which Murray’s guide-book dismisses with little more than a remark about
the most depraved population in Europe. Of depravity I am not connoisseur
enough to pass judgment on this dictum. I can only say that if the
Galatiotes are the worst people in Europe, the world is not in so parlous
a state as some persons have imagined. I presume it must be to the
regions called Kemer Altî—Under the Arch—lying between Step Street and
the pious walls of S. Benoît, that the critic refers. Here the primrose
path of Galata winds among dark and dismal alleys, Neapolitan save for
the fezzes, the odour of mastic, and the jingling _lanterna_, the beloved
hand piano of Galata. Yet even here simplicity would be a truer word than
depravity. Among primrose paths this is at once the least disguised and
the least seductive which I have happened to tread. There is so little
mystery about it, its fantastic inhabitants make so little attempt to
conceal their numerous disadvantages, that no Ulysses should be compelled
to stop his ears against such sirens.
But Galata is by no means all primrose path. Other, more laborious paths
abound there, of drudgery manifold but chiefly of those who go down to
the sea in ships. The tangle of narrow streets between the “Bowery” and
the harbour is given up almost entirely to sailors and watermen—their
lodging, their outfitting, and their amusement. The thickest of these
streets in local colour are in the purlieus of Pershembeh Bazaar.
Pershembeh Bazaar means Thursday Market, and Thursday is a day to come
here. Then awnings shade the little streets around Arab Jami, and
venders of dreadful Manchester prints, of astonishing footwear, of
sweets, of perfumes, of variegated girdles, leave no more than a narrow
lane for passers-by, and there is infinite bargaining from sunrise to
sunset. The next morning there will be not a sign of all this commerce.
It has gone elsewhere: to be precise, to Kassîm Pasha. On Tuesdays you
will find these peripatetic merchants near Top Haneh.
[Illustration: Fountain near Galata Tower]
[Illustration: The Kabatash breakwater]
If the Thursday Market goes, the rest of Galata remains, and the best of
it: the alleys of jutting upper stories that know so well the value of a
grape-vine, the quaint shops and coffee-houses, the cavernous bakeries,
the place of broken lights where the oar makers ply the local variation
of their trade, the narrow courtyard where the sailmakers sit, the
wharves and landings of the Golden Horn, the quays of Top Haneh, the
breakwater of Kabatash—which is at its best in a south wind—and all that
enticing region called Kalafat Yeri, the Place of Pitch, where from time
immemorial men have built boats and caulked them, and fitted them out
with gear. In front of this shore, off the old Galata which the Genoese
originally walled in, lies the noble mass of shipping of which I have
already spoken. That is the supreme resource of Galata, and one which is
hidden under no bushel, waiting patiently to make the fortune of the man
who will etch it. Where were Mr. Murray’s eyes when he came to Galata?
Her vices would hardly have attracted his attention if he had taken in
the virtue of her contribution to the pictorial.
VI
THE CITY OF GOLD
Under this designation, gentle reader or severe, you probably never
would recognise the straggling settlement of wooden houses, set off by
a few minarets and shut in from the southeast by a great black curtain
of cypresses, that comes down to the Asiatic shore opposite the mouth of
the Golden Horn. That is because you have forgotten its old Greek name,
and mix it up in your mind with a certain notorious town in Albania.
Moreover, your guide-book assures you that a day, or even half a day,
will suffice to absorb its interest. Believe no such nonsense, however.
I have reason to know what I am talking about, for I have spent ten of
the best years of my life in Scutari, if not eleven, and have not yet
seen all its sights. By what series of accidents a New English infant,
whose fathers dwelt somewhere about the Five Towns long before Mr. Arnold
Bennett or even Mr. Josiah Wedgwood thought of making them famous, came
to see the light in this Ultima Thule of Asia, I hesitate to explain. I
tried to do so once before an election board in that sympathetic district
of New York known as Hell’s Kitchen, and was very nearly disfranchised
for my pains. Only the notorious example of the mayor, who also happened
to be born on the wrong side of the Atlantic and who nevertheless
had reached his high office without any intermediate naturalisation,
preserved to me the sacred right of the ballot. But the fact gives me
the right to speak of guide-books as cavalierly as I please.
Yet it also singularly complicates, I find, my intention of doing
something to draw my native town from the obscurity into which it has
too long relapsed. In considering its various claims to interest, for
instance, my first impulse is to count among them a certain lordly member
of the race of stone-pines. I used to look up at it with a kind of awe,
so high did its head tower above my own and so strangely did it parley
with the moving air. Our heads are not much nearer together now; but
unaccountable changes have taken place in the thatch of mine, while the
pine has lost none of the thickness and colour that delighted me long
ago. I suppose, however, that other pines are equally miraculous, and
that the pre-eminence of this one in my eyes is derived from the simple
fact that I happened to be born in sight of it. I will therefore struggle
as valiantly as I may against the enormous temptation to do a little
Kenneth Grahame over again, with Oriental variations. For the rest, there
must have been less difference between a Minor Asiatic infancy and a New
English one than might be imagined. It was conducted, for the most part,
in the same tongue. It was enlivened by the same games and playthings.
It was embittered by the same books and pianos. Its society was much
more limited, however, and it was passed, for the most part, behind high
garden walls, to adventure beyond which, without governess or guardian of
some sort, was anathema.
[Illustration: Fresco in an old house in Scutari]
I could easily lose myself in reminiscences of one or two Scutari
gardens. In fact, I can only save myself—and the reader—from such a
fate by making up my mind to write a separate chapter about gardens in
general. As for the houses that went with the gardens, they were very
much like the old houses of Stamboul. They were all halls and windows,
and they had enormously high ceilings, so that in winter they were about
as cosy as the street. I remember one of them with pleasure by reason of
the frescoes that adorned it, with beautiful deer in them and birds as
big as the deer stalking horizontally up the trunks of trees. Another was
a vast tumble-down wooden palace of which we humbly camped out in one
corner. It had originally belonged to an Armenian grandee who rejoiced in
the name of the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked. The Son of the Man Who Was
Cooked had the honour to be a friend of the Sultan of his day, who not
seldom visited him. His majesty used to come at all hours, it is said,
and sometimes in disguise. This was partly because the Son of the Man Who
Was Cooked loved to go loaded with jewels, as the legend went, and the
Sultan hoped by finding him in that case to have the better ground for
raising loans. But it is also whispered that other reasons entered into
the matter, and that on the men’s side of the house a secret stair was
built, enabling majesty to circulate in the house without attracting too
much attention. Certain it is that such a stair, black and breakneck,
existed, for my room was at the top of it—and as I lay in bed in winter
I could look out through the cracks in the wall and see the snow in the
garden. But I never wondered then, as I have wondered since, whether the
legend that Abd ül Hamid was half an Armenian had any connection with our
house. Another of its attractions was that it boasted in the cellar a
bottomless pit—or so the servants used to assure us.
These were they who lent, perhaps, the most local colour to that Minor
Asiatic youth. They were daughters of Armenia, for the most part. And
I sometimes think that if William Watson had enjoyed my opportunities
he never would have written “The Purple East.” Surely he never squirmed
under an Armenian kiss, which in my day partook both of sniffing and of
biting and which left the victim’s cheek offensively red and moist. Yet
how can I remember with anything but gratitude the kindly neighbours to
whom foreign children, coming and going between the houses that in those
distant days made a small Anglo-American colony in upper Scutari, were
always a source of interest? For some mysterious reason that is buried
in the heart of exiled Anglo-Saxondom, we really knew wonderfully little
about our neighbours. We never played with their children or entered
other than strangers the world outside our garden wall. Nor was it
because our neighbours were unwilling to meet us half-way. They paid us
the compliment of naming a certain place of amusement which existed in
our vicinity the American Theatre, hoping thereby to gain our patronage.
But I fear this hope met with no response. At any rate, I never came
nearer the unknown delights of the American Theatre than the top of our
garden wall, from which I remember once listening entranced to such
strains of music as never issued from our serious piano. I recognised
them years afterward, with a jump, in an opera of Suppé. I have also
lived to learn that Scutari, or the part of it where we lived, is a sort
of Armenian Parnassus, perhaps even an Armenian Montmartre, given over
entirely to the muses. Emancipated Armenian ladies, they tell me, do
such unheard-of things as to walk, on their own two feet, vast distances
over the hills of Asia with emancipated Armenian gentlemen in long locks
and flowing neckties; and imperishable Armenian odes have celebrated the
beauties of Baghlar Bashi and Selamsîz.
Nevertheless, we did not suffer the consequences of our aloofness.
Between our garden and another one, to which we were in time allowed
to go alone, there existed, unbeknownst to our elders, certain post
stations, as it were, where a wayfarer might stop for rest and
refreshment. Out of one barred window a lady always passed me a glass of
water. She rather reminded me of some docile overgrown animal in a cage.
Indeed I am not sure she could have got out if she tried—which apparently
she never did—for she was of immeasurable proportions. I thought of her
when I later came to read of a certain Palace lady pet-named Little
Elephant, who built a mosque in Scutari. I know not whether this was the
same whom a Sultan, having sent messengers to the four quarters of the
empire in search of the fattest beauty imaginable, found in my native
town, almost under his palace windows, and led away in triumph. As George
Ade has told us, slim princesses used not to be the fashion in Turkey.
From another window, higher above the street, attentions of another
sort used to be showered on us by an old gentleman who never seemed to
dress. He was always sitting there in a loose white gown, as if he had
just got up or were just going to bed, and he would toss us down pinks
or chrysanthemums, according to the season. But the person most popular
with us was a little old woman who lived in a house so old and so little
that I blush when I remember how greedy I used to be at her expense.
She used to reach out between the bars of her window spoonfuls of the
most heavenly preserve I have ever tasted, thick and white and faintly
flavoured with lemon. So distinguished a sweetmeat could only possess so
distinguished a name as bergamot.
Returning to Scutari long afterward, it came upon me with a certain
surprise that no one offered me sweets or flowers, or even a glass of
water. My case was oddly put to me by a man like one of Shakespeare’s
fools, who perhaps should not have been at large but who asked himself
aloud when he met me at a mosque gate: “I wonder what he is looking
for—his country?” If Scutari tempts me to do Kenneth Grahame over again,
it also tempts me to do Dr. Hale over again, to whose famous hero I could
give other points than that of the election board in Hell’s Kitchen. The
enduring taunt of my school-days was that I never could be President,
and it was a bitter blow to me when I learned that my name could never
be carved in the Hall of Fame above the Hudson. Yet when I went back to
Scutari, as a man will go back to the home of his youth, the inhabitants
were so far from recognising me as one of themselves that the thought
occurred to me how amusingly like life it would be if I, who am not
notable for the orthodoxy of my opinions, were massacred for a Christian
in the town where I was born! Nevertheless I have discovered with a good
deal of surprise, in the room of the vanished Scutari I used to know, a
Scutari that I never saw or heard of when I was young—I speak, of course,
to the race of men that likes Stamboul—a place of boundless resources,
of priceless possibilities—a true City of Gold.
* * * * *
The favourite story is that Chrysopolis was so called because of the
Persian satraps who once lived there and heaped up the gold of tribute.
Others have it, and I like their theory better, that the city took its
name from Chryses, son of Chryseis and Agamemnon, who, fleeing after
the fall of Troy from Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, met there his end. A
few poetic-minded individuals have found an origin for the word in the
appearance the town presents from Constantinople at sunset with all its
panes on fire. I don’t know that the idea is more far-fetched than any
other. An equal variety of opinion prevails with regard to the modern
name. Certain authorities claim that it is a corruption of Üsküdar, used
by the Turks, which is from a Persian word meaning a post messenger.
For myself, I am feebly impressed by all these Persians, who seem to me
dragged in by the ears. A Turkish savant told me once that he believed
Üsküdar to be a corruption of an old Armenian name, Oskitar or Voskitar,
which is merely a translation of Chrysopolis. When Mehmed II captured
Constantinople he brought a great many Armenians into it, to repopulate
the city and to offset the Greeks; and the richest of them, who came
from Broussa, he settled in Scutari, which has always retained a certain
Armenian tinge. I learn that in ancient Armenian some such word could
have been made out of Chrysopolis. But the name Scutari is much older
than the Turkish conquest. Villehardouin and at least one Byzantine
historian speak of the palace of Scutari, on the promontory that juts out
toward Seraglio Point. Also, I seem to remember reading in Gibbon of a
corps of _scutarii_ who had their barracks on that side of the strait.
I have never been able to lay my hand on those _scutarii_ again, and
so cannot found very much of an argument upon them. Any Latin lexicon,
however, will give you the word _scutarius_, a shield-bearer, and tell
you that a corps of them existed under the later empire. Wherefore I
formally reject and contemn Murray, Von Hammer and Company, with their
Persian postboys, and take my stand on those Roman shields. In all
probability the name spread, as in the case of Galata, from a barracks or
a palace to the entire locality, and Üsküdar must be a Turkish attempt to
pronounce the Greek Σκουτάριον.
Of that oldest Scutari I did not set out to write an account, but it is
convenient that the visitor should be aware of how ancient and honourable
a town he is treading the streets. I find it a little difficult to write
coherently, however, for two ancient and honourable towns are there.
