Transcriber’s Note

Text was added to the original cover by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.

The Mihrab of the Mosque of Roustem Pasha, Showing Persian Tiles.

CONSTANTINOPLE.

BY
EDMONDO DE AMICIS,
Author of “Holland,” “Spain and the Spaniards,” etc.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FIFTEENTH ITALIAN EDITION BY
MARIA HORNOR LANSDALE.

ILLUSTRATED.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
Vol. I.

PHILADELPHIA:
HENRY T. COATES & CO.
1896.

Copyright, 1896, by
HENRY T. COATES & CO.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOLUME I.

Photogravures by W. H. Gilbo.

THE ARRIVAL.

The arrival at Constantinople made such an overpowering impression upon me as to almost efface what I had seen during the previous ten days’ trip from the Straits of Messina to the mouth of the Bosphorus. The Ionian Sea, blue and unruffled as a lake; the distant mountains of Morea, tinged with rose color in the early morning light; the archipelago, gilded with the rays of the setting sun; the ruins of Athens; the Gulf of Salonika, Lemnos, Tenedos, the Dardanelles, and a crowd of persons and events which had caused me infinite amusement during the voyage,—faded into such indistinct and shadowy outlines at the first sight of the Golden Horn that were I now to undertake a description of them it would be an effort rather of imagination than of memory; and so, in order to impart something of life and warmth to the opening pages of my book, I shall omit all preliminaries and begin with the last evening of the voyage at the precise moment when, in the middle of the Sea of Marmora, the captain came up to my friend Yunk and me, and, laying his two hands on our shoulders, said, in his pure Palerman accent, “Gentlemen, to-morrow at daybreak we shall see the first minarets of Stambul.”

Ah! you smile, my good reader, you who have plenty of money and are tired of spending it—who, when a year or so ago the fancy seized you to go to Constantinople in twenty-four hours, with your purse well lined and your trunks packed, set forth as calmly as if it were a trip to the country, uncertain up to the last moment whether, after all, it might not pay better to take the train for Baden-Baden instead. If the captain had said to you, “To-morrow morning we shall see Stambul,” you would probably have answered, quite calmly, “Indeed? I am very glad to hear it.” But suppose, instead, you had brooded over the idea for ten years; had passed many a winter’s evening mournfully studying the map of the East; had fired your imagination by reading hundreds of books on the subject; had travelled over one-half of Europe merely to console yourself for not being able to see the other half; had remained nailed to your desk for a whole year with this sole object in view; had made a thousand petty sacrifices and calculations without end; had erected whole rows of castles in the air, and fought many a stiff battle with those of your own household; and finally had passed nine sleepless nights at sea haunted by this intoxicating vision, and so blissfully happy as to have a twinge of something like remorse at the thought of all your loved ones left behind;—then you would have some idea of the real meaning of those words: “To-morrow at daybreak we shall see the first minarets of Stambul;” and instead of replying phlegmatically, “I am glad to hear it,” you would have given a great thump on the bulkhead, as I did.

One great source of satisfaction to my friend and myself was our profound conviction that, boundless as our expectations might be, they could not possibly be foiled. About Constantinople there is no uncertainty, and the most pessimistic traveller feels that there, at least, he is safe, since no one has ever been disappointed; and this, moreover, has nothing to do with the charm of its great associations or the fashion of admiring what every one else does. It has a beauty of its own, at once overmastering and triumphant, before which poets, archeologists, ambassadors, and merchants, the princess and the sailor, people of the North and of the South, one and all, break forth into loud exclamations of astonishment. In the opinion of the whole world it is the most beautiful spot on earth. Writers of travels on arriving there at once lose their heads. Perthusier falls to stammering; Tournefort declares that human language is powerless; Pouqueville thinks himself transported to another world; Gautier cannot believe that what he sees is real; the Viscount di Marcellus falls into ecstasies; La Croix is intoxicated; Lamartine returns thanks to God; and all of them, heaping metaphor upon metaphor, endeavor to make their style more glowing, and search their imaginations in vain for some simile that shall not fall miserably short of their ideas. Chateaubriand alone describes his arrival at Constantinople with such apparent tranquillity of soul as to strongly suggest the idea of stupor, but he does not fail to observe that it is the most beautiful thing in the world; and if the celebrated Lady Montague, in pronouncing a similar opinion, has allowed herself the use of a perhaps, she clearly wishes it to be tacitly understood that the first place belongs to her own beauty, of which she had a very high opinion. It is, after all, a cold German who declares that the most beautiful illusions of youth, the very dreams of first love, become poor and insipid when contrasted with the delicious sensations which steal upon the soul at the first sight of those charmed shores, while a learned Frenchman affirms that the first impression made by Constantinople is one of terror.

Imagine, then, if you can, the effect produced by all these impassioned statements on the ardent brains of a clever painter of twenty-four and a bad poet of twenty-eight! But still, not satisfied with even all this illustrious praise of Constantinople, we turned to the sailors to see what they would have to say about it; and here it was the same thing. Ordinary language was felt by even these rough men to be inadequate, and they rolled their eyes and rubbed their hands together in the effort to find unusual words and phrases in which to express themselves, attempting their description in that far-away tone of voice and with the slow, uncertain gestures used by uneducated persons when they try to recount something wonderful. “To arrive at Constantinople on a fine morning,” said the helmsman—“believe me, gentlemen, that is a great moment in a man’s life.”

The weather, too, smiled upon us. It was a fine, calm night; the water lapped the sides of the vessel with a gentle murmuring sound, while the masts and rigging stood out clear and motionless against the sky sparkling with stars. We seemed hardly to move. In the bow a crowd of Turks lay stretched out at full length, blissfully smoking their hookahs with faces turned to the moon, whose light, falling upon their white turbans, made them look like silvery haloes; on the promenade deck was a concourse of people of every nationality under the sun, among them a company of hungry-looking Greek comedians who had embarked at Piræus.

I can see before me now the pretty face of little Olga, one of a bevy of Russian children going with their mother to Odessa, very much astonished at my not understanding her language, and somewhat displeased at having addressed the same question to me three consecutive times without obtaining an intelligible answer. Here on one side a fat, dirty Greek priest, wearing a hat like an inverted bushel-measure, is looking through his glass for the Sea of Marmora, and on the other, an English evangelical clergyman is standing stiff and unyielding as a statue, who for three days past has not spoken to a soul nor looked at any one; near by are two pretty Athenian girls in their little red caps, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, who turn simultaneously toward the water whenever they find any one looking at them, in order to show their profiles, while a little farther off an Armenian merchant is telling the beads of his Greek rosary. Near him is a group of Hebrews, dressed in their antique costume, some Arabians in long white gowns, a melancholy-minded French governess, and a few of those nondescript personages one always meets in travelling, about whom there is nothing particular to indicate their country or occupation; and in the centre of all this mixed company a little Turkish family, consisting of a father wearing a fez, a veiled mother, and two little girls in trousers, all four curled up under a tent on a pile of many-colored pillows and cushions, and surrounded by a motley collection of luggage of every shape and hue.

How one realized the vicinity of Constantinople! On all sides there was an unwonted gayety, and the faces lit up by the ship’s lights were all happy ones. The group of children skipped around their mother shouting the ancient Russian name of Stambul: “Zavegorod! Zavegorod!” Passing near one and another of the little groups, I caught the names of Galata, Pera, Skutari, Bujukdere, Terapia, which acted upon my excited brain like stray sparks from the preliminaries of some grand display of fireworks. Even the sailors were delighted to be nearing a place where, as they said, one forgets, if only for a single hour, all the troubles of life. Among the white turbans in the bow as well there were unusual signs of life: the imaginations of even those sluggish and impassive Mussulmen were stirred as there began to float before their minds the magic outlines of Ummelunia, “Mother of the World”—that city, as says the Koran, “which commands on one side the earth, and on two, the sea.” It seemed as though, had the engine been stopped, the ship must still have gone on, impelled forward by the sheer force of that impatient longing which throbbed and palpitated from her decks. From time to time, as I leaned over the side and looked down at the water, a hundred different voices seemed to mingle with the murmur of the waves—the voices of all those who cared for me. “Go,” they said, “son, brother, friend! Go and enjoy your Constantinople. You have well earned it; now enjoy yourself, and God be with you!”

It was midnight before the passengers began to disperse, my friend and I being the last to go, and then with lingering steps. We could not bear to shut up between four walls an exuberance of joy as compared with which the Circle of Propontis seemed narrow and contracted. Halfway down the stair we heard the captain’s voice inviting us to come on the bridge the next morning. “Be up before sunrise,” he cried, appearing at the top of the companion-way; “whoever is late will be thrown overboard.”

A more superfluous threat was never made since the world began. I did not close my eyes, and I don’t believe that the youthful Muhammad II. on that famous night of Adrianople when he tore his bed to pieces, agitated by visions of Constantine’s city, tossed and turned more than did I throughout those four hours of expectation. In order to quiet my nerves I tried counting up to a thousand, keeping my eyes fixed on the line of white spray thrown up against my port by the movement of the vessel, humming monotonous tunes set to the throbbing of the engine, but all in vain. I was hot and feverish, my breath was labored, and the night seemed endless. At the first glimmer of dawn I leaped out of bed, to find Yunk already up; we tore into our clothes, and in three bounds were on deck.

Despair! It was foggy.

A thick, impenetrable mist concealed the horizon on every side, and it looked like rain; so the great spectacle of the approach to Constantinople was lost, all our hopes dashed, the voyage, in short, a failure. I was completely stunned.

