unparalleled enclosure or the names of those who continued, during six
hundred years, to add palace to palace, one richer than another in
jewelled furniture, in the new jewelry of mosaic, in the spoils of
ancient art. Nicephorus Phocas was the last emperor to do so, when he
enlarged and fortified the waterside Palace of Bucoleon. By the eleventh
century the emperors had begun to prefer the Palace of Blacherne. But
Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, found the great ladies of the court
assembled in the Bucoleon when the crusaders occupied the city in 1204,
and after the restoration of 1261 Michael Palæologus lived there until
Blacherne could be put in order. From that time on the Great Palace
fell rapidly into decay. When the Florentine Buondelmonte visited it
early in the fifteenth century it was already a ruin. Its condition in
1453 suggested to the Turkish conqueror the Persian distich which has
been so often requoted: “The spider has woven his web in the palace of
kings, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”
By the sixteenth century little was left of it but a few columns and the
ruins of the Bucoleon. The colossal group of a lion and a bull, which
gave the smaller palace its name, still stood on the old quay of the
imperial galleys in 1532, when it was turned around by an earthquake. Is
it impossible that that marble might yet be recovered from the sand of
the shore? The westernmost of the palaces composing the Bucoleon, the one
associated with the name of the Persian prince Hormisdas, who came as
an exile to the court of Constantine the Great, was pulled down as late
as 1871, when the Roumelian railway was built. Two lions from a balcony
of its sea façade now flank the east staircase of the Imperial Museum.
The ruins of the eastern palace, the so-called House of Justinian,
where the great emperor may very well have lived before he came to the
throne, were barely saved by the Friends of Stamboul when the railway was
double-tracked in 1912. To-day this pile of ancient brickwork, rising
from the edge of the Marmora, is almost the last vestige of the palace
whose legendary splendour filled so many mediæval pages. On the slope
behind it the fires to which I have referred laid bare several Byzantine
terraces, the entrances to a number of vaulted substructures, and a
tower which had been incorporated into the surrounding houses. Might it
be, perhaps, the tower of the Great Admiral Apocaucus, which he built
as a prison for John Cantacuzene but in which he himself was murdered
in 1345? I am not the one to say. But that Palatine Hill, so long the
centre of the world, where so much has been enacted that is most coloured
and passionate of life, and which now looks so quietly at its quiet
sea—and there is a blue keeps no trace of all the keels that have scarred
it from the time of the Argonauts!—that Palatine Hill has an immense
attraction for me. And I marvel that no one has yet taken advantage of
its present accessibility to learn precisely what, after so many fires
and earthquakes and other spoilers, may be left of its old arrangement.
[Illustration: The House of Justinian]
A Palatine Hill which might reveal more dominates the opposite end of
the city. This ridge above the Golden Horn is the site of the palace
whose name of Blacherne—or Vlaherni as I should be tempted to write it
if I were not afraid of my friends the Byzantinists—seems to have been
derived from that of some barbarian settler. Was he haply a Wallachian?
He settled, at all events, on this hilltop in pre-Constantinian days, and
outside the line of the Constantinian, or even of the Theodosian, walls.
It was only in the seventh century that the emperor Heraclius threw a
wall outside the quarter. Which emperor first built a palace there is
not known, but Anastasius I enlarged one as early as the fifth century.
In 457 the pious Pulcheria, the virgin empress of Marcian, founded the
celebrated shrine of the Madonna of Blacherne. Restored and enlarged in
different reigns, it was the object of several of those annual imperial
pilgrimages which played so large a part in the life of the ancient city.
There was even a day in the year when the emperors bathed in the Holy
Well of the church. This _áyazma_ may still be seen in the waterside
quarter of Balat. The name Balat is a Turkish corruption of the Greek
word for palace, and Aïvan Seraï, as the adjoining quarter is called,
means the Palace of the Balcony. These names are another reminder of
the palace that figures so often in the chronicles of the crusades.
Of the palace itself more remains than of the Great Palace, though it
still waits for a Labarte or an Ebersolt. Bits of masonry crop out of
the ground or stand visibly among the houses all the way up the hill.
Indeed, I suspect that a good deal of the hill itself is artificial.
Such, at least, is the case of the high terrace bordering the city wall
where the mosque of Aïvas Effendi faces two ivy-mantled towers. An
innocent-looking hole in the courtyard of the mosque winds down into
a black subterranean maze of passages, stairways, cells, and tiers of
arches climbing above bottomless pits. So much earth and rubbish have
sifted into this extraordinary labyrinth that its true extent can only
be guessed at until it is systematically excavated. In the meantime,
archæology has been very busy discussing which of the two contiguous
towers that form a part of it was the tower of Anemas, and whether
either of them was the tower of the emperor Isaac Angelus. The Anemas in
question was a Byzantinised Arab, descendant of the Emir who surrendered
Crete to Nicephorus Phocas, and he had the honour of being the first of
many prisoners of state to be shut up in his tower. Whichever it may have
been, however, the most unarchæological visitor is capable of enjoying
a dip into that romantic darkness and the view, from the terrace, of a
cypressed country beside the Golden Horn.
[Illustration: The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus]
On top of the hill stands the well-preserved ruin known in Turkish as
Tekfour Seraï, the Palace of the Crown-Wearer. As to its real name,
there has been the most fanciful variety of opinions. The palace is now
generally supposed, however, to have been built in the tenth century by
Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It seems to have been separate from the
Palace of Blacherne, though on the analogy of the Great Palace it may
have belonged to the same group. Architects as well as archæologists take
a particular interest in Tekfour Seraï, because it is the only authentic
piece of domestic building left of Byzantine Constantinople. The main
façade is divided into three tiers of arched windows and ornamented by
a mosaic of dark and light stone that recalls the brickwork of later
Byzantine churches. What the general effect does not recall is the
Venetian version of Byzantine civil architecture. We should not take that
version too literally, of course, any more than the Venetian Gothic;
but St. Mark’s is so true a transcription of a Byzantine church—without
the crockets—that one has the more faith in the palaces. The difference
may be chiefly one of periods. It is noticeable that the spacing of the
arches of Tekfour Seraï is not like that of the _Fondaco dei Turchi_,
to whose designed irregularity Ruskin drew attention. Neither has the
checker-work of the façade anything in common with the plaques of
porphyry and serpentine reflected in the Grand Canal. It suggests,
rather, the checker-work of the Ducal Palace. The first tier of arches,
too, looks like the same kind of ground arcade. Is it possible that any
influence interacted between the two palaces? If so the presumption
would be that it worked in Venice, under a Gothic cloak; for the Ducal
Palace, or the lagoon front of it, belongs to the century after the Latin
occupation of Constantinople. In the light of my question this latter
detail is interesting, since the features I have noted decorate only the
sea façade of Tekfour Seraï. The question lies so near the fantastic,
however, and so far from any track of sober archæology where I have
happened to browse, that I merely ask it and hurry on, leaving for some
happy expert, with means to excavate and knowledge to compare, to state
the true affiliations of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus.
* * * * *
The richest remains of old Constantinople are its churches. Little as
they are generally known, almost every one knows something about the
greatest of them. There seems to me a peculiar fitness in the name of
Justinian’s cathedral, which is not exactly rendered by its current
vocable. It was not dedicated to any saint, but to the Divine Wisdom;
and the Turks still call it _Aya Sofya_. The cross no longer surmounts
that old cathedral, it is true, nor are Christian forms of worship
permitted within its walls. In the divine wisdom, however, there is
room for more than one form of worship. And St. Sophia, whose marbles,
borrowed from half the temples of antiquity, have beautified the rites
not only of Mohammed and of Christ, but of Apollo, of Pallas, of Asiatic
Cybele, of Egyptian Isis and Osiris and how many older divinities of the
pagan world, seems to me more than any other temple to express what is
universal in religion, stripped of all pettinesses of creed. I shall
make no attempt to analyse the elements of so supreme an expression. One
is silenced, too, in the face of so many human associations. A thousand
years before St. Peter’s that great dome swung in the Byzantine air, and
under it one is bewildered by a cloud of ghosts. Yet impressions detach
themselves—of space, of light, of an immense distinction. All the little
Turkish rearrangements are swallowed up in it, as must have been the
glitter of the Greek ritual. Decoration has no part in the nobility of
that effect. There is nothing to hide. Each of those leaping arches and
soaring domes does something—and in a way! But there is also a perfection
of detail, rich, coloured, as if suffused by a glamour of dusky gold that
is between the white morning clarity of paganism and the Gothic twilight.
The churches of Constantinople neither begin nor end with St. Sophia,
however. The oldest of them is St. John the Baptist of the Studion, so
called from the Roman senator Studius who about 463 founded a monastery
near the Golden Gate. The monks by whom this monastery was first peopled
belonged to the order known as the Sleepless Ones, because by a system
of relays they kept up an unending series of offices. Nevertheless, they
found time to gain renown as copyists and illuminators of manuscripts,
and some of the hymns they wrote are still sung. The monks took the
unpopular side against the iconoclastic emperors, but after the triumph
of the iconodules, in the ninth century, the Studion became the most
important monastery in the city. Its abbot took precedence of all other
abbots. The emperors visited it annually in state. Two of them even
exchanged their crowns for its habit. In 1054 several meetings took
place there between Constantine X and the legates who had come from Rome
to settle the differences between the Pope and the Patriarch. Cardinal
Humbert finally settled those differences by laying on the altar of St.
Sophia a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch Cerularius and all
his followers. That was the first definite schism between the churches.
When Michael Palæologus drove the Latin emperors from Constantinople
in 1261, he made the first part of his triumphal entry on foot from
the Golden Gate to the Studion. In front of him went in a chariot the
famous icon of the ὀδηγητρία, the Shower of the Way, which he left in
the church. This sacred painting, ascribed to the prolific brush of St.
Luke, was acquired with other relics in Jerusalem by Eudoxia, empress
of Theodosius II. She gave it to her sister-in-law Pulcheria, who built
a special church for it on Seraglio Point. The relic gradually took the
place of the Palladium which Constantine brought from Rome. It was prayed
to in battles, shown from the walls in sieges, carried in triumphs, and
annually borne in procession to the Great Palace for the ceremonies of
Easter. The Studion possessed other precious relics of its own, such as
the head of John the Baptist and the Sacred Lance. Several persons of
importance were buried in the precincts of the monastery. Among them
was a Turkish prince, son of Baïezid the Thunderbolt, who died there
of the plague in 1417. Brought up as a hostage at the court of Manuel
Palæologus, he became a Christian, but for fear of incurring his father’s
displeasure the monks would not baptise him till his last illness. It
was under Baïezid II that the monastery passed into Turkish hands. By
way of compensation the Sultan sent to the Pope of the day, who happened
to be Alexander Borgia, the Sacred Lance and other relics. An order of
dervishes followed the monks of the Studion, and the church of St. John
is now called Emir Ahor or Imrahor Jamisi, the mosque of the Chief of the
Stables.
[Illustration: Interior of the Studion]
Of the monastery very little remains save a fine cistern and a few
fragments of wall. Little more will soon be left of the church unless
something be done to save it. A heavy fall of snow crushed in the roof
a few years ago, and the powers that be have not yet found means or
inclination to preserve that monument of a past in which they had no
part. The church is interesting not only because it is the oldest in
Constantinople and associated with so much history, but because it is
the one pure basilica extant in the city. The best-preserved parts of
it are the walls of the narthex, where are still visible the remnants
of colonnades with a fine entablature of an early transition period
from Corinthian to Byzantine. After the disuse of the basilica as a
mosque, the Russian Archæological Institute obtained permission to
investigate it and made some interesting discoveries. The north wall
of the mosque yard was scraped of its plaster and was found to contain
ancient bricks disposed in the form of a cross, proving that the Turkish
court takes the place of an early Christian atrium. In the south aisle
of the interior three graves were found corresponding perfectly to the
description of the last resting-place of the great abbot Theodore of the
ninth century. An underground passage was also opened, leading from the
bema to the adjoining cistern, and the foundations contained evidence
of a more ancient sub-structure. But the most interesting discovery
was that of a beautiful marble pavement beneath the Turkish floor, in
which figures of men and animals were framed in marble between squares,
disks, and geometrical curves of porphyry and serpentine. Unfortunately,
some disagreement arose between the Russians and the Ministry of Pious
Foundations, and the work was stopped. Nothing was done, however, to
protect the ruined basilica, and the last time I saw it the pavement was
lost in weeds.
There are some twenty-five other buildings in Stamboul that were
originally Byzantine churches. That is, of course, but a small proportion
of the multitude that astonished Villehardouin and his men. Covering
as they do a period of ten centuries, however, they exhibit most
interestingly the gradual development of ecclesiastical architecture from
the Roman basilica to the high-domed trefoil church of the fourteenth
century. This development is not always easy to follow, as in some
cases the churches have been much altered to suit Turkish needs. The
orientation of a mosque, for instance, differs from that of a church,
since the _mihrab_ must face Mecca, and actual changes of structure
have occasionally resulted. Then, of course, all interior decoration
too visibly representing Christian symbols or the human form has been
destroyed or covered up. And a good deal of exterior brickwork has
disappeared under plaster and whitewash. Consequently the prowler in
Stamboul is on the look-out, if he have the least tinge of archæology in
him, for anything that may hint at a pre-Turkish origin. Not that very
much can remain above ground to discover. After so much careful searching
it will only be a small built-in structure or fragment that will come
to light. But several of the attributions of churches are disputed.
Their true names were lost with their original worshippers, and it is a
comparatively short time since Christians have been free to circulate at
will in the Turkish quarters of Stamboul. And there is reason to hope
that under many a piece of baroque stencilling an old mosaic waits to be
laid bare.
The art of mosaic existed, of course, long before Constantine. But glass
mosaics containing a film of gold were the invention of the later empire,
and the Byzantine architects made vast use of them. What a museum of
this splendid art Constantinople must once have been we can only guess.
Ravenna, however, early became important for the study of mosaics, for in
the capital of Justinian many of his masterpieces were destroyed during
the iconoclastic controversy. And to-day Salonica, Venice, Sicily, and a
few widely scattered monasteries contain the chief remaining specimens.
