contrary, there are reasons why
you should stay—and not only to take another coffee. There are benches
to curl up on, if you would do as the Romans do, having first neatly
put off your shoes from off your feet. There are texts and patriotic
pictures to look at, to say nothing of the wonderful brass arrangements
wherein the _kahveji_ concocts his mysteries. There is, of course, the
view. To enjoy it you sit on a low rush-bottomed stool in front of the
coffee-shop, under a grape-vine, perhaps, or a scented wistaria, or
a bough of a neighbourly plane-tree; and if you like you may have an
aromatic pot of basil beside you to keep away the flies. Then there are
more active distractions. For coffee-houses are also barber shops, where
men cause to be shaved not only their chins but different parts of their
crowns, according to their countries; and a festoon of teeth on a string
or a suggestive jar of leeches reminds you how catholic was once the art
of the barber in other parts of the world. There is also the resource
of games—such as backgammon, which is called _tavli_ and played in
Persian, and draughts, and cards. They say, indeed, that bridge came from
Constantinople. There is a club in Pera which claims the honour of having
communicated that passion to the Western world. But I must confess that
I have yet to see an open hand of the long narrow cards you find in a
coffee-house.
[Illustration: Playing _tavli_]
The great resource of coffee-houses, however, is the company you meet
there. The company is better at certain hours than at others. Early in
the day the majority of the habitués may be at work, while late in the
evening they will have disappeared altogether. For Stamboul has not quite
forgotten the habits of the tent. At night it is a deserted city. But
just before and just after dark the coffee-houses are full of a colour
which an outsider is often content to watch through lighted windows.
They are the clubs of the poorer classes. Men of a street, a trade, or
a province meet regularly at coffee-houses kept often by one of their
own people. So much are the humbler coffee-houses frequented by a fixed
clientèle that the most vagrant impressionist can realise how truly
the old Turkish writers called them Schools of Knowledge. Schools of
knowledge they must be, indeed, for those capable of taking part in their
councils. Even for one who is not, they are full of information about the
people who live in Stamboul, the variety of clothes they wear, the number
of dialects they speak, the infinity of places they come from. I am at
the end of my chapter and I cannot stop to descant on these things—much
less on the historic guilds which still subsist in the coffee-house
world. The guilds are nearly at the end of their chapter, too.
Constitutions and changes more radical are turning them into something
more like modern trade-unions. Their tradition is still vivid enough,
though, for it to be written, as in the laws of Medes and Persians, that
no man but one of Iran shall drive a house-builder’s donkey; that only
a Mohammedan Albanian of the south shall lay a pavement or a southern
Albanian who is a Christian and wears an orange girdle shall lay railroad
ties; that none save a landlubber from the hinterland of the Black Sea
may row a caïque or, they of Konia peddle _yo’ourt_, or——
[Illustration: The plane-tree of Chengel-kyöi]
It is no use for me to go on. I would fill pages and I probably would
not make it any clearer how clannish these men are. Other things about
them are just as interesting—to the race of men that likes Stamboul. That
first question, for instance, that comes to one on the arriving train,
at the sight of so many leisurely and meditative persons, returns again
and again to the mind. How is it that these who burst once out of the
East with so much noise and terror, who battered their way through the
walls of this city and carried the green standard of the Prophet to the
gates of Vienna, sit here now rolling cigarettes and sipping little cups
of coffee? Some conclude that their course is run, while others upbraid
them for wasting so their time. For my part, I like to think that such
extremes may argue a complexity of character for whose unfolding it would
be wise to wait. I also like to think that there may be some people in
the world for whom time is more than money. At any rate, it pleases me
that all the people in the world are not the same. It pleases me that
some are content to sit in coffee-houses, to enjoy simple pleasures,
to watch common spectacles, to find that in life which every one may
possess—light, growing things, the movement of water, and an outlook on
the ways of men.
II
MOSQUE YARDS
I often wonder what a Turk, a Turk of the people, would make of a Western
church. In an old cathedral close, perhaps, he might feel to a degree
at home. The architecture of the building would set it apart from those
about it, the canons’ houses and other subsidiary structures would not
seem unnatural to him, and, though the arrangement of the interior would
be foreign, he would probably understand in what manner of place he
was—and his religion would permit him to worship there in his own way.
But a modern city church, and particularly an American city church,
would offer almost nothing familiar to him. It would, very likely, be
less monumental in appearance than neighbouring buildings. There would
be little or no open space about it. And strangest of all would be the
entire absence of life about the place for six days out of seven. The
most active institutional church can never give the sense a mosque does
of being a living organism, an acknowledged focus of life. The larger
mosques are open every day and all day, from sunrise to sunset, while
even the smallest is accessible for the five daily hours of prayer. And,
what is more, people go to them. Nor do they go to them as New Yorkers
sometimes step into a down-town church at noontime, feeling either
exceptionally pious or a little uneasy lest some one catch them in the
act. It is as much a matter of course as any other habit of life, and as
little one to be self-conscious about. By which I do not mean to imply
that there are neither dissenters nor sceptics in Islam. I merely mean
that Islam seems to be a far more vital and central force with the mass
of those who profess it than Protestant Christianity.
However, I did not set out to compare religions. All I wish is to
point out the importance of mosques and their precincts in the picture
of Constantinople. The yards of the imperial mosques take the place,
in Stamboul, of squares and parks. Even many a smaller mosque enjoys
an amplitude of perspective that might be envied by cathedrals like
Chartres, or Cologne, or Milan. These roomy enclosures are surrounded by
the windowed walls which I have already celebrated. Within them cypresses
are wont to cluster, and plane-trees willingly cast their giant shadow.
Gravestones also congregate there. And there a centre of life is which
can never lack interest for the race of men that likes Stamboul. Scribes
sit under the trees ready to write letters for soldiers, women, and
others of the less literate sort. Seal cutters ply their cognate trade,
and cut your name on a bit of brass almost as quickly as you can write
it. Barbers, distinguishable by a brass plate with a nick in it for
your chin, are ready to exercise another art upon your person. Pedlers
come and go, selling beads, perfumes, fezzes, and sweets which they
carry on their heads in big wooden trays, and drinks which may tempt you
less than their brass receptacles. A more stable commerce is visible in
some mosque yards, or on the day of the week when a peripatetic market
elects to pitch its tents there; and coffee-houses, of course, abound.
Not that there are coffee-houses in every mosque yard. I know one small
mosque yard, that of Mahmoud Pasha—off the busy street of that name
leading to the Bazaars—which is entirely given up to coffee-houses. And
a perfect mosque yard it is, grove-like with trees and looked upon by a
great portico of the time of the Conqueror. There is something both grave
and human about mosque yards and coffee-houses both that excellently
suits them to each other. The combination is one that I, at any rate, am
incapable of resisting. I dare not guess how many days of my life I have
I cannot say wasted in the coffee-houses of Mahmoud Pasha, and Yeni Jami,
and Baïezid, and Shah-zadeh, and Fatih. The company has an ecclesiastical
tinge. Turbans bob much together and the neighbouring fountains of
ablution play a part in the scene. And if the company does not disperse
altogether it thins very much when the voice of the _müezin_, the
chanter, sounds from his high white tower. “God is most great!” he
chants to the four quarters of the earth. “I bear witness that there is
not a god save God! I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God!
