At the top of the aforesaid embankment there is a little coffee-house just built, and commanding a view of the city very different from most others. One is surprised by the totally new aspect of Constantinople as seen from this side; whereas from the Bosphorus one sees little except the architectural outlines of the mosques, interspersed here and there with a little green, or shadowed by the tall plumes of dark cypresses: from this end of the city there appear to be on the whole more trees than houses. The fresh verdure crops up everywhere amid brown roofs. Below and on the left there is a glimpse of the Golden Horn. At your feet, in the hollow, lies the famous little mosque with its three cypresses, and the great buildings about the Seraskierat and St. Sophia are but shadowy outlines in the hazy distance.
This part of the city is thinly populated, and it has an almost desolate look. As the ground rises, the houses are fewer, and there are many irregular open spaces, covered with thin grass in spring, deep in dust in summer, and in winter deeper still with mud. And all along this side, from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmora, runs the great barrier of turreted walls which baffled Eyub, who lies buried where he fell, and which at the end made such long and brave resistance to Mehemet the Conqueror.
Nearest the sea lies the fortress he built, Yedi Kule, the Seven Towers. The vast ruin with its great court, its numerous towers and gates and ramparts, has become in the course of events the habitation of a nondescript Armenian cobbler. After having been successively the stronghold of the city, and the prison in which, by a rather liberal interpretation of the law of nations, the Sultans confined the Ambassadors of the countries against which they declared war — it was afterward used as a school and is now a mere ruin. The last time I was there I was wandering idly through the outer gate intending, as usual, to peer between the stones into the so-called Well of Blood, into which the aforesaid Armenian cobbler declares that the heads of a number of Janissaries were thrown when Mahmud the Reformer destroyed the corps. The well is deep and black, and there is water in it, and probably no bones at all by this time. In passing through the gate I stumbled against a stone which lay in the way under the arch. It was a bit of the head-stone of a woman’s grave, as was clear from the carved sunflower, for men’s graves have a turban or a fez, according to the epoch. Below the flower a part of the inscription was still legible — the dedication to God, “the ever abiding One” — and below that, in Turkish, the words: “I have come to the garden of this world, but have found no kindness.” More had followed, but the stone was broken off at that place. There was an odd pathos and pity about it, as though the unhappy woman, whoever she had been, buried long ago outside the walls, had come back, knocking once more at the gate of the “garden of this world,” asking for a little of that kindness of which she had found none in life. It was all very lonely and desolate, the high sun beating down upon the withered shrubs and bushes and dusty paths of the garden which had once flowered in the court, and blazing more fiercely still upon the deserted hillock, the ruined mosque, and the mouth of the Well of Blood outside the open gate, and there, in the shadow of the arch between, the ghost of the Turkish woman asking for kindness and finding none.
In order to form any idea of the extent of the fortress one should climb at least one of the towers, though the view from the ramparts hardly repays the trouble. But the towers themselves are vast and gloomy places, some of them filled with wooden lofts, to be reached only by movable ladders, and formerly used as sleeping-places for soldiers. The winding stone stairs are so dark that the Armenian cobbler brings a lantern to show you the way. There were prisons below and prisons high up, prisons with windows and prisons without. The last French ambassador who was locked up here, when war was declared between Turkey and France in 1798, was Ruffin, and the room which is shown as his is dimly lighted by a single grated window, less than two feet square, and at such a height from the floor that only a tall man can look out through it. It must be confessed that there was something imposing in the simple and straightforward disregard of the law of nations shown in imprisoning the ambassadors of foreign powers. Upon the tiled roofs of the towers the wind-blown dust has accumulated in the course of half a century or more, and the shrubs and bushes flourish abundantly. The cobbler says that the ghosts of the executed excellencies whose heads were formerly set up on the edge of the ramparts, as they were on Temple Bar, wander at night in this hanging garden.