In Constantinople, where palaces, churches, public monuments and private
houses without number were tapestried with mosaic, there are in 1914 only
four buildings where anything is visible of this lost art. The attendants
of St. Sophia used to make quite an income by selling mosaics which they
picked out of the walls of the galleries. This infamous commerce has
now been checked, but there is no telling what ravages were committed
while it flourished. The earthquake of 1894 was also disastrous for
the decoration of the mosque, correspondingly enlarging the area of
plaster in the nave. The vaulting of the aisles and galleries, however,
the soffits of the arcades, and the inner narthex still contain a
greater extent of mosaic, and presumably older, than exists elsewhere
in the city. The church of St. Irene, long a Turkish armoury and now a
military museum, also contains, in the narthex, a little mosaic which
may be of Justinian’s time. That of the apse belongs to the restoration
of the church during the iconoclastic period. And in a chapel of the
eighth-century church of the All-blessed Virgin, now Fetieh Jami, where
the figures of Christ and twelve prophets still look down from a golden
dome, we have work of a much later period—probably the fourteenth
century. But a far finer example of the work of that period is to be seen
in Kahrieh Jami, once Our Saviour in the Fields.
[Illustration: Kahrieh Jami]
Kahrieh Jami, popularly known as the mosaic mosque, is in every way
one of the most interesting monuments of Constantinople. Like Imrahor
Jamisi it was originally the church of a monastery, and its history goes
back as far. Like the Studion, also, it suffered from the quarrels of
iconoclasm, it gave hospitality at a historic moment—namely during the
last siege—to the miraculous icon of the Shower of the Way, and it fell
into Turkish hands during the reign of Baïezid II. Kahrieh Jami means the
Mosque of Woe, from the scenes that were enacted there when the Turks
stormed the walls. The church seems always to have had a particular
connection with Syria. The abbot Theodore, an uncle of Justinian’s
empress, came to it from Antioch in 530. Again in the ninth century, when
the iconoclasts were finally beaten, the celebrated Syrian monk Michael
was made abbot, while pilgrims from Syria always made the monastery
their headquarters. The church we know was not the church built outside
the walls of Constantine as early, it may be, as the fourth century.
The original church was successively rebuilt in the sixth century—by
Justinian—in the seventh, in the ninth, and in the eleventh or at the
beginning of the twelfth. To this latter restoration by Mary Ducas, a
princess with Bulgarian blood in her veins, the church owes its present
lines and perhaps a part of its interior decoration.
[Illustration: Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: Theodore Metochites offering his
church to Christ
Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier, Constantinople]
The last of the Byzantine restorers was a personage who recalls, as he
anticipated, the humanists of the Renaissance. His name was Theodore
Metochites, and you may see him in a great striped turban kneeling over
the royal door of the inner narthex, offering a model of his church to
the seated Christ. He was what we call nowadays, though his history
has been repeated in every time and country, a self-made man; and like
more than one of those who have risen from nothing to the height of
power, he outlived his fortune. Born of poor parents in Nicæa, the
city of the creed, and early left an orphan, he went as a young man to
Constantinople, where he succeeded by his handsome presence and his
talent as an orator in attracting the attention of the emperor Andronicus
II. He was, however, more than an orator. He aspired to be a poet as
well, and some of his not too intelligible verses have been translated
into German. In history he took a particular interest. He became the
chief astronomer of his time. His favourite pupil in the latter science
was Nicephorus Gregoras, a monk of Our Saviour in the Fields, who,
three hundred years before Gregory XIII, proposed to rectify the Julian
calendar. If Greek priests realised this fact, and how nearly alike were
the names of the two churchmen, they might be more willing to adopt a
system which was christened after a Pope. It was characteristic of the
time that Metochites took as much interest in astrology as he did in
astronomy. Philology was another subject that engrossed him. He made
six hundred years ago an attempt which is being made in Athens to-day
to restore the Romaic Greek language to its Attic purity, for he was a
devoted student of Aristotle and particularly of Plato. With all these
scholarly tastes, however, he was a man of affairs. By his success as an
ambassador and in other public posts, he rose from one responsibility
to another till he became Grand Logothetes—or as we might say, prime
minister. He was far-sighted enough to see, a hundred and fifty years
before the final catastrophe, the imminence of the Turkish peril. Among
his writings, too, are some curiously modern reflections on absolute
monarchy. Nevertheless he became involved, through his fidelity to his
imperial master, in the long quarrel between Andronicus II and his
grandson Andronicus III. When the latter usurped the throne in 1328
Metochites was stripped of his honours and his wealth, his palace—near
that of Blacherne—was razed to the ground, and he was sent into exile.
Allowed to return after two years, he retired to his own monastery, where
he lived only two years more.
If this great man was unhappy in his death, he was happier than perhaps
he knew in the monument that has kept alive the memory of his humanism
and of his loyalty. The grace of its proportions, the beauty of its
marbles, the delicacy of its sculpture, everything about it sets the
church apart as a little masterpiece. Kahrieh Jami is also notable for
the faded frescoes in its side chapel, where a portrait of Andronicus II
looks ghostlike out of a niche, for in no other Constantinople church
does there remain any visible trace of painting—or any such tomb as the
one, in the same chapel, of the Grand Constable Michael Tornikes, with
a long Greek epitaph. What completes, however, this picture of the last
days of Byzantium, what gives Kahrieh Jami its unique interest, are its
mosaics. In the nave they are still hidden, waiting as if for the day
of release from a strange enchantment. But in the narthexes Mohammedan
sensibilities have for once spared two long series of scenes from the
life of Christ and the legend of Mary. And they make one ask oneself
again why so noble an art is practically lost. For richness of effect no
other form of surface ornament can equal it. The modern art of painting
is, of course, far more expressive; for that very reason it is less
suited to mural decoration. Mosaic can carry farther, and for great
spaces or distances it is equally expressive—witness the tragic Christ
of Cefalù. Moreover, it has decorative effects of its own which painting
never can rival, while its greater brilliancy is better suited to most
architectural settings. And it is infinitely more durable. Of the great
frescoes of the Renaissance some are already gone, while others crack and
darken year by year. The art of Michelangelo and Leonardo will one day
be as mythic as that of Zeuxis and Apelles, except for the shadow of it
saved by our modern processes of reproduction. But the mosaics of Venice,
Ravenna, and Sicily, of Salonica and Constantinople, will last as long as
the buildings that contain them.
[Illustration: Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: the Massacre of the Innocents
Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier, Constantinople]
[Illustration: Giotto’s fresco of the Massacre of the Innocents, in the
Arena chapel, Padua
Photograph by Alinari Brothers, Florence. Reproduced by permission]
In this very matter of the relation between fresco and mosaic, Kahrieh
Jami happens to play a particular part. The mosaics are disposed with
such a mastery of composition, there is so wide a range of colour in
them, in life and naturalness and sometimes in choice of subject they
differ so greatly from better-known mosaics of an earlier period, that
some critics have seen in them a fine Italian hand—and one no less
fine than that of Giotto, who painted the Arena chapel in Padua about
the time Metochites restored this church. Not that any one has gone
so far as to ascribe the Byzantine series to Giotto himself, but that
the qualities I have mentioned, together with certain similarities of
detail, have been ascribed to the revolutionary influence of the Italian
series. It is not yet unanimously decided whether the mosaics all belong
to the same period. Perhaps we must wait for the evidence of those
still hidden in the nave to know whether any of them belong to the time
of Mary Ducas. The Russian archæologist Schmitt, who has written the
completest monograph on the subject—and who picked enough plaster away
in the nave to assure himself that mosaics were still there—assigns the
work to the period of Metochites, but surmises it to have been inspired
by some Syrian original of the ninth century. Diehl, the eminent French
Byzantinist, sees rather in Kahrieh Jami a last revival of Byzantine
art, contemporaneous with but not derived from the early Tuscan school of
painting. When these savants expressed their opinions neither of them was
aware of an odd little fact quite lately established not by a Byzantinist
but by a layman who was looking at some photographs of the mosaics. In
the photograph of the central bay of the outer narthex he discovered,
above a two-handled jar which a servant carries on his shoulder to the
marriage at Cana, a date in Arabic numerals—but real Arabic numerals,
not the ones we have made out of them. This date is 6811, which in the
Byzantine system of chronography is equivalent to 1303. The find was
interesting in itself as being the earliest use yet recorded—if I am
not mistaken—of Arabic numerals on a public monument. It has a further
interest in pointing to the Syrian affiliations of the monastery and in
lending colour, however slight, to Schmitt’s theory with regard to the
Syrian origin of certain of the mosaics. But it tends more definitely to
prove that the mosaics were executed before Giotto’s frescoes in Padua,
which could hardly have been begun and much less completed by 1303.
[Illustration: Mosaic from Kahrieh Jami: the Marriage at Cana
Photograph by Sébah and Joaillier, Constantinople]
I do not know whether any one, in discussing this matter, has drawn
attention to so small a detail as a certain checkered border of
disconcerting similarity in the two series. Therefore I, who am nothing
of an expert in these questions, will pass it by. But I cannot pass
Kahrieh Jami by without pointing out, from the depth of my inexpertness,
how unlikely it was that Theodore Metochites, the lover of all things
Greek, should send, at the end of the thirteenth century, for one of
those hated Latins who had just been driven out of Constantinople, to
decorate the church they had left a ruin. Even if it should be proved
that the designer of these mosaics was an Italian, however, or that he
had watched Giotto in the house of the Scrovegni, it would not alter the
fact that the trend of influence was all the other way. Constantinople
had for the young Italian cities, down to 1453, an immense artistic
prestige. Indeed, the church of the Salute, recalling as it does the
lines of a mosque, seems to suggest that in Venice, at least, this
influence did not cease with the coming of the Turks. Greek masters of
mosaic were invited time and again to decorate Italian interiors. The
primitive Italian painters drew Byzantine madonnas on gold backgrounds
exactly like mosaicists working in a new—and possibly a cheaper—medium.
Giotto himself, like his master Cimabue, made pictures with little cubes
of coloured glass. I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never
influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the
contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of
inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of
the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has
been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in
the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of
the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. Need it dim the glamour
of the Renaissance to look upon it as something less of an immaculate
conception? If the Renaissance was a reflowering, it was of a plant that
had silently grown in another soil. And Kahrieh Jami is the last flower
of that plant in its own Byzantine ground.
* * * * *
From Kahrieh Jami to the walls is but a step—in more ways than one. They
are the part of old Constantinople that is most visible. They still form
an almost complete circuit, of some thirteen miles, around Stamboul.
Where the circuit is most broken is along the Golden Horn, though even
there large sections of the wall remain. On the land side only one breach
has been made, for the railway that leads to Bulgaria and the west.
Whether other breaches will follow remains to be seen. For the walls
lie under sentence of death. In 1909 a bill passed Parliament and was
signed by the Sultan, providing that the walls be pulled down and their
materials sold for the public profit. In spite of the disdain under
which Constantinople generally lies, I am happy to say that so loud a
protest immediately rose to heaven as to dissuade the astonished Young
Turks from carrying out their law. I can quite understand that that old
rampart of Christendom represents to them merely so much brick and stone
in a very bad state of preservation, which they began to demolish five
hundred years ago and since have left to encumber the earth. Moreover,
they have been to Vienna, they have been to Paris, they have been to all
sorts of places. They have seen fine boulevards laid out on the site of
ancient fortifications, and they ask themselves: If the Europeans do it,
why do they make such a fuss when we propose to? I would rather like
to tell them, for Turkey is not the only place where Young Turks grow.
However, as none of them will ever read this obscure page I will content
myself with saying that I shall never object to the sea-walls being
pulled down—provided the railway be made to subside into a tunnel, and
the gateways along the Golden Horn be preserved like those of Florence
to ornament the city. As for the land walls, they are too great an asset
ever to be disposed of except under direst stress of over-population,
which now seems remote enough. Only in that case, dear Young Turks, you
will also have to cut down your cemetery cypresses outside the walls. And
then will double stars be scratched out of many travellers’ handbooks!
Constantinople has long been famous for her walls. About the rocky
headland of Seraglio Point, which was the acropolis of the first settlers
from Megara, may still lie some blocks of the fortifications built by
Pausanias after the battle of Platæa, when he drove the Persians out
of Byzantium and made it one of the strongest cities of the ancient
world. This wall lasted until it was destroyed in 196 by the emperor
Septimius Severus, in revenge upon the Byzantines for having taken the
part of his rival Pescennius Niger. He also changed the name of the
city to Antonina and made it subject to Perinthos, now a sleepy hamlet
of the Marmora called Eregli. But he later refortified the town, on the
advice of his son Caracalla. The Byzantium thus enlarged extended into
the Golden Horn not quite so far as Yeni Jami, and into the Marmora no
farther than the lighthouse of Seraglio Point. When in 328 Constantine
the Great decided to turn Byzantium into New Rome, he carried the walls
to the vicinity of the Oun Kapan-Azap Kapou bridge on one side, and on
the other to the gate of Daoud Pasha, in the Psamatia quarter. He set
the forum bearing his name, marked to-day by the so-called Burnt Column,
at the place where the city gate of Septimius Severus opened on to the
_Via Egnatia_. His own city gate opened on to that road at the point now
called Issa Kapoussou—the Gate of Jesus. The charming little mosque of
Ramazan Effendi stands on the street which follows the line of the wall
for a short distance to the north. Of the wall itself nothing that can
be identified as such remains visible. It was the emperor Theodosius
II, he who first brought to Constantinople those much-travelled bronze
horses long since naturalised in Venice, who gave the walls their present
extension. The inner of the two lines of land walls he built in 413, the
outer wall and the moat being added while Attila was ravaging the Balkan
peninsula in 447. Two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in Greek, still
record this achievement over the gate now called after the _Yeni Mevlevi
Haneh_. Later emperors did no more than repair the work of Theodosius,
except at that northwestern corner of the city where the growing
importance of the Blacherne quarter necessitated fresh enlargements or
defences. Since the Turkish conquest more or less extensive repairs have
been carried out by Mehmed II, Mourad IV (1635), and Ahmed III (1721).