Hasten to the worship of God! Hasten to permanent blessedness! God is
most great!”
[Illustration: The yard of Hekim-zadeh Ali Pasha]
In the mosque the atmosphere is very much that of the mosque yard.
There may be more reverence, perhaps, but people evidently feel very
much at home. Men meet there out of prayer time, and women too, for
what looks like, though it may not always be, a _sacra conversazione_
of the painters. Students con over their Koran, rocking to and fro on a
cushion in front of a little inlaid table. Solitary devotees prostrate
themselves in a corner, untroubled by children playing among the pillars
or a turbaned professor lecturing, cross-legged, to a cross-legged class
in theology. The galleries of some mosques are safety-deposit vaults
for their parishioners, and when the parish burns down the parishioners
deposit themselves there too. After the greater conflagration of the
Balkan War thousands of homeless refugees from Thrace and Macedonia
camped out for months in the mosques of Stamboul. Even the pigeons that
haunt so many mosque yards know that the doors are always open, and are
scarcely to be persuaded from taking up their permanent abode on tiled
cornices or among the marble stalactites of capitals.
[Illustration: “The Little Mosque”
From an etching by Ernest D. Roth]
One thing that makes a mosque look more hospitable than a church is its
arrangement. There are no seats or aisles to cut up the floor. Matting is
spread there, over which are laid in winter the carpets of the country;
and before you step on to this clean covering you put off your shoes from
off your feet—unless you shuffle about in the big slippers that are kept
in some mosques for foreign visitors. The general impression is that of
a private interior magnified and dignified. The central object of this
open space is the _mihrab_, a niche pointing toward Mecca. It is usually
set in an apse which is raised a step above the level of the nave. In it
is a prayer-rug for the _imam_, and on each side, in a brass or silver
standard, an immense candle, which is lighted only on the seven holy
nights of the year and during Ramazan. At the right of the _mihrab_,
as you face it, stands the _mimber_, a sort of pulpit, at the top of a
stairway and covered by a pointed canopy, which is used only for the noon
prayer of Friday or on other special occasions. To the left, and nearer
the door, is a smaller pulpit called the _kürsi_. This is a big cushioned
armchair or throne, reached by a short ladder, where the _imam_ sits to
speak on ordinary occasions. There will also be one or more galleries
for singers, and in larger mosques, usually at the _mihrab_ end of the
left-hand gallery, an imperial tribune enclosed by grille work and
containing its own sacred niche. The chandeliers are a noticeable feature
of every mosque, hanging very low and containing not candles but glass
cups of oil with a floating wick. I am afraid, however, that this soft
light will be presently turned into electricity. From the chandeliers
often hang ostrich eggs—emblems of eternity—and other homely ornaments.
[Illustration: Entrance to the forecourt of Sultan Baïezid II]
[Illustration: Detail of the Süleïmanieh]
The place of the mosque in the Turkish community is symbolised, like
that of the mediæval cathedral, by its architectural pre-eminence.
Mark, however, that Stamboul has half a dozen cathedrals instead of
one. It would be hard to overestimate how much of the character of
Stamboul depends on the domes and minarets that so inimitably accident
the heights between the Golden Horn and the Marmora. And on closer
acquaintance the mosques are found to contain almost all that Stamboul
has of architectural pretension. They form an achievement, to my mind,
much greater than the world at large seems to realise. The easy current
dictum that they are merely more or less successful imitations of St.
Sophia takes no account of the evolution—particularly of the central
dome—which may be traced through the mosques of Konia, Broussa, and
Adrianople, and which reaches its legitimate climax in Stamboul. The
likelier fact is that the mosque of Stamboul, inspired by the same remote
Asiatic impulse as the Byzantine church, absorbed what was proper to it
in Byzantine art, refining away the heaviness or overfloridness of the
East, until in the hands of a master like Sinan it attained a supreme
elegance without losing any of its dignity. Yet it would be a mistake to
look for all Turkish architecture in Sinan. The mosques of Atik Ali Pasha
and of Sultan Baïezid II are there to prove of what mingled simplicity
and nobility was capable an obscure architect of an earlier century. His
name is supposed to have been Haïreddin, and he, first among the Turks,
used the monolithic shaft and the stalactite capital. How perfect they
are, though, in the arcades of Baïezid! Nothing could be better in its
way than the forecourt of that mosque, and its inlaid minarets are unique
of their kind. Nor did architecture die with Sinan. Yeni Jami, looking
at Galata along the outer bridge, is witness thereof. The pile of the
Süleïmanieh, whose four minarets catch your eye from so many points of
the compass, is perhaps more masculine. But the silhouette of Yeni Jami,
that mosque of princesses, has an inimitable grace. The way in which each
structural necessity adds to the general effect, the climactic building
up of buttress and cupola, the curve of the dome, the proportion of
the minarets, could hardly be more perfect. Although brought up in the
vociferous tradition of Ruskin, I am so far unfaithful to the creed of
my youth as to find pleasure, too, in rococo mosques like Zeïneb Sultan,
Nouri Osmanieh, and Laleli Jami. And the present generation, under men
like Vedad Bey and the architects of the _Evkaf_, are reviving their art
in a new and interesting direction.
To give any comprehensive account of the mosques of Stamboul would be to
write a history of Ottoman architecture, and for that I lack both space
and competence. I may, however, as an irresponsible lounger in mosque
yards, touch on one or two characteristic aspects of mosques and their
decoration which strike a foreigner’s eye. The frescoing or stencilling
of domes and other curved interior surfaces, for instance, is an art that
has very little been noticed—even by the Turks, judging from the sad
estate to which the art has fallen. Some people might object to calling
it an art at all. Let such a one be given a series of domes and vaults to
ornament by this simple means, however, and he will find how difficult it
is to produce an effect both decorative and dignified. The restorers of
the nineteenth century spoiled many a fine interior by their atrocious
baroque draperies or colour-blind colour schemes. If I were a true
believer I could never pray in mosques like Ahmed I or Yeni Jami, because
the decorator evidently noticed that the prevailing tone of the tiles was
blue and dipped his brush accordingly—into a blue of a different key.
Yet there are domes which prove how fine an art the Turks once made of
this half-mechanical decoration. One of the best in Stamboul is in the
tomb of the princes, behind the Shah-zadeh mosque. The stencilling is
a charming arabesque design in black, dark red, pale blue, and orange,
perhaps happily toned by time, which a recent restoration was wise enough
to spare. The tomb of Roxelana and the great tomb beside Yeni Jami also
contain a little interesting stencilling. But the most complete example
of good work of this kind is outside Stamboul, in the Yeni Valideh
mosque of Scutari. The means used are of the simplest, the colours being
merely black and dull red, with a little dull yellow; but the lines are
so fine and so sapiently spaced on their broad background of white that
the effect is very much that of a Persian shawl. A study of that ceiling
should be made compulsory for every decorator of a mosque—and might yield
suggestions not a few to his Western cousin.