The second one, lying next to the south and facing the Marmora instead
of the Bosphorus, is the more ancient, and I suppose in the eyes of
the world the more honourable. Chalcedon was its name—derived, by one
report, from the Homeric soothsayer Chalkas—and it is represented to-day
by the suburbs of Haïdar Pasha, Kadi Kyöi, and Moda. The history of
these adjoining quarters is so intertwined that it is sometimes hard to
distinguish between Chalcedon and Chrysopolis. Chalcedon, like Byzantium,
was founded by colonists from Megara, but a few years earlier. Its
greater accessibility and hospitality to ships and the flatness of its
site gave it advantages which Chrysopolis did not possess. Chrysopolis,
on the other hand, nearer Byzantium and commanding the mouth of the
Bosphorus, occupied the more strategic position with regard to the
traffic of the strait. Both cities suffered greatly during the Persian
wars, and were for a time ruled by the satraps of Darius. The Athenians
seized them early in the history of their league, in order to levy tolls
on passing ships. So early arose the vexed question of the straits.
Philip of Macedon included the two cities in his siege of Byzantium, but
was driven away by the Athenians. Xenophon stopped a week in Chrysopolis
on his way back from Persia. Hannibal ended his troubled days in a suburb
of Chalcedon. Nicomedes III of Bithynia left that town in his will to the
Romans, who fought over it with Mithridates of Pontus. The Goths ravaged
it on the occasion of their first raid into Asia Minor. The fate of the
Roman world was settled on the heights of Chrysopolis in 324, when that
other man without a country, Constantine of York, vanquished his last
rival, Licinius, and took him prisoner. The experiences and associations
of that victory must have had much to do with the transfer of the capital
from the Tiber to the Bosphorus. From that time onward the two Asiatic
cities lost something in importance but gained in peace—though Persians,
Saracens, and Turks later troubled them again. The fourth Ecumenical
Council sat in Chalcedon in 451, in that church of St. Euphemia which
had been a temple of Venus. The famous oracle of Apollo Constantine
destroyed, using its marbles for his own constructions on the opposite
side of the strait. From Chrysopolis he also took a celebrated statue of
Alexander the Great. His example was followed by the emperor Valens, who
utilised the walls of Chalcedon as a quarry for the aqueduct that still
strides across a valley of Stamboul. And even Süleïman the Magnificent
was able to find materials for his greatest mosque in the ruins of the
church of St. Euphemia and of the palace of Belisarius.
[Illustration: The Street of the Falconers]
To-day a few sculptured capitals remain above ground in Scutari,
and every now and then some one in Kadi Kyöi digs up in his garden a
terra-cotta figurine. Otherwise there is nothing left to remind you of
the antique cities that sat in front of Byzantium. They have disappeared
as completely as the quaint little Scutari of my youth. But two
settlements still remain there, and still different, although so long
united under one destiny. When projected trolley-cars and motor roads
come into being, as they are destined shortly to do, I fancy that this
separation will become less and less marked. For the time being, however,
Scutari and Kadi Kyöi might be on opposite sides of the Bosphorus. Kadi
Kyöi, with its warmer winds, its smoother lands, its better harbours, its
trim yachts, its affluent-looking villas, its international _Bagdadbahn_,
has acquired a good deal of the outward appearance of Europe. Whereas
Scutari remains Asiatic and old-fashioned. It is very much what it was
before Bagdad railways, when the caravans of the East marched through its
narrow streets, when the Janissaries pounded their kettledrums in the
square of Doghanjiler—the Falconers. And it contains almost all that is
to be seen in the two towns of interest to the comer from afar.
* * * * *
The great sight of Scutari, after all, is Scutari itself—which very few
people ever seem to have noticed. In front of it opens, somewhat north of
west, a nick in the shore known as the Great Harbour. As a matter of fact
it is very little of a harbour, whose inner waters are barely safe from
the swirl of the Bosphorus as it begins to squeeze past Seraglio Point.
The front door of Scutari is here, however, and one altogether worthy of
the City of Gold. Seen from the water it is admirably bordered with boats
and boat-houses, being no less admirably overlooked by minarets and
hanging gardens and climbing roofs and the dark overtopping wall of the
great cemetery, while nearer acquaintance proves it to be amply provided
with local colour in the way of plane-trees, fountains, and coffee-houses
galore. The heart of the town lies in an irregular amphitheatre which
twists back from the Great Harbour. Into the floor of the amphitheatre
project half a dozen buttresses of an upper gallery, and through the long
narrow corridors between them streets climb, sometimes by steps, to the
cypresses and their amply sweeping terrace. In this scene, if you like, a
lesser Stamboul is set. It has its old houses, its vines, its fountains,
its windows of grille work, its mosque yards, its markets, its covered
bazaar, even its own edition of the Sacred Caravan and the Persian
solemnity of _Mouharrem_. But it has an air of its own, as the storks
will tell you who nest near the flower market. It does not imitate, it
complements Stamboul. And it contains monuments so remarkable that I am
constantly amazed and scandalised to find out how little people know
about them.
Four mosques in particular are the pride and jewels of my native town.
They were all erected by princesses—the two oldest after the designs of
Sinan. The earliest one, dating from 1547, is the first you see when you
come to Scutari. It stands, like the mosque of Rüstem Pasha, on a terrace
above the hum of the landing stage. As a matter of fact it was built
by the wife of Rüstem Pasha, who was also the daughter of Süleïman the
Magnificent and Roxelana. Mihrîmah, this lady was called, which means
Moon and Sun. Her mosque is named after her, though it is also called the
Great Mosque and the Mosque of the Pitcher—for what reason I have yet
to penetrate. It is a little stiff and severe, to my way of thinking.
The minarets have not the spring that Sinan afterward learned to evoke,
and the interior is rather bare. Perhaps it has been pillaged. But the
courtyard, looking out through trees to the Bosphorus, is a delightful
spot, and it contains one of the most admirable mosque fountains I know.
There are also other fountains in the court, and an old sun-dial, too
overgrown by leaves to do its work, and a _mouvakît haneh_. When I was
speaking of mosque yards in general I did not mention this institution.
It may seem to us that people who count twelve o’clock at sunset cannot
pay much attention to the science of time keeping. But the exact hours
of prayer, like the exact direction of Mecca, are very important matters
for Mohammedans. The Arabs, I believe, were the first inventors of
clocks. At all events, the first clock seen in Europe was a present to
Charlemagne from Haroun al Rashid. A clock is an essential part of the
furniture of every mosque. Haroun al Rashid is a long time dead, however,
and most of the clocks seen to-day were made in England. Mosques of any
size, nevertheless, have their own corps of timekeepers, who do their
work in a pavilion called the _mouvakît haneh_—the house of time—and
incidentally repair the watches of the neighbourhood. Some of them also
take solar observations with instruments that were made for a museum.
[Illustration: Fountain in the mosque yard of Mihrîmah]
Next in chronological order is the mosque of the _Valideh Atik_—which
might be translated as the Old or, more politely, as the Wise Mother.
It is more popularly known as Top Tashi, or Cannon Stone. In a steep
street near the mosque lies a big stone cannon-ball from which the
quarter may take its name. However, the Wise Mother was a certain Nour
Banou, Lady of Light, who lies buried beside her husband, Sultan Selim
II, in the courtyard of St. Sophia. Her mosque stands on the second
story of Scutari, and its two minarets and contrasting cypresses,
with their encompassing arcade and massive-walled dependencies, make
the most imposing architectural group in the town. The mosque has
recently undergone a thorough restoration, which is rarely a very happy
proceeding. Luckily the restorers left the painted wooden ceilings that
decorate the under-side of the gallery—or so much of them as had not
been painted out before. There is also an elaborately perforated marble
_mimber_, whose two flags would seem to indicate that a church once
stood here. But what is best is the tiled recess of the _mihrab_. The
tile makers of Nicæa had evidently not begun to lose their cunning in
the day of the Lady of Light—unless she borrowed from some other place.
In any case, the two panels at right angles to the _mihrab_ are so high
an ornament of my native town that Scutari deserves to be celebrated
for them alone. They seem to me to rank among the finest tiles in
Constantinople, though Murray passes them by without a word. In Turkish
eyes this mosque has a further interest as being one of the spots known
to have been visited by Hîdîr or Hîzîr, lord of the Fountain of Life. In
the porch of the mosque hangs an illuminated manuscript commemorating
this illustrious visit, and near it are three holes by which Hîzîr is
supposed to have moved the mosque in token of his presence.
[Illustration: Tiles in the mosque of the Valideh Atik]
[Illustration: Chinili Jami]
The third princess to build in Scutari was one whose acquaintance we
have already made, the great _valideh_ Kyössem. Her mosque also stands
on the upper terrace, at the head of the long corridor known as Chaoush
Deresi. The Turks call it Chinili Jami, which really means the China
Mosque. It is a tiled mosque, much smaller than Rüstem Pasha, faced on
the inside and along the porch with blue and white tiles of not so good a
period. Between 1582, when the Lady of Light tiled her _mihrab_, and 1643
something had evidently happened in Nicæa. As a matter of fact, I believe
the tiles came from Kütahya. Nevertheless the mosque is charming, there
is the quaintest pagoda-like fountain in one corner of the court, and the
main gate of the yard composes with the fountain and the mosque and the
cypresses around it in the happiest possible way.
[Illustration: The fountains of the Valideh Jedid]
The latest of our four mosques was erected by the sultana who, being by
birth a Greek, took away San Francesco in Galata from the Conventuals.
At least that lady was the builder if she was the mother of Ahmed III as
well as of Moustafa II. She atoned, however, for that eminently feminine
piece of high-handedness by her mosque in Scutari. It is popularly
called the Valideh Jedid, the mosque of the New Mother, and it belongs
to that early period of Turkish rococo which Ahmed III borrowed from
Louis XV. For the mosque of a new mother, the style is admirably adapted.
It is to be seen at its most characteristic in the fountain of marble
embroideries which stands outside the north gate of the mosque yard. A
second fountain stands beside the first, of the sort where cups of water
are filled for passers-by. Then comes the tomb of the foundress, who
lies like the Kyöprülüs under a skeleton dome of bronze. And you should
see the roses that make a little garden around her in May. They are an
allusion, I suppose, to her graceful Turkish name, which may be less
gracefully rendered as Rose Attar of Spring. The mosque yard has no great
interest—except on Fridays, when a fair is established along its outer
edge. But I must draw attention to the bird-house, like a cross-section
of a little mosque with two minarets, on the façade of the forecourt, and
to the small marble beehive that balances it. This forecourt is the only
one of its kind in Scutari. As for the mosque itself, you may find the
windows too coquettish even for a New Mother. For myself I rather like
their flower-pots and flowers, though they clearly belong to a day other
than that of the old window jewellery of Sinan’s time. The green tiles
about the _mihrab_ also betray a symptom of decadence in that they are of
a repeating pattern. But the chief point of the mosque is one to which I
drew attention a good many pages back, namely its stencilling. Being a
native of Scutari, I can without presumption recommend to all Ministers
of Pious Foundations that they preserve that old painting as long as the
last flake of it hangs to the ceiling, and that before the last flake
falls they learn the secret of its effect. So may they in days to come
restore to Rüstem Pasha and Sultan Ahmed and Yeni Jami a part of their
lost dignity.
[Illustration: Interior of the Valideh Jedid
In the gallery at the left is the imperial tribune]
[Illustration: The Ahmedieh]
You are not to suppose that Scutari has no other mosques than these.
Áyazma Jami and the Selimieh are two other imperial monuments whose
delightful yards make up for their baroque interiors. And the small
Ahmedieh is an older structure which you must not attribute to any Sultan
Ahmed. Oldest of all is Roum Mehmed Pasha, once a Greek church. If I pass
it by, however, I simply cannot pass by a mosque which stands in its own
_medresseh_ court on the south side of Scutari harbour. I would rather
study theology there than anywhere else in the world. At least, I do not
believe any other theological school has so perfect a little cloister
lying so close to the sea. And while other cloisters were designed by
Sinan, I know of no other that was founded by a poet. The name of this
poet was Shemsi Pasha, and he was a soldier and a courtier as well. But
it was the poetry in him, together with his quick wit and gay humour,
that first drew him into the notice of Süleïman the Magnificent. Unlike
many men of his circle, he was a real Turk, being descended from a
Seljukian family that reigned at one time on the shores of the Black Sea.
He became a greater favourite of Selim II than he had been of Süleïman.
Selim made him master of ceremonies to receive the ambassadors who came
to Adrianople to congratulate the new Sultan on his accession. Among
these was a Persian, whom his European colleagues greatly astonished
by taking off their hats as he rode in with his magnificent suite. The
Persian asked Shemsi Pasha what the extraordinary gesture might signify,
and Shemsi Pasha told him it was a Christian way of showing that they
were ready to drop their heads at the feet of the Sultan. Under Mourad
III Shemsi Pasha reached an even higher pitch of fortune, and it was
then that he built his _medresseh_. He jokingly began to call himself
the Falcon of Petitions, for it was his business to receive petitions
that people brought to the Sultan—and the presents that accompanied them.
One day he came away from the Sultan in high good humour, saying: “At
last I have avenged the dynasty of my fathers, for if the house of Osman
caused our ruin I have prepared that of the house of Osman.” Asked what
he meant, he explained that he had just induced the Sultan—for forty
thousand ducats—to sell his favour. “From to-day the Sultan himself will
give the example of corruption, and corruption will dissolve the empire.”
[Illustration: Shemsi Pasha]
Were I a little more didactically inclined, this speech should inspire
the severest reflections on the man who made it and on the ironical
truth of his lightly uttered prophecy. As it is, I am more inclined to
reflect on the irony of the fact that ill-gotten gains may do more good
or create something nearer the immortal than the savings of honest toil.
At any rate, the _medresseh_ of Shemsi Pasha is such a place as only a
poet or a great architect could imagine; and many homeless people found
refuge there during the late Balkan War. The cloister is very small
and irregular. There are cells and a covered arcade on two sides. The
third, I think, from three or four quaint little windows of perforated
marble that remain in a corner of the wall, must once have been more
open to the Bosphorus than it is now. On the fourth side, and taking up
a good deal of the court, are the mosque and the tomb of the founder.