[Illustration: The Golden Gate]
An infinite variety of interest attaches to these walls—from the gates
that pierce them, the towers that flank them at intervals of some sixty
feet, the devices, monograms, and inscriptions of every period they
contain, the associations they have had so much time to accumulate. Two
points, however, have a special interest for expert and layman alike. I
have already spoken of Tekfour Seraï, where the Theodosian wall merges
into later additions, and of the imperial quarter of Blacherne. I have
yet to speak, even more cursorily, of the Golden Gate. This great triple
portal and the marble towers flanking it existed before the walls
themselves, having been built as a triumphal arch over the Egnatian
Way by Theodosius the Great, after his defeat of Maximus in 388. The
statue of the emperor and the other sculptures that adorned it once are
gone, but you can still see over the central arch the rivet holes of the
original inscription:
HAEC LOCA THEVDOSIVS DECORAT POST FATA TYRANNI
AVREA SÆCLO GERIT QVI PORTAM CONSTRVIT AVRO
When the younger Theodosius extended the walls he made the Golden
Gate a part of them, but kept it as the state entrance to the city.
Distinguished guests were met there—ambassadors, visiting princes, at
least one Pope. Holy processions burned their incense under that archway.
Through it passed emperors in splendour when they came to the purple,
or when they returned victorious from war. No gateway in Europe can
have seen so much of the pomp and glory of the world. Now the arches are
blind, save for one small postern in the centre, and that was nearly
choked by an earthquake in 1912. One Roman eagle still looks down from
a high marble cornice upon the moat, empty of all but garden green, and
upon a colony of Turkish gravestones that stand among cypresses where the
_Via Egnatia_ started away for the Adriatic.
On the other side lies a silent enclosure whose own day has come and
gone since the last emperor passed through the Golden Gate. This is the
fortress of the Seven Towers—three of which were built by the Turkish
conqueror and connected by curtains with the city wall. In the towers are
passages and cells as black as the subterranean maze of Blacherne, and
they were used for the same purpose. Many are the stories of captivity
in this high-walled place that have been told and remain to be told.
One of them is briefly legible, in Latin, in a stone of the southeast
tower, where it was cut by a Venetian in the seventeenth century. It used
even to be the fashion to clap an ambassador into prison there when war
broke out between his country and the Porte. Turkish state prisoners, of
course, perished there without number. And one sultan, Osman II, when he
was no more than eighteen, was barbarously put to death there in 1622.
And all that blood and bitterness, which was so desperately the whole
of reality for so many breathing men, is now but a pleasant quickening
of romance for the visitor who follows a lantern through the darkness
of the towers or who explores the battlements of the wall, grassy and
anemone-grown in the spring, from which a magnificent view stretches of
the sea and the city and the long line of ruined turrets marching up the
hill.
[Illustration: Outside the land walls]
If every ended drama of human greatness must come at last to a view,
the road around the land walls of Constantinople can do more for the
man who walks it than any such road I know. Other cities have walls,
it is true. Other walls have moats. Some of their moats contain water,
too, while this moat contains only water-wheels and vegetable-gardens.
And how much more greenly do the vegetables grow, I wonder, because of
all the dead men that have fallen under the ramparts? Other ramparts
wear as picturesque a verdure, and blossoming fruit-trees have the same
trick of setting them off in the spring. And cypresses are no monopoly
of Constantinople. But no such army of cypresses faces other walls, from
such a camp of strange grey stones. Nor in any Eternal City does water
play so magical a part of background. The landscape is most dramatically
accidented where you look past the high terraces of Blacherne toward
the landlocked brightness of the Golden Horn. A view is also to be
admired down the valley of the Lycus, of the whole city stretching to
the sea. But the noblest perspective is the simpler one where the road,
avenue-like between the moat and the cypresses, dips and rises and dips
again toward the Golden Gate and the Marmora, till a last marble tower
stands superbly out of the blue. The contrast of sea and cypresses and
tawny stones, always perfect, here takes an insensible colour, I suppose,
from the thought of the sentinels who called from tower to tower in old
Byzantine nights; and of all the horsemen and banners that have ridden
against those walls; and of what they did for the other end of Europe—the
walls—till civilisation was safely planted there; and of something yet
more intangible, that is deepest and strangest in human fate.
[Illustration: A last marble tower stands superbly out of the blue]
IV
THE GOLDEN HORN
Why the Golden Horn should be called the Golden Horn is a question that
has agitated many serious pens. A less serious pen is therefore free
to declare itself for an explanation that does not explain. The Greeks
always seem to have been fond of the word gold. In their language as
in ours it has a pleasant sound, and it has pleasant implications—the
philosophers to the contrary. At any rate, the Greeks of Constantinople
made much use of it. The state entrance to the city was through the
Golden Gate. One of the most famous parts of the Great Palace was the
Golden Hall. The suburb of Scutari was anciently known as the City of
Gold. There were in different parts of the town a Golden Milestone, a
Golden Arch, a Golden Roof, and a Golden Stream, while the Greek church
abounds in golden springs and golden caves. I have even known a Greek
serving-maid to address her mistress in moments of expansion as “my
golden one”! The Golden Horn, then, was probably named so for even less
reason than the orange valley behind Palermo—because some one a long time
ago liked the sound of the words.
I always wish I might have seen the Golden Horn before it was bridged. It
must have made, opening out of the lake-like basin where the Bosphorus
and the Marmora come together, one of the most satisfactory pieces of
geography in nature. However, if the bridges cut up that long curving
perspective they add something of their own to it, and whoever stands
upon them must acknowledge that the Golden Horn is still a satisfactory
piece of geography. Consider, for instance, its colour, which may not
be quite so blue as Naples but which is far from the muddiness of New
York. Consider also the shores that overlook it—how excellently their
height is proportioned to its breadth, how superlatively the southern
one, in particular, is set off by the pinnacles of Seraglio Point and
the mosques that ride the higher crests. Yet do not fail to consider
that more intimate element of its character, its busy water life. I say
so with rather a pointed air, as if, having already found something
to write about one bank of the Golden Horn, I intended to go on and
give a compendious account of the Golden Horn itself, to the last fish
that swims in it. Alas, no! I have admired the Golden Horn from every
conceivable point of view, I have navigated it in every conceivable
sense, I have idled much about its banks and bridges, I have even
ventured to swim in its somewhat doubtful waters—only to learn how
lamentable is my ignorance in their regard. My one consolation is that
I never encountered any other man who knew very much about the Golden
Horn—save casual watermen and sea-captains who have much better things to
do than to write books, or read them.
[Illustration: The Golden Horn
From the _Specchio Marittimo_ of Bartolommeo Prato]
All harbours bring the ends of the earth together, and the part of the
Golden Horn outside the bridges looks a little like them all. Flags of
every country fly there, beside stone quays or moored to red buoys in
the open. Trim liners and workaday tramps bring in a little atmosphere
from the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the far-off Atlantic. Tugs puff
busily about. Cranes take up the white man’s burden as naturally as in
any other port. Every harbour brings the ends of the earth together in
its own way, however, and so does this. If you happen to tie up at a buoy
instead of alongside, you will soon make the acquaintance of a gentleman
in a row-boat very much like other row-boats, fringed with bumpers.
This gentleman will probably be a Greek, though he may be anything, and
he will demand all the gold of Ophir to set you ashore, getting not a
little of it in the end. If you prefer to stay on board you will very
likely make the acquaintance of another gentleman in a trimmer boat,
painted blue and green, pointed at both ends and provided at each with
an upstanding post which is convenient for tow-lines. This is a bumboat,
and the Maltese in command will furnish you almost anything in the way
of supplies—for a consideration. Should you have a cargo to land, you
must deal with a yet more redoubtable race of beings. These men are
Laz, a race of dare-devils from the region of Trebizond, which was the
ancient Colchis. You may know them by their tight black clothes, by the
sharpness of their shoes, ending in a leather thong, and by the pointed
hood of two long flaps which they wear knotted about their heads like a
turban. Some of them are Mohammedans and some of them are Christians, but
all of them speak a mysterious language of their own. Two sorts of boats
are peculiar to these brothers of Medea: the _mahona_, a single-masted
scow with a raking stem, and a smaller snub-nosed _salapouri_. I do not
include the mad little open _taka_, broad of beam, high of board, and
gay with painted stars, in which they are not afraid to run down the
coast from their own country. Woe be you if you happen to displease a
_mahonaji_, for he belongs to a guild that holds the commerce of the port
in no gentle hand. He will neither discharge your goods nor let any one
else, if so it seem good to him, and not even the government can make him
change his mind.
[Illustration: Lighters]
The lightermen are by no means the only guild in the Golden Horn, though
I suppose they are doomed to follow the way of the others. These old
organisations still persist among the different kinds of watermen.
Each guild has its own station, like the _traghetti_ of Venice, each
has a headquarters, or _lonja_—which is a corruption of the Italian
_loggia_—and each a series of officers headed by a _kehaya_. This
dignitary takes no actual part, as a usual thing, in the work of the
guild, but earns the lion’s share of the profits, and in return therefor
protects the guild in high quarters. Under the old régime the _kehayas_
of the principal guilds were members of the palace camarilla. In older
times still the guilds were required to contribute heavily to the
expenses of war in recognition of their privileges, and even now the
lightermen and the custom-house porters are obliged to give the War
Department so many men on so many days a week.
[Illustration: Sandals]
The outer bridge draws a sharp boundary-line between the cosmopolitan
part of the harbour and the part where local colour is the rule. For any
one who takes an interest in boats and those who have to do with them,
the bit of water between Yeni Jami and the Arsenal is one of the happiest
hunting-grounds in the world. This is the true home of the water guilds.
The lightermen’s headquarters are here, and their four anchored flotillas
are a distinct note of the scene. Here also are the headquarters of
many lesser watermen such as row you across the Horn for a piastre—or
even less if you do not insist on a boat to yourself. The smartest ones
have their station just inside the bridge. Most of their boats are trim
skiffs, gay with carving and gilding, and fitted out with velvet cushions
and summer awnings. This skiff, called a _sandal_, has almost ousted
the true boat of the Golden Horn, which is the legendary caïque. I am
sorry to say it, because I do not like to see the Turks change their own
customs for European ones, but truth compels me to add that I have lolled
too much in gondolas to be an unbridled admirer of the caïque. A gondola
is infinitely more roomy and comfortable, and it has the great advantage
of not forcing you to sit nose to nose with a perspiring boatman. The
caïque is swifter and easier in its gait, however, and, when long enough
for two or three pairs of oars, not even a gondola is more graceful.
Caïques still remain at the ferries higher up the Golden Horn—and grubby
enough most of them are, for they have fallen greatly in the world since
bridges were built and steamers began to ply.
[Illustration: Caïques]
If I were really to open the chapter of caïques I would never come to the
end. The word is a generic one, and applies to an infinity of boats, from
the stubby little single-oared _piadeh kaïk_ of the Golden Horn ferries
to the big _pazar kaïk_. You may admire this boat, and the carving that
decorates it, and its magnificent incurving beak, and the tassel that
should dangle therefrom, at the wharves of Yemish, off the Dried Fruit
Bazaar. They all come, early in the morning, from different villages on
the Bosphorus, rowed by men who stand to the heavy-handled oars and drop
with them to their backs. There are also caïques with sails, undecked
boats built on the lines of a fishing caïque, that bring fruit and
vegetables from the villages of the Marmora. They are prettier to look at
than to navigate, for they have no keel and their mainsail is a balloon,
to be pulled from one side to the other of a fearsome stick, boom and
gaff in one, that spears the heavens. The human part of the caïque has
its picturesque points as well. The sail caïques are navigated more often
than not by Greeks. As with fishing caïques, it depends on the village
they come from. The men of the bazaar caïques are all Turks, and none
of them ever saw a boat till he took ship for Constantinople. What is
odder yet, the same is true of most of the ordinary boatmen of the inner
Horn. Many of them are Laz; many others are Turkish peasants from the
hinterland of the Black Sea. Those from one village or district enter one
guild, serving a long apprenticeship before they can be masters of their
own craft.
[Illustration: Sailing caïques]
Another boundless chapter is that of the larger vessels that frequent
the inner Horn. You get an inkling of how boundless it is when you
stand on the bridge in front of Yeni Jami and look at the shipping that
crowds along the shores. A perfect museum of navigation is there. Modern
steamers lie beside the caravels of Columbus—as a matter of fact, the
Greeks still call them _karavia_—and motor-boats make way for vessels
whose build and rig can have changed very little since the days of the
Argo. One notable armada is anchored off Odoun Kapan, the wood market,
under the mosque of Süleïman, and the most notable part of it, for
me, is always made up of certain ships called _gagalî_ because their
bows have the curve of a parrot’s beak. They have two eyes, like the
_bragozzi_ of the Adriatic, and their tremendously tilted bowsprit starts
from a little one side of the bow. But what is most decorative about them
is the stern, a high triangle adorned with much painting and carving and
an open balustrade along the top, from either end of which a beam juts
out horizontally over the sea in the line of the hull.
[Illustration: Galleons that might have sailed out of the Middle Ages
anchor there now]
One or two minor fleets, made up of small Greek _alamánas_ or Turkish
_chektîrmehs_, are usually tied up off other Stamboul markets. But
the most imposing one of all hides the Galata shore. It begins,
distinguishably enough, just beyond the landing-stage of the skiffs I
have mentioned, with a squadron of lighters and the raft that makes a
bobbing street between certain tubby-looking sailing vessels. _Bombarda_
is the name of their class, or _vouvartha_, if you prefer, and they bring
oil and wine from as far away as the Greek islands. Beyond them rises
so intricate a maze of rigging as would have baffled even an old German
engraver. I wonder a man can ever find his own ship there, so closely
does one elbow another, nor in any single row, all the way to Azap Kapou.