At this moment the captain appeared, wearing his accustomed cheerful smile. Explanations were unnecessary. The instant his eye fell on us he took in the situation, and, patting me on the shoulder, said, consolingly, “That will be all right; don’t give yourselves the slightest concern. This fog, for which you ought to be very thankful, will help us to make the most glorious entrance into Constantinople one could possibly desire. In two hours, you may take my word for it, the sky will be absolutely clear.” At these brave words my blood began to circulate freely again, and we followed him to the bridge.

The Turks were already assembled in the bow, seated cross-legged upon strips of carpet, with their faces turned toward Constantinople. Presently the other passengers began to appear, armed with glasses of all sizes and styles, and took their places, one after another, along the port rail of the vessel, like people in the gallery of a theatre waiting for the curtain to rise. A fresh breeze was blowing; no one spoke, but gradually every glass was levelled upon the northern shore of the Sea of Marmora, where, as yet, nothing could be seen.

The fog, however, had lifted so rapidly that it was now little more than a filmy veil hanging over the horizon, while above it the heavens shone out clear and resplendent. Directly ahead of us could be seen indistinctly the little archipelago of the three Isles of the Princes, the Demonesi of the ancients, and the favorite pleasure-grounds of the court in the time of the Byzantine Empire, now a popular resort and place of amusement for the people of Constantinople.

Both shores of the Sea of Marmora were still completely hidden.

It was not until an hour had gone by that at last there appeared——

But there is no use in attempting to understand a description of the approach to Constantinople without first having a clear idea of the plan of the city. Supposing the reader to stand facing the mouth of the Bosphorus, that arm of the sea which separates Asia from Europe and connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmora, he will have on his right the continent of Asia, on his left, Europe; here ancient Thrace, there ancient Anatolia. Following this arm, he will find on his left, immediately beyond its mouth, a gulf, or rather an extremely narrow bay, forming with the Bosphorus almost a right angle, and stretching for some miles into the continent of Europe, in the shape of an ox’s horn; hence the name Golden Horn, or Horn of Abundance, because, when the capital of Byzantium was here, the wealth of three continents flowed through it. On that point of land, bathed on the one hand by the Sea of Marmora and by the Golden Horn on the other, on the site of ancient Byzantium, rises, on its seven hills, Stambul, the Turkish city; across from it, on the other point, washed by the waters of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, lie Galata and Pera, the Frankish cities; while on the Asiatic shore, directly opposite the opening of the Golden Horn, Skutari rises from the sea. Thus what is called Constantinople is, in reality, three large cities separated by the sea—two lying opposite each other, and the third facing them both, and all so near together that from each of the three it is possible to distinguish the buildings of the other two nearly as distinctly as one can see across the widest parts of the Thames or the Seine. The point of the triangle occupied by Stambul, which curves back toward the Horn, is the celebrated Cape Seraglio, which conceals up to the very last moment, from any one approaching from the Sea of Marmora, the two banks of the Golden Horn; that is to say, the largest and most beautiful part of Constantinople.

It was the captain at last, with his trained sailor’s eye, who discovered the first shadowy outline of Stambul.

The two Athenian ladies, the Russian family, the English clergyman, Yunk, I, and a number of others, all of whom were going to Constantinople for the first time, had gathered around him in a group, silent, absorbed, every eye intent on trying to pierce through the fog, when, suddenly throwing his left arm out toward the European shore, he exclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen, I see the first building!”

It was a white peak, the summit of some very high minaret whose base remained as yet completely hidden. Immediately every glass was levelled at it, and every eye began to burrow in that little rent in the haze as though trying to make it larger. The ship was now steaming rapidly ahead. In a few minutes an uncertain shape was visible beside the minaret, then another, then two, then three, then many more, which, stretching out in an endless line, gradually assumed the appearance of houses. On the right and ahead of us everything was still concealed by the fog. That which was now coming into view was the part of Stambul which extends like the arc of a circle for about three miles, from Cape Seraglio along the northern shore of the Sea of Marmora to the Castle of the Seven Towers; but the Seraglio hill was still invisible. Beyond the houses, one after another, the minarets now flashed into sight, white, lofty, their peaks touched with rose color by the rising sun. Below the houses we could begin to distinguish the dark line of the ancient walls, uneven and tortuous, strengthened at regular intervals by massive towers, their foundations partially washed by the sea-waves, and encircling the entire city. Before long fully two miles of the city lay before us in full view, but, to tell the truth, the sight fell decidedly short of my expectations. It was just here that Lamartine asked himself, “Can this be Constantinople?” and cried, “What a disappointment!” The hills being still hidden, nothing was to be seen but interminable lines of houses along the shore, and the city was apparently perfectly flat. “Captain,” I too cried, “is this Constantinople?” The captain seized me by the arm and pointed ahead. “O man of little faith!” said he, “look there!” I looked, and an exclamation of amazement escaped me. A shadowy form, vast, impalpable, towering heavenward from a lofty eminence, rose before us, its graceful outlines still partially obscured by a filmy cloud of vapor, and surrounding it four tall and graceful minarets whose peaks shone like silver as they caught the first rays of the morning sun. “St. Sophia!” cried a sailor, and one of the Athenian ladies murmured in an undertone, “Hagia Sofia!” (Holy Wisdom). The Turks in the bow at once rose to their feet. And now before and around the great basilica were discernible through the fog other vast domes and minarets crowded close together like a forest of gigantic branchless palms. “The mosque of Sultan Ahmed!” cried the captain, pointing; “the Bayezid mosque, the mosque of Osman, the Laleli mosque, the Suleimaniyeh!”

Mosques of Sultan Ahmed and St. Sophia.

But no one was listening. The mist was now rapidly melting away, and in every direction there leaped into view mosques, towers, masses of green, tier above tier of houses. The farther we advanced, the more the city unfolded before us her charming outlines, irregular, picturesque, sparkling, and tinged with every hue of the rainbow, while the Seraglio hill now emerged completely from the fog and stood out clear and distinct against the gray mass of cloud behind it. Four miles of city, all that part of Stambul which overlooks the Sea of Marmora, lay stretched out before us, her black walls and many-colored houses reflected in the limpid water as in a mirror.

Suddenly the vessel came to a standstill. Every one crowded around the captain to know what had happened. He explained that we would have to wait, before proceeding any farther, until the fog had lifted a little more. And indeed the mouth of the Bosphorus was still completely hidden behind a thick veil of mist. In less than a minute, however, this had begun to disperse, and we were able to move forward, howbeit with caution.

We were now approaching the hill of the Old Seraglio, and here the general excitement and curiosity became intense.

“Turn your back,” said the captain, “and don’t look until we are directly opposite.”

I obediently did as I was told, and tried to fix my attention upon a camp-stool, which seemed to dance before my eyes.

“Now!” cried the captain, after a few moments, and I spun around. The boat had again stopped, this time opposite and very close to the Seraglio.

It is a large hill, clothed from top to bottom with cypress, terebinth, fir, and huge plane trees, whose branches, reaching out across the city-walls, throw their shadow on the water below; and from the midst of this mass of verdure, separately and in groups, as though dropped at haphazard, rise in a confused, disorderly mass, the roofs of kiosks and pavilions crowned with gilded domes and galleries, charming little buildings of unfamiliar shape, with grated windows and arabesqued doorways, white, small, half hidden, suggesting a labyrinth of avenues, courtyards, and recesses—an entire city enclosed in a wood, shut off from the world, full of mystery and sadness. The sun was now shining full upon it, but above there still hovered a nebulous veil of haze. No one was to be seen, not the faintest sound could be heard. All the passengers stood perfectly motionless, their eyes fixed upon that hill invested with centuries of associations—glory, pleasure, love, intrigue, bloodshed; the citadel, palace, and tomb of the great Ottoman monarchy. For a little while no one moved or spoke. Suddenly the first mate called out, “Gentlemen, Skutari is in sight!”

Every one turned toward the Asiatic shore. Skutari, the Golden City, barely visible to the naked eye, lay scattered over the summits and sides of her great hills, the morning mist throwing a delicate veil over her radiant beauty, smiling and fresh as though just called into being by the touch of a fairy wand. Who can give any idea of that sight? The language we employ to describe our own cities is altogether inadequate to depict that extraordinary variety of color and form, that marvellous mixture of town and country, at once gay and austere, Oriental and Western, fantastic, graceful, imposing. Imagine a city composed of thousands of crimson and yellow villas, thousands of gardens overflowing with verdure, a hundred snow-white mosques rising in their midst; above it a forest of enormous cypresses, indicating the site of the largest cemetery of the East; on the outer edge huge white barracks, groups of houses and cypresses, villages built on the brows of little hills; beyond them others, again, half hidden in foliage, and over all, the peaks of minarets and summits of domes, sparkling points of light, halfway up the side of a mountain which closes in the horizon as it were with a curtain. A great metropolis scattered throughout an enormous garden and overhanging a shore here broken by steep precipices, there shelving gently down in green gradations to charming little inlets filled with shade and bloom; and below, the blue mirror of the Bosphorus reflecting all this splendor and beauty.

As I stood gazing at Skutari my friend touched me on the elbow to announce the discovery of still another city, and, sure enough, turning toward the Sea of Marmora, there, on the same Asiatic shore and a little beyond Skutari, lay a long string of houses, mosques, and gardens which we had but lately passed in front of, but which, up to this moment, had been entirely hidden by the fog. With the help of the glass it was now easy to distinguish cafés, bazârs, European-looking houses, flights of stairs, the walls of the market-gardens, and boats scattered along the shore. This was Kadi Keui (Village of the Judge), erected on the ruins of ancient Chalcedon, the former rival of Byzantium—that Chalcedon founded six hundred and eighty-four years before Christ by the Megarians, to whom the Delphic Oracle gave the surname of The Blind for having selected that rather than the opposite site, where Stambul is now situated.