[Illustration: Yeni Jami]
The windows of mosques are another detail that always interests me. They
are rarely very large, but there are a great many of them and they give
no dim religious light, making up a great part as they do of the human
sunniness of the interior. A first tier of square windows stand almost at
the level of the floor, and are provided with folding shutters which are
carved with many little panels or with a Moorish pattern of interlaced
stars. Higher up the windows are arched and are made more interesting
by the broad plaster mullions of which I have already spoken. These
make against the light a grille of round, oval, or drop-shaped openings
which are wonderfully decorative in themselves. The same principle is
refined and complicated into a result more decorative still when the
plaster setting forms a complete design of arabesques, flowers, or
writing, sometimes framing symmetrically spaced circles or quadrangles,
sometimes composing an all-over pattern, and filled in with minute
panes of coloured glass. Huysmans compared the windows of Chartres to
Persian rugs, because the smallness of the figures and their height
above the floor make them merely conventional arrangements of colour.
Here, however, we have the real principle of the Oriental rug. Turkish
windows contain no figures at all, nor any of that unhappy attempt at
realism that mars so much modern glass. The secret of the effect lies in
the smallness of the panes used and the visibility of the plaster design
in which they are set. And what an effect of jewelry may be produced in
this way is to be seen in the Süleïmanieh, and Yeni Jami—where two slim
cypresses make delicious panels of green light above the _mihrab_—besides
other mosques and tombs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Mosques are even more notable than private houses for the inscriptions
on their walls. Every visitor to St. Sophia remembers the great green
medallions bearing the names of the chief personages of Islam in letters
of gold. In purely Turkish mosques similar medallions may be seen, or
large inscriptions stencilled like panels on the white walls, or small
texts hanging near the floor. But there is a more architectural use
of writing, above doors and windows or in the form of a frieze. When
designed by a master like Hassan Chelibi of Kara Hissar, the great
calligrapher of Süleïman’s time, and executed in simple dark blue and
white in one of the imperial tile factories, this art became a means of
decoration which we can only envy the Turks. Such inscriptions are always
from the Koran, of course, and they are often happily chosen for the
place they occupy. Around the great dome of the Süleïmanieh, and lighted
by its circle of windows, runs this verse: “God is the light of the
heavens and of the earth. His light is like a window in the wall, wherein
a lamp burns, covered with glass. The glass shines like a star. The lamp
is kindled from the oil of a blessed tree: not of the east, not of the
west, it lights whom he wills.”
It is not only for inscriptions, however, that tiles are used in mosques.
Stamboul, indeed, is a museum of tiles that has never been adequately
explored. Nor, in general, is very much known about Turkish ceramics.
I suppose nothing definite will be known till the Turks themselves, or
some one who can read their language, takes the trouble to look up the
records of mosques and other public buildings. The splendid tiles of
Süleïman’s period have sometimes been attributed a Persian and sometimes
a Rhodian origin—for they have many similarities with the famous Rhodian
plates. The Turks themselves generally suppose that their tiles came
from Kütahya, where a factory still produces work of an inferior kind.
The truth lies between these various theories. That any number of the
tiles of Constantinople came from Persia is impossible. So many of
them could not have been safely brought so far overland, and it is
inconceivable that they would have fitted into their places as they do,
or that any number of buildings would have been erected to fit their
tiles. The Rhodian theory is equally improbable, partly for similar
reasons though chiefly because the legend of Rhodes is all but exploded.
The Musée de Cluny is almost the last believer in the idea that its
unrivalled collection of Rhodian plates ever came from Rhodes. Many of
them probably came from different parts of Asia Minor. That tiles were
produced in Asia Minor long before the capture of Constantinople we know
from the monuments of Broussa, Konia, and other places. They were quite
a different kind of tile, to be sure, of only one colour or containing
a simple arabesque design, which was varied by a sort of tile mosaic.
Many of them, too, were six-sided. The only examples of these older
tiles in Constantinople are to be seen at the _Chinili Kyöshk_ of the
imperial museum—the Tile Pavilion—and the tomb of Mahmoud Pasha. It is a
notorious fact, however, that the sultans who fought against the Persians
brought back craftsmen of all kinds from that country and settled
them in different parts of the empire. Selim I, for instance, when he
captured Tabriz, imported the best tile makers of that city, as well as
from Ardebil and Kashan—whence one of the words for tiles, _kyashi_—and
settled them in Isnik. This is the city which under an older name had
already produced the historian Dion Cassius and the Nicene Creed. Other
factories are known to have existed in Kastambol, Konia, Nicomedia, and
Constantinople itself. One is supposed to have been in Eyoub, though
no trace of it remains to-day unless in the potteries of Chömlekjiler.
Another, I have been told, flourished at Balat. I know not whether it
may have been the same which Sultan Ahmed III transferred in 1724 from
Nicæa to the ruined Byzantine palace of Tekfour Seraï. A colony of
glass-blowers there are the last remnant to-day of the tile makers of two
hundred years ago.
[Illustration: Tile panel in Rüstem Pasha]
The art itself declined and gradually died out as the sultans stopped
making conquests and building mosques. For the imperial mosques are
monuments of victory, built and endowed out of the spoils of war. After
the martial period of the empire came to an end with Süleïman I only one
mosque of importance, that of Ahmed I, was built by a reigning sultan
in his own name. But the tiles of the imperial factories, after many
fires and much thieving, still make up what is most brilliant and most
durable in the colour of Stamboul. The best tiles are Nicene of the
sixteenth century, that extraordinary _cinque-cento_, when so many of the
best things of the world were produced. They are distinguished by the
transparent white glaze of their background, on which are drawn tulips,
carnations, wild hyacinths, and a certain long bent serrated leaf common
to the Rhodian plate. The chief colours are a dark and a turquoise blue
and a tomato red, green and yellow occurring more rarely. And they are
never quite smooth, the red in particular usually being in slight relief.
This gives them a variety which is absent from many modern tiles.
The feeling for variety, in fact, was one great secret of Turkish tile
making and tile setting. Sinan, for instance, used tiles very sparingly
in his larger buildings. He was great enough to depend very little on
ornament for his effect, and he knew that tiles would look like paper
or linoleum—if such things existed in his day!—on a monumental surface.
But he had a perfect tact of using this tapestry wherever he wanted a
touch of colour or distinction—over a window, along a cornice, around
a _mihrab_. His masterpiece in this decoration is the mosque of Rüstem
Pasha, son-in-law and Grand Vizier to Süleïman the Magnificent. This
mosque, lifted on retaining walls above the noise of its busy quarter,
has a portico which must have been magnificently tiled—judging from the
panel at the left of the main door—and the whole interior is tiled to
the spring of the dome. The mosque is small enough for the effect of the
tiles to tell—and to be almost ruined by the fearful modern frescoes of
the vaulting. The guides of Pera have a favourite legend to the effect
that Rüstem Pasha brought back these tiles from his wars in Persia and
built a mosque for them to save giving them up to his imperial master.
But no one need be an expert to see the impossibility of any such story.