This is where the Genoese had shipyards of old, and galleons that might
have sailed out of the Middle Ages anchor there now for repairs, with
craft that look a little more like Western seas. I despair of ever really
knowing anything about them—of ever being able to tell at first shot a
_maouna_ of the Black Sea from a _maouna_ of the White Sea, or a _saïka_
from either, or to discover that Flying Dutchman of a craft of whose
existence I have been credibly informed, namely, the Ship of the Prophet
Noah.
[Illustration: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus
From a Persian miniature
By courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris]
The Black and the White Sea play a great part in these matters, the White
Sea meaning the Marmora and the Mediterranean. In the days when guilds
were more important than they are now the Captains of the White Sea were
the navy, while the Captains of the Black Sea were the merchant marine,
and that must have something to do with the fact that the watermen of
the Golden Horn still come from the littoral of the Black Sea. The
Prophet Noah also, whom I have just mentioned, is likewise involved in
matters maritime, as being the father of ship-builders. The archangel
Gabriel, according to Mohammedan tradition, taught him how to model the
keel of the ark from the breast-bone of a goose, and wrote talismanic
invocations on different parts of the ship—as “O Steadfast One” on the
planks, and “O Allotter of the True Path” upon the rudder. The patrons
of Turkish seamen are, if you please, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus!
Mohammed seems to have entertained a sympathy for these mythic beings,
whose adventures are told in the eighteenth chapter of the Koran. The
name of their dog, somewhat variously known as Kitmir or Al Rakim,
used to be written on the outside of letters in order to ensure their
safe passage across the sea, and this happy animal is one of the few
to whom paradise is specifically promised. Von Hammer accounts for the
association of so curious a company with seamen on the ground that a
verse of the Koran mentions their entering a ship. But astrologically, I
believe, they are related to the constellation of the Great Bear; whence
it is clear enough why they should be concerned with navigation. It is
further to be noted of the seamen of the Golden Horn that whether they
belong to the Black Sea or the White, and whether they sacrifice to the
Seven Sleepers or to St. Nicholas, the jargon of their trade is almost
purely Italian. Even the boatmen in the harbour shout _sía_ when they
want each other to back water, not suspecting that the gondoliers in
Venice do exactly the same—though the gondoliers may not spell it quite
as I do. The names of a few kinds of ships and of a few parts of them
have been slightly Turkified or Grecicised, as the case may be, but an
Italian sailor would be lost only on a steamer. There a Turkish captain
uses English words as glibly as you or I. On a motor-boat, however, he
would pass to French.
It is rather surprising that the Greeks, who were always a seafaring
people, should have taken over so much of the ship language of their
Latin conquerors. The case of the Turks is less surprising, for they are
tent men born. Nor have their coreligionaries in general ever been great
adventurers upon the deep. The Caliph Omar even went so far as to forbid
them sea voyages. Nevertheless, the science of navigation owes much to
the Arabs, and we get from them our words arsenal and admiral—meaning
“house of construction” and “prince of the sea”—while some of the
greatest exploits of the Turks were connected with the sea. The deep
valley of Kassîm Pasha, inside the Azap Kapou bridge, is supposed to have
been the final scene of one of the most celebrated of those exploits, the
one successfully carried out by Sultan Mehmed II during his siege of the
city, when he hauled a squadron of eighty galleys out of the Bosphorus,
dragged them over the hills in a night, and relaunched them inside
the chain that locked the Golden Horn. That chain may be seen to-day
in the military museum of St. Irene. Kassîm Pasha does not seem to me
altogether to fit the contemporary descriptions, although it would offer
the easiest route. There is no doubt, however, about the famous arsenal
that sits solidly at the mouth of the valley to this day. How many days
it will continue to sit there is another matter, for its long water-front
may become more valuable for commercial purposes than for those of a
modern shipyard. It was founded by Sultan Selim I in 1515, was enlarged
by his son Süleïman the Magnificent, and reached the climax of its
importance under his grandson Selim II. Those were the great days when
the Captains of the White Sea were the terror of the Mediterranean, and
when a disaster like the battle of Lepanto, in which the Turks lost two
hundred and twenty-four ships and thirty thousand men, could not shake
the empire. The Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha said to the Venetian
Balio, apropos of that battle and of the conquest of Cyprus by the Turks
which preceded it: “There is a great difference between your loss and
ours. In taking a kingdom from you it is an arm of yours that we have
cut off, while you, in beating our fleet, have merely shaved our beard.”
Nor was this a piece of rodomontade. The winter after Lepanto, 1571-2,
one hundred and fifty-eight galleys of different sizes were laid down
in the Arsenal. And when that famous Prince of the Sea Kîlîj Ali Pasha
expressed a doubt as to whether he could find the rigging and anchors he
needed, the Grand Vizier said to him: “Lord Admiral, the wealth and power
of the empire are such that if it were necessary we would make anchors of
silver, cables of silk, and sails of satin.”
A few relics of this fallen greatness are to be seen in the museum
of the Arsenal, some distance up the Horn from the Admiralty proper.
Some wonderful figureheads of galleys are there, flags and pennants
of different sorts, a chart of the time of the Conqueror painted on
parchment, a few interesting models, and one or two of the big ship
lanterns that were the sign of the dignity of an admiral, corresponding
to the horsetails of the _vezirs_. A pasha of three lanterns, however,
was a much more important personage than a pasha of three tails. Most
picturesque of all are a number of great gilded caïques, with swooping
bows and high sterns, in which the sultans used to go abroad. The largest
of them is said to have been a Venetian galley. It has twenty-two
rowlocks on either side, and each oar was rowed by three or four men.
As a matter of fact, the long horizontal overhang of the bow does look
rather like some of the models in the Arsenal at Venice, while two
lions guard the stern. But the lions have no wings, they were always a
favourite ornament of Turkish as of Byzantine galleys, and the lines of
the hull are precisely those of any caïque. As to the imperial cabin at
the stern there is no doubt. It is a triple cupola rather, supported by
columns, and all inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl and lumps
of garnet glass. Reclining under this wonderful canopy Sultan Mehmed IV
used to go about the Bosphorus, while over a hundred men in front of him
rose and fell with their oars. What a splash they must have made!
The Arsenal has given a certain colour to the whole suburb of Kassîm
Pasha. It is chiefly inhabited by naval officers, who under Abd ül Hamid
II outnumbered their men! There is a quarter of it called _Kalliounjou
Koullouk_, which means the Guard-house of the Galleon Men. There are also
a number of fountains in Kassîm Pasha carved with three ship lanterns
to show who built them. And not the least famous of the Princes of the
Sea lies there himself beside the mosque he raised out of the spoils of
his piracies. This Pialeh Pasha was by birth a Croat and the son of a
shoemaker. Captured as a boy by the Janissaries, he grew up to command
the fleets of his captors, to conquer Chio and sixty-six other islands,
and to marry the daughter of Sultan Selim II. But he failed to take Malta
from the Knights of St. John, and it was the bitterness of his life. His
mosque is almost unknown, so far does it lie in the back of Kassîm Pasha.
They say that Pialeh dug a canal to its doors. They also say that he
wanted to make it like a ship. The mosque, at all events, is different
from all other mosques I know. The nave is shallower than it is wide,
its six equal domes being held up by two central pillars like masts,
while the single minaret rises out of the wall opposite the _mihrab_.
The _mihrab_ itself, contained in no apse, is perhaps the finest tiled
_mihrab_ I know. Some of the tiles have been stolen, however, and the
mosque in general has a pillaged appearance. I thought from the bareness
of the entrance wall that a large part of the magnificent frieze of blue
and white tiles, an inscription by the famous Hassan Chelibi, must have
been stolen too, until the _imam_ told me that the frieze originally
stopped there, as no true believer may turn his back on any part of the
Koran. The outside of the mosque is also unusual, with its deep porch,
two-storied at either end. It is the largest mosque on the left bank
of the Golden Horn, and even without its historical and architectural
interest it would be worth a visit for the charm of its plane-shaded
yard and the cypress grove behind the mosque where Pialeh lies in a
neglected _türbeh_.
[Illustration: The _mihrab_ of Pialeh Pasha]
I perceive that I am now embarked on a chapter more boundless than any.
Yet how can one speak of the Golden Horn and be silent with regard to
its shores? I have already written three chapters about one of them, to
be sure, and I propose to write a fourth about the other. But the quiet
inner reaches of the Golden Horn contain much less in the way of water
life, and depend much more upon the colour of their banks. This colour
must have been vivider before steam lengthened the radius of the dweller
in Stamboul and when the Golden Horn was still a favourite resort of the
court. Nevertheless there is a great deal of character in the quiet, in
the not too prosperous and evidently superseded settlements that follow
the outer bustle of the harbour. One of the most characteristic of them
is the Greek quarter of Phanar—or Fener, as the Turks call it. In both
languages the name means lantern or lighthouse. It originally pertained
to a gate of the city wall, being derived from a beacon anciently marking
a spit of land in front of the gate. There stood more anciently an inner
fortified enclosure in this vicinity called the Petrion. A convent of
that name once existed, I know not whether founded by a certain Petrus,
a noble of the time of Justinian, who lived or owned property in this
neighbourhood. It was here that the Venetians were able to effect their
entrance into the city in 1203 and 1204, by throwing bridges from their
galleys to the battlements of the wall. No galley would be able to come
so close to the wall to-day. But the wall is still there, or large parts
of it. And behind it, occupying perhaps the site of the old Petrion, the
Greek Patriarchs of Constantinople have had their headquarters for the
past three hundred years.
[Illustration: Old houses of Phanar]
You would never guess, to look at the rambling wooden _konak_ or the
simple church beside it, that you were looking at the Vatican of the
Greek world. Neither would you suspect that the long alley skirting
the water, hemmed in between dark old stone houses with heavily barred
windows and upper stories jutting out toward each other on massive
stone brackets, was once the Corso of Constantinople. That was when the
great Greek families that furnished princes to Moldavia and Wallachia
and dragomans to the European embassies and to the Porte maintained
the splendour of a court around the Patriarchate. The ambassadors of
the tributary principalities lived there, too, and a house is still
pointed out as the Venetian embassy. A very different air blows in the
Phanar to-day. Many of the Phanariotes emigrated to Greece or otherwise
disappeared at the time of the Greek revolution, while those of their
descendants who still remain in Constantinople prefer the heights of
Pera. None but the poorest, together with Armenians and Jews not a
few, now live in those old stone houses. They are worth looking at,
however—and I hope prefectures bursting with modernity and the zeal of
street-widening will remember it. None of them, I believe, dates from
before the fifteenth century, but after the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus
they are all that is left to give an idea what a Byzantine house may have
looked like. They also suggest how the old wooden house of Stamboul may
have come by its curving bracket. If none of them are very decorative
on the outside, we must remember that the house of a mediæval Greek in
Stamboul was very literally his castle. Some of the houses originally
contained no stairs at all, unless secret ones. Beside the stone house
stood a wooden one which contained the stairs, and each floor of the
two houses communicated by a narrow passage and two or three heavy iron
doors. In case of fire or massacre the inmates betook themselves to the
top floor of their stone house and barricaded their iron doors until the
coast was clear. Occasionally it was so clear that no wooden house and
no stairs were left them. But you would never suspect from outside what
pillars and arches, what monumental fireplaces, what plaster mouldings,
what marquetry of mother-of-pearl, what details of painting and gilding
and carving those top floors hide. And under many of them gardens still
run green to the water’s edge.
[Illustration: The outer court of Eyoub]
Of a very different character is the hollow of converging valleys outside
the city wall where lies, at the end of the Golden Horn proper, the
suburb of Eyoub Soultan. Eyoub Soultan, _anglice_ Prince Job, takes its
name from a friend and standard-bearer of the Prophet who took part
in the third Arab siege of Constantinople in 668 and fell outside the
walls. Of this good man and his last resting-place so many legendary
things are related that I don’t know where my chapter would end if I
repeated only the few of them I have heard. I can only say that when
Sultan Mehmed II was making his own siege, eight hundred years later,
he opportunely discovered the burial-place of the saintly warrior.
This discovery having stimulated the flagging ardour of the besiegers,
with what results we know, the Conqueror built a splendid mausoleum
above the grave of the Prophet’s friend and beside it the first of the
imperial mosques. To this, the holiest shrine of Islam in Constantinople,
the sultans come for that ceremony which takes for them the place of a
coronation—to be girded with the sword of Osman. So holy a shrine is it
that until the re-establishment of the constitution in 1908 no Christian
had ever entered that mosque except in disguise, or so much as its outer
court. Even now it is not easy for a Christian to see the inside of the
_türbeh_. I have not, at all events. But I count myself happy to have
seen its outer wall of blue and green tiles, shaded by broad eaves and
pierced in the centre by an intricate grille of brass which shines where
the fingers of the faithful pass over the letters of the creed. And I
must confess that I lay up no grudge against the _imams_ for keeping me
out. I cannot say it is for the same reason that another man of God,
with whom I sometimes sit in front of another tomb in Stamboul, once
gave me for never having been himself in the tomb of Eyoub: that he did
not feel himself worthy. It is, rather, an inconsistent feeling that I
am not sorry if some things and some places still be held sacred in the
world. On one side of the tomb, opening out of the same tiled wall, is
a _sebil_ where an attendant waits to give cups of cold water to the
thirsty. On the other side a window opens through a grille of small green
bronze hexagons into a patch of garden where a few rose-bushes stand
among graves. And in the centre of the quadrangle stand two enormous
plane-trees, or what is left of them, planted there by the Conqueror five
hundred years ago. The mosque itself is not very interesting, having been
restored too many times. It contains one much-prized relic, however,
consisting of a print of the Prophet’s foot in stone. Beside the mosque
and the forecourt is a second court, larger and irregular in shape, also
shaded by plane-trees, where, furthermore, are a fountain of ablution and
painted gravestones in railings and a colony of pigeons that are pampered
like those of St. Mark’s.
[Illustration: Eyoub]
The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most
picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but
they all have the grave dignity which the Turks contrive to put into
everything they do, and the streets take a tone from the great number of
pious institutions that line them, interspersed with cypresses and tombs.
The quarter is indeed, more than any other, the Pantheon of Stamboul, so
many important personages have chosen to be buried near the friend of the
Prophet. The pious Mehmed V, however, is the first sultan who has chosen
to lie to the last day in the company of all those good and famous men.