The mosque must have been a little jewel in its day. It is half a ruin
now. The minaret is gone and so is all but the pillars of the portico
that looked into the court. Within, however, are intricately panelled
shutters, and a little gallery painted on the under-side, and a carved
_mimber_ of woodwork like that in the tombs of Roxelana and her sons.
The refugees of 1912, poor wretches, saw no reason why they should not
drive as many nails as they needed into that precious wood. The greatest
ornament of the mosque is a magnificent bronze grille in the archway that
opens into the adjoining tomb. This grille is rather like one they show
you at Ravenna, in a crypt window of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, except
that it has an arrow in each of the arched openings; and the surmounting
lunette is a more complicated design. Did Shemsi Pasha, who seems to have
had rather a genius for picking things up, get hold of a real Byzantine
grille and make this perfect use of it? The tomb itself is in a piteous
state of neglect. Nothing is left to show which of the three bare and
broken wooden catafalques marked the grave of the dead poet. Windows in
the outer wall look through a little marble portico upon a ruined quay.
And, tempered so, the splash and flicker of the Bosphorus come into the
mosque.
[Illustration: The bassma haneh]
[Illustration: Hand wood-block printing]
One of the sights of Scutari which always interests me is to be seen
behind Shemsi Pasha, where a bluff first begins to lift itself above the
sea. Here on any summer day you will notice what you may think to be
lines of clothes drying in the wind. The clothes are really those soft
figured handkerchiefs which are so greatly used in the East. Bare-legged
men dip them in the sea to set the colours; and from them you may
follow a gory trail of dye till you come to a house with thick wooden
bars tilted strangely out under the eaves like gigantic clothes-horses.
This is the _bassma haneh_—the printing-house. It has belonged to the
same family for two hundred years, and during that time it can hardly
have changed its methods of wood-block printing. Every bit of the work
is done by hand. Every stitch of it is lugged down to the salt water
for the colours to be made fast, and lugged back. And the factory, like
other old-fashioned institutions in Constantinople, is open only from
the day of Hîd’r Eless, in May, to that of Kassîm, in November. Once, as
I rather intrusively poked my way about it, I came upon a man, whether
old or young I could not say, who sat on the floor blocking out the
first pattern on long white strips of cloth that were ultimately, as
he told me, to make turbans for the people of Kürdistan. The room was
almost dark, and it contained hardly anything beside the mattress where
the man slept at night and a sizzling caldron beside him. The mixture in
the caldron, into which he kept dipping his block, was a dye of death:
so he told me, literally in those words, adding that it had already cut
ten years off his life. But his employers never could afford to put some
sort of a chimney over the caldron—and they assured him that employment
like his was to be found in no other country. Was it true? he asked me. I
thought to myself that the idyllic old days of hand labour, after which
so many of us sigh, may not always have been so idyllic after all.
* * * * *
If you go to the _bassma haneh_ by following the shore from the Great
Harbour, it is very likely that you will never get there, by reason of
the bluff to which I have just alluded. No road runs along the edge of
that bluff to Haïdar Pasha and Moda, as perhaps in some far distant day
of civic improvement may be the case; but here and there the houses are
set a little back, and so many streets come vertically down toward the
water that there are plenty of places to take in what the bluff has to
offer. And then you will see why so many sultans and emperors built
palaces there of old. I may, however, draw your attention for a moment to
the island lighthouse falsely known as Leander’s Tower. In an old Italian
map it is put down as _Torre della Bella Leandra_, and I have wondered if
there, haply, was a clew to the name or whether it is simply a sailor’s
jumble of the legend of the Dardanelles. In Turkish it is called _Kîz
Koulesi_—the Maiden’s Tower—and it has a legend of its own. This relates
to a Greek emperor who, being told that his daughter would one day be
stung by a serpent, built a little castle for her on that sea-protected
rock. But it happened to her to be seen by an Arab gallant, who expressed
his admiration by bringing her flowers in disguise. Among them a viper
chanced to creep one day, before the gallant left the mainland, and the
princess’s prophecy was fulfilled. The gallant immediately sucked the
poison out of her wound, however, and ran away with the princess. He was
the celebrated hero Sid el Battal, forerunner of the Spanish Cid, who
commanded the fifth Arab siege of Constantinople in 739 and who now lies
buried in a town named after him in Asia Minor. The existing Maiden’s
Tower was built in 1763 by Sultan Moustafa III. But a Byzantine one
existed before it, of the emperor Manuel Comnenus, from which a chain
used to be stretched in time of war across to Seraglio Point. And many
centuries earlier the rock bore the statue of a heifer in memory of
Damalis, wife of that Athenian Chares who drove away Philip of Macedon.
After her the bluff itself used to be called Damalis—which again may be
connected with the intricate myth of Io and the Bosphorus.
Every one knows the old story of the Delphian Oracle, who told the
colonists of Byzantium to settle opposite the City of the Blind. The City
of the Blind turned out to be the place whose inhabitants had passed
by the site of Seraglio Point. The reproach cannot be fastened on the
City of Gold, because Chalcedon really incurred it. But I have already
associated the two towns, and I am willing to do so again. For to live in
Scutari is to prove either that the oracle was blind or that Byzas made
a mistake. No other conclusion is possible for him who loiters on the
bluffs opposite Seraglio Point. One of the best places to see Stamboul
is there, where you look at it against the light. And it is something to
see in the early morning, with mists melting out of the Golden Horn and
making a fairyland of all those domes and pinnacles. As for the sunsets
of Scutari, with Stamboul pricking up black against them, they are so
notable among exhibitions of their kind that I cannot imagine why they
were not long ago put down among sunsets of San Marco and moonlights of
the Parthenon and I know not how many other favourite wonders of the
world.
[Illustration: The Bosphorus from the heights of Scutari]
I never heard, however, of guides recommending so simple an excursion.
What they will sometimes grudgingly recommend is to climb the hill
of Chamlîja. Chamlîja—the Place of Pines—is a hill of two peaks, one
a little higher than the other, on the descending terraces of which
amphitheatrically sprawls the City of Gold. Chamlîja is the highest hill
on the Bosphorus, and therefore is it dear to the Turks, who are like
the Canaanites of old in that they love groves and high places. The
groves, it is true, are now rather thinly represented by the stone-pines
that give the height its name; but Turkish princes, like their Byzantine
predecessors, have villas among them, while the hill is a favourite
resort of their subjects. The widest prospect, of course, is to be had
from the top of Big Chamlîja. But a more picturesque one is visible
from the south side of Little Chamlîja, taking in a vivid geography of
cypress forest and broken Marmora coast, and Princes’ Isles seen for
once swimming each in its own blue, and far-away Bithynian mountains;
while to the explorer of a certain northern spur, running straight to
Beïlerbeï Palace, is vouchsafed one of the most romantic of all visions
of the Bosphorus. Chamlîja has an especial charm for the people of the
country because of its water. No European can quite understand what that
means to a Turk. Being forbidden to indulge in fermented liquors, he is
a connoisseur of water—not mineral water, but plain H₂O—as other men
are of wine. He calls for the product of his favourite spring as might
a Westerner for a special vintage, and he can tell when an inferior
brand is palmed off on him. A dervish named Hafid Effendi once published
a monograph on the waters of Constantinople in which he described the
sixteen best springs, which he himself had tested. I will not enumerate
all the conditions which he laid down for perfect water. One of them
is that it must be “light”; another is that it should flow from south
to north or from west to east. A certain spring of Chamlîja meets
these requirements better than any other in Constantinople. A sultan,
therefore, did not think it beneath him to house this famous water of my
native town, and gourmets pay a price to put it on their tables.
A second pretext do guides and guide-books, out of the capriciousness
of their hearts, allow outsiders for visiting Scutari, and that is to
see the great cemetery. For that matter, few people with eyes of their
own and a whim to follow them could look up from the water at that
wood of cypresses, curving so wide and sombre above the town, without
desiring to know more of it. I have wondered if Arnold Böcklin ever saw
it, for in certain lights, and from the right point of the Bosphorus,
Scutari looks strangely like a greater Island of Death. In spite of its
vast population of old grey stones, however, there is to me nothing so
melancholy there as in our trim Western places of burial, shut away
from the world and visited only with whispers. There is, of course, a
gravity, the inseparable Turkish gravity, but withal a quiet colour of
the human. For the Turks have a different attitude toward death from
ours. I do not mean that they lack feeling, but they seem to take more
literally than we their religious teaching on the subject. They have no
conventional mourning, and the living and the dead seem much nearer to
each other. Nor is it merely that tombs and patches of cemetery ornament
the busiest street. “Visit graves,” says a tradition of the Prophet: “Of
a truth they shall make you think of futurity.” And “Whoso visiteth every
Friday the graves of his two parents, or one of the two, he shall be
written a pious son, even though he had been disobedient to them in the
world.” And people do visit graves. The cult of the _türbeh_ is a thing
by itself, while every cemetery is a place of resort. The cypresses of
Scutari are, therefore, the less funereal because the highways of common
life run between them. I speak literally, for the main thoroughfares
between Scutari and Kadi Kyöi pass through the cemetery. Under the trees
the stone-cutters fashion the quaint marble of the graves. Fountains are
scattered here and there for the convenience of passers-by. People sit
familiarly among the stones or in the coffee-houses that do not fail to
keep them company. I remember an old man who used to keep one of the
coffee-houses, and how he said to me, like a Book of Proverbs: “Death
in youth and poverty in age are hard, but both are of God.” He was born
in Bulgaria, he told me, when it was still a part of Turkey, but he
wished to die in Asia, and so he had already taken up his abode among the
cypresses of Scutari. A more tragic anticipation of that last journey
has been made by a colony of lepers. I went to visit them once, when I
thought less of my skin than I do now. They live in a stone quadrangle
set back from the Haïdar Pasha road, with windows opening only into their
own court. In front of the gate is a stone post where people leave them
food. When they offered me some of it, out of the hospitality of their
hearts, I must confess I drew the line. They kept house in families, each
in its own little apartment, and the rooms were clean and comfortable in
the simple Turkish way. But the faces and hands of some of the inmates
were not good to see. It made one’s heart sick for the children who are
born and innocently grow up in that place of death.
[Illustration: Gravestones]
The stones of Scutari are a study which I have often wished I had the
knowledge to take up. Every grave has a headstone and a footstone, taller
and narrower than our old-fashioned tombstones. You can tell at a glance
whether a man or a woman is buried beneath the marble slab that generally
joins the two stones. In old times every man wore a special turban,
according to his rank and profession, and when he died that turban was
carved at the top of his headstone. The custom is still continued,
although the fez has now so largely taken the place of the turban.
Women’s stones are finished with a carving of flowers. Floral reliefs are
common on all monuments, which may also be painted and gilded. And in the
flat slab will be a little hollow to catch the rain—for thirsty spirits
and the birds. The epitaphs that are the chief decoration are not very
different from epitaphs all over the world, though perhaps a little more
flowery than is now the fashion in the West. The simpler ones give only
the name and estate of the deceased, with a request for a prayer or a
_fatiha_—the opening invocation of the Koran—and some such verse as “He
is the Everlasting,” “Every soul shall taste death,” or “We are God’s
and we return to God.” This sentiment is also characteristic: “Think
of the dead. Lift up your hands in prayer, that men may some time visit
your grave and pray.” The epitaph is often rhymed, though it may be of
a touching simplicity—like “O my daughter! O! She flew to Paradise and
left to her mother only the sorrow of parting,” or “To the memory of the
spirit of the blessed Fatma, mother of Ömer Agha, whose children find
no way out of their grief.” Others are more complicated and Oriental,
ending, like the inscriptions on public buildings, in a chronogram. Von
Hammer quotes one, not in this cemetery, which is peculiarly effective in
Turkish:
_The joy of the life of Feïsi, inspector of markets,_
_Has vanished into the other world. O how to help it!_
_For he has lost his rosebud of a daughter,_
_Whose like will bloom no more. O how to help it!_
_The wind of death blew out in the lantern_
_The light of the feast of life. O how to help it!_
_In bitterness his eye swells with tears_
_That are like the tide of the sea. O how to help it!_
_In bitterness was written the verse of the number of the year:_
_Hüsseïna has gone away! O how to help it!_
Behind the house of the lepers a trail branches away into the most lonely
part of this strange forest, ultimately leading down a hill, too rough
for any but the most adventurous carriage, to a quaint little stone arch
mysteriously called Bloody Bridge that spans a thread of water beside a
giant plane-tree. On this southward-looking slope the cypresses attain a
symmetry, a slenderness, a height, a thickness of texture and richness
of colour unmatched in Stamboul. They grow in squares, many of them,
or in magic circles. The stones under them are older than the others,
and more like things of nature in the flowered grass. On certain happy
afternoons, when the sun brings a fairy depth and softness of green out
of the cypresses, when their shadows fall lance-like across bare or mossy
aisles, and the note of a solitary bird echoes between them, it is hard
not to imagine oneself in an enchanted wood.