The tiles must have been designed for the walls which they incrust,
and by a supreme master of decoration. I should not be surprised to
learn that Sinan himself drew them all. There is a tall narrow panel on
either side of the mosque, between two windows, which seems to me one
of the most perfect ways imaginable of filling such a space. So are the
spandrels of the arches supporting the gallery, and the niche of the
_mihrab_, and the back of the _mimber_. All through the mosque, however,
the way in which the artist has varied his designs and colours, while
never losing his unity of effect, is a piece of genius. Narrow spaces and
points of special interest are treated each in its own way; but unbroken
surfaces of wall are never allowed to become monotonous by covering them
with only one form of tile. They are broken up by narrower border tiles
into panels, each of which is treated differently though harmonising with
its neighbour and balancing the corresponding space on the opposite side
of the mosque. Even within one of these spaces monotony is avoided by the
fact that the tiles are almost never of a repeating pattern. Two or four
tiles are required to make up the scheme. And then the pattern does not
always fit the tiles, so that the interstices come in different places
in different parts of the design, and you feel that the tiles could
only have been made for that one space. In the case of special panels,
of course, many tiles are required to make up the pattern. The splendid
flowered panel in the portico contains forty-five tiles, exclusive of the
border, and every one of them different. Such work was not commercial
tile making. It was an art.
[Illustration: The _mihrab_ of Rüstem Pasha]
[Illustration: In Rüstem Pasha]
Two mosques of a later period in Stamboul are completely tiled, that
of Sultan Ahmed I and the one begun by his wife—Yeni Jami. They prove
the wisdom of Sinan in not attempting to tile a large interior. Still,
the gallery of Sultan Ahmed also proves that the architect was not
altogether ignorant of what he was about. He put his best tiles there,
where they can only be seen at close range. And his best is very good. I
have counted twenty-nine varieties of tiles there, or rather of designs,
divided, like those of Rüstem Pasha, into framed panels. The tiles facing
the _mihrab_, where the gallery widens over the main doorway, are so
good that I sometimes ask myself if the architect did not borrow from an
earlier building. Two series of eleven panels, one above the other, make
a tall wainscot whose only fault is that too much richness is crowded
into too narrow a space. The lower series is the finer. Five panels to
the right balance five panels to the left of a spindle-shaped Persian
design. Its two neighbours are conventionalised cypress trees, than which
nothing more decorative was ever invented. Then come two magnificent
panels of larger spindles against a thicket of peach-blossoms or Judas
blossoms, red with small blue centres, followed by two more cypresses.
Five panels of the upper series, one of them forming the axis, are
latticed again with blossoming sprays. In this case there is no spindle
to hide the greater part of the flowers, which are blue with small red
centres. The tiles are very nearly if not quite as good as those of the
preceding century, and they make a wall more splendid than exists outside
the old Seraglio.
[Illustration: Tiles in the gallery of Sultan Ahmed]
Yeni Jami is better suited for tiling, being comparatively a smaller
mosque. Its proportions are also much better and the frescoing is
not so bad as that of Sultan Ahmed. The tiles themselves are not so
interesting. But attached to the mosque, and giving entrance to the
imperial tribune, is a suite of rooms which are also tiled. This imperial
apartment is carried across the street on a great pointed arch, and is
reached from outside by a covered inclined way which enabled the Sultan
to ride directly up to the level of his gallery. At the same level is
also a little garden, held up by a massive retaining wall, and a balcony
with a rail of perforated marble once gave a magnificent view over the
harbour. The view has since been cut off by shops, and the apartment
itself has fallen into a sad state of neglect or has been subjected to
unfortunate restorations. A later and more intelligent restoration has
brought to light, under a vandal coat of brown paint, the old gilding of
the woodwork. But the tiles of the walls remain—except where they have
been replaced by horrible panels of some composition imitating Florentine
mosaic. Among them are charming cypresses and peach-trees. There are also
remains of lovely old windows, to say nothing of tall hooded fireplaces
and doors incrusted with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl. The tiles
are palpably of a poorer period than those I have described. But there is
a great attractiveness about this quaint apartment, that only adds to the
general distinction of Yeni Jami.
The original founder of the mosque, as I have said, was the favourite
wife of Ahmed I. This princess is one of the most famous women in Turkish
chronicles. Whether she was a Greek or a Turk, history does not confirm,
though the custom of the sultans to marry none but slaves would point to
the former origin. Her name in the Seraglio was Mahpeïker—Moon Face. She
is oftenest remembered, however, by the name Kyössem, Leader of a Flock,
from the fact that she was the first of a troop of slaves presented to
the young sultan. During his reign she gained an increasing voice in the
affairs of the empire, and during those of her sons Mourad IV and Ibrahim
her word was law. The position of empress mother is an exceptional one
in Turkey, as in China, the occupant of it being the first lady in the
palace and the land. She is known as the _valideh soultan_, or princess
mother—for the word sultan properly has no sex. Our word sultana does not
exist in Turkish, being a Greek or Italian invention. The reigning sultan
prefixes the title to his own name, while other persons of his blood put
it after theirs. When the grandson of Kyössem, the boy Mehmed IV, came
to the throne, the great _valideh_ continued, against all precedent, to
inhabit the Seraglio and to exercise her old influence. But at last the
jealousy of Mehmed’s mother, defrauded of her natural rank, kindled a
palace intrigue that caused the older _valideh_, at the age of eighty,
to be strangled one night in the Seraglio. Her mosque, still unfinished,
suffered by a fire which ravaged the quarter; and it was finally
completed by her young rival, a Russian named Tar’han, or Hadijeh. After
the latter the mosque is called to-day the yeni _valideh soultan jamisi_,
the mosque of the new empress mother. In common parlance, however, it
goes by the name of _yeni jami_, the new mosque—though it has had time
to become fairly venerable. And she who became the new _valideh_ in 1649
now occupies the place of honour under the dome of the tomb beside the
mosque, while the murdered Kyössem rests near her husband in their little
marble house on the Hippodrome.
The tombs that accompany mosques are only less interesting than the
mosques themselves, both for their architectural character and for
their historical associations. When space permits they lie in an inner
enclosure of the mosque yard, technically called the garden, behind the
mosque. Long before Constantinople became their capital the sultans had
perfected a type of mausoleum, or _türbeh_. This is a domed structure,
usually octagonal in shape, cheerfully lighted by two or three tiers
of windows. Every tomb has its own guardian, called the _türbedar_,
and some are attached to a school or other philanthropic institution.
These mausoleums are often extremely elaborate in decoration, but they
all retain a certain primitive simplicity with regard to their central
feature. There is no sarcophagus of marble or porphyry. The occupant of
the _türbeh_ is buried in the floor, and over his grave stands a plain
wooden catafalque covered with green cloth. Like a Turkish coffin, it
is ridged and inclined from the head, where a wooden standard supports
the turban of the deceased. A woman’s catafalque has no standard, a
scarf being thrown across the head. Embroideries, of gold on velvet, or
of quotations from the Koran in a zigzag pattern, may cover the green
cloth. Such embroideries are often a piece of a last year’s hanging from
the Kaaba at Mecca or from the Prophet’s tomb at Medina. But nothing
is imposing about the catafalque unless its size, which indicates the
importance of the person commemorated. The largest one I remember is that
of Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror. And the rail around the catafalque
is all that suggests permanence, and that is generally of wood inlaid
with mother-of-pearl. The simple epitaph is written on a placard which
hangs casually from the rail, or perhaps from an immense candle to be
lighted on holy nights. Near by may be an inlaid folding stand with an
illuminated Koran. The floor is matted and covered with rugs like a
mosque or a house.