Several of the most notable mausoleums, though the most neglected, are of
the period of Süleïman I, and built by Sinan. In one of them, separated
from a little library by a porch of precious tiles, lies the Bosnian
slave, nicknamed from his birthplace Sokollî Mehmed, whose destiny it was
to become the Treasurer of Süleïman, successor to the terrible admiral
Barbarossa, and Grand Vizier of the empire. When his imperial master
died on the battle-field of Szigeth, in Hungary, Mehmed Pasha succeeded
in hiding the fact until Selim II could reach Constantinople. The young
sultan was the worst who had yet ascended the throne, but he stood in
such awe of his father’s great minister that Sokollî ruled the empire
throughout Selim’s reign and part of that of Mourad III. Three hundred
years before De Lesseps he conceived the idea of the Suez Canal, and
might have carried it out had he lived. He was murdered in 1579—at the
instigation, it was whispered, of the jealous and cruel Lala Moustafa
Pasha. The latter also has a place in this Turkish Pantheon. He was the
barbarian who flayed alive Marcantonio Bragadin, the heroic defender of
Famagusta, and stuffed his skin with straw. Having been paraded before
the troops in Cyprus and hung up in the Arsenal at Kassîm Pasha for
the edification of the galley-slaves, this bloody trophy was at last
presented to the Venetians, who gave it honourable burial in their own
Pantheon of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Lala Moustafa was himself of Christian
origin, being of the same Serb race as Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the admiral
Pialeh Pasha, and still another son-in-law of the imperial house who lies
in Eyoub, Ferhad Pasha, a vizier of Mourad III and Mehmed IV. Although
not born in the faith, Ferhad Pasha was renowned for the beauty of his
calligraphy. Among this group of mausoleums is that of one real Turk,
the celebrated Sheï’h ül Islam Ebou Sououd Effendi, who drew up and
interpreted the laws of Süleïman.
The _türbehs_ cluster so thickly between the mosque and the water that
one avenue is lined by nothing else, and from it little paved alleys
wander away between crowded gravestones and arching trees. Few of the
trees are cypresses here. The cypresses inhabit a hill beyond this silent
quarter, and through them climbs the most picturesque street in Eyoub.
Toward the top it forks. Whichever way you take, you will do well,
particularly in the spring, when the left-hand lane brings you into sight
of a blossoming valley of fruit-trees. But you will do better after all
to take the right-hand turn and climb a little farther, the cypresses
and gravestones thinning as you climb, till you come to a coffee-house
that did not need Pierre Loti to make it famous. Any man who gazes from
a height upon leagues of space and many habitations of his fellow men
is forced into philosophy. Here, however, you sip in with your coffee
strange things indeed as you look down from your high cemetery edge, past
cypresses and turbaned stones and the minarets of the mosque and the
procession of siege-battered towers scaling the slope beyond, upon the
whole picture of the Golden Horn framed between its two beetling cities.
The outer bridge, to be sure, is cut off by the curve of Galata; but the
heights of Scutari, or sometimes those of the Bithynian Olympus, are
visible to remind you what a meeting-place of nations is here.
[Illustration: The cemetery of Eyoub]
On this hilltop stood in old times the castle of Cosmidion, where Godfrey
of Bouillon and Bohemund stopped with their men on the way to the first
crusade. The castle took its name from the adjoining church of SS. Cosmas
and Damian, built by Theodosius the Younger and rebuilt with magnificence
by Justinian. In times still older this was the hill called Semistra—or
so I shall choose to believe until some one proves me wrong. Walking
along its bare crest, where you sometimes meet camels marching strangely
in from the villages of Thrace, you overlook that last reach of the
Golden Horn which used to be called Argyrolimnai, the Silver Pools. Two
small streams come together here, the Cydaris and the Barbyses as they
once were called, and they played a particular part in the mythology
of Byzantium. Io, fleeing from the jealousy of Hera, gave birth to her
daughter Keroessa at the foot of the hill where the two streams meet. The
child was nursed by Semistra, who gave her name to the hill in question,
and in whose honour an altar anciently stood at the meeting-place of
the rivers. Keroessa became in turn the mother of Byzas, founder of
Byzantium. The father of Byzas was no less a personage than Poseidon, god
of the sea, and the son married Phidalia, daughter of the river Barbyses.
How it happened that Byzas also came from so far away as Megara I do not
pretend to know; but in the name Keroessa, which seems to be connected
with the metamorphosis of Io, we have the mythic origin of the name of
the Golden Horn.
The two rivers are now called Ali Bey Souyou and Kiat Haneh Souyou, and
a power-house has taken the place of the altar of Semistra. The upper
branches of both valleys are bridged by a number of aqueducts, of all
periods from Justinian to Süleïman, and emperors and sultans alike
loved to take refuge in this pleasant wilderness. How it may have been
with the Greeks I do not know, but for the Turks spring has always been
the season of the rivers. The northern extremity of Eyoub, bordering
the Silver Pools, is still called _Beharieh_, from a spring palace of
Sultan Mahmoud I that exists no more. It is with the name of his uncle
Ahmed III, however, that the two valleys are chiefly associated. The
last words of Nero might more justly have been uttered by this humane
and splendour-loving prince—_qualis artifex pereo!_ He delighted above
all things in flowers, water, and illuminations—though I cannot conceal
that he also cherished an extreme admiration for breathing beauty. He
was one of the greatest builders who have reigned in Constantinople,
and he had the good fortune to discover a grand vizier of like tastes
with himself. It happened that an intelligent young envoy of theirs,
known by the curious name of Twenty-eight Mehmed, from the number of
his years when he signed the Peace of Passarowitz went, in 1720, on a
special embassy to Paris. He brought back such accounts of the court of
Louis XV, such pictures and presents also, as to change the whole course
of Ottoman architecture. So vivid a description in particular did the
ambassador give of the new palace of Versailles and of its older rival
at Marly-le-Roi, that Ahmed III resolved to imitate them. He had already
built a seat on the banks of the Ali Bey Souyou, whose magnificent planes
and cypresses may still be admired there. He then turned his attention
to the Kiat Haneh valley, where he played strange tricks with the river,
laid out gardens, built a palace, and commanded his courtiers to follow
his example—_à la_ Louis XIV and the Signs of the Zodiac. There grew up
as by magic a continuous line of villas and gardens from the village of
Kiat Haneh to that of Sütlüjeh, opposite Eyoub. And the fête which the
sultan gave when he inaugurated this new pleasure-ground was the most
splendid of the many that marked his long reign. It befell him, however,
in 1730, to be dethroned. Whereupon a fanatical mob asked permission of
his successor to burn the palaces of Kiat Haneh. Mahmoud I replied that
he could not allow the palaces to be burned, lest other nations draw
unfavourable conclusions with regard to the inner harmony of the empire,
but that the palaces might be destroyed! They accordingly were—one
hundred and seventy-three of them. Of so much magnificence not one stone
now remains upon another, and he who rows past the Silver Pools to-day is
almost asphyxiated by the fumes of the brick-kilns that have replaced the
pleasances of old.
As for the river itself, it comes nearer deserving the name which
Europeans have given it, of the Sweet Waters of Europe. Why they did so
I do not know, unless they thought the real name too prosaic. Kiat Haneh
means Paper House, from a mill originally built there by Süleïman I. The
valley it waters has remained an open meadow of occasional trees—perhaps
in accordance with the old Turkish usage, whereby any place where the
sultan pitches his tent belongs thereafter to his people to the end
of time. I presume the meadow of Kiat Haneh is destined ultimately to
become a city park. In the meantime a palace of Abd ül Aziz, looking
rather like a frosted cake, stands in the walled park of Ahmed III. The
huge rooms are empty of furniture, and no one is there to watch the
river splash down its marble cascades except two sour custodians and
the gentle old _imam_ of the adjoining mosque. But for a few weeks in
spring, beginning with the open-air festival of Hîdîr Eless, the lower
part of the valley is a favourite place of resort. Sunday and Friday are
the popular days. Then arbours of saplings thatched with dried boughs
follow the curve of the river; then picnic parties spread rugs or matting
on the grass, partaking of strange meats while masters of pipe and drum
enchant their ears; then groups of Turkish ladies, in gay silks, dot
the sward like tulips; then itinerant venders of fruit, of sweets, of
nuts, of ice-cream, do hawk about their wares; then fortune-tellers,
mountebanks, bear tamers, dancers, Punch and Judy shows may be seen; and
boats pass and repass on the river like carriages on the Corso. Most of
them are _sandals_ of the smarter kind. But once in a while the most
elegant craft in the world skims into sight—a three-oared caïque, with
a piece of embroidered velvet, whose corner tassels trail in the water,
thrown over the little deck behind the seat. The _kaïkjis_ are handsome
fellows, in fuller white cotton knickerbockers than you can imagine, in
white stockings, in shirts of crinkly Broussa gauze and short sleeveless
jackets embroidered with gold.
[Illustration: Kiat Haneh]
Most of the ladies are in the modern Turkish costume, with a kind of
silk mantilla of the same material as the dress falling from the head
to the waist. The effect is very Spanish and graceful—more so than
when the ladies wear a white scarf over their hair and a long garment
as shapeless as a waterproof. In these degenerate days veils are more
often absent than not. I must warn you, however, that the Sweet Waters
of Europe are not the Sweet Waters of Asia. I remember noticing one day
on the river a gaudy little skiff rowed by two young and gaily costumed
boatmen. In the stern sat an extremely fat Turkish lady, steering. She
was dressed decorously in black, and the black veil thrown back from
her face allowed every one to remark that she was neither in her first
youth nor particularly handsome. Yet boatmen snickered as she passed,
and rowdies called after her in slang which it seemed to me should not
be used to a lady. I said as much to my _kaïkji_, who told me that the
lady was a famous _demi-mondaine_, named Madam Falcon, and that for the
rest I must never expect such good manners at Kiat Haneh as at Gyök Sou.
I must confess that I looked at Madam Falcon with some interest the next
time we passed; for the Turkish half-world is of all half-worlds the most
invisible, and so far as I knew I had never seen a member of it before.
Madam Falcon paid no attention to the curiosity she aroused. Sitting
there impassively in her black dress, with her smooth yellow skin, she
made one think of a graven image, of some Indian Bouddha in old ivory. So
venerable a person she seemed, so benevolent, so decorous and dead to the
world, that she only made her half-world more remote and invisible than
ever. But she was a sign—in spite of the smart brougham driving slowly
along the shore with a Palace eunuch sitting on the box—that the great
days of Kiat Haneh are gone. Nevertheless it has, during its brief time
of early green, a colour of its own. And the serpentine river, winding
between tufts of trees and under Japanesey wooden bridges, is always
a pleasant piece of line and light in a spring sun. But beware of the
coffee-house men on the shore! For their season is short, and if they
catch you they will skin you alive.
V
THE MAGNIFICENT COMMUNITY
_Galata, que mes yeux désiraient dès longtemps..._
—ANDRÉ CHÉNIER.
_In Pera sono tre malanni:_
_Peste, fuoco, dragomanni._
—LOCAL PROVERB.
It is not the fashion to speak well of Pera and Galata. A good Turk
will sigh of another that he has gone to Pera, by way of saying that
he has gone to the dogs. A foreign resident will scarcely admit that
so much as the view is good. Even a Perote born pretends not to love
his Grande Rue if he happens to have read Loti or Claude Farrère. And
tourists are supposed to have done the left bank of the Golden Horn
when they have watched the Sultan drive to mosque and have giggled at
the whirling dervishes. A few of the more thorough-going will, perhaps,
take the trouble to climb Galata Tower or to row up the Sweet Waters of
Europe. For my part, however, who belong to none of these categories, I
am perverse enough to find Pera and Galata a highly superior place of
habitation. I consider that their greatest fault is to lie under the
shadow of Stamboul—though that gives them one inestimable advantage which
Stamboul herself lacks, namely the view of the dark old city crowned by
her imperial mosques. Pera—and I now mean the whole promontory between
the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus—Pera occupies a really magnificent
site, it has a history of its own, it contains monuments that would make
the fortune of any other town, and it fairly drips with that modern
pigment known as local colour. Who knows, it may even be destined to
inherit the renown of the older city. Stamboul tends to diminish, whereas
Pera grows and has unlimited room for growing. The left bank is already
the seat of the Sultan and of the bulk of the commerce and finance of the
capital. Moreover, the battles of the revolution fought there in 1909
give the place a peculiar interest in the eyes of the Young Turks. On
that soil, less encumbered than Stamboul with the débris of history, they
may find conditions more favourable for the city of their future.
If the story of Pera cannot compare with that of the grey mother city,
it nevertheless can boast associations of which communities more
self-important might be proud. Jason stopped there on his way to get
the Golden Fleece, and after him Beshiktash was known in antiquity as
Iasonion. In the valley behind that picturesque suburb there later
existed a famous laurel grove, sacred of course to Apollo, who, with
Poseidon, was patron of Byzantium. The sun-god was also worshipped at a
sacred fount which still exists in Galata, within the enclosure of the
Latin church of St. George. Legend makes this spring the scene of the
martyrdom of St. Irene, daughter of a Roman ruler, who was put to death
for refusing to sacrifice to Apollo and who became herself the patron
saint of the new Christian city of Constantinople. Christianity is said
to have been brought there by no less a person than the apostle Andrew.
He is also reputed to have died in Galata, though another tradition
makes Patras the scene of his death; but in any case he was buried in
Constantine’s Church of the Holy Apostles. The church of St. Irene where
he preached, somewhere in the vicinity of Top Haneh, was restored with
magnificence by Justinian. An earlier emperor, Leo the Great, had already
built in the neighbourhood of Beshiktash the celebrated church of St.
Mamas, together with a palace that was long a favourite resort of the
imperial family. In the light of recent history it is interesting to
recall that Krum, King of Bulgaria, sacked and burned the suburb of St.
Mamas, with the rest of Thrace, in 811.