As in most Oriental cities, there are two distinct modes of existence in Constantinople — the out-door life and the in-door life. The majority of Turks leave their homes in the morning and return late in the afternoon when their work is done. During the day they live out-of-doors or in the bazaars, but so soon as the Turk has completed his business he goes home, and if you ask for him you will be told that he is in the harem and not to be disturbed; and, as a rule, his servants will refuse even to inform him of your presence. If it is indispensable that you should see him, you may await his pleasure in the selamlik, the room for receiving male guests, which is to be found in every Turkish house, and beyond which are the mysterious regions of the harem. “Harem,” in the modern acceptation of the word, merely means the private apartments, and these would be called by the same name even in a bachelors’ establishment inhabited solely by men, but generally it is applied to every place intended for women. The end of the Turkish railway carriage, curtained off from the rest, is harem; so is the ladies’ cabin on board ship, and the latticed gallery in a mosque. In the dwelling-house it is all that quarter inhabited by the wife and children and other ladies of the family; and here I may say, in passing, that very few Turks nowadays have more than one wife, though the Koran allows every man four at a time, and encourages a constant change by facilitating divorce. The traditional Turk with his innumerable women no longer exists, except as a very rare exception, but the Mussulman has not sacrificed the advantages of the privacy granted him by the Mohammedan law and custom. Whatever exists or goes on behind the doors leading out of the selamlik belongs to his private life, and no one with any knowledge of Eastern manners would think of even suggesting the existence of women in the house. His life when away from home during the day is passed exclusively among men, and he does not even like to be seen in the company of any female member of his household. I have once or twice seen a Turk driving with a veiled lady, far in the country on the Asian side, but never in Stamboul. During the busy hours of the day the Turk lives out-of-doors, in the streets, under the trees in the open squares, and in the shops of the bazaar eating, drinking, taking his coffee, and smoking, wherever it best suits his convenience.
The consequence is that the busy part of the city is full of eating-houses and coffee-shops, and there is no end to the itinerant venders of food and drink who carry their wicker stands up and down in the crowd. There is the man who sells bread and “pidè” and “peksemit “ — unleavened bread and biscuits; there is the cheese-monger who has a round wicker basket and one or two kinds of cheese and “yoord,” or Turkish curds; there is the cook who sells kebaby — little morsels of lamb or mutton broiled on wooden skewers, and pilaf, kept hot in a big closed tin, or stuffed spring squashes and other vegetables; not to mention the sweet-meat-sellers, the custard-makers, and the sellers of sherbet. Most numerous of all are the water-carriers. They generally have a cylindrical vessel strapped on their shoulders and closely covered with green boughs to protect the water from the sun; in one hand they hold the end of a flexible tube with a polished brass faucet, and in the other they carry two or three heavy glasses, with which, by a skilful movement of the fingers, they play a perpetual tune which gives notice of their whereabouts. Coming from Italy one is forcibly struck by the extreme cleanliness of all these peddlers of food and drink, and by the highly appetizing appearance of what they have to sell. But besides these, there are a certain number of kitchens and restaurants in the bazaar. In particular, there is a fat and rosy Turk who makes the best kebaby in the world, and whose little place is in a small court close to one of the thoro
ughfares. On the clean marble slab which forms the sill of the window, the rows of wooden skewers lie ready for use, pilaf heaped up in large dishes steams by the well-kept fire, and a couple of clean, handy boys wait upon the customers, who sit at a little table at the back of the kitchen or out of doors in the quiet court before it.