“That makes three cities,” said the captain, checking them off on his fingers as each moment brought a fresh one into view.

The ship was still lying stationary between Skutari and the Seraglio hill, the fog completely concealing everything on the Bosphorus beyond Skutari, as well as Galata and Pera, which lay directly before us. Boats began to pass close by—barges, steam-launches, sailboats—but no one paid any attention to them. Every eye was glued to that gray curtain which hung over the Frankish city. I trembled with impatience and anticipation. Yet a few moments and there would be unfolded before my eyes that marvellous spectacle which none has here been able to behold unmoved. My hands shook so violently that it was with difficulty I could hold the glass to my eyes. The captain, worthy man, watched my excitement with keen delight, and, presently clapping his hands together, cried, “There it is! there it is!”

And, true enough, there did at last begin to appear through the mist first little specks of white, then the vague outlines of a lofty eminence, then scattered beams of light where some window caught and reflected the sun’s rays, and finally Galata and Pera stood revealed before us—a mountain, a myriad of houses, of all colors, heaped one above another, a lofty city crowned with minarets, domes, and cypress trees, and towering over all the monumental palaces of the foreign ambassadors and the great tower of Galata; beneath, the vast arsenal of Top-Khâneh and a forest of shipping; and still, as the fog lifted, more and more of the city came into view stretching along the banks of the Bosphorus; and in bewildering succession there leaped into sight streets and suburbs extending from the hilltops to the water’s edge, closely built, interminable, marked here and there with the sparkling white tips of the mosques—line upon line of buildings, little bays, palaces built upon the shore, pavilions, kiosks, gardens, groves; and, dimly outlined through the distant haze, other suburbs still, their roofs alone distinguishable, all gilded by the sun’s rays—a luxuriance of color, a profusion of verdure, a succession of vistas, a grandeur, a grace, a glory sufficient to make any one break forth into transports of incoherent delight. Every one on board, however, stood speechless, staring, with mouth and eyes wide open—passengers, seamen, Turks, Europeans, children. Not a whisper was heard. No one knew in which direction to look. On one side lay Skutari and Kadi Keui; on the other, the Seraglio hill; opposite, Galata, Pera, and the Bosphorus. To see it all one had to keep revolving around in a circle like a teetotum, and revolve we did, devouring with our eyes first this and then that, gesticulating, laughing, but speechless with admiration. Heavens above! what moments in a man’s life!

But yet the most beautiful and imposing sight of all was to come. We were still lying stationary off Seraglio Point, and until this has been rounded you cannot see the Golden Horn or get the most wonderful of all the views of Constantinople.

“Now, gentlemen and ladies, pay attention!” cried the captain before giving the order to proceed. “This is the critical moment; in three minutes we shall be opposite Constantinople.”

I felt myself grow hot and cold. For a moment all was still. How my heart beat! How feverishly I waited for that blessed word, “Forward!”

“Forward!” shouted the captain. The ship began to move.

On we go! Kings, princes, potentates, ye great ones of the earth! at that moment I felt nothing but compassion for you. All your wealth and power seemed but little in comparison with my place on that boat, and an empire a poor thing to offer in exchange for one look.

A minute passes, then another. We are gliding by Seraglio Point, and see opening before us an enormous space flooded with light and a huge mass of many shapes and colors. The point is passed, and behold! before us lies Constantinople—Constantinople, boundless, superb, sublime! The glory of creation and mankind! A triumph of beauty, far surpassing one’s wildest dreams!

And now; poor wretch, attempt to describe it. Profane with your commonplace words that divine vision. Who indeed can describe Constantinople? Chateaubriand? Lamartine? Gautier? What things you have all stammered and stuttered about it! and yet no one can resist trying. Words, phrases, comparisons crowd through the brain and drop off the end of one’s pen. I gaze, talk, write, all at the same time, hopeless of success, and yet compelled to the attempt by some overmastering influence.

View of Pera and Galata.

Let us see, then. The Golden Horn lies directly opposite us like a wide river; on each bank there extends a ridge; upon them stretch two parallel lines of the city, embracing eight miles of hill and valley, bay and promontory, a hundred amphitheatres of buildings and gardens, an enormous space dotted over with houses, mosques, bazârs, seraglios, baths, kiosks, of an infinite variety of color and form, and from their midst the sparkling points of thousands of minarets reaching heavenward like great pillars of ivory; then groves of cypresses descending in dark ranks from the hilltops to the water’s edge, fringing the outskirts, outlining the inlets; and through all a wealth of vegetation, crowning the heights, pushing up between the roofs, overhanging the water, flinging itself up in radiant luxuriance wherever it can obtain a foothold. To the right, Galata, her foreground a forest of masts and flags; above Galata, Pera, the imposing shapes of her European palaces outlined against the sky; in front, the bridge connecting the two banks, across which flow continually two opposite, many-hued streams of life; to the left, Stambul, scattered over her seven hills, each crowned with a gigantic mosque with its leaden dome and gilded pinnacle: St. Sophia, white and rose-tinted; Sultan Ahmed, flanked by six minarets; Suleiman the Great, crowned by ten domes; the Validêh Sultan, reflected in the waves; on the fourth hill the mosque of Muhammad II.; on the fifth, that of Selim; on the sixth, the seraglio of Tekyr; and, high above everything else, the white tower of the Seraskerat, which commands the shores of two continents from the Dardanelles to the Black Sea. Beyond the sixth hill of Stambul on the one hand, and Galata on the other, nothing can be distinguished save a few vague outlines of buildings, faint indications of towns and villages, broken up by bays and inlets, fleets of little vessels, and groups of trees hardly visible through the blue haze, and which appear more like atmospheric illusions than actual objects.

How can one possibly take in all the details of this marvellous scene? For a moment the eye rests upon a Turkish house or gilded minaret close by, but, immediately abandoning it, roams off once more at will into that boundless space of light and color, or scales the heights of those two opposite shores with their range upon range of stately buildings, groves, and gardens, like the terraces of some enchanted city, while the brain, bewildered, exhausted, overpowered, can with difficulty follow in its wake.

An inexpressible majestic serenity is diffused throughout this wonderful spectacle, an indefinable sense of loveliness and youth which recalls a thousand forgotten tales and dreams of boyhood—something aërial, mysterious, overpowering, transporting the imagination and senses far beyond the bounds of the actual.

The sky, in which are blended together the most delicate shades of blue and silver, throws everything into marvellous relief, while the water, of a sapphire blue and dotted over with little purple buoys, reflects the minarets in long trembling lines of white; the cupolas glisten in the sunlight; all that mass of vegetation sways and palpitates in the morning air; clouds of pigeons circle about the mosques; thousands of gayly-painted and gilded pleasure-boats flash over the surface of the water; the zephyrs from the Black Sea come laden with the perfumes of a thousand flower-gardens; and when at length, intoxicated by the sights and sounds and smells of this paradise, and forgetful of all else, one turns away, it is only to behold with fresh sensations of wonder and amazement the shores of Asia, with their imposing panorama of beauty; Skutari and the nebulous heights of the Bithynian Olympus; the Sea of Marmora dotted over with little islands and white with sails; and the Bosphorus, covered with shipping, winding away between two interminable lines of kiosks, palaces, and villas, to disappear at last mysteriously amid the most smiling and radiant hillsides of the Orient. To deny that this is the most beautiful sight on earth would be churlish indeed, as ungrateful toward God as it would be unjust to his creation; and it is certain that anything more beautiful would surpass mankind’s powers of enjoyment.

On recovering somewhat from my own first overwhelming sensations I turned to see how the other passengers had been impressed. Every countenance was transfixed. The eyes of the two Athenian ladies were suspiciously moist; the Russian mother had, in that supreme moment, clasped her little Olga to her breast; even the voice of the icy English priest was now heard for the first time, murmuring to himself, “Wonderful! wonderful!”

The vessel having in the mean time dropped anchor not far below the bridge, we were quickly surrounded by small boats from the shore, which a moment later discharged a rabble of Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew porters upon our decks, and these, while anathematizing the aliens from the other world, at the same time took possession of our property and our persons. After making some feeble show of resistance, I shook hands with the captain, gave a kiss to little Olga, and, bidding our fellow-passengers farewell, went over the side with my friend, where a four-oared barge rapidly transported us to the custom-house. Thence, after threading a labyrinth of tortuous streets, we finally reached our quarters in the Hotel de Byzance on the summit of the hill of Pera.

FIVE HOURS LATER.

The visions of the morning have disappeared, and Constantinople, that dream of light and beauty, turns out to be a huge city, cut up into a succession of hills and valleys, a labyrinth of human anthills, cemeteries, ruins, and desert-places—a mixture without parallel of civilization and barbarism, reflecting something of every city in the world, gathering within its borders every aspect of human life. That comparatively small part enclosed within the walls forms, as it were, the skeleton of a mighty city; as for the rest, it is a vast aggregation of barracks, an enormous Asiatic encampment, in which swarms a population of every race and religion under the sun. It is a great city in a state of transformation, composed of ancient towns falling into decay, of new ones built but yesterday, and of still others in process of erection. Everything is topsy-turvy; on all sides are seen the traces of some gigantic undertaking—mountains tunnelled through, hills levelled, suburbs razed to the ground, great thoroughfares laid out, heaps of stone, and the traces of disastrous fires, portions of the earth’s surface for ever undergoing some alteration at the hand of man. The disorder and confusion and the never-ending succession of strange and unexpected sights make one dizzy.