[Illustration: The tomb of Sultan Ahmed I]
The tombs attached to the imperial mosques are naturally the most
important. Not every sultan built his own, however. In the _türbeh_ of
Ahmed I two other sultans are buried, his sons Osman II—who was the first
sultan to be murdered by his own people—and the bloody Mourad IV. Among
the innumerable people whom the latter put to death was his brother
Prince Baïezid, the hero of Racine’s “Bajazet,” who lies beside him. In
the tomb of Hadijeh at Yeni Jami five sultans rest: her son Mehmed IV,
her grandsons Moustafa II and Ahmed III, and her great-grandsons Mahmoud
I and Osman III. These and others of the larger tombs are noticeable
for the number of little catafalques they contain, marking the graves
of little princes who were strangled on the accession of their eldest
brother.
The most interesting tombs, from an artistic point of view, are those of
the period of Süleïman the Magnificent. How this later Solomon came by
his European nickname I can not tell, for the Turks know him as Solomon
the Lawgiver. But magnificent without doubt he was, and Stamboul would
be another city if all trace of his magnificence were to disappear. His
_türbeh_, behind the mosque he built in his own name, is perhaps the
most imposing in Constantinople, though neither the largest nor the most
splendidly decorated. A covered ambulatory surrounds it, and within are
handsome tiles and stained-glass windows. I prefer, however, the tomb
of his famous consort. The legend of this lady has enjoyed outside of
her own country a success that proves again the capriciousness of fame.
For the great Kyössem was a more celebrated princess whose name has
been forgotten in Europe. It is perfectly true that Süleïman did put
to death his eldest son Moustafa, a prince of the greatest promise, and
that Roxelana’s son, Selim II, did inherit the throne accordingly—and
so cut off the line of great sultans. But it has yet to be proved that
Roxelana really was the “fatal woman” of popular history, who instigated
her stepson’s murder. I suspect the truth of the matter was largely
that she had a good press, as they say in French. She happened to fall
into the orbit of one of the greatest men of her time, she furnished
copy for the despatches of one or two famous ambassadors, and—they gave
her a pronounceable name! I have been told that it is a corruption of a
Persian name meaning red-cheeked; but I have privately wondered if it
had anything to do with the Slavic tribe of Roxolani. Be that as it may,
this princess was a Russian slave of so great wit and charm that the
Lord of the Two Earths and the Sovereign of All the Seas paid her the
unprecedented compliment of making her his legal wife. He even built for
her, unlike any other sultan I remember, a tomb to herself. And Sinan
subtly put into it a feminine grace that is set off by the neighbouring
mausoleum of her husband. In the little vestibule are two panels of
rose-red flowers that must have been lovely in their day. In consequence
of some accident the tiles have been stupidly patched and mixed up. The
interior is sixteen-sided, with alternate windows and pointed marble
niches. The spaces between are delicately tiled, and most so in the
spandrels of the niches, where are sprays of rose-coloured flowers like
those in the vestibule.
[Illustration: In Roxelana’s tomb]
There is another tomb behind another mosque of Süleïman, which is,
perhaps, the most perfect monument of its kind in Stamboul. I did not
always think so. But the more I look at its fluted dome and at the scheme
of its interior tiling, the more I seem to see that here again Sinan,
or the great decorator who worked with him, exquisitely found means to
express an idea of individuality. This tomb was built, like the mosque
to which it belongs, in memory of Süleïman’s second and best-beloved
son, the young Prince Mehmed. The mosque—so-called of the Shah-zadeh,
the Prince—has lost its original decoration, but its graceful lines and
its incrusted minarets combine with the smaller buildings and the trees
about it to make one of the happiest architectural groups in Stamboul.
As for the _türbeh_, it fortunately remains very much as Sinan left
it. The design of the tiles is more abstract and masculine than those
in Roxelana’s _türbeh_, being mainly an intricate weaving of lines and
arabesques. But there is about them a refinement, a distinction, which,
it is hardly too fantastic to say, insensibly suggest the youth and the
royal station of the boy whose burial chamber they beautify. For the
colour—rarest of all in Turkish tiles—is a spring green and a golden
yellow, set off by a little dark blue. The tomb is also remarkable,
as I have already said, for the stencilling of its dome, as well as
for the lovely fragments of old stained glass in the upper windows and
for a sort of wooden canopy, perforated in the wheel pattern common
to the balustrades of the period, covering the prince’s catafalque.
It is supposed to symbolise the throne which Süleïman hoped his son
might inherit. Beside the prince, but not under the canopy, rests his
humpbacked younger brother Jihangir. As for the unhappy Prince Moustafa,
he was buried in Broussa, in the beautiful garden of the Mouradieh.
The _türbeh_ of Prince Mehmed has, in my mind, another pre-eminence
which perhaps it does not deserve. As in most other public buildings of
Stamboul, an inscription is carved over the door. These inscriptions are
generally in poetry and sometimes very long. The uninitiated reader would
never guess that the last verse of many of them is also a date, for the
Arabic letters, like certain Roman letters, have a numerical value. And
the date of many a Turkish monument is hidden in a chronogram, always
the last line of the inscription, in which the arithmetical sum of the
letters is equivalent to the numeral of the year in which the monument
was erected. I am not learned enough to say when this recondite fashion
started, but the chronogram of this tomb is the earliest I happen to know
about in Stamboul. It reads: “Grant, Lord, to him who rests here to win
the grove of Eden.” The arithmetical value of the line is 950, which year
of the Hegira is equivalent to 1543 of our era.
There are several other interesting tombs in this enclosure, of which
the most important are those of Rüstem Pasha, builder of the tile mosque
we have already noticed, and of a certain Ibrahim Pasha, Grand Vizier to
Sultan Mourad III. I have a particular fancy for the latter _türbeh_,
which seems to me in its neglected way a little masterpiece. Consider me
now its door—how admirably drawn it is, provided with what green bronze
knockers in the shape of lyres! The tiles of the interior, or the more
important of them, are simplified from those of Prince Mehmed, transposed
into another key—dark red and less dark blue on white—and set between
two encircling inscriptions. There are also certain panels of flowers
between high windows. But I think I am most undone by a little dado, one
tile high, where two outward curving sprays of wild hyacinth that just
do not fit into the breadth of a tile enclose a small cluster of tulips
and carnations—inimitably conventionalised and symmetrical. Nothing more
simple or more decorative was ever imagined.
Selim II, the unworthy supplanter of him who might have been Mehmed III,
lies in a tomb handsomer than he deserves, in the court of a mosque
built by a greater than he—St. Sophia. His large _türbeh_ lacks the
elegant proportion of his brother’s, but the tile panels of its porch
are very effective. So is the tile tapestry of its inner walls, though a
little monotonous—mainly white in effect, dotted with little tulips and
other flowers enclosed in small Persian spindles. Four other sultans
are buried in the precincts of St. Sophia, the mad Moustafa I and the
dethroned Ibrahim lying in dishonourable neglect in the bare, whitewashed
chamber that was once the baptistery of the cathedral. And it was through
having been the slave of Ibrahim that the _valideh soultan_ Hadijeh was
able to complete Yeni Jami in her own name and build beside it the great
mausoleum in which she lies!