In the eyes of most comers from afar the dervishes, those who are
ignorantly called the howling dervishes, stand for Scutari and all its
works. And the fact always irritates me because it indicates so perfect
a blindness to the treasures of the City of Gold—and something else that
no sightseer ever pardons in another. The tourists are not in the least
interested in dervishes in general. The subject of mysticism and its
Oriental ramifications is not one they would willingly go into. They do
not dream that Scutari is full of other kinds of dervishes. They have
never heard of the _Halveti_, as it were the descendants of the Sleepless
Ones of the Studion, who consider it a lack of respect to the Creator
to sleep lying down, or even to cross their legs, and who repeat every
night in the year the _temjid_, the prayer for pity of insomnia, which is
heard elsewhere only in Ramazan. No one has ever taken a tourist to see
so much as the beautiful ironwork of the tomb of the holy Aziz Mahmoud
Hüdaï, who lived eighteen years in a cell of the ancient mosque of Roum
Mehmed Pasha. They do not even know that _Roufaï_ is the true name of the
dervishes they go to stare at, and that there is more than one _tekkeh_
of them in Scutari. The traditional “howling” is all that concerns them.
And if I were the sheikh of that _tekkeh_ I would shut its doors to all
tourists—or at least to more than one or two of them at a time. They make
more noise than the dervishes.
[Illustration: Scutari Cemetery]
Having relieved my mind on this subject, in my quality of a native
of Scutari, I am able to continue in my other quality of peripatetic
impressionist. And incidentally I may record my observation that tourists
have, after all, rather a knack for choosing sights that are interesting
to see. I am a great admirer of the oblong wooden hall of the _Roufaï_,
coloured a dull green, with its weapons and inscriptions and brass
candlesticks at the end of the _mihrab_, and its recess of tombs, and
its latticed gallery. The floor under the gallery is railed off and set
apart for the spectators, who also overflow into the central quadrangle
in case of need—if they be of the faith. The ceremony itself has been
described so often that there is no need for me to describe it again,
though I would like to do so with a little more tolerance for unfamiliar
religious observances than some books show. I have never read, however,
of such a ritual as I once happened to see on the Mohammedan Ascension
Day. Part of the service was a sermon from the black-bearded _sheï’h_
upon the miraculous event of the day. At the end of the usual rite all
the dervishes and many of the spectators formed a great ring in the
centre of the hall, holding hands, and circled in a time of eight beats,
calling _“Allah! Allah! Al-lah!”_ The rhythm grew faster and faster, and
the calling louder and hoarser, until two or three visiting dervishes of
another familiar sect slipped into the middle of the ring and began to
whirl in their own silent way, while an old man with a rose tucked under
his black turban sang with a wildness of yearning that only Oriental
music can convey. Then the ring broke and they all marched in a long line
into the recess of the tombs, where each man prostrated himself before
the first of the turbaned catafalques.
Whether that was the end I have no means of knowing, for I was asked to
leave. That is always the case, I notice, when I want to stay after the
rest of the sightseers have got tired and gone away. It rather annoys me
that I should be classed with unbelievers, and made to sit with them on
a bench behind the railing instead of squatting on a sheepskin mat like
the other people of Scutari. Yet if it were not so it would never have
befallen me to come into contact with so eminent a personality of my day
as Mme. Bernhardt—or at least with her parasol. The actress has often
been to Constantinople, and she must have seen the howling dervishes many
times. Who knows what so great an expert in expression may have caught
from the ritual frenzy of the _Roufaï_? It so happened that one of those
times was also the occasion of my first visit. I went early, in order to
secure a good place. Mme. Bernhardt did not. She has no doubt learned by
long and flattering experience that however late she arrives she is sure
of a good place. Nor can I suppose she always manages it in the way she
did then. She arrived late, I say, and by the time she arrived there was
no room left in the front row of benches. I regret to confess that I did
not at once hop out of my seat and put her into it. The performance had
already begun, tourists were all the time coming in, and while I caught
some buzz about the Divine Sarah, I was just then paying more attention
to the men of God in front of me. Presently, however, I felt a fearful
poke in my back. I knew that poke. It was the eternal feminine. It was
beauty. It was genius. It was the Divine Sarah, desiring impressions and
not to be debarred from them by a small tourist _quelconque_—and divinely
unconscious that she might be imparting them, yet not unaware that many
a man would jump into the Seine or the Bosphorus at a poke from her.
What would you? I was young, the parasol was hard, and the Divine Sarah
was the Divine Sarah. I accordingly slipped out of my place, I hope not
without a gracious smile. And what I saw of the dervishes that day was
through the foliage of a very complicated hat. I must say that I resented
it a little. But I consoled myself by murmuring behind Sarah’s back—and
the poet’s—
“_To poke is human, to forgive divine._”
VII
THE GARDENS OF THE BOSPHORUS
_Giardini chiusi, appena intraveduti,_
_o contemplati a lungo pe’ cancelli_
_che mai nessuna mano al viandante_
_smarrito aprì come in un sogno! Muti_
_giardini, cimiteri senza avelli,_
_ove erra forse qualche spirto amante_
_dietro l’ombre de’ suoi beni perduti!_
—GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO: “Poema Paradisiaco.”
In the matter of gardens the Turk has never acquired the reputation of
his Moorish and Persian cousins. Perhaps it is that he belongs to a
younger race and has had more conflicting traditions out of which to
evolve a style. For no man likes a garden better than he. He never could
put up with a thing like the city back yard or the suburban lawn of the
New World. He is given to sitting much out-of-doors, he does not like to
be stared at while he is doing it, and he has a great love of flowers.
This is one of his most sympathetic traits, and one which was illustrated
for me in an unexpected quarter during the late Balkan War when I saw
soldiers in a temporary camp laying out patches of turf and pansies
around their tents. The fashion of the buttonhole is not yet perfectly
acclimated in Constantinople, but nothing is commoner than to observe a
grave personage marching along with one rose or one pink in his hand—of
which flowers the Turks are inordinately fond. Less grave personages do
not scorn to wear a flower over one ear, with its stem stuck under their
fez. And I always remember a fireman I once beheld who was not too busy
squirting water at a burning house to stop every now and then and smell
the rose he held between his teeth.
I cannot claim to know very much about the gardens of Stamboul, though no
one can walk there without continually noticing evidences of them—through
gateways, over the tops of walls, wherever there is a patch of earth
big enough for something green to take root. Any one, however, may know
something about the gardens of the Bosphorus. The nature of the ground
on which they are laid out, sloping sharply back from the water to
an average height of four or five hundred feet and broken by valleys
penetrating more gradually into the rolling table-lands of Thrace and
Asia Minor, makes it possible to visit many of them without going into
them. And the fact has had much to do with their character. Gardens
already existed on the banks of the Bosphorus, of course, when the
Turk arrived there, and he must have taken them very much as he found
them. Plane-trees still grow which, without any doubt, were planted by
Byzantine gardeners; and so, perhaps, were certain great stone-pines. I
have also wondered if the Turks did not find, when they came, the black
and white pebbles, generally arranged in un-Oriental-looking designs,
that pave so many garden paths. I am more inclined to believe that these
originated in the same order of things as the finer mosaic of church
walls than that they were imported from Italy. Perhaps the Italians
imported them from Constantinople.
It would be interesting to know whether the Byzantine influence played
any part in the gardens of the Renaissance, as it did in so many other
arts. However, there is no doubt that the Italian influence came back
to Constantinople after the Turkish period. It began to come most
definitely, if by a roundabout road, when Sultan Ahmed III imitated the
gardens of Versailles. It came again from the same quarter when the
successor of Ahmed III sent the son of Twenty-eight Mehmed on another
mission to Paris. And it came more definitely still, by a still more
roundabout road, when a Russian ambassador brought to Constantinople,
at the end of the eighteenth century, a painter named Melling. Like
Van Mour, Melling has left most interesting records of the Bosphorus
of his day. In the course of time it befell him to be recommended as
landscape-gardener to a member of the imperial family, the celebrated
Hadijeh _Soultan_. Through the good graces of this enlightened princess
he later became architect to her brother, Sultan Selim III, the Reformer.
I do not know whether it was the painter, in turn, who obtained for the
Sultan the brother of the gardener of Schönbrunn. But altogether Melling
must have done a good deal more for the gardens of the Bosphorus than to
paint them.
At the same time, no one has done more for them than the Bosphorus
itself. A terrace ten feet long may be as enviable as an estate reaching
from the water’s edge to the top of the hill, since it is the blue
panorama of the strait, with its busy boats and its background of
climbing green, that is the chief ornament of the garden. The Turks
lean, accordingly, to the landscape school. Their gardens have, really,
very little of an Italian air. The smallest patch of ground in Italy is
more architectural than the largest Turkish estate. However much stone
and mortar the Turks put together in retaining and enclosing walls,
the result has little architectural effect. They do not trim terraces
with marble balustrades, while the lack of garden sculpture is with
them a matter into which religion enters. Nor do they often plant
trees like the Italians—to balance each other, to frame a perspective,
to make a background. Still less, I imagine, do they consciously make
colour schemes of flowers. And Lady Mary Montagu noted a long time ago
the absence of the trim parterres to which she was accustomed. It is
perfectly in keeping with Oriental ideas of design, of course, for a
Turkish garden not to have too much symmetry. Yet it does have more
symmetry than an out-and-out landscaper would countenance, and definitely
artificial features. I always wonder whether the natural look of so many
paths and stone stairs and terraces is merely a result of time or whether
it is an accidental effect of the kind striven for by a school of our own
gardeners.
[Illustration: In a Turkish garden]
If Turkish gardens tend to look a little wild, it is partly because they
contain so many trees. In Constantinople, at least, there is so little
rain in summer that it would be almost impossible to keep the gardens
green without them—to say nothing of the shade and privacy they afford.
The old gardeners evidently studied the decorative effect of different
kinds of trees. Those who have never visited Constantinople sometimes
imagine the Bosphorus to be overhung by palms—I suppose because it washes
the coast of Asia and hows into the Mediterranean. They are accordingly
sadly disillusioned when they come to it at the end of a winter in other
parts of the Mediterranean and encounter a snow-storm. As a matter of
fact, the Bosphorus, which lies in about the same latitude as Long Island
Sound, has been solidly frozen over two or three times in history. The
last time was in February, 1621. That winter, if I remember correctly,
was also severe for certain adventurers lately come from England to
Massachusetts Bay. But if palms are as great a rarity in Constantinople
as in New York or Connecticut, the trees that do grow there belong to
a climate more like northern Italy. Among the most striking of them,
and happily one of the commonest, is the stone-pine. These are often
magnificent, marching in a row along the edge of a terrace or the top of
a hill with full consciousness of their decorative value. The cypress,
even more common, seems to me never to have been made the most of.
Perhaps the Turks, and the Greeks before them, associated it too much
with death to play with it as did the Italians of the Renaissance. The
Constantinople variety, it is true, inclines to raggedness rather than
to slenderness or height. Other evergreens, including the beautiful
cedar of Lebanon, have been domesticated in smaller numbers. Being
unscientifically minded, I can say that the magnolia might properly be
classed among them, the _Magnolia grandiflora_ of our Southern States,
since it keeps its glossy leaves all winter long. One of the less
tenacious brotherhood, the plane-tree, is easily king of the Bosphorus,
reaching a girth and height that almost fit it for the company of
the great trees of California. It always seems to me the most treey
of trees, so regularly irregular are the branches and so beautiful a
pattern do they make when the leaves are off. Limes, walnuts, chestnuts,
horse-chestnuts, Lombardy poplars, acacias of various sorts, mulberries,
the Japanese medlar, the dainty pomegranate, the classic bay, are also
characteristic. The pale branches of the fig are always decorative, and
when the leaves first begin to sprout they look in the sun like green
tulips. The olive and the glorious oleander will only thrive in sheltered
corners, while oranges and lemons grow in pots. In the hillside parks
that are the pride of the larger estates, nightingale-haunted in the
spring, pleasantly green in rainless summers, and warmly tawny in the
autumn, deciduous trees predominate altogether. Among them is one of
heart-shaped leaves and dark capricious branches with whose Latin name
I am unacquainted but which is one of the greatest ornaments of the
Bosphorus. The Turks call it _ergovan_, and its blossoming is the signal
for them to move to their country houses. In English, I believe, we call
it the Judas, after some legend that makes it the tree on which the
traitorous apostle hanged himself. He would apparently have been of high
descent, for the flowers, which took thereafter the stain of his blood,
have a decided violet tinge. They fledge the branches so thickly before
the leaves are out that they paint whole hillsides of April with their
magenta.
[Illustration: A Byzantine well-head]
[Illustration: A garden wall fountain]
In addition to the woodiness of the Bosphorus gardens, Lady Mary Montagu
remarked another element of their character which, I am afraid, has
become less frequent since her day. However, if garden sculpture of one
kind is rare, garden marbles of another kind do very definitely exist.
Here, too, I fancy the Turk found something when he came. There is a
smiling lion to be found in certain gardens who, unless I am greatly
mistaken, has Byzantine blood in his veins—if that may be said of a
water spouter. He is cousin german to the lion of St. Mark, who only
improved on him by growing wings. There are also well-heads which are
commonly supposed to have been turned to that use by the Turks out of
Byzantine capitals. But I do not see why some of them may not be original
well-heads. One sees exactly the same sort of thing in Italy, except
that the style of ornament is different in the two countries. The purely
Turkish garden marbles are of the same general order, having to do with
water. And, although there was less need of them when nature had already
been so generous, they are what the Turk brought most of himself to the
gardens of the Bosphorus. The Turkish well-heads are not particularly
interesting, being at their best not much more than a marble barrel. Much
more interesting are the marble basins and the upright tablets behind
them which mark the head of a water-pipe. These tablets are sometimes
charmingly decorated with arabesques and low reliefs of flowers. But the
real fountains are the most characteristic, and it seems to me that they
offer the most in the way of suggestion to the Western gardener. I think
no one has ever understood like the Oriental the poetry of water. Western
architects and gardeners have, of course, made great use of decorative
water; but we never seem to be happy unless we have a mountain of marble
and a torrent of water to work with. Whereas the architects of the East
have always known in this matter how to get the greatest effect out
of the least material. There are charms in a shallow pool or a minute
trickle of water which are of an entirely different order from those of
an artificial lake or cascade.