The composition of the favorite dish must sound extraordinary to European ears. “Pidè,” or unleavened bread, is cut into squares and laid in the bottom of a soup-plate. Upon this curded cream is poured to the thickness of two fingers. Upon this, again, little squares of meat hot from the fire are heaped up, and the whole is seasoned with salt, pepper, cardamom, and sumach. It is exceedingly good and, what is more, very digestible, as those travellers will know who have been accustomed in Russia to eating sour cream with everything. Nor is the pilaf to be despised, though it would take long to describe the proper mode of preparing it, and to explain the differences between the four great pilafs of the world — the Turkish, the Greek, the Persian, and the East Indian, of which the Persian is, in my opinion, by far the best. The cook provides you with food, but not with drink, and if you require the latter you must hail the passing waterman and buy a glass of water or sherbet. Civilization, however, is far advanced in Constantinople, where every customer expects a knife and fork with his food, and uses them both. In Persia he would be given a piece of unleavened cake, which he would have to supplement with his fingers. For my own part, it has always struck me that fingers should be considered as much more appropriate instruments for feeding than forks. I know that they are my own fingers and that I have washed them, but as for the forks in places of public entertainment, I am not sure that they have been washed at all, and I would much rather not think of the way in which they have been used. We would rather suffer much than use another man’s toothbrush, but we think nothing at all of using the whole world’s fork — a fact which proves the vanity of most outward refinements.
But everything which the Turk consumes in the Bazaar is in the nature of luncheon, his principal meal being always taken at home and after sunset. In a dark corner of Bezestan there stands a little mosque with a small minaret, of which the pointed spire springs up like that of a toy house toward the high vault of the roof overhead. At midday, as at the other hours of prayer while the Bazaar is open, the muezzin climbs the tall tower and calls the faithful from the window above with as much zeal as though he were crying the summons from the highest pinnacle of Sultan Ahmed. But though it be midday there is no general movement among the crowd, as there would be in Southern Christian countries at the dinner hour. For the Turk, when away from home, is nomadic and indifferent to regular meals, whereas the evening dinner or supper at home is a patriarchal institution treated with due importance and solemnity. There are Turkish families still in which a table is set in the selamlik, and is literally open every day to all comers, rich and poor. Anyone may enter, and he will be shown to a place at the master’s table if he be of the master’s class, or at another, lower down the hall, if he be an inferior. And in Turkey, to dine means also to spend the night, the entertainer being expected to furnish his guests with beds, slippers, and sleeping garments. Of course the ladies of the establishment do not appear, but are served separately in the harem. The chief butler of a friend of mine was recently heard to complain bitterly that the guests often rose very early in the morning and carried away the shirts and slippers provided them for the night — a poor return for such open-handed hospitality. It must be said that Turkish dinners do not as a rule last a long time. They consist indeed of a very great number of dishes, but these are offered but once to each guest and removed with incredible rapidity by the servants.
The street which runs from the Post-office to Nur-i-Osmaniye is one of the most characteristic of Constantinople, for it forms the principal thoroughfare between Galata Bridge and the Bazaar.
It is a nondescript and cosmopolitan street, crowded with shops and offices of every trade and every nation. It is a favorite neighborhood for Greek and Armenian dentists, the assurances of whose skill are expressed in enormous signs. There too, in the neighborhood of the Postoffice itself, the public scribes sit all day long in the shade, grave and impassive as sphinxes, and ready to lend their skill with the pen for the correspondence of the unlettered. Their customers are chiefly Turkish women, who generally veil themselves more closely than usual while dictating in low and confidential tones the messages they themselves are unable to write. The system is familiar enough in Italy and Greece, as well as in most Eastern countries; but it is worth while to linger a moment and catch a glimpse of some of those faces as they bend eagerly over the scribe’s table, watching the swiftly moving reed pen. For Turkish is written with reeds, and the inkstand is a little sponge. Near this spot is the Yeni Jami, one of the beautiful mosques of Stamboul, frequented at all hours by a motley crowd of worshippers. Leave behind you the glare, the hurry, and the rush of the thronged street, thrust your feet into the wide slippers at the door, and enter the beautiful building at the hour of prayer. The contrast is sudden, solemn, and grand, and something of the deep mystery of Oriental life is all at once made clear to you. In the cool shadows Mussulmans of all ages are prostrating themselves before the Mihrab — the small shrine which in every mosque shows the exact direction of Mecca — or before the sacred writings in other parts of the wall. There is profound belief and devotion in their attitudes, gestures, and accents, a belief as superior to the idolatrous superstition of the far East as it is beyond the conviction of the ordinary Christian in simplicity and sincerity. It is indeed impossible to spend much time among Mussulmans without acquiring the certainty that they are profoundly in earnest in religious matters, and that the unfurling of the Standard of the Prophet which is occasionally hinted at as a vague possibility, would be productive of results not dreamed of in the philosophy of Europe.