[Illustration: The _türbeh_ of Ibrahim Pasha]
[Illustration: The court of the Conqueror]
These _türbehs_, with the fountains of the outer courtyard and the trees
that shade them and the minarets that tower above the trees, give an
oddly Turkish air to the precincts of St. Sophia. It is to a real mosque,
however, that one must go for a typical mosque yard. A part of it that
is lacking to St. Sophia, and, indeed, to many mosques, is another inner
enclosure called the _haram_, or sanctuary. This forecourt of the mosque
is always more architectural than the “garden,” being a paved quadrangle
surrounded by an arcade. In the centre of the cloister a covered fountain
should bubble, sometimes under trees. I have already mentioned one
of the best examples of such a court. It belongs to the old mosque of
Sultan Baïezid II, more popularly known as the Pigeon Mosque. This is
less of a sanctuary than any other forecourt in Stamboul. But the reason
is that the mosque lacks an outer yard other than the square of the War
Department. And I would be the last to find fault with the scribes who
sit in the arcades, or to call them Pharisees who sell beads and perfumes
there. During the month of Ramazan a busy fair is held there, open only
during the afternoon, where the complicated sweetmeats of the season
are sold together with other things worthy to be given as presents at
_Baïram_. I must say, however, that I have a weakness for the court of
another old mosque, that of Sultan Selim I, in a less accessible part of
Stamboul. Part of its charm is perhaps due to the fact that it is more
remote and therefore more subject to silence. Above the barred windows
that look into the outer sunlight are lunettes of tiles, while around the
fountain cypresses and grape-vines make an inimitable shade. Nor can I
pass by the court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the last and greatest vizier
of Süleïman I. This is supposed to be a lesser work of Sinan, but I like
it almost better than any other. Within the mosque are treasures of
tiles, of stained glass, of painted wood, of perforated marble. Without
is one of the noblest porticoes in Stamboul, looking down upon a cloister
that is a real cloister. For into its colonnade open cells where live the
students of a _medresseh_.
[Illustration: The main entrance to the court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha]
A _medresseh_ is a theological school and law school combined, since in
Islam the teachings of the Prophet, as embodied in the Koran and the
traditions, form not only the rule of life but the law of the land.
It is only recently that a difference has been recognised between the
_Sheriat_ or sacred law and the civil law, but their boundaries are still
indistinct, and for many men the same door leads to legal or to spiritual
preferment. I have said so much about tombs and tiles and other matters
that I have left myself no room to speak of _medressehs_—or schools of
other kinds, or libraries, or caravansaries, or baths, or hospitals, or
soup-kitchens, or any other of the charitable institutions that cluster
around a mosque yard. We are wont to imagine that philanthropy was
invented in the West, and that the institutional church is a peculiarly
modern development. But before America was discovered institutional
mosques flourished in Stamboul and all over Asia Minor, and continue to
do so to this day. Almost no mosque, indeed, has not some philanthropy
connected with it. They are administered, mosques and dependencies and
all, by a separate and very important department of government called the
Ministry of the _Erkaf_—of Pious Foundations.
[Illustration: The court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha]
[Illustration: Doorway in the _medresseh_ of Feïzoullah Effendi]
[Illustration: The interior of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha]
The necessities of space do not always allow these dependencies to gather
around their central mosque yard. Or sometimes they are independent
foundations and may have a yard of their own of which a small mosque
is merely one feature. Two very interesting examples are _medressehs_
in the vicinity of the mosque of the Conqueror. They both belong to the
same period and their founders were both ministers of Sultan Moustafa
II, who was dethroned in 1703. The smaller and more ruinous was built
by Feïzoullah Effendi, _Sheï’h ül Islam_, a mighty man of God who did
and undid viziers in his day and perished miserably at Adrianople in the
upheaval that drove his imperial master from the throne. His _medresseh_
nearly perished too, in 1912, to make way for a new boulevard. But it
was happily saved by the society of the Friends of Stamboul, and in time
its little cloister may become less of a jungle. Its chief ornament
is the structure to the left of the gateway, where a flight of steps
mounts under a wonderful arch or crocket of perforated marble to a
pillared porch with a mosque on one side and a library on the other.
The mosque is the more dilapidated, but it contains fragments of good
tiling and a charming little door. The library has the same little door,
shallow-arched and ornamented with fine stalactites of marble. The
interior of the library is almost filled by a square cage, which has a
corresponding door of its own and a dark inner compartment. On the wired
shelves of this structure big books are piled on their sides, and their
titles and numbers are written on the edges of the leaves. They are all
manuscripts, and some of them are illuminated or beautifully bound. I
also saw a finely bound catalogue to which nothing has been added for
two hundred years. For that matter the library does not look as if any
one had consulted it for two hundred years, though the librarian is
supposed to be there every day except Tuesday and Friday. He accordingly
spends most of his time in his book-shop in the mosque yard of the
Conqueror.
[Illustration: Entrance to the _medresseh_ of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha]
The other _medresseh_, separated from this one by a straight easterly
stretch of the new boulevard, is that of the Grand Vizier Amouja-zadeh
Hüsseïn Pasha—the Son of the Uncle. I need hardly point out that Hüsseïn
Pasha was not the son of his own uncle, but of that of a famous cousin of
his. For he belonged to the great family of the Kyöprülü, who gave Turkey
five of her best grand viziers. The head of the house, that iron old
man who stopped for a time the decadence of the empire—and put to death
thirty-six thousand people in five years—lies in the skeleton _türbeh_
of marble and bronze on Divan Yolou, near the Burnt Column. Hüsseïn
Pasha’s tomb is also open to the street and to the rains of heaven. Its
tall stones and taller trees stand behind a cobweb grille to the left
of his _sebil_, where an attendant gives cups of cold water to thirsty
passers-by. Between the _sebil_ and the gate are two grilles of bronze,
set in two great windows of delicately chiselled marble, that do much to
make this _medresseh_ one of the most notable corners of Stamboul. There
is a big L-shaped courtyard within, pleasant with trees and a central
pagoda of a fountain, looked upon by white cloisters for students, by
a library containing no books, by a ruined primary school, and by an
octagonal mosque charmingly set in a square ambulatory of pillars.
[Illustration: The _medresseh_ of Hassan Pasha
Note the bird-house with minarets]
I should be afraid to guess how many such institutions are in Stamboul or
how many thousand students attend them at the expense of their founders.
They are a wonderful tribute to the philanthropy of another day—the day
of the great schools of Bagdad and Cairo and Cordova, the day of the
mediæval cloisters. Stamboul has needed bitter lessons to learn that that
day is past. Indeed, a good part of old Stamboul has taken refuge in
these courtyards, and would still be true to the old order which made the
mosque the centre of the community and supposed all knowledge to be in
the Koran. For the race of men that likes Stamboul there is a great charm
in these places, with their picturesqueness and their air, part gravity,
part melancholy, familiar to the East and particular to all places that
have known change and ruin. There is tragedy in them, too, and menace.
For they teach too many men too little. But there is also a germ in them
of something that might conceivably save Stamboul in spite of herself.
“Seek knowledge, even though it be in China,” is one of the most famous
sayings of the Prophet, and he taught his followers that the greater holy
war was against ignorance. Halil Bey and Van Berchem, in their monumental
_Corps d’Inscriptions Arabes_, quote an epigraph to the same effect from
a thirteenth-century _medresseh_ in Sîvas: “The pursuit of knowledge is
an obligation imposed on every Moslem. The merit of science is greater
than that of devotion.” And the _medresseh_ of Ali Pasha in Stamboul has
this written above the gate: “Whoever taught me a single word, I was his
slave.” If the spirit that made such utterances could once touch Islam
again, would it not be enough?