[Illustration: A jetting fountain in the garden of Halil Edhem Bey]
Almost every Turkish garden contains visible water of some sort, which
at its simplest is nothing but a shallow marble pool. In the centre of
the pool is sometimes a fountain which I always think of with regret when
there is pointed out for my admiration a too fat marble infant struggling
with a too large marble fish, or a dwarf holding an umbrella over its
head. This fountain consists of nothing but a series of jets, generally
on varying levels, set in a circle of those marble stalactites—here
should one call them stalagmites?—which are so familiar in Oriental
architecture. Nothing could be simpler, apparently, but nothing could
combine more perfectly all the essentials of a jetting fountain. There
is another fountain which deals even more delicately with the sound
of water. This is a dripping fountain, set always against a wall or a
bank. It is a tall marble tablet, decorated, perhaps, with low reliefs
of fruit and flowers, on the face of which a series of tiny basins are
carved. I have seen one where water started at the top from the eyes
of two doves and trickled into the first little basin, from which it
overflowed into two below, then back into one, and so on till it came
into three widening semi-circular pools at the bottom. _Selsebil_ is the
name of this fountain in Turkish, which is the name of a fountain in
Paradise; and a fountain of Paradise it may be indeed with all its little
streams atinkle. A more delightful ornament for a garden does not exist,
being equally adapted for the end of a vista or for a narrow space; and
it requires the smallest supply of water.
[Illustration: A _selsebil_ at Kandilli]
[Illustration: A _selsebil_ of Halil Edhem Bey]
The Turkish architects have not scorned more imposing effects when they
had the means, as did Ahmed III at Kiat Haneh. The marble cascades into
which he turned the Barbyses are called _chaghleyan_—something which
resounds. I have seen a smaller _chaghleyan_ in a garden on the Asiatic
shore of the Bosphorus. This is a series of descending pools, one
emptying into another till the water finally runs into a large round
marble basin. The water starts, between two curved flights of stone
steps, from three marble shells in the retaining wall of a terrace; and
from the terrace an arbour looks down the perspective of mirroring pools
to an alley that leads from the last basin away between arching trees.
This beautiful old garden belongs to the Turkish painter Ressam-Halil
Pasha, who studied in Paris at a time when the plastic arts were still
anathema among the Turks. In his studio are figure studies, made
during his student days, which even now he could scarcely exhibit in
Constantinople; and it would be thought a scandalous thing if he tried to
get Turkish models to sit for such pictures. When he heard where I came
from he asked if there were in America a painter called Mr. Cox, who had
studied with him under Gérôme.
* * * * *
There is rivalry between the gardens of the upper, the middle, and the
lower Bosphorus with regard to their advantages of position. The upper
Bosphorus is the most desirable from the European point of view. This
preference is fairly well established, for Lady Mary Montagu wrote
letters from Belgrade Forest two hundred years ago, and about the same
time a summer colony composed of Europeans and of the great Phanariote
families began to gather at Büyük Dereh and Therapia. In much earlier
times, however, the Byzantine emperors built villas at Therapia, and the
very name of the place indicates the antiquity of its repute as a place
of resort. The name has come down in the story of Jason and the Argo,
who sailed between these shores in the dawn of legend. When those early
voyagers returned from Colchis with Medea, that formidable passenger
threw out poison on the Thracian shore; whence the name Pharmakia,
changed by the euphemism of the Greeks to Therapia, or Healing. There
are reasons, to be sure, why it is better to look at Therapia than to be
in it. The view it commands is the bleakest on the Bosphorus, and the
prevailing north wind of midsummer, the _meltem_, which keeps the strait
much cooler than you would imagine from its latitude, sometimes gets on
one’s nerves. Nevertheless Therapia is a centre for an extraordinary
variety of pleasant excursions, there are delicious gardens in the
clefts of its hills, and from May till October the embassies impart to
it such gaiety as the somewhat meagre social resources of Constantinople
afford. I shall be surprised if the proximity of Belgrade Forest and
the magnificent beach of Kilios on the Black Sea, to say nothing of the
various other resources of the Bosphorus and the Marmora, do not some day
make Therapia much more famous as a summer resort.
[Illustration: In the garden of Ressam Halil Pasha]
Constantinople is, I believe, the sole diplomatic post to which summer
residences are attached. Each envoy also has a launch for keeping
in touch with the Sublime Porte, fifteen miles away. The local
legend is that the birds which are so characteristic a feature of the
Bosphorus—halcyons are they?—for ever skimming up and down just above
the surface of the water, are the souls of the Phanariote dragomans
who used to go back and forth so often between Therapia and Stamboul.
A despatch-boat, as well, is at the disposal of each ambassador except
the Persian. These dignities came about very naturally by reason of the
epidemics and disorders which used to break out in the city, the distance
of Constantinople from other European resorts, and the generosity of the
sultans. The English, French, and German governments all own beautiful
estates at Therapia, presented to them by different sultans, while the
Russians are magnificently established at the neighbouring village of
Büyük Dereh. Their great hillside park is a perfect wood, so dense in
summer that the water is scarcely visible from it. The Italians also make
_villeggiatura_ at Therapia, the Austrians and Persians being installed
farther down the Bosphorus. Our ambassador is the sole envoy of his
rank obliged to hunt up hired quarters, though even some of the small
legations occupy their own summer homes. Should Congress ever persuade
itself that diplomatic dignity is a thing worthy to be upheld, or should
some sultan present us with one of the old estates still available, I
hope we shall build an embassy, like the one the French occupied so long,
in keeping with its surroundings and not such a monstrosity as other
Powers have put up. The charming old French embassy, which originally
belonged to the famous Ypsilanti family, was one of the sights of the
Bosphorus until it burned up in 1913. The grounds are not so large as
some of the other embassy gardens, but none of the others seem to me so
happily placed or so sapiently laid out. A bridge led from the house to
the first terrace, whose trees and flowers irregularly follow the curve
of the hillside. A formal avenue and steep wood paths mount to the grassy
upper terrace, commanding between noble pines and beeches the mouth of
the Black Sea.
[Illustration: The upper terrace of the French embassy garden at
Therapia]
[Illustration: The garden of the Russian embassy at Büyük Dereh]
There are Turks, of course, in the upper Bosphorus, as there are
Christians in the middle Bosphorus. One of the most conspicuous of all
the Bosphorus gardens is at Beïkos, on the Asiatic shore—which, for the
rest, is much more Turkish than the European. Beïkos is also connected
with the Argonauts, being the place where they met with so unkind a
welcome from Amycus, king of the Bebryces. He or some other mythic
personage is supposed to have been buried on the hilltop behind Beïkos.
This height, popularly known as Giant’s Mountain, is the only one on the
Bosphorus from which you can see both the Black Sea and the Marmora—as
Byron recorded in a notorious stanza. A giant grave is still to be seen
there, some twenty feet long, which the Turks honour as that of rather
an unexpected personage. A little mosque adjoins the grave—built, I
believe, by the ambassador Twenty-eight Mehmed—and in the mosque is this
interesting inscription: “Here lies his excellency Joshua, the son of
Nun, who although not numbered among the apostles may well be called a
true prophet sent of God. He was despatched by Moses (on whom be peace)
to fight the people of Rome. While the battle was yet unfinished the sun
set. Joshua caused the sun to rise again and the Romans could not escape.
This miracle convinced them; and when Joshua invited them, after the
battle, to accept the true faith, they believed and accepted it. If any
man doubts, let him look into the sacred writings at the Holy Places of
the Christians and he will be satisfied.” The garden I have wandered so
far away from rises on a pyramid of terraces at the mouth of a smiling
valley which bears the grim name of _Hounkyar Iskelesi_—the Landing-Place
of the Manslayer. A white palace crowns the pyramid, facing the long
river-like vista of the Bosphorus. The palace was built by the great
Mehmed Ali, of Egypt, to whom the sultan of the day paid the honour of
coming to see his new pleasure-house and of expressing his admiration of
it. The viceroy accordingly assured his majesty, as Oriental etiquette
demands, that the palace and everything in it was his. Whereupon his
majesty, to the no small chagrin of the viceroy, graciously signified his
acceptance of the gift.
Beïkos and the shores of its great bay were a favourite resort of sultans
long before the day of Mehmed Ali. In general, however, the Turks have
always preferred the narrow middle stretch of the Bosphorus; and for
most reasons I am with them. The summer _meltem_—which some derive from
the Italian _maltempo_—often intensely irritating near the mouth of the
Black Sea, is here somewhat tempered by the windings of the strait.
Then here the coasts of the two continents approach each other most
closely, are most gracefully modelled and greenly wooded. The Asiatic
shore in particular, which opposite Therapia is forbidding enough, is
here a land of enchantment, with its gardens, its groves, its happy
valleys, its tempting points and bays, its sky-line of cypresses and
stone-pines, its weathered wooden villages, its ruined waterside castle
of Anadolou Hissar, its far-famed Sweet Waters—and most so if seen from
Europe in a light of sunset or early morning. If Mehmed Ali lost his
palace at Beïkos—and on Arnaout-kyöi Point there are the ruins of another
one which he was stopped from building—several of the most enviable
estates along this part of the Bosphorus belong to his descendants. The
beautiful wooded cape of Chibouklou, on the Asiatic side, is crowned
by the mauresque château of the present Khedive. Directly opposite, on
the southern point of Stenia Bay, is the immense old tumble-down wooden
palace of his grandfather Ismaïl, the spendthrift Khedive of the Suez
Canal, who died there in exile. The garden behind it is the largest and,
historically, one of the most interesting on the Bosphorus. The name of
the bay is derived, according to one story, from that of the Temple of
Sosthenia, or Safety, built by the Argonauts after their escape from
King Amycus. A temple of Hecate was also known there in more authentic
times, and a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael by Constantine
the Great. On a stormy night of 1352, the admirals Nicolò Pisani of
Venice and Paganino Doria of Genoa unwittingly took shelter in the bay
within bow-shot of each other, during an interval of a long sea-fight
which raged between them the whole length of the Bosphorus. Emirgyan,
the name of the village in which the khedivial estate is situated, was
that of a Persian general who surrendered Erivan to Sultan Mourad IV in
1635, and who ended his days in pleasant captivity on this wooded shore.
His beautiful Persian palace of Feridoun was the wonder of its day. His
conqueror used often to visit him there, for Emirgyan was a man of wit
and an accomplished musician. Not only did he first introduce into Turkey
a sort of Persian bassoon and the four-stringed Persian _chartar_ from
which we get our guitar, but he marked a new epoch in Turkish music.
There were also other reasons why Mourad used to visit the palace of
Feridoun, where, “in the design of refreshing his vital spirits and of
summoning the warmth which awakens joy, it pleased” the Sultan “to give
rein to the light courser of the beverage of the sunrise”—as a discreet
historian put that violent young man’s propensity to strong waters.
It was after a debauch here that he died, at the age of twenty-eight,
having beheaded a hundred thousand of his people and having entertained
a strange ambition to be the last of his line. He gave orders on his
death-bed that the head of his brother Ibrahim, the last surviving male
of his blood, be brought to him. But his courtiers took advantage of his
condition to dissemble their disobedience, and the imperial family to-day
springs from that brother. As for the luckless Emirgyan, he saved his
head from the elder brother, only to be deprived of it by the younger.
At Roumeli Hissar, still farther to the south, is a neglected garden
which belonged to Halim Pasha, brother of the prodigal Ismaïl. In it
are two unpretentious houses which look as if they were built of brown
stucco. There is sentiment in that stucco, however, for it is really mud
brought from the banks of the Nile. According to the law of Islam Halim
would have been Khedive in turn if Ismaïl had not bound the Turkish
government, by a substantial _quid pro quo_, to make the viceroyalty
hereditary to the eldest son in his own family. And Halim Pasha’s
family later suffered the misfortune to be nearly ruined by an English
speculator.
But there is one spot in their park which must have gone far to make up
for their disinheritance. It is the brow of a bluff which seems to drop
sheer into the Bosphorus. There an artful group of cypresses and one
gnarled olive frame the blue below; and there on sunny afternoons, there
most notably on starry evenings, when shore lights curve fantastically
through the underlying darkness and all land and water sounds have some
summer magic in them, an Antony might dream away content the loss of
Egypt.
Halim Pasha owned another splendid garden on Bebek Bay. Next to his faded
pink wooden _yalî_ in the dignified old Turkish style, and likewise
linked by bridges across the public road to a park that climbs the hill
behind, is the trim _art-nouveau_ villa of the actual Khedive’s mother.
This majestic old lady is one of the most familiar figures on the
Bosphorus. Her annual approach and departure on her son’s big turbine
yacht _Mahroussah_ are the signals for spring and autumn to open their
campaigns, while her skimming mahogany steam-launch is an integral part
of summer. She is, moreover, a person whom the poor of her neighbourhood
have cause to bless. During the lenten month of Ramazan she provides
_iftar_, the sunset breakfast of the day, for any who choose to come
to her door. So many choose to come that during that month her grocery
bills must be quite appalling. And on occasions of public rejoicing she
literally keeps open house—or open garden. She admits any and all within
her gates, offers them coffee, ices, and cigarettes, and entertains them
with music.