Among the antiquities of the town, its names have been the subject of
much research and confusion. Pera is a Romaic word meaning opposite or
beyond, and first applied indiscriminately with Galata to the rural
suburb on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This hill was also called
Sykai, from the fig-trees that abounded there; and when the mortar-loving
Justinian beautified and walled the suburb, he renamed it after himself.
With regard to the word Galata there has been infinite dispute. I myself
thought I had solved the question when I went to Genoa and saw steep
little alleys, for all the world like those I knew in Genoese Galata,
which were named _Calata_—a descent to the sea—and of which the local
dialect made the _c_ a _g_. But the accent was different, and I lived to
learn that the name, as that of a castle on the water’s edge, has been
found in Byzantine MSS. dating from two hundred years earlier than the
time Genoa founded her colony there. Villehardouin also speaks of the
tower of “Galathas,” which the crusaders stormed as a preliminary to
their capture of Constantinople. It apparently stood in the vicinity of
the custom-house, and to it was attached the chain that padlocked the
Golden Horn. I would like to believe that the name came from Brennus
and his Gauls, or Galatians, who passed this way with fire and sword in
the third century B. C. There is more certainty, however, with regard to
its own derivatives. The Italian word _galetta_ is one of them, more or
less familiar in English and very common in its French form of _galette_.
Another French word, _galetas_, is also derived from Galata, meaning a
high garret and hence a poor tenement. Belonging at first to the castle
alone, the name seems to have spread to the whole surrounding settlement.
It now applies to the lower part of the hill, formerly enclosed by the
Genoese wall, while Pera is the newer town on top of the hill, “beyond”
the old.
The history of the town we know began in the Latin colonies that
originally fringed the opposite shore of the Golden Horn. Constantinople
has always been a cosmopolitan city. The emperors themselves were of many
races and the empire they governed was as full of unassimilated elements
as it is to-day. Then even from so far away as England and Denmark men
came to trade in the great city that was named from a citizen of York.
It was natural that Italians should come in the greatest number, though
they felt less and less at home as the emperors became more and more
Greek. The people of Amalfi and Ancona, the Florentines, the Genoese,
the Lombards, the Pisans, and the Venetians, all had important colonies
in Constantinople. And by the twelfth century four of them at least had
their own settlements between Seraglio Point and the Azap Kapou Bridge.
The easternmost were the Genoese, whose quarter was near the present
railway station; next came the Pisans, then the men of Amalfi—not far
from Yeni Jami—and last the Venetians.
The Venetian colony was long the most important. Basil II, the Slayer
of the Bulgarians, as early as 991 granted to Venice definite commercial
privileges, which were greatly extended a hundred years later by Alexius
II in gratitude for the help the Republic had given him against Robert
Guiscard and the Normans. The colony occupied an important strip of
water-front, from the western side of the outer bridge to the anchorage
of the wood galleons under the Süleïmanieh. During the Latin occupation
the Venetians naturally extended their borders, since the Republic
had taken so important a part in the Fourth Crusade; and the Doge now
added to his other titles that of Lord of a Quarter and a Half of the
Roman Empire. But in spite of the Greek restoration of 1261 and the
consequent rise of Genoese influence, the Venetians still maintained
their foothold. They continued to keep their strip of the Golden Horn and
to form an _imperium in imperio_ after the manner of foreign colonies
in Constantinople to-day. The origin, indeed, of the capitulations
which embarrass the Turks so much is perhaps the _Capitulare Baiulis
Constantinopolitani_ which governed the Balio. This functionary, sent
every two years from Venice, was both the viceroy of his colony and
minister resident to the emperor. As such he had places of honour in
St. Sophia and the Hippodrome, and the Byzantine government allowed him
certain supplies. The office continued, in fact, down to the end of
the Republic, though under the Turks the Balio was less viceroy than
ambassador. No trace seems to remain, however, of that long occupation.
I have often wondered if any of the old stone _hans_ in the quarter of
the Dried Fruit Bazaar go back so far, or the two marble lions which
still spout water into a pool in the court of one of them. I have also
asked myself whether the small _medresseh_ of Kefenek Sinan, with its
odd octagonal tower, ever had anything to do with Venice. But the only
indisputable relic of Venice I have come across is the _Varda!_ the
porters shout when they warn you out of their way. That is the Venetian
dialect for _guarda_, or “look out”—as any man can verify in Venice
to-day.
[Illustration: Lion fountain in the old Venetian quarter]
In the growing rivalry between Venice and Genoa the former enjoyed a
constant advantage in Constantinople until 1261. Then the Genoese very
nearly succeeded in dislodging the Venetians from Stamboul altogether.
They took possession of the Venetian churches and destroyed the palace
of the Balio, sending its stones to Genoa to be built into the cathedral
of San Lorenzo. A generation later they provoked a massacre of the
Venetians, in which the Balio himself was killed; and the fleets of
the two republics more than once came to blows in the Bosphorus. In the
meantime Michael Palæologus had given the Genoese, partly as a reward
for their services against the Venetians, partly to get rid of allies
so formidable, the town of Perinthos, or Eregli, in the Marmora. About
1267, however, the Genoese succeeded in obtaining the far more important
site of Galata. The conditions were that they should not fortify it,
and that they should respect the emperor as their suzerain. But the
enmity of Venice and the decadence of the Greeks brought it about that
Galata presently built walls, captured the old castle of the chain, and
otherwise conducted herself as an independent city. The existing Galata
Tower marks the highest point of the walls, which were twice enlarged,
and which in their greatest extent ran down on one side to Azap Kapou and
on the other as far as Top Haneh. The colony was governed by a Podestà,
sent every year from Genoa, who, like the Venetian Balio, was also
accredited as minister to the emperor.
Galata existed as a flourishing Genoese city for nearly two hundred
years. The coming of the Turks in 1453 put an end to the conditions
which had made her independence possible. Although cut off from Genoa,
however, she did not immediately cease to be an Italian city. Indeed, the
Conqueror might have been expected to deal more hardly with the Latin
suburb than he did; for while the Galatiotes had entered into amicable
relations with the invaders and had in the end voluntarily surrendered,
they had also been the backbone of the Greek defence. But in accepting
the keys of Galata Sultan Mehmed II assured the colonists the enjoyment
of their goods and their faith, merely enjoining them to build no more
churches, to forego the use of bells, and to throw down their land
fortifications. This last condition seems never to have been carried out.
[Illustration: Genoese archway at Azap Kapou]
Under the new régime Galata proceeded to reorganise herself as the
_Magnifica Communità di Pera_. The head of this Magnificent Community was
a _magnifico_, prior of the Brotherhood of St. Anne, who was aided by a
sub-prior and twelve councillors. Their deliberations chiefly concerned
the churches, since in civil affairs they were naturally subject to
the Porte. The Rue Voïvoda, the Wall Street of Galata, perpetuates the
title of the Turkish functionary who was the superior temporal power of
the Magnificent Community. The churches diminished in number, however,
as the Latin population dwindled, and by 1682 their administration had
passed into the hands of religious orders, or of the Patriarchal Vicar.
This dignitary represented that member of the papal court whose title of
Patriarch of Constantinople was the last shadow of the Latin occupation.
The Patriarchal Vicar has now been succeeded by an Apostolic Delegate. On
the other hand, the ambassadors of the Catholic powers, and particularly
of France, gradually assumed protection of the Latin colony—which was
no longer distinctively Genoese or Venetian. The Magnificent Community,
accordingly, ceased to have corporate existence. But the Latin “nation”
still forms one of the constituent elements of the Ottoman empire. And
while the population of Galata is now more Greek, even more Turkish and
Hebrew, than European, it is only within a generation or two that French
has begun to supersede Italian as the _lingua franca_ of the town, and it
still retains an indefinable Italian air.
Of that old Italian town modern Galata contains little enough, except for
the fanatic in things of other times. The Tower, of course, the whilom
_Torre del Cristo_, is the most visible memorial of the Genoese period.
The top, however, has been repeatedly remodelled. This great round keep
was built in 1348, during the first enlargement of the walls, which
originally extended no farther than the Rue Voïvoda. The Genoese took
advantage of the absence of the emperor John Cantacuzene to carry out
this contravention of his authority, and they further secured themselves
against reprisals by burning his fleet. He built another one in order
to punish his so-called vassals, but they defeated it and trailed the
emperor’s flag in disgrace through the Golden Horn. Galata Tower has now
degenerated to the peaceful uses of fire watchers and of those who love
a view, the small square at its base being also visited once a year by
a Birnam Wood of Christmas-trees. Of the fortifications that originally
extended from it there remains here only a reminiscence in the name
of the Rue Hendek—Moat Street. The greater part of the walls was torn
down in 1864, the inscriptions and coats of arms they contained being
ultimately removed to the imperial museum. Further down the hill remnants
of masonry still exist, and a few turrets. The garden of the monastery
of S. Pierre is bounded by a fragment of the turreted city wall of 1348,
while in the wall of S. Benoît is another turret, probably of the wall
of 1352. One or two others are to be seen along the water-front at Yagh
Kapan. The most picturesque fragment of all, and perhaps the oldest, is
behind the bath of Azap Kapou, where a little Turkish street called Akar
Cheshmeh—the Fountain Drips—passes through an archway in a high wall.
Above the arch is a tablet containing the arms of Genoa—the cross of St.
George—between the escutcheons of the two noble houses of Doria and De
Merude[1]; and an olive-tree waves banner-like from the top of the wall.
[1] For this information I am indebted to F. W. Hasluck, Esq.,
of the British School at Athens.
Galata has always been famous for its fires, to say nothing of its
earthquakes. These, and changes of population, with the street-widening
and rebuilding of our day, have left us very little idea of the
architecture of the Genoese colony. In the steep alleys on either side
of the Rue Voïvoda are a number of stone buildings, with corbelled upper
stories and heavily grated windows, which are popularly called Genoese.
They bear too close a resemblance to Turkish structures of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, and to the old houses of the Phanar, to be so
named without more study than any one has taken the trouble to give them.
But they are certainly mediæval and they suggest how Galata may once
have looked. The façade of one of them, in the Rue Perchembé Bazaar, is
decorated with a Byzantine marble panel. This was the fashionable quarter
of Genoese Galata. The palace of the Podestà was there, at the northeast
corner of the place where Perchembé Bazaar crosses Voïvoda. Indeed, this
Ducal Palace, much transformed, still survives as an office building and
rejoices in the name of Bereket Han—the House of Plenty.
Such slender honours of antiquity as Galata may boast cluster chiefly
about certain churches and missions. The story of these is a picturesque
chapter in the history of the mediæval orders. The Franciscans were
the first to come to Constantinople, opening a mission on Seraglio
Point in 1219, during the lifetime of St. Francis, and establishing
themselves in Galata as early as 1227. No trace of them now remains in
either place, each of the various branches into which the order divided
having eventually removed to Pera. The church of San Francesco d’Assisi,
belonging to the Conventuals, was the cathedral of the colony, and one
worthy of Genoa the Superb. Partially destroyed by fire in 1696, it was
seized by the mother of Sultans Moustafa II and Ahmed III, who built
on its site—below the Imperial Ottoman Bank—the existing Yeni Valideh
mosque. The church of Sant’ Antonio, on the Grande Rue de Pera, is the
direct descendant of the cathedral of San Francesco and the missionaries
of 1219.
The Dominicans were also settled at an early date on both sides of
the Golden Horn. Arab Jami, the mosque whose campanile-like minaret
is so conspicuous from the water, was formerly their church of San
Paolo. Tradition ascribes its foundation to St. Hyacinth, the great
Dominican missionary of the Levant. The fathers were dispossessed about
1535 in favour of the Moorish refugees from Spain, who also invaded
the surrounding quarter. The quarter is still Mohammedan, though the
Albanian costume now gives it most colour. Refugees of a less turbulent
character had come from Spain a few years earlier and found hospitality
at different points along the Golden Horn. These were the Jews driven
out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. There was already a considerable
colony of Jews in Constantinople. Many of them had been Venetian subjects
and lived on the edge of the Venetian settlement, at the point where the
mosque of Yeni Jami now stands. When the great sultana Kyössem acquired
that property she exempted forty of the residents from taxation for life
and engaged herself to pay the Karaïte community an annual ground rent
of thirty-two piastres. This was a considerable sum in 1640, but it now
amounts to little more than a dollar a year! The sultana furthermore
granted the Jews new lands at the place called Hass-kyöi—which might
roughly be translated as Village of the Privy Purse—and a large Jewish
colony still lives there, most of whose members speak a corrupt Spanish.
As for the Dominican fathers, they took refuge in what is now the Mission
of S. Pierre. The building had originally been a convent of nuns of
St. Catherine and gardens were added to it by a generous Venetian, in
whose memory a mass is still performed once a year. This monastery has
been burned and remodelled so many times that little can be left of its
original appearance. Among its other claims to interest, however, is
a Byzantine icon kept in the church, said to be none other than that
celebrated icon of the Shower of the Way which I have already mentioned.
The latter end of this venerable work of art is involved in as great
mystery as its origin. According to the Greeks it was found in Kahrieh
Jami by the Turks in 1453 and cut to pieces. Whether they admit the icon
of Kahrieh Jami to have been the identical icon which the emperor Baldwin
presented to St. Sophia in 1204, and which the Venetian Balio took away
by force and put into the church of Pantocrator, now Zeïrek Kilisseh
Jami, I cannot say. The Latins, however, claim that the Venetians never
lost it, and that consequently it was never cut to pieces by the Turks,
but that it ultimately came into possession of the Dominican fathers.
Where doctors of divinity disagree so radically, let me not presume to
utter an opinion!
In the court of the church and on the façade of the monastery toward the
Rue Tchinar—the Street of the Plane-Tree—are stone escutcheons bearing
the lilies of France and the arms of a Comte de St. Priest. He was a
French ambassador at the time of our Revolutionary War. The building
being under French protection and on the central street of old, of oldest
Galata—the one which climbs past the palace of the Podestà from the
water’s edge to the Tower—was occupied at different times by the notables
of the French colony. Among these, about the middle of the eighteenth
century, was a merchant named Louis Chénier. Settling as a young man
in Galata, he had become deputy of the nation—an office peculiar to the
colony from the time of Colbert—right-hand-man to the ambassador, and
husband, like many a European before and after him, of a Levantine lady.