Walk down a stately street, and you find it ends in a precipice; come out of a theatre, and you are surrounded by tombs; climb to the summit of a hill, beneath your feet you discover a forest, while a new city confronts you from some neighboring hilltop; the street you have this moment left suddenly winds away from you through a deep valley half hidden by trees; walk around a house, you discover a bay; descend a lane, farewell to the city: you find yourself in a lonely defile, with nothing to be seen but the sky above you; towns appear and disappear continually. They start into view over your head, beneath your feet, over your shoulder, far off, near by, in sun and shadow, on the tops of mountains and on the shore below. Take a step forward, an immense panorama is spread out before you; backward, and you see nothing at all; lift your head, and the points of a thousand minarets flash before your eyes; turn it, and not one is in sight. The network of streets winds in and out among the hills, overtopping terraces, grazing the edges of precipices, passing beneath aqueducts, to break up suddenly in footpaths leading down some grassy incline to the water’s edge, or else, skirting piles of ruins, meanders away among rocks and sand to the open country. Here and there the huge metropolis stops, as it were, to take breath in the solitude of the country, then recommences, more crowded, gay, noisy, bewildering, than before; here it spreads out flat and monotonous, there scales the hillside, disappears over the summit, disperses; then once more gathers itself together. In one section it ferments with life, noise, movement; in another there is the stillness of death; one quarter is all red, another white, a third shines with gilding, a fourth looks like a mountain of flowers: stately city, village, country, garden, harbor, wilderness, market, cemetery, in endless succession, rear themselves, one above another, in such a manner that certain heights command in a single view all the aspects of life which are usually found embraced in an entire province. In every direction a series of strange and unfamiliar shapes is outlined against the sea and sky, so close together and so indented and broken up by the extraordinary variety of architectural forms that the eye becomes confused and the various objects seem to melt one into another.

In among the Turkish dwelling-houses European palaces rise suddenly up, spires overtop the minarets, and cupolas crown the garden-terraces, with battlemented walls behind them; roofs of Chinese kiosks appear above the façade of a theatre; barred and grated harems face rows of glazed windows; side by side with open balconies and terraces are found Moorish buildings with recessed windows and small forbidding doorways. Shrines to the Madonna are set up beneath Arabian archways; tombs stand in the courtyards; towers arise amid the hovels; mosques, synagogues, Greek, Catholic, Armenian churches, crowd one upon the other, as though each were striving for the mastery, and, from every spot unoccupied by buildings, cypress and pine, fig and plane trees stretch forth their branches and tower above the surrounding roofs.

An indescribable architecture of expedients, following the infinite caprices of the soil, portions of buildings cut up into sections, triangular, upright, prone, surrounded and connected by bridges, props, and defiles, heaped up in confused masses, like huge fragments detached from a mountain-side.

At every hundred steps the scene changes. Now you are in a suburb of Marseilles; turn, and it becomes an Asiatic village; another turn, and it is a Greek settlement; still another, a suburb of Trebizond. The language and dress, the faces you meet, the look of the houses in the various quarters, all suggest a different country from the one you have just left; they are bits of France, slices of Italy, samples of England, scraps of Russia. One sees depicted in vivid colors on the great surface of the city that battle which is here being waged between the various groups of Christians on the one hand fighting to repossess themselves of, and Islamism on the other defending with all its remaining strength, the sacred soil of Constantinople. Stambul, once entirely Turkish, is assailed on all sides by settlements of Christians, before whose advance it is slowly giving way all along the banks of the Golden Horn and the shores of the Sea of Marmora; in other directions the conquest is proceeding much more rapidly: churches, hospitals, palaces, public gardens, schools, and factories are rending asunder the Mussulman’s quarters, encroaching upon his cemeteries, and advancing from one height to another, until already, on the dismayed soil, there are sketched the vague outlines of another European city, as large as the one now covering the banks of the Golden Horn, and destined one day to embrace the European shore of the Bosphorus.

Ancient Fountain.

But from such general observations as these the attention is distracted at every step by some fresh object of interest: on one street it is the monastery of the dervishes, in another a great Moorish building, a Turkish café, a bazâr, a fountain, an aqueduct. In the course of a quarter of an hour, too, one is obliged to alter his gait at least a dozen times. You must descend, mount, climb down some steep incline or up by stairs cut out of the rock, wade through the mud and surmount a thousand different obstacles, threading your way now through crowds of people, then in and out among shrubbery; here stooping to avoid lines of clothes hung out to dry; at one moment obliged to hold your breath, at the next inhaling a hundred delicious odors. From a terrace flooded with light and commanding a magnificent view of the Bosphorus, Asia, and the blue arch of heaven one step will bring you to a network of narrow alley-ways, leading in and out among wretched, half-ruined houses and choked up with heaps of stone and rubbish; from some delicious retreat filled with verdure and bloom you emerge on a dry, dusty waste littered with débris; from a thoroughfare glowing with life, movement, and color you step into some sepulchral recess, where it seems as though the silence had never been broken by the sound of a human voice; from the glorious Orient of one’s dreams to quite another Orient, forbidding, oppressive, falling into decay, and suggestive of all that is mournful and depressing. After walking about for a few hours amid this medley of strange sights, one’s brain becomes completely confused. Were any one to suddenly put the question to you, “What sort of a place is Constantinople?” you would only stare at him vacantly, quite incapable of giving any intelligible reply. Constantinople is a Babylon, a world, a chaos.—Is it beautiful?—Marvellously.—Ugly?—Horribly so.—Do you like it?—It fascinates me.—Shall you remain?—How on earth can I tell? Can any one tell how long he is likely to stay on another planet?

You return at last to your lodgings, enthusiastic, disappointed, enchanted, disgusted, stunned, stupefied, your head whirling around like that of a person in the first stages of brain fever. This condition gradually gives way to one of complete prostration, utter exhaustion of mind and body; you have lived years in the course of a few hours, and feel yourself aged.

And the population of this huge city?

THE BRIDGE.

The best place from which to see the population of Constantinople is the floating bridge, about a quarter of a mile long, which connects the extreme point of Galata with the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, just below the mosque of the Validêh Sultan. Both banks are European territory, but, notwithstanding this fact, the bridge may be said to connect Europe and Asia, since nothing in Stambul but the ground itself is European, and even those quarters occupied by Christians have taken on an Asiatic character. The Golden Horn, though in appearance a river, in reality separates two different worlds, like an ocean. European news reaches Galata and Pera, and at once it is in every one’s mouth, and circulates rapidly, fresh, minute, and accurate, while in Stambul it is heard only like some vague, far-away echo; the fame of worldwide reputations and the most startling events roll back from before that little strip of water as from some insuperable barrier, and across that bridge, daily traversed by a hundred thousand feet, an idea does not pass once in ten years.

Bridge of Galata.

Standing there, you can see all Constantinople pass by in the course of an hour. Two human currents flow incessantly back and forth from dawn to sunset, affording a spectacle which the market-places of India, the Pekin fetes, or the fairs of Nijnii-Novgorod can certainly give but a faint conception of. In order to get anything like a clear idea you must fix your attention on some particular point and look nowhere else. The instant you allow your eyes to wander everything becomes confused and you lose your head. The crowd surges by in great waves of color, each group of persons representing a different nationality. Try to imagine the most extravagant contrasts of costume, every variety of type and social class, and your wildest dreams will fall short of the reality; in the course of ten minutes and in the space of a few feet you will have seen a mixture of race and dress you never conceived of before.