The custom, for the rest, is common among the Turks at all times of
festivity. I remember going one night to another garden in Bebek, not
by invitation but because any one was free to go in order to celebrate
the accession day of his majesty Abd ül Hamid II. The garden belonged
to a younger brother of that personage, popularly known as Cowherd
Solomon Esquire. For Turkish princes have no title other than that of
their humblest subject. A band was playing in the garden, which is on
the very top of Bebek hill, and the Greeks of the village were dancing
among the flower-beds, while a row of little princes and princesses
in big gilt armchairs looked solemnly on. Beyond them a clump of huge
umbrella-pines lifted themselves darkly against the fairy scene of the
illuminated Bosphorus. Every other villa was outlined in light, the water
burned with reflections of architectural designs or of Arabic texts of
fire, and the far-away hill of Chamlîja was one twinkling field of the
cloth of gold. Süleïman Effendi was reported to be not too strong in the
head but to make up for it by possessing the Evil Eye and the greatest
understanding of cows of any man in Constantinople. Of these he kept a
large herd, selling their milk like any commoner; and when he wished to
add to their number no man dared refuse to sell to him. If he did the cow
in question was sure to die within the month by reason of the Evil Eye of
the imperial milkman. Abd ül Hamid caused this eccentric old gentleman
much unhappiness, tormenting him greatly with spies. Süleïman Effendi
lived long enough to see the last of the spies, however, if not of Abd ül
Hamid. And he must have been not altogether destitute of human qualities,
for his wife died of grief the day after his death.
[Illustration: The Villa of the Sun, Kandilli]
The picturesque bay of Bebek and the opposite headland of Kandilli are
so involved with historic memories that I am more and more tempted to
stray out of my gardens. Kandilli, in particular, is full of plane-trees
and terraces and rows of stone-pines to prove that older generations
were not blind to its enchantments. Among other sultans, Mehmed IV
spent much of his time there. His favourite wife was the lady of taste
and determination who built the mosque of the New Mother in Scutari.
Discovering once that her lord spent more of his hours than she found
proper in the society of a Circassian dancing-girl, she caused a man
slave of her own to be educated in the terpsichorean art and presented
him to the Sultan. She then asked one night, as they sat at the edge of
the water at Kandilli, that the two dancers perform together for her
amusement. The slaves accordingly danced on the terrace before their
imperial masters, nearer and nearer the water, till the man, by a
seemingly careless thrust of his foot, tripped his companion into the
Bosphorus. She was immediately carried away into the dark by the current,
here extremely swift; and the Sultana doubtless slept the more sweetly,
knowing there was one less dancer in the world.
I do not know whether the imperial villa near the boat landing that was
torn down in 1913 was the scene of this little drama. _Yalî_ is the
true name of such a country house, if it is built, as it should be, on
the edge of the water, with gateways letting a little of the Bosphorus
into the lower hall and making there a boat-house and _porte cochère_
in one. In every country place of any size there is a _kyöshk_ as well,
otherwise a kiosk, built somewhere in the garden and constituting one of
its more formal ornaments. I once had the honour of being received in a
kiosk belonging to a member of the imperial family, which was larger than
the _yalî_ to which it belonged. It was, alas, no such place as I have
read of in Lady Mary Montagu, who describes a room built by the sultan
of her day for his daughter, “wainscotted with mother of pearl fastened
with emeralds like nails.” She also speaks of wainscotting of “cedar set
off with silver nails” and “walls all crusted with Japan China,” “the
whole adorned with a profusion of marble, gilding, and the most exquisite
painting of fruit and flowers.” These splendours were no invention of
Lady Mary, for many other visitors testify to them, as well as Melling,
Van Mour, and all their school of painters of the Bosphorus. Those villas
never were of an enduring architecture, and the spell of Europe—more
potent than ever for us was that of the gorgeous East—has been more fatal
to them than time and fire. Still, the most modern _yalî_, if designed by
an architect of the country, almost always has some saving touch of its
own. And in the middle Bosphorus there are quite a number of houses which
preserve the graceful old architecture.
The number of those which preserve even a remnant of the old interior
decoration is much more limited. One of them is a kiosk at Emirgyan
belonging to the _Sherifs_ of Mecca. And it is quaint to see what an
air, both whimsical and distinguished, that faded eighteenth-century
decoration gains from the ugly modern furniture set about a fountain
in the cross-shaped saloon of those descendants of the Prophet. The
most complete example of the work of the same period is the house on
Arnaout-kyöi Point belonging to an Armenian family, unmistakable by
its projecting upper stories and the agreeable irregularity of its
silhouette. Passers along the quay may catch a glimpse of a high rococo
ceiling in rose and gold. But a glimpse of a more perfect ceiling is
to be caught by any one who rows up the Asiatic shore from Anadolou
Hissar—if he be not too contemptuous of certain crazy wooden piles which
his caïque will pass.
[Illustration: An eighteenth-century villa at Arnaout-kyöi]
This ceiling, and the whole room to which it belongs, is the most
precious thing of its kind in all Constantinople, if not in all the
world. The design of the room is that of the earlier Broussa mosques, a
T-shaped arrangement with the top of the T in the garden and three square
bays, slightly raised above a central square, leaning out on piles above
the water. At the intersection of the two axes stands a fountain, with
a cluster of marble stalactites rising from a filigree marble pedestal,
in the centre of a shallow square tank of marble. On the garden side,
where the door is, there are no windows, but a series of cupboards and
niches of some light wood once delicately inlaid with wavy stems and
pointed leaves. On the water side an unbroken succession of windows,
not very tall and set at the level of the divan, look north and west and
south, and bring the Bosphorus like a great sparkling frieze into the
pavilion. They also make the water light, by reflection, the upper part
of the room. At the height of the window tops a shelf, slightly carved
and gilded, runs entirely around the walls. Above that rises a frieze of
painted panels in which tall sprays of lilies and other flowers stand in
blue and white jars, each in a pointed arch and each framed by garlands
of tiny conventionalised flowers. And above all hangs a golden ceiling,
domed over the fountain, over each bay hollowed into an oblong recess,
lovely with latticework and stalactites and carved bosses and Moorish
traceries of interlaced stars, and strange border loops of a blue that
echoes the jars below or the sea outside, and touches of a deep green,
and exquisite little flowers, all shimmering in a light of restless water.
[Illustration: The golden room of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha]
The creator of this masterpiece was that great friend of the arts
Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, to whose _medresseh_ in Stamboul I have already
referred. His _yalî_ has disappeared and his legendary pleasure-grounds
are now a wilderness, albeit superlatively pleasant still either to look
into or to look out of. In them is one of the sixteen famous springs of
Hafid Effendi. Historic garden-parties were given in this garden, and
ambassadors whom sultans delighted to honour were taken to sit in the
golden room. It used to be a detached kiosk in Hüsseïn Pasha’s garden.
In modern times a house has been added to it, and a retired provincial
governor has inherited the fallen splendour of the Kyöprülüs. Some day,
I suppose, it will all go up in smoke or tumble into the Bosphorus. In
the meantime the fountain is still, the precious marquetry has been
picked out of the doors, the woodwork cracks and sags, the blue jars and
the flowers become more and more ghostly, the gold of the ceiling grows
dimmer every day. But even so, the golden room has a charm that it can
never have had when the afternoon sun first shimmered into it.
* * * * *
The gardens of the lower Bosphorus are in many ways less picturesque than
those nearer the Black Sea. The hills on which they lie are in general
lower, farther apart, and more thickly covered with houses. With their
milder air, however, their more Mediterranean light, and their glimpse
into the Sea of Marmora, they enjoy another, a supreme, advantage.
The upper Bosphorus—well, in other places you may see sharply rising
slopes terraced or wooded. Beside the Nordfjord, the coast of Dalmatia,
or Lake Como, where would the Bosphorus be? But nowhere else may you
behold the silhouette of Stamboul. And that, pricking the sky above its
busy harbour, just not closing the wide perspective that shines away
to the south, is the unparalleled ornament of the gardens of the lower
Bosphorus. The garden that Melling laid out for the princess Hadijeh
was in this part of the strait, at the point of Defterdar Bournou,
above Orta-kyöi. Abd ül Hamid, who to his other crimes added a culpable
crudity of taste, pulled down the princess’s charming old house in order
to build two hideous new ones for two daughters of his own. Most of the
finest sites in the neighbourhood, or on the opposite shore, belong or
have belonged to different members of the imperial family. Abd ül Hamid
himself was brought back from Salonica at the outbreak of the Balkan War
and shut up in the Asiatic garden of Beïlerbeï. In this old pleasance of
the sultans Abd ül Aziz built a palace for the empress Eugénie when she
went to the East to open the Suez Canal. It must have been strange to
Abd ül Hamid to look out from its windows at the opposite park where he
reigned for thirty-three years. The city of palaces which grew up around
him there was never known otherwise than as Yîldîz Kiosk—the Pavilion of
the Star—from a _kyöshk_ his father built. Another pavilion in that park,
also visible from Beïlerbeï, is the Malta Kiosk, where Abd ül Hamid’s
older brother Mourad passed the first months of his long captivity, and
where Midhat Pasha, father of the Turkish constitution, was iniquitously
tried for the murder of Abd ül Aziz. In the pleasant lower hall of this
little palace, almost filled by a marble basin of goldfish, it is not
easy to reconstitute that drama so fateful for Turkey—which did not end
when Abd ül Hamid received from Arabia, in a box labelled “Old Japanese
Ivory,” the head of the murdered patriot.
The park of Yîldîz originally belonged to the palace whose name of
Chira’an—The Torches—has been corrupted by Europeans into Cheragan.
Only a ruin stands there now, on which Abd ül Aziz once squandered half
the revenues of the empire. He stumbled on the threshold the first time
he went into his new house, and never would live in it; but after his
dethronement he either committed suicide or was murdered there. His
successor, Mourad V, dethroned in turn after a reign of three months,
lived in his unhappy uncle’s palace for nearly thirty years. Abd ül
Hamid is said to have kept his brother so rigorously that the ladies of
the family were at one time compelled to dress in the curtains of the
palace. The so-called mad Sultan, deprived of books and even of writing
materials, taught his children to read and write by means of charcoal on
the parquet floor. The imperial prisoner occupied the central rooms of
the palace, the doors leading from which were nailed up. When architects
were called after his death to put the palace in order they found a foot
of water standing on the marble floor of the state entrance, at the north
end; and street dogs, jumping in and out of the broken windows, lived
in the magnificent throne-room above. Upon his own dethronement, Abd ül
Hamid begged to be allowed to retire to this splendid residence. It was
presented, instead, to the nation by Sultan Mehmed V for a parliament
house. But after two months of occupancy as such it was destroyed by
fire. It was only the last of many palaces, one of which was built by
Selim III and in which Melling, again, had a hand. The name Chira’an
goes back, I believe, to the time of Ahmed III, whose Grand Vizier and
son-in-law, Ibrahim Pasha, had a palace there. This minister, by some
reports a renegade Armenian, is famous in Turkish annals for his liberal
administration, for his many public buildings, and for his introduction
of printing into the Ottoman Empire. Among his other talents was one
for humouring the tastes of his splendour-loving master. Ibrahim
Pasha gave the Sultan one night at Chira’an a garden-party, at which
countless tortoises, with lights fastened to their shells, made a moving
illumination among the trees. Whence the name of The Torches.
Ahmed III gave many similar entertainments in his own gardens on Seraglio
Point, sometimes fêtes of lights, sometimes fêtes of flowers. Of the
latter he had such an admiration that he created at his court a Master
of Flowers, whose credentials, ornamented by gilt roses, ended thus: “We
command that all gardeners recognise for their chief the bearer of this
diploma; that they be in his presence all eye like the narcissus, all
ear like the rose; that they have not ten tongues like the lily; that
they transform not the pointed pistil of the tongue into the thorn of
the pomegranate, dyeing it in the blood of inconvenient words. Let them
be modest, and let them keep, like the rosebud, their lips closed. Let
them not speak before their time, like the blue hyacinth, which scatters
its perfume before men ask for it. Finally, let them humbly incline
themselves before him like the violet, and let them not show themselves
recalcitrant.” The tulip does not seem to be mentioned in this document,
but the culture of tulips under Ahmed III and his congenial Grand Vizier
became as extravagant a rage as ever it did in Holland. Indeed, tulips
were first introduced into the Low Countries from Constantinople, by the
Fleming Ogier de Busbecq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Süleïman
the Magnificent. Under the Latinised form of his name he has left a
quaint memoir of his two embassies. The word tulip is a corruption of
the Turkish word _dülbend_—turban—which was a favourite nickname of the
flower among the Turks. Ahmed III always celebrated tulip time, inviting
the grandees of the empire to come and admire his tulip beds. He devised
a way of illuminating them at night with the small glass cup lamps used
in mosques. Mahmoud I was of a taste to continue this pretty custom. He
also laid out special tulip and hyacinth gardens behind the summer palace
he built at the water’s edge. Alleys of cypress-trees were there, and a
great pool of marble, and about it the slaves of the harem would sing and
dance in the fairy light of the illuminated flowers.