Of all places in the world, Constantinople is interesting by the strong contrasts which it presents at every turn, and this sudden change from the brilliant animation of the streets to the solemn quiet of the mosques and tombs is one of the most striking. The marvellous richness of decoration in the interior of many of the Jamis brings to the surface the deeper side of Oriental character. As in most Eastern countries, some of the highest developments of art are brought into close contact with the most tasteless constructions and hideous ornaments. The magnificence, in virtue of which the epithet gorgeous is so frequently applied to the East, is often thrown into even stronger relief by the proximity of a certain squalid tawdriness extremely offensive to European taste. But here, as in Europe, the arts are intimately dependent upon religion and upon religious ideas. The Mussulmans of the Sunnite sect, who do not permit the representation of anything that has breath, have devoted an amount of attention to the art of writing equal to that which has been bestowed upon painting in the West. To the cultured Turk a piece of beautiful caligraphy affords as much artistic delight as we could find in the pictures of the greatest masters. The European may in time familiarize himself with the Arabic character — which is a sort of shorthand — so as to read it as readily as the Latin or the Gothic. But he can never, I believe, learn to distinguish the artistic values therein which correspond to our ideas of drawing, color, light, and shade. A Turk the other day pointed out to me a text from the Koran which hung upon his wall written in plain black upon a white ground. “That writing,” he said, “gives me as much æsthetic pleasure as you could find in any Titian.” Such specimens of caligraphic skill are often richly framed and preserved under glass, but some of the most beautiful of them all are found in the glazed tiles used in ornamenting the mosques and tombs. Some of these inscriptions are positively priceless in the eyes of the Turks, and they are rapidly becoming so in the eyes of the European collector, who, however, finds it almost impossible to obtain the smallest specimen of them. For it is always in connection with religion, and generally in places of worship, that the best objects are found. But art in the East is rapidly decaying, and the se
cret of producing the wonderful tiles, of which so many thousands are still to be seen, is lost forever, while the manufacture of cheap and inferior imitations is altogether in the hands of the Jews in the Bazaar.
In all legends and traditions of the East, the Arab horse plays an important part, and when I first visited the horse market in Stamboul, I had anticipatory visions of thoroughbreds which would have delighted the hearts of Lady Anne Blunt and her husband. The disappointment was as complete as any I have ever suffered. The At-Bazaar is on the east side of the mosque of Mehemet II. the Conqueror. It would have been impossible to choose a worse place for the purpose of showing off horses, were there any to be shown, than the three-cornered open space, irregularly paved with cobble-stones of all sizes, on the steep incline of a little hill. This yard is surrounded by a number of wretched wooden houses, most of which contain a dark and ill-ventilated stable, where the few horses for sale by the various owners are kept — and ill-kept — in ordinary stalls. Two or three unwieldy Hungarian brutes and a dozen or so of stout little Saloniki cobs are the usual occupants, and I once found amongst them a monstrous form of horse-flesh which recalled the legends of Hereward’s ugly mare and of the animal which the devil lent the exciseman in the “Ingoldsby Legends.” As to his legs, he was fully eighteen hands high, but his body was no longer than that of one of the aforesaid Saloniki ponies. His head reminded me of nothing so much as of a certain ancient leathern hat-box, a sort of heirloom in my possession, weather-beaten under many skies and jaded in many express trains, hallmarked all over with a whole geographical dictionary of names of cities printed on scraps of paper of every possible hue. There was something so strangely unnatural about the animal’s whole appearance that my attention was riveted by him for many minutes, and my guide, the splendid old Turk who is the chief of the horse-dealers, looked at me curiously as though suspecting that I meant to buy him. I was shown one animal, at last, well worth seeing and buying.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1355