Behind a crowd of Turkish porters, who go by on a run, bending beneath the weight of enormous burdens, there comes a sedan chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory, out of which peeps the head of an Armenian lady; on either side of it may be seen a Bedouin wrapped in his white cape, and an old Turk wearing a white muslin turban and blue caftan; a young Greek trots by, followed by his dragoman dressed in embroidered zouaves; next comes a dervish in his conical hat and camel’s-hair mantle, who jumps aside to make room for the carriage of an European ambassador preceded by liveried outriders. One can hardly be said to actually see all of these, only to catch glimpses of them as they flash by. Before you have time to turn around you find yourself surrounded by a Persian regiment in their towering caps of black astrakhan; close behind them comes a Hebrew, clad in a long yellow garment open up the sides; then a dishevelled gypsy, her baby slung in a sack on her back; next a Catholic priest, with his staff and breviary; while advancing among a mixed crowd of Greeks, Turks, and Armenians may be seen a gigantic eunuch on horseback, shouting Vardah! (Make way!), and, closely following him, a Turkish carriage decorated with flowers and birds and filled with the ladies of a harem, dressed in green and violet and enveloped in great white veils; behind them comes a Sister of Charity from one of the Pera hospitals, and after her an African slave carrying a monkey, and a story-teller in the garb of a necromancer. One point which strikes the stranger as being singular, although it is in reality the most natural thing in the world, is that all this queer multitude of people pass one another without so much as a glance, just as though it were some London crowd; no one stops; every one hurries on intent upon his own affairs, and out of a hundred faces that pass by not one will wear a smile. The Albanian in his long white garment, with pistols thrust in his belt, brushes against the Tartar clad in sheepskin; the Turk guides his richly-caparisoned ass between two files of camels; close behind the aide-de-camp of one of the imperial princes, mounted on an Arabian charger, a cart rumbles along piled up with the odd-looking effects of some Turkish household. A Mussulman woman on foot, a veiled female slave, a Greek with her long flowing hair surmounted by a little red cap, a Maltese hidden in her black faldetta, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a negress wrapped in a many-tinted Cairo shawl, an Armenian from Trebizond, all veiled in black—a funereal apparition; these and many more follow each other in line as though it were a procession gotten up to display the dress of the various nations of the world. It is an ever-changing mosaic, a kaleidoscopic view of race, costume, and religion, which forms and dissolves with a rapidity the eye and brain can with difficulty follow. It is quite interesting to fix your gaze on the footway of the bridge and look for a while at nothing but the feet: every style of footwear that the world has known, from that which obtained in Eden up to the very latest phase of Parisian fashion, goes by—yellow babbuccie, the red slipper of the Armenian, turquoise-blue of the Greek, and black of the Israelite—sandals, high boots from Turkistan, Albanian leggings, slashed shoes, gambass of the Asia Minor horsemen of all colors, gold-embroidered slippers, Spanish alpargatas, feet shod in leather, satin, rags, wood, crowded so close together that in looking at one you are aware of a hundred. And while thus engaged you must be on your guard to avoid being knocked down. Now it is a water-carrier with his huge water-skin on his back, or a Russian lady going by on horseback; now a troop of imperial soldiers wearing the uniform of zouaves, who advance as though charging the enemy; now a procession of Armenian porters, who pass two by two, carrying huge bales of goods suspended from long poles across their shoulders; then a crowd of Turks push their way to right and left through the throng in order to embark on some of the many little steamboats which, starting from the bridge, ply up and down the Bosphorus and Golden Horn. It is one continuous tramp and roar, a murmur of hoarse gutturals and incomprehensible interjections, among which the occasional French or Italian words which reach the ear seem like rays of light seen through a thick darkness. The figures which strike the fancy most forcibly of all are, perhaps, those of the Circassians. These wild, bearded men, who pass with measured tread in groups of four or five, wearing large fur caps like those of the ancient Napoleon guard, and long black caftans, with daggers thrust in the belt and a silver cartridge-box suspended on the breast, look like veritable types of brigands, or as though their sole business in Constantinople might be the sale of a sister or daughter dragged thither by hands already imbued with Russian blood. Then there is the Syrian, clad in a long Byzantine dolman, with a gold-striped handkerchief wrapped about his head; the Bulgarian, in sombre-colored tunic and fur-edged cap; the Georgian, with his casque of dressed leather and tunic gathered into a metal belt; the Greek from the Archipelago, covered with lace, silken tassels, and shining buttons. From time to time it seems as though the crowd were receding somewhat, but it is only to surge forward once more in great, overpowering waves of color crested with white turbans like foam, in whose midst may occasionally be seen a high hat or umbrella or the towering headgear of some European lady tossed hither and thither by that Mussulman torrent.

It is stupefying merely to note the diversity of religions represented. Here gleams the shining pate of a Capuchin father; there towers aloft the ulema’s Janissary turban; farther on the black veil of the Armenian priest floats in the breeze; imams pass in their white tunics; nuns of the Stigmata; chaplains of the Turkish army clad in green and carrying sabres; Dominican brothers; pilgrims returned from Mecca wearing talismans about their necks; Jesuits; dervishes; and these last, queerly enough, carry umbrellas to protect them from the sun, while in the mosques they may be seen tearing their flesh in self-inflicted torture for their sins.

To one who watches attentively a thousand amusing and interesting little incidents detach themselves from the general confusion. Now it is a eunuch, who glares out of the corner of his eye at a young Christian dandy caught peering too curiously into the carriage of his mistress; a French cocotte, dressed in the latest fashion, who follows the gloved and bejewelled son of a pasha; a sergeant of cavalry in full-dress uniform, who, stopping short in the middle of the bridge, and, seizing his nose between two fingers, emits a trumpet blast loud enough to make one jump; or a quack, who, in return for some poor wretch’s piece of money, makes a cabalistic sign on his forehead supposed to restore his eyesight; here a large family-party, newly arrived, have gotten separated in the crowd: the mother rushes hither and thither, searching for her children, who, on their part, are weeping at the tops of their voices, while the men of the party try to mend matters by laying about them in all directions; a lady from Stambul passes by, and under pretence of adjusting her veil gets a good look at the train of a lady from Pera. Horses, camels, sedan chairs, carriages, ox-carts, casks on wheels, bleeding donkeys, skinny dogs, pass in a long file, dividing the crowd in two. Sometimes a big fat pasha of the three horse-tails goes by in a magnificent carriage, followed on foot by a negro, his guard, and his pipe-bearer. The Turks all salute him, touching the forehead and the breast, while a throng of Mussulman beggars, horrible, meagre-looking wretches, with muffled faces and bare chests, hurl themselves at the carriage-windows, begging vociferously for alms. Eunuchs out of employment pass in groups of two and three or a half dozen at a time, with cigarettes in their mouths, easily distinguished by their corpulency, their long arms, and great black cloaks. Pretty little Turkish girls, dressed like boys in green trousers and red or yellow waistcoats, run and jump about with catlike agility, pushing their way through the crowd with soft little crimson-tinted hands; shoe-cleaners with their gilded boxes; wandering barbers, their stool and basin ready at hand; venders of water and Turkish sweetmeats can be seen in every direction, threading their way through the press and shouting out their wares and avocations in Greek and Turkish. At every step you meet a military uniform, officers in fiery and scarlet trousers, their breasts glittering with decorations; grooms of the Seraglio gotten up like generals in command of an army; policemen carrying whole arsenals at their belts; zeibeks, or free soldiers, wearing those enormous breeches with pockets behind which give them outlines like the Hottentot Venus; imperial guards with nodding white plumes on their helmets, and breasts covered with gold lace; city guards, who march about carrying handcuffs—Constantinople city guards! One might as well speak of people who had been charged with the duty of keeping down the Atlantic Ocean. One curious contrast is that which is found between the rich clothing on the one hand and the miserable rags on the other, between persons so laden down with the quantity and magnificence of their apparel as to look like walking bazârs and others who scarcely may be said to have any apparel at all. The nakedness alone is a noteworthy sight. Every tint of human skin can be found, from the milk-white Albanian to the jet-black slave from Central Africa or blue-black native of Darfur; breasts which look as though they would resound at a blow like a bronze vase or break in pieces like an earthenware pot; hard, oily, wooden surfaces, or shaggy like the hide of a wild boar; brawny arms tattooed with outlines of leaves and flowers or rude representations of ships under full sail, and hearts transfixed by arrows. All such particulars, however, as these cannot possibly be noted in the course of a single visit to the bridge. While you are trying to make out the designs tattooed on an arm, your guide is calling your attention to a Serb, a Montenegrin, a Wallach, an Ukrainian Cossack, a Cossack of the Don, an Egyptian, a native of Tunis, a prince of Imerezia. There is hardly time even to make a note of the different nationalities. It is as though Constantinople still maintained her former position as queen of three continents and capital of twenty tributary kingdoms. Yet even this would hardly account for the extraordinary features of that spectacle, and one amuses himself by fancying that some mighty deluge has swept over the neighboring continent, causing a sudden influx of immigration. An expert eye can still distinguish in that mighty human torrent the distinctive features and costumes of Caramania and Anatolia, of Cypress and of Candia, of Damascus and Jerusalem—Druses, Kurds, Maronites, Telemans, Pumacs, and Kroats, and all the innumerable variety of the innumerable confederations of anarchies extending from the Nile to the Danube and from the Euphrates to the Adriatic. Those in search of the beautiful and those with a craving for the horrible will find, equally, their wildest hopes surpassed. Raphael would have been in ecstasies, Rembrandt beside himself with delight. The purest examples of Grecian beauty and that of the Caucasian races appear side by side with snub noses and receding foreheads. Women pass with the look and bearing of queens, others who might pose as furies. There are painted faces and faces disfigured by disease and wounds, colossal feet and the tiny feet of the Circassian no longer than your hand; gigantic porters, great fat Turks, and negroes like dried-up skeletons, ghosts of human beings who fill you with horror and pity; every aspect of human life, extremes of asceticism and voluptuousness, utter weariness, radiant luxury, and wasted misery; and, still more remarkable than the variety of human beings, is that of the garments they wear. Any one with an eye for color would find himself in clover. No two persons are dressed alike. Some heads are enveloped in shawls, others crowned with rags, others decked out like savages—shirts and undervests striped or particolored like a harlequin’s dress; belts bristling with weapons, some of them reaching from the waist to the arm-pits; Mameluke trousers, knee-breeches, tunics, togas, long cloaks which sweep the ground, capes trimmed with ermine, waistcoats encrusted with gold, short sleeves and balloon-shaped ones, monastic garbs and theatre costumes; men dressed like women, women who seem to be men, and peasants with the air of princes; a ragged magnificence, an exuberance of color, a profusion of ornament, braid, fringe, frippery of all sorts; a childish and theatrical display of decoration, which makes one think of a ball given by the inmates of an insane asylum, who have decked themselves out with the contents of all the peddlers’ packs in the world.