Nothing is left now of this garden, or the palace to which it belonged,
or the Gate of the Cannon, after which they were named. A disastrous fire
and the building of the Bulgarian railway long made a waste of the tip of
Seraglio Point, until in 1913 it was turned into a public park. Seraglio
Point is an Italian misnomer for the Turkish _Seraï Bournou_—Palace
Point. But a palace and gardens remain, not far away, and to them has
been transferred the title of Top Kapou—Cannon Gate. Although this is now
the oldest palace in Constantinople, the name of _Eski Seraï_—the Old
Palace—belongs to the site of that older one which the Conqueror built
on the hill of the War Department. He was the first, however, to set
apart Seraglio Point as a pleasure-ground for his family, and he built
the _Chinili-Kyöshk_, now of the Imperial Museum. His son and grandson
built other pavilions of their own, but it was not until the reign of
his great-grandson Süleïman I that the court was definitely transferred
to the Seraglio. As in the Palace of Celestial Purity in the Forbidden
City, no woman had up to that time been permitted to sleep there. And
it is perhaps significant that the decadence of the empire began very
soon after the transfer of the harem to the new palace. From that time
on the Old Palace, whose grounds Süleïman greatly curtailed to make
room for his two principal mosques, was reserved for the families of
deceased sultans, while the new palace was continually enlarged and
beautified. Something legendary attaches to it in the eyes of the common
people, who are pleasantly inclined to confuse King Solomon, the friend
of the Queen of Sheba, and a great personage in Mohammedan folklore,
with their own Sultan Süleïman. A soldier from Asia Minor related to
me once how Sultan Solomon sent out four birds to the four quarters of
heaven to discover the most perfect site for a palace, and how they came
back with the news that no place was to be found in the world so airy
or so beautiful as Seraglio Point. He accordingly built the palace of
Top Kapou. And beneath it he hollowed out a space reaching far under the
sea in which he planted a forest of marble pillars. I cannot vouch for
the last part of the story, but I am inclined to agree with the Sultan’s
birds. Certainly the garden of the Seraglio has its superb situation
between the Golden Horn and the Marmora, its crescent panorama of cities,
seas, and islands, and its mementoes of the past, to put it alone among
the gardens of the world. Acropolis of ancient Byzantium, pleasance of
Roman, Greek, and Ottoman emperors for sixteen hundred years, it is more
haunted by associations than any other garden in Europe. One could make
a library alone of the precious things its triple walls enclose: the
column of Claudius Gothicus, the oldest Roman monument in the city; the
church of St. Irene, originally built by Constantine, whose mosaics look
down as Justinian and Leo left them on the keys of conquered cities, the
battle-flags of a hundred fields, the arms and trophies of the martial
period of the Turks; the sarcophagus of Alexander, which is but one
of the glories of the museum; the imperial library, where the MS. of
Critobulus was discovered; the imperial treasury, with its jewels, coins,
rare stuffs, gemmed furniture, the gifts and spoil of kings, in vaults
too dim and crowded for their splendour to be seen; the sacred relics of
the Prophet which Selim I captured with Egypt and which constitute the
credentials of the sultans to the caliphate of Islam. The structure in
which these are preserved, its broad eaves and crusting of flowered tiles
reflected in a pool bordered by lanterns to be lit on holy nights, is one
of the things that make that garden incomparable. Then there are quaint
turrets and doorways; there are kiosks; there are terraces; there are
white cloisters a little grassy and neglected; there are black cypresses
and monstrous plane-trees into which the sun looks with such an air of
antique familiarity.
Of all this every one has written who has ever been to Constantinople.
But not many have written of a part of the garden which until the fall
of Abd ül Hamid almost no outsider had visited. A few wrote then of the
strange scene which took place there when the slaves of the deposed
Sultan were set at liberty, and any Circassian who believed himself to
have a relative in the imperial harem was invited to come and take her
away. The dramatic contrasts and disappointments one could imagine made a
true term to all the passionate associations of that place. No one lives
there now. When a few more years have passed and no breathing person has
any vital memory connected with it, the harem of the old Seraglio will
be, like how many other places devised by a man to house his own life, a
resort for sightseers at so much a head, a mere piece of the taste of a
time. As it is, the Gate of Felicity does not open too easily, and one
can still feel the irony of its name.
[Illustration: In the harem of the Seraglio
Photograph by Abdullah Frères, Constantinople]
The entrance to the harem is under the pointed tower which catches
the eye from afar. You go first into the court of the black eunuchs,
narrow, high-walled on one side, overlooked on the other by a tiled
porch and by a series of cells which never can have been light enough
for the tiles that line them to be visible. A great hooded fireplace
terminates the dark passage into which they open. Up-stairs are roomier
and lighter quarters, also tiled, for the superior dignitaries of this
African colony. A few vestiges of their power remain in the vestibule
at the farther end of the court, in the shape of various instruments
of torture. In a dark angle of this place, which communicates with the
Court of the Pages and the Sultan’s quarters, a lantern hanging behind a
rail marks where the old _valideh_ Kyössem was strangled with a curtain
cord. Tiles of the same period as her mosque face one of the side walls
with an elegant row of cypress-trees. Beyond them opens another court.
More tiles are there, and a lane of turf, where only the Sultan might
ride, leads between the flagstones to a marble block. The interior of
the harem is a labyrinth so complicated that I would have to visit it
many more times to bring away any clear idea of its arrangement. There
is very little of what we would call splendour in those endless rooms
that sultan after sultan added to without order or plan. They contain,
as true Turkish rooms should, almost no furniture. What furniture they
do contain is late Empire, rather the worse for wear. Ugly European
carpets cover a few floors. Stuffy European hangings drape a few windows.
Gilded canopies cover a dais or two where a _valideh soultan_ held her
court—and almost the whole of a dark cupboard where a sultana did not
disdain to sleep. There are ceilings more or less elaborately carved and
gilded. There are big niches for braziers. There are doors inlaid with
tortoise-shell and ivory and mother-of-pearl. There are wall fountains,
some of them lovely with sculptured reliefs and painting. There are
baths, also containing fountains, and screens of filigree marble, and
marble tanks. There are, above all, tiles and tiles and tiles. They line
almost all the rooms, and many of them are very bad. The new fashion
in taste which Ahmed III imported from France became more and more
popular until it nearly swallowed up the whole palace. Who knows what
priceless walls were rifled in order to make room for cheap Dutch tiles
and frescoes of imaginary perspectives! Porcelain and marble have been
visibly painted over in some places, and panels that end up-stairs or in
another room prove how ruthlessly partitions were put up. Yet there is
a seducing quaintness about the Turkish rococo at its best. And there
are enough good tiles left in the palace to make up for all the rest.
I remember some simple ones in a passage, representing nothing but the
tents of a camp, and several showing the holy places of Mecca. These, I
believe, were of the time of Mehmed III. Others are absolutely the most
superb things of their kind in Constantinople. A room of Mourad III, the
gallery so called of Sultan Selim, and a magnificent hall which Süleïman
himself might have built, if he did not, give an idea of what a magic
place that old labyrinth may originally have been. Two rooms of Ahmed
I are also charming, one a small dining-room delicately painted with
fruit and flowers, the other a library, with inlaid cupboards for books
and a quantity of cool green tiles. Interesting in another way is the
_Kafess_, the Cage, where the young princes lived until it was time for
them to ascend the throne—or to be strangled. Sultan Ibrahim was there
when courtiers came to do homage to him, with the news that his terrible
brother Mourad IV was dead; but he would not believe it until his mother,
the great Kyössem, ordered Mourad’s body to be shown him. The broad eaves
and exterior tiles of the Cage overhang a court of two levels, through
the middle of whose stone pavement a fantastic little river is cut for
running water. The one open side, guarded by a balustrade of perforated
marble, overlooks a sunken garden and a bit of the Golden Horn. And I
remember another court, higher in the air, where an upper story leaned
out on brackets, as if for a better view of the Bosphorus, and where
cherry-trees stood in blossom around a central pool.
[Illustration: The “Cage” of the Seraglio
Photograph by Abdullah Frères, Constantinople]
[Illustration]
VIII
THE MOON OF RAMAZAN
_In the name of the most merciful God: Verily we sent down
the Koran in the night of Al Kad’r. And what shall make thee
understand how excellent the night of Al Kad’r is? The night
of Al Kad’r is better than a thousand months. Therein do
the angels descend, and the spirit of Gabriel also, by the
permission of their Lord, with his decrees concerning every
matter. It is peace until the rising of the morn._—Sale’s KORAN.
While Ramazan is the sole month of the Mohammedan calendar generally
known to the infidel world, the infidel world has never been very sure
whether to spell its last syllable with a _d_ or with a _z_. Let the
infidel world accordingly know that either is right in its own domain.
The Arabs say Ramadan, the Persians and the Turks say Ramazan. And they
all observe throughout the month a species of fast that has no precise
counterpart in the West. So long as the sun is in the sky, food or drink
of any kind may not pass the true believer’s lips. He is not even allowed
the sweet solace of a cigarette. But from the firing of the sunset gun
until it is light enough to distinguish a white hair from a black he may
feast to surfeiting.
Nothing is more characteristic of late afternoons in Ramazan than
the preparations for the evening meal which preoccupy all Moslems,
particularly those who work with their hands. As the sun nears the
horizon, fires are lighted, tables are spread, bread is broken, water
is poured out, cigarettes are rolled, and hands are lifted half-way to
the mouth, in expectation of the signal that gives liberty to eat.
This breaking of the daytime fast is called _iftar_, which means feast
or rejoicing, and is an institution in itself. The true _iftar_ begins
with _hors-d’œuvres_ of various sorts—olives, cheese, and preserves,
with sweet _simits_, which are rings of hard pastry, and round flaps of
hot unleavened bread, called _pideh_. Then should come a vegetable soup,
and eggs cooked with cheese or _pastîrma_—the sausage of the country—and
I know not how many other dainties peculiar to the season, served in
bewildering variety and washed down, it may be, with water from the
sacred well Zemzem in Mecca. Any Turkish dinner is colossal, but _iftar_
in a great house is well nigh fatal to a foreigner. Foreigners have the
better opportunity to become acquainted with them because Ramazan is the
proverbial time for dinner-parties. The rich keep open house throughout
the month, while the poorest make it a point to entertain their
particular friends at _iftar_. The last meal of the night also has a name
of its own, _sohour_, which is derived from the word for dawn. Watchmen
patrol the streets with drums to wake people up in time for it, while
another cannon announces when the fast begins again.
In a primitive community like that of the Prophet’s Arabia and in a
climate where people anyway sleep during much of the day, Ramazan might
be comparatively easy to keep. Under modern conditions, and especially
in a town containing so large an alien population as Constantinople, it
is not surprising that the fast is somewhat intermittently observed. The
more Europeanised Turks make no pretence of fasting, to the no small
scandal of their servants. Others strengthen their resolution by an
occasional bite in private or a secret cigarette. Every now and then
some such person is arrested and fined, for church and state are still
officially one in Turkey, and the _Sheriat_ is a system of Blue Laws that
would leave very little room for individual judgment if it succeeded in
altogether having its way. Those who are most conscientious are those
upon whom the fast falls most heavily—peasants and workmen who cannot
turn day and night about. So complete a derangement of all the habits of
life naturally has its effect. No one who employs Turks or does business
with them can get anything done, and tempers habitually mild grow
strained as the month proceeds. Thus in one way or another does Ramazan
continue to colour the whole life of the cosmopolitan city.
Stamboul, always solemn under her centuries and proud even in decay, is
never prouder or more solemn than when illuminated for the holy month of
Islam. It is one of the sights of the world to see the dark city under
the moon of Ramazan, constellated with circlets of light that bead the
galleries of numberless minarets. The imperial mosques that cut out so
superb a silhouette above the climbing roofs have two, four, or six
minarets to illuminate, some of them with three galleries apiece. And
they use a yet more magical device. Lines are slung between minaret and
minaret, and from them are suspended small glass mosque lamps in some
decorative order. During the first half of the month they spell, as if in
sparks of gold, a simple phrase like “O Allah!” or “O Mohammed!” After
the fifteenth they often trace in the dark sky the outline of a flower or
a ship. There is something starlike about these graceful illuminations,
but they are called _mahieh_—moonlight.
Théophile Gautier called Ramazan a Lent lined with a Carnival. The phrase
is a happy one if it does not lead the reader into attributing a Latin
vivacity to Turkish merrymakings. The streets of Stamboul, ordinarily so
deserted at night, are full of life during the nights of Ramazan. But
their gaiety is little enough like the uproar of a European Carnival.
Even in the busiest centres of amusement, where a carriage or even a man
often finds difficulty in passing, there is none of the wild hilarity
whereby an Occidental must express his sense of the joy of life. The
people stroll quietly up and down or sit quietly in the coffee-houses,
making their _kef_ in a way that reveals Turkish character on its most
sympathetic side. They are practically all men. Early in the evening
veiled women in their loose street costume may sometimes be seen,
accompanied by a servant with a lantern. But as the hours wear on they
disappear, leaving only fezzes and turbans in the streets. Even the
Christian women, who also inhabit their quarters of Stamboul, observe the
custom. It is the rarest thing in the world for an Armenian or a Greek of
the poorer classes to take his wife out with him at night.
The coffee-houses are, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of
Stamboul streets during the nights of Ramazan. In the daytime they are
closed, or the purely Turkish ones are, as there is then no scope for
their activities. They are open all night long, however. And few be they
that do not attempt to add in some way to their customary attractions.
This is often accomplished in a simple manner with the aid of an
instrument that we do not associate with the East—I mean the gramophone,
which enjoys an enormous popularity in Constantinople. There, however, it
has been taught to utter sounds which might prevent many from recognising
an old friend. I confess that I prefer myself the living executant to
his mechanical echo. One never has to go far during Ramazan to find
him. Itinerant gipsies, masters of pipe and tom-tom, are then much in
evidence in the humbler coffee-houses. There they go, two and two, a
man and a boy, in the wide black trousers, the dark-red girdle, and
the almost black fez which they affect. In larger coffee-houses there
will be a whole orchestra, so called, of the fine lute, if one may
so translate its Turkish title—a company of singers who also play on
instruments of strange names and curves that suit the music they make.