III
OLD CONSTANTINOPLE
_Now you may know that those who had never before seen
Constantinople looked upon it very earnestly, for they never
thought there could be in all the world so rich a city; and
they marked the high walls and strong towers that enclosed
it round about, and the rich palaces, and mighty churches—of
which there were so many that no one would have believed it
who had not seen it with his eyes—and the height and length
of that city which above all others was sovereign. And be it
known to you, that no man there was of such hardihood but his
flesh trembled; and it was no wonder, for never was so great
an enterprise undertaken by any people since the creation of
the world._—Marzials’ G. DE VILLEHARDOUIN: “De la Conqueste de
Constantinople.”
To many people the colour of Stamboul looks purely Turkish—at first
sight. The simplest peasant of Asia Minor could not look at it often,
however, without noticing things of an order strange to him—a sculptured
capital lying in the street, bits of flowered marble set into a wall,
a column as high as a minaret standing by itself, a dome of unfamiliar
shape, and mosque walls mysterious with unreadable letters and the
sacrilegious picturing of human forms, and ruined masonry or dark
subterranean vaultings leading off into myth. For other newcomers it may
become a game of the most engrossing kind to track out these old things,
and mark how Stamboul has fitted into the ruts of Byzantium, and hunt for
some lost piece of antiquity that no one else has found. And there are
men for whom Stamboul does not exist. Through it they walk as in some
inner city of the mind, seeing only the vanished capital of the Cæsars.
Divan Yolou is for them the _Mese_ of old. In the Hippodrome they still
hear the thunder of Roman chariots. And many a Turkish monument has
interest for them only because its marbles are anagrams that spell anew
the glory of the ancient world.
Need I say that I am no such man? The essential colour of Constantinople
is for me, who am neither Byzantinist nor Orientalist, a composite one,
and the richer for being so. I confess I do not like the minarets of St.
Sophia, but it is only because they are ugly. I am sorry that the palace
of Constantine has so completely disappeared, but I am Philistine enough
to suspect that the mosque built on its site may lift quite as imposing
a mass against the sky. I like to remember that the most important
street of Stamboul was the Triumphal Way of the Byzantine emperors—and
earlier still the home-stretch of a famous Roman road, the _Via Egnatia_,
which continued from Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic, the Durazzo of Balkan
squabbles, the line of the Appian Way; but it seems to me that the
sultans added interest to that historic thoroughfare. Nevertheless, I am
inconsistent enough to be sorry that Byzantinists are so rare, and to be
a little jealous of
_the glory that was Greece,_
_And the grandeur that was Rome._
I do not pretend to set up Constantinople against Rome or Athens. Without
them, of course, she would not have been—what she was. But I do maintain
that her history was as long, that she played a rôle no less important
in her later day, and that without her our modern world could never have
been quite what it is. We are unjustly inclined to forget that link in
the chain. Different from Rome and Athens, as they differed from each
other, Constantinople fused in her own crucible, with others of Oriental
origin, the elements of civilisation which they furnished. Out of these
elements she formulated a new religion, created the architecture to
embody it, codified a system of law. Having thus collected and enriched
the learning of antiquity, she bequeathed it to the adolescent Europe
of the Renaissance. We are accustomed to speak of the dark ages that
followed the fall of Rome. There was, properly speaking, no darker age
than had been. The centre of light had merely moved eastward, and such
miserable frontier villages as London, Paris, and Vienna were merely,
for the time being, the darker. To them Constantinople was what Paris
is to us, the _ville lumière_, and far more. She was the centre of a
civilisation whose splendour and refinement were the legend of the West.
She contained such treasures of ancient art as are now scattered in a
thousand museums. Under her shadow Athens became a sort of present-day
Oxford or Venice and Rome not much more than a vociferous Berlin.
Entirely new races—Slavs, Huns, Turks—began to be drawn into her orbit,
as the Gauls, the Britons, and the Teutons had been drawn by Rome. If
the far-away cities of Bagdad and Cordova felt her influence, how much
more was it so in countries with which she had more immediate relations?
Italy in particular, and Venice above all other Italian towns, owe more
to Constantinople than has ever been appraised. Venice would always have
been Venice, but a Venice without the St. Mark’s we know, without the
stolen horses of bronze, without the pillars of the _Piazzetta_, without
many of the palaces of the Grand Canal, without the lion, even, which is
as Byzantine as Byzantine can be. Several other Italian cities contain
notable examples of Byzantine architecture or decoration, while in half
the collections of Europe are ivories, reliquaries, bits of painting and
mosaic and goldsmiths’ work that came out of Byzantium. That jewel of
Paris, the _Sainte-Chapelle_, is not Byzantine, but it was built to house
the church treasures from Constantinople which were a part of the loot of
the fourth crusade, and some of them may still be seen in _Notre Dame_.
In indirect ways the account is harder to reckon. Some authorities find
a Byzantine origin for so remote an architectural language as Romanesque
building, while few now deny that the Italian school of painting was
derived directly from the mosaics of Constantinople. All admit, at any
rate, that the prodigious movement of the Renaissance was fed by the
humanists who took refuge in Italy from the invading Turk.
[Illustration: St. Sophia
From an etching by Frank Brangwyn
Reproduced by permission of C. W. Kraushaar, N. Y.]
Yet Constantinople has remained, comparatively to her two great rivals,
an undiscovered country. The Russians are alone to maintain there such
a centre of research as the schools of Rome and Athens, and excavaters
take it for granted that Stamboul hides nothing worth their trouble.
They would have more reason if the emperors had not collected so many of
the masterpieces of antiquity. For about Athens will always linger some
glamour of the Periclean age, and its sculpture, like its literature,
remains the high-water mark of a certain artistic achievement. The case
of Rome, however, is more complicated. Rome never created an art so
original as Byzantine architecture or Byzantine mosaic; and Justinian it
was, not Cæsar or Augustus, who carried Roman law to such a point that no
principle has been added to it since. I think the old _odium theologicum_
must have something to do with the fact that the age of Justinian and one
or two great periods that followed it enjoy so little general renown.
The split between the churches originally destroyed the tradition of
renown; and because we are of the West, because we are descended from
the crusaders, because we derive our religious traditions from Rome, we
still entertain some vague ancestral prejudice against Orthodoxy and
its capital. The present masters of Constantinople have, of course,
greatly encouraged this prejudice by taking no interest themselves in
the history of the city or allowing others to do so. Then other details
of accessibility enter into the matter, and of language, and a thousand
subtleties of association. Rome, for instance, has long been a province
of European literature. Keats and Shelley and Browning, to mention only
later English poets, and I know not how many others, besides generations
of novelists and playwrights and historians and travellers and painters
and sculptors, have made a whole public that knows or cares very little
about the Cæsars feel at home in Rome; whereas Gibbon and Byron and Lady
Mary Montagu are the sole greater English names that attach themselves
to the Bosphorus. It waters, to be sure, a much larger corner of French
literature. And the immense learning of Gibbon has perhaps done more
than any amount of ignorance and prejudice to weight the scale against
Constantinople.