Above the babel of sounds made by all this multitude one hears the piercing cries of the Greek newsboys selling newspapers in all languages under heaven, the stentorian tones of the porters, loud laughter of the Turkish women; the infantile voices of the eunuchs; the shrill falsetto of a blind beggar reciting verses from the Koran; the hollow-resounding noise of the bridge itself as it sways under this multitude of feet; the bells and whistles from a hundred steamboats, whose smoke, coming in great puffs, from time to time envelops the entire throng of passers-by. This vast concourse of people embarks in the boats which leave every moment for Skutari, the villages along the Bosphorus, and the suburbs on the Golden Horn; spreads out over the bazârs and mosques of Stambul, the suburbs of Fanar and Balat, to the most distant points on the Sea of Marmora; flows like an advancing tide in two great currents over the Frankish shore, to the right in the direction of the sultan’s palaces, to the left toward the ancient quarters of Pera, and, receding once more across the bridge, is fed by innumerable little streams flowing down the steep, narrow lanes and byways which cover the hillsides of both banks, connecting ten cities and a hundred villages, and binding together Asia and Europe in an intricate network of commerce, intrigue, and mystery, at the mere thought of which one’s mind becomes hopelessly confused.

One would naturally expect all this to make an amusing and enlivening spectacle, but it is quite otherwise: after the first sensations of excitement and wonder have died down the brilliant coloring begins to pale; it no longer wears the aspect of a gay Carnival procession, but humanity itself seems to be passing in review—humanity with all its miseries and follies, its infinite discord of clashing beliefs and irreconcilable customs, a pilgrimage of decayed races and humbled nations; a boundless tide of human misery; wrongs to be set right, stains to be washed out, chains to be broken; an accumulation of tremendous problems which blood alone, and that in torrents, is capable of solving—a sight at once overpowering and depressing. One’s interest, too, is rather blunted than aroused by the enormous number and variety of strange sights and objects. What sudden mysterious changes the mind is subject to! Here was I, not a quarter of an hour after reaching the bridge, leaning listlessly against the side, scribbling on the wooden beam with a pencil, and acknowledging, between my yawns, that Madame de Staël was pretty near the truth when she pronounced travelling to be the most melancholy of human pleasures.

STAMBUL.

In order to restore one’s equilibrium after the bewildering scenes of the bridge it is only necessary to follow one of the many narrow streets which wind up the hillsides of Stambul. Here there reigns a profound peace, and you may contemplate at your leisure those mysterious and evasive aspects of Oriental life of which only flying glimpses can be obtained on the other bank amid the noise and confusion of European manners and customs. Here everything is Eastern in its strictest sense. After walking for fifteen minutes the last sounds have died away, the crowds entirely disappeared; you are surrounded on every side by little wooden, brightly-painted houses, whose second stories extend out over the ground floor, and the third again over those; in front of the windows are balconies enclosed with glass and close wooden gratings, which look like little houses thrown out from the main dwelling, and lend to the city an indescribable air of secresy and melancholy. In some places the streets are so narrow that the overhanging parts of opposite houses nearly touch, and you walk for long distances in the shadow of these human bird-cages and literally beneath the feet of the Turkish women, who pass the greater part of the day in them, seeing nothing but a narrow strip of sky. All the doors are tightly shut, and the windows on the ground floor protected by gratings. Everything breathes of jealousy and suspicion; one seems to be traversing a city of convents. Sometimes the stillness is suddenly broken by a ripple of laughter close at hand, and, looking quickly up, you may discover at some small opening or loophole the flash of a bright eye or a shining lock of hair, which, however, instantly disappears; or, again, you surprise a conversation being carried on in quick, subdued tones across the street, which breaks off suddenly at the sound of your footsteps, and you continue your way wondering what thread of mystery or intrigue you may have broken in your passage. Seeing no one yourself, you have the consciousness of a thousand eyes upon you; apparently quite alone, you yet feel yourself to be surrounded by restless, palpitating life. Wishing, possibly, to pass unobserved, you tread lightly, walk rapidly, but all the same you are watched on all sides. So profound is the silence that the mere opening and shutting of a door or window startles you as though it were some tremendous noise. One might suppose that the aspect of these streets would become monotonous and tiresome, but it is not so. A mass of foliage out of which issues the white point of a minaret, a Turk dressed in red coming toward you, a black servant standing immovable before a doorway, a strip of Persian carpet hanging from a window, suffice to form a picture so full of life and harmony that one could stand gazing at it by the hour. Of the few persons who do pass by, none appear to notice you; only occasionally you hear a voice at your shoulder call out “Giaour!” (infidel), and turn just in time to see a boy’s head disappearing behind a window-shutter. Again, hearing a door being opened from within, you pause expectantly, fully prepared to see the favorite beauty of some harem come forth in full costume, instead of which an European lady in bonnet and train appears and, with a murmured Adieu or Au revoir, walks rapidly away, leaving you open-mouthed with astonishment.

In another street, entirely Turkish and silent, you are suddenly startled by the sound of a horn and the stamping of horses’ feet; turning to see what it means, you find it difficult to believe your eyes when a large car rolls gayly into sight over some tracks which up to that moment you had not noticed, filled with Turks and Europeans, with its officials in uniform and its printed tariff of fares, for all the world like a tramway in Vienna or Paris. The effect of such an apparition, seen in one of those streets, is not to be described: it is like a burlesque or some huge joke, and you laugh aloud as you watch it disappear, as though you had never seen anything of the kind before. With the omnibus the life and movement of Europe seem to vanish, and you find yourself back in Asia, like a change of scene at the theatre. Issuing from almost any of these silent, deserted streets, you come out upon small open spaces shaded by one huge plane tree: on one hand there is a fountain out of which camels are drinking; on the other, a café in front of which a number of Turks recline on mats, smoking and gazing into vacancy; beside the door stands a large fig tree, up whose trunk a vine clambers, extending out over the branches and falling in waving garlands to the ground, and between whose leaves enchanting glimpses are caught of the blue waters of the Sea of Marmora dotted all over with white sails. The flood of light and the death-like stillness give these places a certain character, half solemn, half melancholy, which makes an indelible impression upon the mind: one is carried on and on, drawn, as it were, out of himself by a subtle sense of mystery which steeps the senses little by little, until he loses all idea of time and space and seems to float on a vague cloud of dreams.

Fountain in Court of the Mosque of Ahmed.

From time to time you come upon vast barren tracts devastated by some recent fire; hillsides with a few houses scattered here and there, and grassy spaces between them, intersected with goat-paths; tops of hills from which can be seen hundreds of houses and gardens, streets and lanes, but not a living creature, a wreath of smoke, an open door, or the faintest indication of human life, until one almost begins to think himself alone in the midst of this immense city, and, thinking so, to become a trifle uncomfortable. But just follow one of those steep little streets down to the bottom, and in an instant the whole scene changes. You are now on one of the great thoroughfares of Stambul, flanked by splendid buildings, whose beauty almost defies your powers of admiration. On every side rise mosques, kiosks, minarets, arcades, fountains of marble and lapis lazuli, mausoleums of sultans glowing with arabesques and inscriptions in gold, their walls covered with mosaics, their roofs of inlaid cedar-wood, and everywhere that exuberance of vegetation which, pushing its way through gilded railings and scaling garden-walls, fills the air with the perfume of its blossoms. Here are met the equipages of pashas, aides-de-camp in full uniform, officials, employés, eunuchs belonging to great houses, and files of servants and parasites coming and going in a continual succession between the residences of the ministers: one recognizes the fact that he is in the metropolis of a great empire, and admires it in all its magnificence of display. The brilliant atmosphere and graceful architecture, the murmuring of the fountains, the bright sunshine and delicious coolness of the shade, all affect the senses like subdued music, and a hundred smiling images crowd through the mind. Following these thoroughfares, you emerge upon the large open squares, from which arise the mosques of the various sultans, before whose stately magnificence you pause in wondering awe. Each one of these mighty buildings forms the centre, as it were, of a small separate city, with its colleges, hospitals, stores, libraries, schools, and baths, whose existence is at first hardly suspected, so overshadowed are they by the huge dome which they encircle. The architecture, so simple in appearance when seen from a distance, now presents a mass of detail attracting the eye in all directions at once. There are little cupolas overlaid with lead, oddly-shaped roofs rising one above another, aërial galleries, enormous porticoes, windows broken by little columns, festooned archways, spiral minarets, lines of terraces with open-work carving, and capitals supported on stylobates, doorways and fountains covered with ornament, walls picked out in gold and every color of the rainbow—a mass of carving and fretwork, light, graceful, exquisite, across which the shadows chase each other from great oak and cypress trees and willows, while clouds of birds, issuing from the overspreading branches, fly in slow circles around the interiors of the domes, filling every corner of the immense edifice with harmony. And now, for the first time, you begin to be conscious of a feeling stronger and more underlying than a mere sense of the beautiful. These huge structures seem like the marble witnesses of an order of thought and belief altogether different from that in which you have been born and reared—the imposing framework of a hostile race and faith, testifying in a mute but expressive language of lofty heights and glorious lines to the might of a God who is not your God, and a people before whom your fathers have trembled, filling you with admiration not unmixed with awe, which, for a time at least, checks your curiosity and holds you at a distance.

Within the shady courtyards Turks may be seen at the fountains busied about their ablutions, peasants crouched at the foot of the great pillars, veiled women who pass with deliberate steps beneath the lofty arcades: over all there broods a profound quiet, a tinge of sadness and voluptuousness, whose source you try in vain to discover, exercising your mind as upon some enigma. Galata, Pera—how far away they seem! It is as though you were in another world alone, in a different age. This is the Stambul of Suleiman the Magnificent or Bayezid II., and you feel dazed and confused when, on turning away from the square and losing sight of the stupendous monument of the power of the Osmans, you find yourself once more confronted by the Constantinople of to-day, of wood, poverty, and decay, filled with dirt, wretchedness, and misery.