Her family, that is, were of European—in this case of Spanish—origin, but
by long residence in the Levant and by intermarriage with Greeks had lost
their own language. The seventh child of this couple was André Chénier,
the poet of the French Revolution. His birthplace is marked by a marble
tablet. The poet never saw the Street of the Plane-Tree, however, after
he was three years old. He grew up in Paris, where, as every one knows,
he was almost the last victim of the Terror.
The largest mission left in Galata is S. Benoît, whose walls now
overshadow the least monastic quarter of the town. Its history is even
more varied than that of S. Pierre, having been occupied and reoccupied
at different times by the Benedictines, the Observants, the Capuchins,
and the Jesuits. The last were the longest tenants, carrying on a
devoted work for nearly two hundred years. After the secularisation of
their order in 1773 they were succeeded by the Lazarists, who have not
fallen behind in the high traditions of the mission. The place has a
distinctly mediæval air, with its high walls, its Gothic gateway, and its
machicolated campanile. Nothing is left, alas, of the mosaics which used
to decorate the church. After so many fires I fear there is no chance
of their being discovered under modern plaster. But the pillars of the
porch are doubtless those which a diplomatic father obtained by gift
from the Sheï’h ül Islam in 1686. And there are a number of interesting
tablets about the building. One of them records not too truthfully the
rebuilding of the church by Louis XIV. The most notable, perhaps, is the
tombstone of Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania and pretender to the throne
of Hungary, who lived twenty years in exile at Rodosto, on the Sea of
Marmora. When he died there in 1738 his friends asked permission to bury
him in Galata, but were refused. They accordingly pretended to inter him
at Rodosto. As a matter of fact, his coffin was sent in one of the many
boxes containing his effects to S. Benoît. There the royal exile was
secretly buried in the church, his grave long remaining unmarked. Another
grave, all mark of which seems to have disappeared, is that of Jan Van
Mour, a Fleming whom Louis XV made “peintre ordinaire du roy en Levant.”
He had the good fortune to live in Constantinople during the brilliant
reign of Ahmed III, and he was the painter who started in France the
eighteenth-century fashion of _turquerie_. The Museum of Amsterdam
contains a large collection of Turkish documents from his brush, while
there are others in France and in the castle of Biby in Sweden.
* * * * *
The stones of Galata have more to tell than those who ungratefully tread
them are wont to imagine. But they are by no means Christian stones
alone. Although the Latins naturally diminished in number after the
Turkish conquest, the city quickly outgrew its walls. While part of this
growth was due to the influx of Venetians, and later of Greeks, from the
opposite side of the Horn, a good deal of it came about through Turkish
colonisation. This was chiefly without the walls. You can almost trace
the line of them to-day by the boundary between populations. The Turkish
settlements gathered around mosques, palaces, and military establishments
built by different sultans in the country about Galata, mainly on the
water-front. One of the oldest of these settlements grew up in the deep
ravine just west of the Galata wall. It is now engaged in readjusting its
relations to the rest of the world, but it still remains like a piece of
Stamboul, and it is the home of many dervishes. It took its name from a
vizier of Süleïman the Magnificent, the conqueror of Nauplia and twice
governor of Egypt. He was known as Handsome Kassîm, but he ended his days
in bad odour. His quarter is supposed to take after him in the latter
rather than in the former particular by those who do not appreciate what
Kassîm Pasha adds to the resources of Pera. No one, however, should be
incapable of appreciating what the cypresses of Kassîm Pasha do for the
windows of Pera. They are all that is left of the great grove of the
_Petits Champs des Morts_, the old burial-ground of Galata. As the city
grew, the cemeteries, both Christian and Mohammedan, were removed to
the _Grands Champs des Morts_ at the Taxim. They, too, have now been
overtaken by the streets and turned in great part to other uses. But a
field of the dead was there again when the Young Turks took Pera from Abd
ül Hamid in 1909.
I have already mentioned the mosque of Pialeh Pasha and the naval
station which are among the greater lions of the left bank. A detail
of history connected with this famous shipyard is that we perhaps get
our word arsenal from it, through the Italian _darsena_. The accepted
derivation is from the Arabic _dar es sanaat_, house of construction,
from an ancient shipyard in Egypt captured by the founder of this
Arsenal. But as likely an origin is the Turkish word—from the Persian, I
believe—_terssaneh_, the house of slaves. At all events, this is where
the great bagnio of the galley-slaves used to be. These were Christians
captured in war; and of course the Christian powers repaid the compliment
by capturing all the Turks they could for their own galleys. At all
times during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries there
were from three to four thousand slaves in the Arsenal, while several
thousand more were chained to the oars of the imperial galleys. No less
than fifteen thousand were said to have been freed at the battle of
Lepanto. As the Turks became less warlike the number naturally declined,
and came to an end with the abolition of slavery in 1846. One of the
principal activities of the Catholic missions was among the inmates of
this and other bagnios. The fathers were allowed access to the Arsenal
and even maintained chapels there, confessing the slaves, arranging when
they could for their ransom, and heroically caring for them through
epidemics. St. Joseph of Leonissa, one of the pioneer Capuchins, caught
the plague himself from the slaves but recovered to labour again in the
bagnio—so zealously that he even aspired to reach the ear of the Sultan.
He was accordingly arrested and condemned to death. The sentence was
already supposed to have been executed when he was miraculously rescued
by an angel and borne away to his native Italy, living there to a ripe
old age. If the angel might have been discovered to bear some resemblance
to the Venetian Balio, his intervention doubtless seemed no less angelic
to the good missionary.
Another Turkish settlement grew up on the east side of Galata wall at
Top Haneh, Cannon House. The place has been the seat of artillery works
from the beginning of the Turkish era, for it must be remembered that
Mehmed II, in the siege of Constantinople, was the first general to
prove the practicability of cannon, and that during the whole of their
martial period the Turks had no superiors in this branch of warfare. The
conqueror turned a church and its adjoining cloisters into a foundery,
and his son Baïezid II built barracks there for the artillerymen, while
Süleïman I and Ahmed III restored and added to these constructions. There
was also another shipyard at Top Haneh, and another Prince of the Sea is
buried there near the mosque he built.
[Illustration: The mosque of Don Quixote and the fountain of Sultan
Mahmoud I]
I know not how it is that this mosque has so miraculously escaped
notoriety. The exterior, to be sure, is less imposing than the
neighbouring Nousretieh Jami, but there is a perfect little stone
courtyard, with such doorways as only Sinan knew how to draw, while the
interior is as happy in proportion as it is in detail. The _mihrab_ is
unusual in being brightly lighted, and the windows, set among tiles,
contain exquisite fragments of old stained glass. There are also tiled
inscriptions, by Hassan Chelibi of Kara Hissar, above the other windows.
The _mimber_, too, is a masterpiece of its kind, with its delicately
perforated marbles. Then the gallery contains a finely designed arcade
and an interesting marble rail and small rose windows—apparently of
brickwork—above the spandrels of the arches. A characteristic touch
is the big ship’s lantern that swings in front of the _mihrab_. This
beautiful mosque was built by an Italian. Born in Calabria and captured
by Algerian pirates, he turned Turk after fourteen years in the
galleys, and changed his name of Ochiali to Oulouj Ali—Big Ali. The
ex-galley-slave then became a commander of galleys. At the battle of
Lepanto he saved a shred of Turkish honour by capturing the flag-ship of
the Knights of Malta, turning the squadron of Doria, and bringing forty
galleys safely back to Constantinople. For this exploit he was made high
admiral of the fleet and his name was turned into Sword Ali—Kîlîj Ali. An
interesting side-light is thrown on this picturesque character from so
unexpected a source as the novel of “Don Quixote.” In chapter XXXII of
the first part of that book, “in which the captive relates his life and
adventures,” Cervantes tells, with very little deviation from the fact,
how he himself lost his left hand in the battle of Lepanto, how four
years later he was captured by pirates and taken to Algiers, and how he
lived there five years as the slave of a cruel Albanian master. Trying
then to escape, he was caught and brought for trial before a personage
whom he calls Uchali, but who was none other than our friend Kîlîj Ali.
The upshot of the matter was that the builder of our beautiful mosque
bought the author of our immortal novel, whom he treated with great
kindness, and presently accepted for him, in 1581, the very moderate
ransom of five hundred crowns. So might a half-forgotten building in Top
Haneh be brought back to light as the mosque of Don Quixote!
[Illustration: Interior of the mosque of Don Quixote]
[Illustration: The admiral’s flag of Haïreddin Barbarossa
Drawn by Kenan Bey]
The greatest of the Princes of the Sea lies farther up the Bosphorus, at
Beshiktash. The name is a corruption of _besh tash_, five stones, from
the row of pillars on the shore to which he used to moor his galleys.
Known to Europe by the nickname Barbarossa, from his great red beard, his
true name was Haïreddin. Beginning life as a Greek pirate of Mitylene,
he entered the service of the Sultan of Tunis, captured Algiers on his
own account, and had the diplomacy to offer his prize to Selim I. Under
Süleïman the Magnificent he became the terror of the Mediterranean and
his master’s chief instrument in a lifelong rivalry with Charles V. He
died in 1546, full of years and honours, leaving a fortune of sixty
thousand ducats and three thousand slaves. He wished to be buried by the
sea, at the spot where he moored so often in his lifetime; but shanties
and boat yards now shut him off from the water. Nothing could be quainter
or quieter than the little railed garden near the steamer landing, where
a vine-covered pergola leads to the _türbeh_ of that turbulent man of
blood. His green admiral’s flag hangs over his catafalque, marked in
white with inscriptions, with an open hand, and with the double-bladed
sword that was the emblem of his dignity, while his admiral’s lanterns
hang in niches on either side of the simple mausoleum.
The harbour of Jason and Barbarossa—and very likely the one that gave
access to the Byzantine suburb of St. Mamas—is also the place where
Sultan Mehmed II started his ships on their overland voyage. At least
I can never see the valley of Dolma Ba’hcheh—the Filled-in Garden—into
which the sea formerly entered, without convincing myself that it must
have been the channel of that celebrated cruise and not the steeper hill
of Top Haneh. However that may be, the descendants of Mehmed II have long
shown a partiality for the neighbourhood. Ahmed I built a summer palace
there as long ago as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Mehmed IV,
Ahmed III, and Mahmoud I constructed others, while for the last hundred
years the sultans have lived there altogether. The existing palace of
Dolma Ba’hcheh, which occupies most of the old harbour, dates only from
1853. The villas of Yîldîz are more recent still. The neighbourhood of
majesty has done less for the imperial suburb than might elsewhere be
the case. No one seems to find anything incongruous in the fact that
one of the Sultan’s nearest neighbours is a gas house. The ceremony of
_selamlîk_, salutation, when the Sultan drives in state to mosque on
Friday noon, is the weekly spectacle of Beshiktash—though less dazzling
than it used to be. After his prayer the Sultan gives audience to
ambassadors and visitors of mark. I know not whether this custom goes
back to the time of Albert de Wyss, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire,
who used to turn out his embassy when Selim II rode by to mosque, or to
that of the later Byzantine emperors, who received every Sunday the heads
of the Latin communities.
The waterside settlements outside the walls of Galata were and are
prevailingly Turkish. The Christian expansion followed the crest of the
hill, founding the modern Pera. But there is a leaven of Islam even in
Pera. Baïezid II built a mosque in the quarter of Asmalî Mesjid—Vine
Chapel—and a palace at Galata Seraï. This palace finally became a school
for the imperial pages, recruited from among the Christian boys captured
by the Janissaries, and existed intermittently as such until it was
turned into the Imperial Lyceum. Galata Seraï means Galata Palace, which
is interesting as showing the old application of the name. The word
Pera the Turks have never adopted. They call the place Bey O’lou—the
Son of the Bey. There is dispute as to the identity of this Bey. Some
say he was David Comnenus, last emperor of Trebizond, or Demetrius
Palæologus, despot of Epirus—the youngest son of the latter of whom, at
any rate, turned Turk and was given lands in the vicinity of the Russian
embassy. Others identify the Son of the Bey with Alvise Gritti, natural
son of a Doge of Venice, who became Dragoman of the Porte during the
reign of Süleïman the Magnificent, and exercised much influence in the
foreign relations of that monarch. Süleïman himself built in Pera, or on
that steep eastward slope of it which is called Fîndîklî—the Place of
Filberts. The view from the terrace of the mosque he erected there in
memory of his son Jihangir is one of the finest in Constantinople. It
was his father Selim I who established the Mevlevi, popularly called the
Whirling Dervishes, in Pera. There they remain to this day, though they
have sold the greater part of the vast estates they once owned, a little
island of peace and mysticism in the unbelieving town that has engulfed
them. It is the classic amusement of tourists on Friday afternoons to
visit their _tekkeh_; and a classic contrast do the noise and smiles of
the superior children of the West make with the plaintive piping, the
silent turning, the symbolism and ecstasy of that ritual octagon. Among
the roses and ivy of the courtyard is buried a child of the West who also
makes a contrast of a kind. He was a Frenchman, the Comte de Bonneval,
who, after serving in the French and Austrian armies and quarrelling with
the redoubtable Prince Eugene, came to Constantinople, became general
of bombardiers, governor of Karamania, and pasha of three tails. He
negotiated the first treaty of alliance made by Turkey with a Western
country, namely, with Sweden, in 1740.
* * * * *
There are many other Turkish buildings in Pera, but the suburb is
essentially Christian and was built up by the Galatiotes. It began to
exist as a distinct community during the seventeenth century—about the
time, that is, when the Dutch were starting the city of New York. The
French and Venetian embassies and the Franciscan missions clustered
around them were the nucleus of the settlement on a hillside then known
as The Vineyards. We have already seen how the Conventuals moved to Pera
after the loss of San Francesco. Their grounds for two hundred years
adjoined those of the French embassy, but have gradually been absorbed
by the latter until the fathers lately built on another site. The first
Latin church in Pera, however, was S. Louis, of the Capuchins, who have
been chaplains for the French embassy since 1628. Ste. Marie Draperis is
also older in Pera than Sant’ Antonio. The church is so called from a
philanthropic lady who gave land in Galata to the Observants in 1584.