One such instrument, the _out_, is ancestor to the European lute. There
are those, indeed, who find no music in the broken rhythms, the mounting
minor, of a harmony which the Russian composers have only recently begun
to make comprehensible to Western ears. For myself, I know too little of
music to tell what relation it may bear to the antique modes. But I can
listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions,
that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to hear in them
a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires
glimmering on great plains. There are flashes, too, of light, of song,
the playing of shepherds’ pipes, the swoop of horsemen, and sudden
outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the
monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And
more than all, it is the mood of Asia, elsewhere so rarely understood,
which is neither lightness nor despair.
Dancing is not uncommon in the coffee-houses of the people during
Ramazan. Sometimes it is performed by the gipsy girls, dressed in vivid
cotton prints and jingling with sequins, who alone of their sex are
immodest enough to enter a coffee-house. Dancing boys are oftener the
performers—gipsies, Greeks, or Turks—who perpetuate a custom older than
the satyr dances of India or the Phrygian dances of Cybele. _Alimeh_,
whence the French _almée_, and _köchek_ are the technical names of
these not too respectable entertainers. Sometimes the habitués of the
coffee-house indulge in the dancing themselves, if they are not pure
Turks, forming a ring and keeping time to the sound of pipe and drum.
Of recent years, however, all this sort of thing has grown rare. What
has become rarer still is a form of amusement provided by the itinerant
story-teller, the _mettagh_, who still carries on in the East the
tradition of the troubadours. The stories he tells are more or less
on the order of the Arabian Nights, and not very suitable for mixed
companies—which for the rest are never found in coffee-shops. These men
are often wonderfully clever at character monologue or dialogue. They
collect their pay at a crucial moment of the action, refusing to continue
until the audience has testified to the sincerity of its interest by some
substantial token.
[Illustration: A Kara-gyöz poster]
A more elaborate form of entertainment is provided by coffee-houses
fortunate enough to possess a garden or some large back room. This is
the marionette theatre, and it is to be seen at no other time of the
year. The Turkish marionettes, known by the name of their star performer,
Kara-gyöz, are a national institution. In fact, their repertory includes
almost all there is of a national theatre. In common with other Asiatic
marionettes, they do not appear in person. The proscenium arch of their
miniature stage is filled with a sheet of lighted paper. The tiny actors,
cleverly jointed together of transparent materials, move between the
light and the paper, so that their coloured shadows are all that the
public sees. It is enough, however, to offer an amusement worth seeing.
The theatre of Kara-gyöz would make an interesting study in itself,
reflecting as it does the manners of the country. Sometimes, indeed, it
has reflected them so faithfully as to require the intervention of the
censor. But Kara-gyöz himself, otherwise Black-eye, is always amusing,
whatever may be his lapses from propriety. This truculent individual
must be a relative of Punch, although he is said to be a caricature of
a veritable person, one of Saladin’s viziers. He is a humpback with a
black beard and a raucous voice, to whom no enterprise is too difficult
or too absurd. He is accompanied by a right-hand man who points his
repartee and is alternately his dupe and his deceiver. The adventures of
this amorous pair and those of the crack-voiced ladies, the brilliantly
costumed gentlemen, the wonderful dogs, cats, mice, and other creatures
that go to make up the company, create a scene that a spectator of simple
tastes willingly revisits. Among the elements of his pleasure must be
counted the ill-lighted barrack or tent in which the representation
takes place, the gaily dressed children composing the better part of the
audience—here, for once, ladies are allowed!—the loquacious venders of
sweets and drinks, and the music of pipe and drum to the accompaniment of
which the little coloured shadows play on their lighted paper.
The shadow shows are by no means the only species of the dramatic art to
tempt the audiences of Ramazan. There are full-grown theatres that take
themselves, the drama—everything except the lives of their patrons—more
seriously. They are perfect fire-traps wherein the play’s the thing,
innocent as they in great part are of those devices of upholstery
which are the chief pride of the modern stage. The pit is aligned with
rush-bottomed stools and chairs, above which rise, in the European
fashion, tiers of not too Sybaritic boxes. A particularity of them is
that, like the cafés and the streets, they contain no ladies. While there
are Turkish theatres which ladies attend in the daytime, it is contrary
to custom for ladies to take part in public entertainments at night.
Consequently the European ladies who sometimes penetrate Stamboul during
the nights of Ramazan make themselves more conspicuous than is likely to
be pleasant and the objects of comment which it is well that they do not
understand. Women do appear on the stage, but they are never Turks. They
are usually Armenians, occasionally Syrians or Greeks, whose murder of
the language is condoned by the exigencies of the case.
The performances last the better part of the night. They begin at
three o’clock Turkish, or three hours after sunset at any season of
the year, and close in time for the last meal of the night. There is a
curtain-raiser, which is not seldom drawn from the manners of the people.
The piece of resistance, however, is a comedy or melodrama adapted from
the European stage. The first is more likely to be interesting to an
outsider, for the Turks are capital comedians. But the more serious
pieces are characteristic, too, in their mixture of East and West. Madam
Contess, as she is flatly pronounced, will be attended by servants in fez
and _shalvars_, and two gentlemen in top hats will salute each other with
earth-sweeping salaams.
Between the two plays intervene a couple of hours or so of singing and
dancing that are to many the meat in the sandwich. These entertainments
are also highly characteristic of the city that straddles two continents.
The costume of the performers is supposably European, although no Western
_almée_ would consent to be encumbered with the skirts and sleeves of
her Armenian sister, or let her locks hang so ingenuously down her back.
She would also be more scrupulous with regard to her colour schemes.
Whatever the tint of their costume, the _ballerine_ of Stamboul cherish
an ineradicable partiality for pink stockings. As feminine charm
increases, to the eye of an Oriental admirer, in direct proportion to the
avoirdupois of the charmer, the effect is sometimes startling.
The entertainment offered by these ladies is more of the East than of the
West. It is a combination of song and dance, accompanied by strings and
the clapping of the castanet. The music is even more monotonous, in the
literal sense of the word, than that of the fine lute. To the tyro one
song sounds exactly like another, each beginning on the same high note
and each _glissando_ to the same low one. And you are inclined to protest
that a lady suffering from so cruel a cold should never be permitted
to leave her room, much less appear in pink stockings at midnight on
a ramshackle wooden stage. But there is a melancholy passion in those
endless love-songs that haunts the memory—at least of most of those
present, who listen in the silence of perfect appreciation. The dancing
into which each song dies away has been a little more tampered with by
the West. While the basis of it is the Arab _danse du ventre_, it is a
_danse du ventre_ chastened by the cult of the toe. What there may be of
grossness about it is pleasantly tempered for an occasional spectator by
the personal equation. I remember watching, once, an _almée_ who must
have been in her prime before many of her public were in their cradles.
But they had grown up in her tradition, and cries of “One more!” greeted
each effort of her poor old cracked voice. There was nothing pitiable
about it. The audience had a frank affection for her, independent of her
overripe enchantments, and she danced terrible dances for them, eyes half
shut, with a grandmotherly indulgence that entirely took away from the
nature of what she was doing.
So popular is this form of entertainment that it is thrown in as a
sop to sweeten most of the variety performances with which Ramazan
abounds. The street of Stamboul where the theatres cluster is a perfect
Bowery of cinematographs, music-halls, shooting-galleries, acrobatic
exhibitions, and side-shows of a country circus. But it is a Bowery with
the reputation of Broadway, and a picturesqueness that neither can boast.
Part of the picturesqueness it had when I first knew it has gone—in
the shape of the quaint arcades that lined one stretch of it. But the
succession of bright little coffee-houses remains, and the white mosque,
ethereal at night among its dark trees, that Süleïman the Magnificent
built in memory of his dead son. Crowds and carriages abound in
Shah-zadeh-Bashi until two o’clock in the morning, itinerant peddlers of
good things to eat and drink call their wares, tom-toms beat, and pipes
cry their wild invitation to various smoky interiors.
[Illustration: Wrestlers]
One interior to which they invite is the open space, enclosed by green
tent-cloth and not too brilliantly lighted, where may be seen the great
Turkish sport of wrestling. Spectators of distinction are accommodated
with chairs under an awning; the others squat on their heels around
the ring. The wrestlers, sometimes several pairs at a time, appear
barefooted, in leather breeches reaching just below the knee. Their first
act, if you please, is to anoint themselves from head to foot with oil.
That done, each couple stand side by side, join right hands, and bend
with the right foot forward, while an old man recites over them some
incomprehensible rubric, giving their names and recommending them to the
suffrage of the public. They then prance forward to the tent of honour,
alternately clapping their hands and their leather legs. There they kneel
on one knee and salaam three times. Finally, after more prancing and
slapping, during the course of which they hastily shake hands once as
they run past each other, they are ready to begin. They do so by facing
each other at arm’s length, putting their hands on each other’s shoulders
and bending forward till their heads touch. They make no attempt at
clinching. That is apparently the one hold forbidden. The game is to
throw their opponent by pushing his head down till they can get him
around the body or by catching at his legs. Slippery as the wrestlers are
with oil, it is no easy matter. Time after time one will seem to have
his man, only to let him wriggle away. Then they go at each other again
with a defiant “Ho-ho!” The trick is generally done in the end by getting
hold of the breeches. When, at last, one of the two is thrown, the oily
opponents tenderly embrace and then make a round of the ring collecting
tips. Celebrated wrestlers, however, collect their money first. The scene
is picturesque enough under the moon of Ramazan, with the nude figures
glistening in the lamplight, the dimmer ring of faces encircling them,
and the troubled music of pipe and drum mounting into the night.
I must beware of giving the impression that Ramazan is merely a holiday
season. It is a holy month, and during its term religious zeal rises
higher than at any other time. It is enjoined upon the faithful to read
the Koran through during Ramazan, and to perform other meritorious deeds.
The last prayer of the day, which occurs two hours after sunset, takes on
a special significance. Ordinarily known as _yassî_, it is then called
_teravi_—repose—and in place of the usual five prostrations twenty-two
are performed. The ungodly say that this is to aid the digestion of those
who have just eaten a heavy _iftar_. Preaching also takes place every
night in the mosques, and many of the services are attended by women.
This custom was utilised during the Ramazan of 1326, otherwise 1908, for
enlightening the provinces on the subject of the constitution, as it was
in the capital for various attempts to subvert the same.
Two dates in the month have a particular importance. On the earlier of
these, the fifteenth, takes place the ceremony of kissing the Prophet’s
mantle. It used to be one of the most picturesque spectacles of the
city. It still must be for those fortunate enough to enter the Chamber
of the Noble Robe in the Seraglio. I have never done so, nor has any
other Christian unless in disguise. This is the place where the relics
of the Prophet are kept—his cloak, his banner, his sword, his bow, his
staff, one of his teeth, and several hairs of his beard. One of the
last has occasionally been given away as a mark of the highest possible
honour. The swords and other relics of the first three caliphs and of
the companions of the Prophet are also preserved there, together with
a silver key of the Kaaba. The most important are the Sacred Standard,
which used to lead the Sultan’s armies to war, and the Sacred Mantle.
This was given by Mohammed to a poet of his day, who composed the
celebrated ode in honour of the Prophet entitled _Al Borda_—The Mantle.
When, reciting it for the first time, he came to the verse, “For the
Prophet is a sword, drawn from the scabbard of God,” Mohammed threw his
own cloak over his shoulders. The poet religiously preserved the gift and
handed it down to his descendants, who performed miracles with the water
into which they dipped it.
To house these treasures Sultan Selim I, who captured them among the
spoils of Cairo, built a pavilion in the grounds of the Seraglio, which
was restored and enlarged at immense cost by Mahmoud I. Those who have
seen it say that the Chamber of the Noble Robe is a great domed room
lined with magnificent tiles, and that the sacred relics, under a sort
of silver baldacchino, are kept behind a wrought-silver screen in a
chest of beaten gold. The ceremony of opening them is performed by the
Sultan in person, who is supposed to oversee the necessary preparations
on the fourteenth, and who, on the morning of the fifteenth, goes in
state to the Seraglio accompanied by the members of his family and the
grandees of the empire. The mantle is said to be wrapped in forty silk
covers. Whether all of them or any of them are removed for the ceremony
I cannot say. At all events, those who attend it are given the privilege
of kissing the relic, in order of rank. Each time the spot is wiped with
a silk handkerchief inscribed with verses from the Koran, which is then
presented to the person whose kiss it removed. At the end of the ceremony
the part of the mantle or of its cover which received the homage of
those present is washed in a silver basin, and the water is preserved in
ornamental bottles for the Sultan and a few other privileged persons. A
drop of this water is considered highly efficacious against all manner
of ills, or is a much-prized addition to the drinking water of _iftar_.
The ceremony is repeated for the benefit of the ladies of the palace and
other great ladies. And a sort of replica of it takes place in the mosque
of Hekim-zadeh Ali Pasha, in the back of Stamboul, where a second mantle
of the Prophet is preserved.
Mohammedan doctors have greatly disagreed as to the most important
date of Ramazan. The Turks, at all events, now celebrate it on the
twenty-seventh. They then commemorate the night when the Koran was sent
down from the highest heaven to the lowest and when Gabriel began to make
revelation of it to the Prophet. Mohammedans also believe that on that
night are issued the divine decrees for the following year. They call it
the Night of Power, after the ninety-seventh chapter of the Koran, and
keep it as one of the seven holy nights of the year. Consequently, there
is little to be seen in the pleasure resorts of Stamboul on the Night
of Power—which, as foreigners are inclined to forget, is the eve of the
anniversary. Most people spend the evening in the mosques. A special
service takes the place of the usual prayer, and after it the larger
congregations break up into a series of groups around _mollahs_, who
expound the events of the sacred day.