As you go on and on the houses gradually lose their bright coloring, the vine-trellises disappear, moss creeps over the basins of the fountains, the mosques become small and mean, with wooden minarets and cracked, discolored walls, around which brambles and nettles have sprung up; ruined mausoleums, broken stairways, tortuous lanes choked with rubbish and reeking with damp; deserted quarters full of gloom, whose silence is unbroken save for the flapping of birds’ wings or the guttural cry of a muezzin calling out the word of God from some distant unseen minaret. On the face of no city in the world is written in such plain characters the nature of her people’s beliefs. Everything grand or beautiful comes from God, or the sultan—His representative upon earth. All the rest, being merely temporary, is not worthy of consideration and bears the stamp of an utter indifference to mundane things. This pastoral tribe has become a nation, but the instinctive love of nature, of a life of contemplation and idleness, is as strong among its people as ever, and has lent to their metropolis the look of an encampment. Stambul is not a city; she neither works nor thinks, nor does she create; civilization knocks at her doors, lays siege to her streets, and she dozes and dreams in the shadow of her mighty mosques and pays no heed. It is more like a city let loose, scattered, disfigured, representing rather the halt of a wandering race than the stronghold of an established state; a number of cities sketched in outline, an immense spectacular show, rather than a great metropolis, of which no just idea can be obtained without traversing every part.

Taking, then, for our starting-point the first hill, we are at that point of the triangle bathed by the Sea of Marmora. This is, so to speak, the crown of Stambul, an imposing district crowded with associations and filled with magnificent buildings. Here is the ancient Seraglio, occupying the site where arose first, Byzantium, with her acropolis and temple of Jupiter, and then the palace of the empress Placidia and the baths of Arcadius; here stand the mosques of St. Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed; and here is the At-Meidan, covering the space formerly occupied by the Hippodrome, where once, in the midst of an Olympus of marble and bronze and urged on by the frantic cries of a multitude clad in silk and purple, gilded chariots were driven furiously seven times around the course beneath the impassive gaze of the pearl-bedecked emperors. Descending the first hill into a shallow valley, we come upon the western walls of the Seraglio, marking the confines of ancient Byzantium,[A] and directly before us rises the Sublime Porte, containing the offices of the prime minister, foreign minister, and minister of the interior—silent, gloomy regions where seem gathered all the sombreness and melancholy of the fate of the empire.

[A] Other authorities place the walls of ancient Byzantium considerably farther west than this point.—Trans.

From here we ascend the second hill, where rise the Nûri Osmaniyeh mosque (Light of Osman) and the Burnt Column of Constantine, formerly surmounted by a bronze statue of Apollo, whose head was a likeness of the great emperor himself. This column marked the centre of the forum, and was surrounded by marble porticoes, triumphal arches, and statues. On the farther side of this hill opens the Valley of Bazârs, extending from the Bayezid mosque all the way to that of the Validêh Sultan, and including a huge labyrinth of covered streets filled with noise and confusion and crowded with people, from which you issue with your ears deafened and your head in a whirl.

Upon the summit of the third hill, overlooking both the Sea of Marmora and the Golden Horn, stands the gigantic rival of St. Sophia, the mosque of Suleiman—joy and glory of Stambul, as it is called by the Turkish poets—and the marvellous tower of the minister of war, erected on the ruins of the ancient palace of the Constantines, at one time occupied by Muhammad the Conqueror, and converted later on into a seraglio for the old sultanas.

Burnt Column of Constantine.

Between the third and fourth hills the enormous aqueduct of the emperor Valens stretches like an aërial bridge composed of two tiers of delicate arches, around which vines trail and clamber, falling in graceful festoons as far as the roofs of the houses crowded together in the valley beneath.

Passing under the aqueduct, we now ascend the fourth hill. Here, on the ruins of the celebrated church of the Holy Apostles, founded by the empress Helena and rebuilt by Theodosius, rises the mosque of Muhammad II., surrounded by schools, hospitals, and khâns. Alongside the mosque are the slave-bazâr, the baths of Muhammad, and the granite column of Marcian surmounted by a marble capital, on which is a cippus still ornamented with the imperial eagles. Near by is the Et-Meidan, where the famous massacre of the Janissaries took place.

Traversing another valley, likewise closely built up, we mount the fifth hill, surmounted by the mosque of Selim, near the site of the ancient cistern of St. Peter, now converted into a garden. Beneath us, along the shores of the Golden Horn, extends Fanar, the Greek quarter and seat of the Patriarch, where ancient Byzantium has taken refuge, the scene of the revolting carnage of 1821.

Descending into a fifth valley and ascending a sixth hill, we find ourselves upon the territory once occupied by the eight cohorts of Constantine’s forty thousand Goths, beyond the circuit of the earlier walls, which only embraced the fourth hill: this is the precise spot assigned to the seventh cohort, hence the name Hebdomon given to that quarter.

On the sixth hill may be seen still standing the walls of the palace[B] of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, where the emperors were formerly crowned, now called by the Turks Tekfûr Serai—Palace of the Princes. At the foot of the hill lies Balat, the Ghetto of Constantinople, a filthy quarter extending along the banks of the Horn as far as the city-walls: and beyond Balat is the ancient suburb of Blachernæ, where once arose the mighty palace with its gilded roofs, a favorite resort of the emperors, and famous for the sacredness of the relics contained in the church erected by the empress Pulcheria. Now the whole quarter is filled with decay and ruin and melancholy. At the Blachernæ begin the turreted walls which extend from the Golden Horn across to the Sea of Marmora, enclosing the seventh hill, on which stood the Forum of Arcadius, and where may still be seen the pedestal of the column of Arcadius—the largest and most eastern of the hills of Stambul, between which and the other six flows the little river Lycus, which, entering the city near the Charsiou[C] Gate, empties itself into the Sea of Marmora near the ancient gate of Theodosius.

[B] Prof. A. Van Millingen places the site of the Hebdomon Palace on the shore of the Sea of Marmora, outside the walls, near the village of Makri Keui; other authorities state that there are unanswerable arguments in favor of this view.—Trans.

[C] The Lycus enters the city near the Gate of Pusæus and empties into the Sea of Marmora at Vlanga-Bostan.—Trans.

From the walls of the Blachernæ we overlook the suburb of Ortajilar, inclining gently to the water’s edge and crowned with its many gardens; beyond it lies that of Eyûb, the consecrated soil of the Mussulman, with its charming mosques and vast cemetery shaded by a forest of cypresses and white with mausoleums and tombstones; back of Eyûb is the elevated plain which was formerly used as a military camp, and where the legions elevated the newly-made emperors upon their shields;[D] and beyond this, again, other villages are seen, their bright colors set in a framework of green woods and bathed by the farthermost waters of the Golden Horn.

[D] This ceremony more probably took place near Makri Keui on the Sea of Marmora.—Trans.

Such is Stambul, truly a divine vision. But when it is remembered that this huge Asiatic village surmounts the ruins of that second Rome, of that great museum of treasures stripped from all Italy, from Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, one’s heart sinks within him: the mere thought of such an accumulation of works of art makes one dizzy. And where are they now, those great arcades which traversed the city from wall to sea, those gilded domes and colossal equestrian statues which surmounted the mighty columns before baths and amphitheatres, those brazen sphinxes seated upon pedestals of porphyry, those temples and palaces which once reared their mighty façades of granite in the midst of an aërial throng of marble deities and silver emperors? All have disappeared or been changed past recognition. The equestrian statues of bronze have been recast into guns, the copper coverings of the obelisks converted into money, the sarcophagi of the emperors turned into fountains. The church of St. Irene is an armory: the cistern of Constantine[E] is a workshop; the pedestal of the column of Arcadius is occupied by a blacksmith; the Hippodrome is a horse-market; the foundations of the royal palaces are heaps of stones overgrown with ivy; the pavements of the amphitheatre, grass-grown cemeteries. A few inscriptions, half obliterated by fire or defaced by the simetars of the invaders, are all that remain to tell us that on these hills once stood the marvellous metropolis of the Empire of the East. And over all this mass of ruin and decay Stambul sits brooding, like some odalisque above a sepulchre, awaiting her hour.

[E] The Cistern Basilica, ascribed to Constantine the Great, is still used for its original purpose. The Cistern Philoxenes is occupied by silk-spinners.—Trans.

At the Hotel.

And now, if my readers will kindly accompany me back to the hotel, we will rest for a while. The greater part of what I have described thus far having been seen by my friend and myself on the very day of our arrival, one may easily imagine what a condition our brains were in as we wended our way toward the hotel at about nightfall. As we passed through the streets neither of us opened our lips, but on reaching our room we dropped on the sofa, and, facing about, asked each other simultaneously,

“Well, what do you think of it? How does it strike you?”

“Fancy my having come here to paint!”

“And I to write!”

And we laughed in each other’s faces with amused compassion.

Indeed, that evening and for many days after His Majesty Abdul-Aziz might have offered me a province in Asia Minor as a reward for a half-dozen lines of description of the capital of his state, and I could not have produced them, so true is it that you must get a little distance away from great objects before you can describe them, and if you wish to remember them correctly, you must first forget them somewhat.