It passed to the Riformati because of the scandal which arose through
two of the brothers turning Turk, and in 1678 moved to The Vineyards for
the same reason as the Conventuals. It is now under Austrian protection
and serves as chapel for the embassy of that Power, though the fathers
are still Italians. The Observants, also known as Padri di Terra Santa,
preceded them by a few years in Pera, where they acted as chaplains for
the Venetian Balio. Their hospice, marked by the cross of Jerusalem is
between Ste. Marie and the Austrian embassy.
The first European ambassadors were not many in number nor did they
regularly follow each other, and they were usually quartered in a _han_
detailed for that use in Stamboul, facing the Burnt Column. The Venetian
Balio, I believe, always had a residence of his own. The French, however,
set up a country-seat at The Vineyards as early as the time of Henri IV.
And during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim, who in his rage at the Venetians
over the Cretan War threatened to kill every Christian in the empire,
beginning with the Balio, the ambassadors moved to the other side for
good. The Venetians occupied the site since pre-empted by the Austrians.
The Austrian embassy was originally on the other side of the Grande Rue,
beside the now disused church of the Trinitarians, while the Russian
embassy was the present Russian consulate. The existing Russian embassy
was the Polish embassy. The Dutch and the Swedes acquired pleasant
properties on the same slope. All these big gateways and gardens opening
off the Grande Rue give colour to another theory for the Turkish name of
Pera—that it was originally Bey Yolou, or the Street of Grandees.
The British embassy is by no means so young a member of this venerable
diplomatic colony as our own, but its early traditions are of a special
order. They are bound up with the history of the Levant Company. This
was one of those great foreign trading associations of which the East
India Company and the South Sea Company are, perhaps, more familiar
examples. Hakluyt tells us that at least as early as 1511 British vessels
were trading in the Levant, and that this trade became more active
about 1575. In 1579 it was in some sort regularised by letters which
were exchanged between Sultan Mourad III and Queen Elizabeth—“most wise
governor of the causes and affairs of the people and family of Nazareth,
cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and
virtue,” as her imperial correspondent addressed her. At a later date
high-sounding epistles also passed between the Virgin Queen and her
majesty Safieh—otherwise the Pure—favourite wife of the Grand Turk, who
wrote: “I send your majesty so honourable and sweet a salutation of peace
that all the flock of nightingales with their melody cannot attain to the
like, much less this simple letter of mine.” The latter lady adds a touch
of her own to her time, having been in reality a Venetian, of the house
of Baffo. While on her way from Venice to Corfu, where her father was
governor, she was kidnapped by Turkish corsairs and sent as a present to
the young prince Mourad. So great became her influence over him that when
he succeeded to the throne she had to be reckoned with in the politics of
the Porte. Another royal correspondent of the Baffa, as the Balio called
his countrywoman in his reports to the Council of Ten, was Catherine de’
Medici. In the meantime Queen Elizabeth had already issued, in 1581,
letters patent to certain London merchants to trade in the Levant. In
1582 the first ambassador, Master William Harbone, or Hareborne, who
was also chief factor of the Levant Company, betook himself and his
credentials from London to Constantinople in the good ship Susan. The
charter of “the Right Worshipful the Levant Company” was revised from
time to time, but it was not definitely surrendered until 1825. And until
1821 the ambassador to the “Grand Signior,” as well as the consuls in
the Levant, were nominated and paid by the company. It was under these
not always satisfactory conditions that Mr. Wortley Montagu brought his
lively Lady Mary to the court of Ahmed III in 1717. Lord Elgin, of the
marbles, was the first ambassador appointed by the government. I have not
succeeded in gaining very much light as to the quarters provided by the
Levant Company for its distinguished employees. In the Rue de Pologne
there is a funny little stone house, now fallen, I believe, to the light
uses of a dancing-school, which was once the British consulate. The
present embassy is a Victorian structure and known to be in a different
place from the one where Lady Mary wrote her letters.
The town that grew up around these embassies is one of the most
extraordinary towns in creation. First composed of a few Galatiotes who
followed their several protectors into the wilderness, it has continued
ever since to receive accretions from the various nationalities of
Europe and Asia until it has become a perfect babel, faintly Italian
in appearance but actually no more Italian than Turkish, no more
Turkish than Greek, no more Greek than anything else you please. Half a
dozen larger worlds and nobody knows how many lesser ones live there,
inextricably intermingled, yet somehow remaining miraculously distinct.
There is, to be sure, a considerable body of Levantines—of those, namely,
who have mixed—but even they are a peculiar people. The fact gives Pera
society, so far as it exists, a bewildering hydra-headedness. The court
is not the centre of things in the sense that European courts are. The
Palace ladies do not receive, and it is an unheard-of thing for the
Sultan to go to a private house, while in other ways there are profound
causes of separation between the ruling race and the non-Moslem elements
of the empire. By the very constitution of the country the Armenians,
the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other fractions of the population form
communities apart. Even the surprisingly large European colony has
historic reasons for tending to divide into so many “nations.” These have
little in common with the foreign colonies of Berlin, Paris, or Rome. Not
students and people of leisure but merchants and missionaries make up
the better part of the family that each embassy presides over in a sense
unknown in Western cities. The days are gone by when the protection of
the embassies had the literal meaning that once attached to many a garden
wall. But the ambassadors cling to the privileges and exemptions granted
them by early treaties, and through the quarter that grew up around their
gates the Sultan himself passes almost as a stranger.
This diversity of traditions and interests has, of course, influenced the
development of Pera. Not the least remarkable feature of this remarkable
town is its lack of almost every modern convenience. I must admit, of
course, that a generation before New York thought of a subway Pera had
one—a mile long. And it is now installing those electric facilities
which Abd ül Hamid always objected to, on the ground that a dynamo must
have something to do with dynamite. But it will be long before Pera,
which with its neighbours sprawls over as much ground as New York,
will really take in the conception of rapid transit, or even the more
primitive one of home comfort. I hardly need, therefore, go into the
account of the more complicated paraphernalia of modern life. There
are no public pleasure or sporting grounds other than two dusty little
municipal gardens, laid out in old cemeteries, which you pay to enter.
Pictures, libraries, collections ancient or modern, there are none. I
had almost said there is neither music nor drama. There are, to be sure,
a few modest places of assembly where excellent companies from Athens
may be heard, where a visitor from the Comédie Française occasionally
gives half a dozen performances, and where the failures of European
music-halls oftenest air their doubtful charms. On these boards I have
beheld a peripatetic Aïda welcome Rhadames and a conquering host of five
Greek supers; but Brünnhilde and the Rhine maidens have yet to know the
Bosphorus. Not so, however, a translated “Tante de Charles.” When the
“Merry Widow” first tried to make her début, she met with an unexpected
rebuff. Every inhabitant of Pera who respects himself has a big Croat or
Montenegrin, who are the same rose under different names, to decorate
his front door with a display of hanging sleeves and gold embroidery. It
having been whispered among these magnificent creatures that the “Lustige
Witwe” was a slander on the principality—as it was then—of Nicholas I,
they assembled in force in the gallery of the theatre and proceeded to
bombard the stage with chairs and other detachable objects until the
company withdrew the piece.
Consisting of an accretion of villages, containing the conveniences of a
village, Pera keeps, in strange contradiction to her urban dimensions,
the air of a village, the separation of a village from the larger
world, the love of a village for gossip and the credulity of a village
in rumour. This is partly due, of course, to the ingrained belief of
the Turks that it is not well for people to know exactly what is going
on. The papers of Pera have always lived under a strict censorship,
and consequently there is nothing too fantastic for Pera to repeat or
believe. Hence it is that Pera is sniffed at by those who should know her
best, while the tarriers for a night console themselves with imagining
that there is nothing to see. I have never been able to understand why
it should be thought necessary nowadays for one town to be exactly like
another. I, therefore, applaud Pera for having the originality to be
herself. And within her walls I have learned that one may be happy even
without steam-heat and telephones. In despite, moreover, of the general
contempt for her want of intellectual resources, I submit that merely to
live in Pera is as good as a university. No one can hope to entertain
relations with the good people of that municipality without speaking
at least one language beside his own. It is by no means uncommon for a
Perote to have five or six at his tongue’s end. Turkish and French are
the official languages, but Greek is more common in Pera and Galata
proper, while you must have acquaintance with two or three alphabets
more if you wish to read the signs in the streets or the daily papers.
And then there remain an indeterminate number of dialects used by large
bodies of citizens.
A town so varied in its discourse is not less liberal in other
particulars. Pera observes three holy days a week: Friday for the Turks,
Saturday for the Jews, Sunday for the Christians. How many holidays she
keeps I would be afraid to guess. She recognises four separate calendars.
Two of them, the Julian and the Gregorian, followed by Eastern and
Western Christians respectively, are practically identical save that
they are thirteen days apart. There are, however, three Christmases in
Pera, because the Armenians celebrate Epiphany (Old Style); and sometimes
only one Easter. As for the Jews, they adhere to their ancient lunar
calendar, which is supposed to start from the creation of the world. The
Turks also follow a lunar calendar, not quite the same, which makes their
anniversaries fall eleven days earlier every year. Their era begins with
the Hegira. But in 1789 Selim III also adopted for financial purposes an
adaptation of the Julian calendar, beginning on the first of March and
not retroactive in calculating earlier dates. Thus the Christian year
1914 is 5674 for the Jews, and 1332 or 1330 for the Turks. There are also
two ways of counting the hours of Pera, the most popular one considering
twelve o’clock to fall at sunset. These independences cause less
confusion than might be supposed. They interfere very little, unless with
the happiness of employers. But where the liberty of Pera runs to licence
is in the matter of post-offices. Of these there are no less than seven,
for in addition to the Turks the six powers of Europe each maintain their
own. They do not deliver letters, however, and to be certain of getting
all your mail—there is not too much certainty even then—you must go or
send every day to every one of those six post-offices.
[Illustration: Grande Rue de Pera]
For those branches of learning of which Pera is so superior a mistress,
an inimitable hall of learning is her much-scoffed Grande Rue—“narrow as
the comprehension of its inhabitants and long as the tapeworm of their
intrigues,” as the learned Von Hammer not too good-humouredly wrote. I
am able to point out that it has broadened considerably since his day,
though I must add that it is longer than ever! It begins under another
name in Galata, in a long flight of steps from which you see a blue slice
of the harbour neatly surmounted by the four minarets of St. Sophia. It
mounts through a commerce of stalls and small shops, gaining in decorum
as it rises in altitude, till it reaches the height which was the heart
of old Pera. Here was the _Stavrothromo_ of the Perotes, where the Rue
Koumbaradji—Bombardier—climbs laboriously out of Top Haneh and tumbles
down from the other side of the Grande Rue into Kassîm Pasha. The Grande
Rue now attains its climax of importance much farther on, between Galata
Seraï and Taxim, whence, keeping ever to the crest of the hill, it passes
out into the country like another Broadway between apartment-houses and
vacant lots. Other Grandes Rues may be statelier, or more bizarre and
sketchable. This Grande Rue must have been more sketchable in the time
of Von Hammer, who found nothing picturesque in the balconies almost
meeting across the street, in the semi-oriental costumes of the Perotes
and the high clogs in which they clattered about the town. But even now
the Grande Rue is by no means barren of possibilities—where a motor-car
will turn out for an ox-cart or a sedan-chair, and where pedestrians are
stopped by an Anatolian peasant carrying a piano on his back, by a flock
of sheep pattering between two gaunt Albanians, or by a troop of firemen
hooting half-naked through the street with a gaudy little hand-pump on
their shoulders. There are any number of other types that only need the
seeing eye and the revealing pencil which Pera has too long lacked. And
few Grandes Rues can be full of contrasts more profound than meet you
here where East and West, the modern and the mediæval, come so strangely
together.
[Illustration: The Little Field of the Dead]
There are other streets in Pera, and streets that are visibly as well as
philosophically picturesque. There is, for instance, that noisome shelf
which ought to be the pride of the town, overhanging the Little Field of
the Dead, where cypresses make a tragic foreground to the vista of the
Golden Horn and far-away Stamboul, and where crows wheel in such gusty
black clouds against red sunsets. There are also the heights of Fîndîklî,
from which you catch glimpses, down streets as steep as Capri and Turkish
as Eyoub, of the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. But for the
sketchable, for the pre-eminently etchable, Galata is the place—humble,
despised, dirty, abandoned Galata, with its outlying suburbs. If the
Grande Rue de Pera is Broadway, the main street of Galata is the Bowery.
It runs along the curve of the shore from Azap Kapou, at the Arsenal
wall, to the outer bridge and the Bosphorus. And nobody knows it, but
some very notable architecture adorns this neglected highway. Besides the
old Genoese Arab Jami and the mosque of Don Quixote, there is at Azap
Kapou another masterpiece of Sinan, a lovely little mosque founded by the
great Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha. At Fîndîklî, too, there is an
obscure waterside mosque whose aspect from the Bosphorus is admirable,
set as it is among boats and trees, with a valley cleaving the hill
behind it. And even the tall Nousretieh at Top Haneh, built by Sultan
Mahmoud II, has its points. These points, particularly as exemplified
in the twin minarets, are an inimitable slimness and elegance. And I
don’t care if the great door opening on to the parade-ground, and the
court at the north, are rococo; they are charming. There are also two
or three of the handsomest fountains in all Constantinople on this
long street—notably the big marble one at the corner of this very
parade-ground, by Mahmoud I, and the one of his mother at Azap Kapou.
The same princess left near Galata Tower, in that old Grande Rue of
the Genoese where the Podestà lived and André Chénier was born, a wall
fountain whose lamentable state of ruin is a reproach to the city that
can boast such a treasure. The entire left bank, in fact, is particularly
rich in these interesting monuments. This is the only part of the city
for which the sultans installed an entirely new water-system.
[Illustration: The fountain of Azap Kapou]