The Rome of literature is not an Augustan Rome. It is the Rome of the
popes, the Rome of the Renaissance, the Rome of galleries and haunted
palaces and enchanted villas that had no being till Constantinople was
at an end. Or it is a simpler Rome still, of the liquid light, of shops
and theatres and hotels and a friendly court. Against these Romes I am
the last to set up a cry. I merely point out that for most eyes they fill
up the picture of the Eternal City; whereas Constantinople can be looked
at through no such magnifying-glass. Sacked of her wealth, home of the
arts no more, guarded by jealous keepers, and lacking most that is dear
to the modern wanderer’s heart, how should she compete with Rome? Only
in one respect can she hold her own unchallenged against that potent
rival, for by no stretch of the imagination can Rome, crouching on her
seven ant-hills beside her muddy river, be given the palm of place over
Constantinople. And the _campagna_ of Rome, that stretches so vast and
melancholy on many an eloquent page, is but a dooryard to the _campagna_
of Constantinople, which also has imperial aqueducts, and which regards
older than Alban hills and the shining spaces of the Marmora dotted by
high islands, and far away behind them, like Alps seen across a Venetian
lagoon, the blue range, capped three parts of the year with snow, of the
Bithynian Olympus.
I follow, however, but an unprofitable trail. Rome is Rome and
Constantinople is Constantinople. And a day will no doubt come for the
latter when some other impressionist will sigh for the unexploited days
of yore. One of the charms of Constantinople, indeed, is that mystery
still has room there and one may always hope for treasure-trove. The
sacks of 1204 and 1453 undoubtedly made away with the better part of
the statuary and other precious things of which Constantinople was so
unparalleled a museum, but some buried Greek marble may yet come to
light. The soil of Stamboul is virgin so far as excavation is concerned,
and you have no more than to scratch it to pick up something—if only
a coin or a bit of broken pottery. Until very recently, digging for
foundations was the sole thing of the sort permitted. Some most
interesting discoveries have been made in this casual way. Quite a
museum, for example, could have been formed of the different objects
found in the grounds where the American missionaries have their
headquarters. While digging, in 1872, for the foundations of the main
building, an ancient burial-ground was unearthed. The bones, with lamps
and other small objects, were protected by great tiles set triangularly
together, and inside each skull was a Roman coin of early imperial
times, which once paid, I suppose, a passage over Styx. Near by were
ruins of masonry which indicated by their shape a church. Under a
later building coins and tiles of the period of Constans were found. A
beautiful Corinthian column also came to light, and a life-sized marble
statue. When ground was broken for the third building, on the site of
a Turkish _konak_, an old man came to the American in charge and asked
for a private interview. He then introduced himself as an Armenian whose
ancestors had been courtiers of the last emperor Constantine. From them,
he said, a tradition had been handed down in his family about the ground
where the Turkish house had stood. “When you dig into the ground,”
he said, “you will come to an iron door. When you open the door you
will see stone steps. When you go down the steps you will come into a
sort of room. Then you will find a passage leading underground in the
direction of St. Sophia—and in it gold, jewels, statues, all manner of
things that the emperor and his friends put there for safety during the
last siege. I only ask you to give me half!” The missionary thought the
Armenian mad and treated him accordingly. But the old man spent all his
time watching the work. And one day the diggers uncovered a metal door
lying horizontally in the earth. With some difficulty they succeeded
in jacking the door off the masonry in which the hinges were embedded,
and underneath steps appeared, going down into a black void. At that
the missionary began to be interested. When the workmen were out of the
way he went down with the Armenian to explore. They descended into the
subterranean vault they expected. It was held up by marble pillars with
crosses on the capitals. But when they came to look for the passage they
discovered that one end of the vault, the end toward St. Sophia, had
been cut off by a wall of more recent date. That wall, as it happens,
belongs to the great building known as the Valideh Han, erected by the
famous _valideh soultan_ Kyössem. After her death were found, among
other property of hers stored there, twenty chests of ducats. And when I
read about them I could not help wondering whether any of those ducats
came from the passage which the sultana’s workmen must accidentally have
struck into in the seventeenth century.
Constantinople is full of stories and legends of the same sort, in most
of which figures a secret passage leading underground to St. Sophia.
I have poked my own nose into two or three such tunnels, which no
Turk ever constructed, and can vouch for their existence. In reality,
however, there is nothing very mysterious about them. The soil of
Stamboul is honeycombed with cisterns of all sizes, from the enormous
ones picturesquely called by the Turks the Sunken Palace and the Thousand
and One Columns to the small one of the Bible House and Valideh Han.
Others, like the cistern beside the mosque of Sultan Selim I, were
always uncovered. These are usually called _choukour bostan_, hollow
garden, from the fact that vegetable gardens are wont to flourish in
the accumulated silt of their centuries. Brick conduits connect many
of the reservoirs with a water-system which Hadrian is known to have
installed or enlarged while Rome was still the capital of the empire.
And it was only natural for such conduits to lead toward St. Sophia, the
civic centre of the town. We also know that Constantine constructed deep
sewers, on the lines of the _cloaca_ of Rome. But as no one has ever been
able to study these systems thoroughly, there remains something half
mythic about them.
[Illustration: The Myrelaion]
Another casual but more dramatic way in which old Constantinople proves
her temper of eternity is by means of the fires that periodically ravage
Stamboul. There is no more striking suggestion of Stambouls within
Stamboul than to look at the ashes of some familiar, of some regretted
quarter, and discover there a solid piece of antiquity about which houses
have been built and burned who knows how many times. In my own day the
Column of Marcian has reappeared on its hilltop overlooking the Marmora,
having long been lost in the yard of a Turkish house. And I have seen
the obscure mosque of Boudroun Jami gallantly reassert itself above the
ruin of its quarter as the charming little tenth-century church of the
Myrelaion—the convent of Myrrh and Oil. The fires which an archæologist
might best have been suspected of setting were those of 1912 and 1913,
which swept the slope between the Hippodrome and the Marmora. This was
the site of the Sacred Palace of the later Roman emperors. No complete
account of it remains, but from the reports of ambassadors and other
visitors of note, from references of historians, and from the Book of
Ceremonies of the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, scholars have
been able to reconstitute that city of palaces, churches, terraces, and
gardens that overlapped on one side a corner of the present Seraglio
grounds and reached on the other nearly to the church of SS. Sergius
and Bacchus. Constantine the Great was the founder of this imperial
residence. His Palace of Daphne, so called from a statue of the nymph he
brought from Rome, stood on the site of the mosque of Sultan Ahmed I,
and other structures bordered the Hippodrome, opening by a monumental
gateway into the Augustæum, now the square of St. Sophia. To Constantine
also was attributed the magnificent hall of the Magnaura, which Ebersolt
places a little south and west of the present Ministry of Justice. Here
was the throne of Solomon, imitated from the one described in the Book of
Kings, whose fame has come down in the memoirs of more than one amazed
ambassador. It was guarded by golden lions which, during audiences of
state, rose to their feet, beat their tails on the floor, and roared,
while golden birds in a tree behind the throne began to chirp and
flutter among the golden boughs. Still another construction attributed
to Constantine was the Porphyra, the little porphyry palace near the sea
where the imperial children were born.