And then how could one possibly do any writing in a room from whose windows could be seen the Bosphorus, Skutari, and the summit of the Olympus? The hotel was a sight in itself. At all hours of the day people of every country in the world were coming and going through the halls and corridors, up and down the stairs. Every evening twenty different nationalities were represented at table. I could not get the idea out of my head during dinner that I must be an envoy sent out by the Italian government, and that it devolved upon me to introduce some grave question of international importance with the dessert. There were many charming countenances of ladies; rough, uncombed artist heads; seamy adventurers lying in wait for your money; profiles like those of the Byzantine Virgin, lacking nothing but the golden nimbus; queer faces and sinister ones; and every day this motley company changed. At dessert, when every one was talking, it sounded like the Tower of Babel. On the day of our arrival we struck up an acquaintance with a party of Russians infatuated with Constantinople, and after that every evening, when we met at table, we would compare notes. Each one had visited some point of interest during the day and had some interesting experience to relate. This one had been to the top of the Serasker Tower, that one to the Eyûb cemetery; another had spent the day in Skutari; another was just back from a trip on the Bosphorus. The conversation glowed with vivid descriptions, life, color, and when one’s command of language failed him the delicious perfumed wines of the Archipelago were at hand to loose his tongue and stimulate him to fresh efforts. There were, it is true, some fellow-countrymen of mine there who made me furiously angry—moneyed idiots who from soup to dessert never left off abusing Constantinople, and Providence for bringing them there. There were no sidewalks, the theatres were badly lighted, there was no way of passing the evening—apparently they had come to Constantinople to pass their evenings. One of them having made the trip on the Danube, I asked him how he had liked the famous river, upon which he assured me that there was no place on earth where they understood so well how sturgeon should be cooked as on the Austrian Royal and Imperial line of steamboats! Another was a charming example of the lady-killer style of traveller, whose main object in going about the world is to make conquests, carefully recorded in a notebook kept for the purpose. He was a tall, lanky blond, liberally endowed with the greatest of the three gifts of the Holy Spirit. Whenever the conversation turned upon Turkish women, he would fix his eyes upon his plate with a meaning smile and take no part in it, except for an occasional word or two, when he would break off suddenly, taking a sip of wine as though he feared he had said too much. He always hurried into dinner a little behind time, with an important air suggestive of his having been unavoidably detained by the Sultan, and between the courses would busy himself in changing mysterious-looking little notes from one pocket to another, evidently intended to look like billetsdoux from frail fair ones, but which, oddly enough, bore the unmistakable stamp of hotel-bills.

But one certainly does run across all sorts of queer subjects in the hotels of those cosmopolitan cities: no one would believe it without seeing for himself. For instance, there was a young Hungarian there, about thirty years old, a tall, nervous fellow with a pair of diabolical eyes and a quick, feverish way of talking. After acting for some time as private secretary to a rich Parisian, he had enlisted among the French Zouaves in Algiers, was wounded and taken prisoner by the Arabs, and, escaping later from Morocco, had made his way back to Europe, where he hastened to The Hague, hoping to receive an appointment as officer in the war with the Achins; failing in this, he determined to enlist in the Turkish army, but while passing through Vienna on his way to Constantinople for that purpose he had gotten mixed up in some affair about a woman. In the duel which ensued he had received a ball in his neck, the scar from which could still be seen. Unsuccessful at Constantinople as well, “What,” said he, “is there left for me to do?—je suis enfant de l’aventure. Fight I must. Well, I have found the means of getting to India;” and he brought out a steamer ticket. “I shall enlist as an English soldier: there is always some fighting going on in the interior, and that is all I care for. Killed? Well, what if I am? My lungs are all gone, anyhow.”

Another queer creature was a Frenchman whose life seemed to have been one prolonged struggle with the postal authorities all over the world. He had lawsuits pending with the post-office departments of Austria, France, and England; he wrote protesting articles to the Neue Freie Presse, and fired off telegraphic messages of defiance to every post-office on the Continent; not a day went by without his having some noisy altercation at a window where mail was received or distributed; he never, by any chance, received a letter on time or wrote one that reached its destination. At table he would give us an account of all his misfortunes and consequent disputes, invariably winding up with the statement that the postal system had been the means of shortening his life.

Then there was a Greek lady with a strange, wild look and very curiously dressed: she was always alone, and every day would start suddenly up in the middle of dinner and leave the table after making a cabalistic sign over her plate whose significance no one was ever able to make out.

I have never forgotten, either, a good-looking young Wallachian couple, he about twenty-five, she just grown, who only appeared one evening: it was an undoubted case of elopement, for if you looked fixedly at them they both turned red and appeared uneasy, and every time the door opened they jumped as though they were on springs.

Let me see: what others can I remember? Hundreds, I suppose, were I to give my mind to it. It was like a magic-lantern show.

On the days when the steamers were due my friend and I used to find the greatest amusement in watching the new arrivals as they came into the hotel, exhausted, confused, some of them still under the influence of the approach to Constantinople—countenances which seemed to say, “What world is this? What on earth have we dropped into?” One day a boy passed us, that instant landed; he was entirely beside himself with joy at having actually reached Constantinople, the culmination of his dreams, and was squeezing his father’s hand between both his own in an ecstasy of delight, while the father, equally moved by the sight of his son’s happiness, was saying, “Je suis heureux, de te voir heureux, mon cher enfant.”

We used to pass the hot part of the day gazing out of our windows at the Maiden’s Tower, which rises up, white as snow, from a solitary rock in the Bosphorus just opposite Skutari, and while we told each other stories about the legend of the young prince of Persia who sucked the poison from the arm of the beautiful sultana bitten by a snake, a little fellow of five years old would chatter across at us from the window of an opposite house, where he appeared every day at the same hour.

Everything about that hotel was queer: among other things, we would run every evening against one or two doubtful-looking characters hovering around in front of the entrance. They evidently gained a livelihood by providing artists’ models, and, taking every one for a painter, would assail all who came and went with the same low-voiced inquiries: “A Turk? A Greek? An Armenian? A Jewess? A Negress?”

Constantinople.

But suppose, now, we turn our attention again to Constantinople itself, and wander about as unrestrainedly as birds of the air? It is a place where one may give free rein to his caprices. You can light your cigar in Europe and knock the ashes off in Asia, and, getting up in the morning, ask yourself what part of the world it would be pleasant to visit during the day, with two continents and two seas to choose from. Saddled horses stand waiting for you in every square; boats with their sails spread are ready to take you anywhere you may choose to go; steamboats lie at every pier awaiting nothing but the signal to depart; kâiks manned with rowers and skiffs fitted with sails crowd the landing-places; while an army of guides, speaking every language of Europe, is at your disposal for as long a time as you may want any of them. Do you care to hear an Italian comedy? see the Dancing Dervishes? listen to the buffooneries of Kara-gyuz, the Turkish Punchinello? be treated to the licentious songs of the Parisian café chantant? watch the gymnastic performances of a band of gypsies? listen to an Arabian story-teller? attend a Greek theatre? hear an imam preach? see the Sultan pass on his way to the mosque? You have but to say what you prefer and it is ready at hand. Every nationality is at your service—Armenians to shave you, Hebrews to clean your shoes, Turks to row your boat, negroes to dry you after the bath, Greeks to bring your coffee, and one and all to cheat you. Perhaps you are heated from your walk? here are ices made from the snows of Olympus. Thirsty? you can drink the waters of the Nile as the Sultan does. Should your stomach be a little out of order, here is water from the Euphrates to set it straight, or, if you are nervous, water from the Danube. You can dine like the Arab of the desert or a gourmand of the Maison dorée. If you want to doze and drowse, there are the cemeteries; to be stirred up and excited, the bridge of the Validêh Sultan; to dream dreams and see visions, the Bosphorus; to pass Sunday, the Archipelago of the Princes; to see Asia Minor, Mt. Bûlgurlû, the Golden Horn, the Galata Tower, the world, the Serasker Tower. It is, above all, a city of contrasts. Things which we never think of connecting in our minds are seen there at a single glance side by side.

Skutari is the starting-point for the caravans for Mecca, and also for the express trains for Brusa, the ancient metropolis; the Sofia railroad passes close by the mysterious walls of the old Seraglio; Catholic priests bear the Holy Sacrament through the streets escorted by Turkish soldiers; the common people have their festivals in the cemeteries; life and death, sorrow and rejoicing, follow so close upon one another’s heels as to seem all a part of the same function. There are seen the movement and energy of London side by side with the lethargic inertia of the East. The greater part of existence is led in public before your eyes, but over the private side of life there hangs a close, impenetrable veil of mystery; under that absolute monarchy there exists a liberty without bounds.

It is impossible, for several days at least, to get a clear impression of anything: it seems every moment that if the disorder is not quelled at once a revolution must break out. Every evening you feel, on reaching your lodgings, as though you had just returned from a long journey, and in the morning ask yourself incredulously if Stambul can really be here, close at hand. There seems to be no place where you can go to get your brain a little clear; one impression effaces another; you are torn by conflicting desires; time flies. You think you would like to spend the rest of your life here, and the next moment wish you could leave to-morrow. And when it comes to attempting a description of this chaos—well, there are moments when you are strongly tempted to bundle together all the books and papers on your table and pitch the whole thing out of the window.

ALONG THE GOLDEN HORN.

It was not until the fourth day after our arrival that my friend and I attempted to introduce anything like method into our sightseeing. We were on the bridge quite early in the morning, still uncertain as to how we would spend the day, when Yunk proposed that we should make our first regular expedition with tranquil minds and a well-defined route for purposes of study and observation. “Let us,” said he, “explore thoroughly the northern bank of the Golden Horn, if we have to walk till nightfall to do it; we can breakfast in some Turkish restaurant, take our noonday nap under a sycamore tree, and come home by water in a käik.” The suggestion being accepted, we provided ourselves with a stock of cigars and small change, and, after glancing over the map of the city, set forth in the direction of Galata.

If the reader really cares to know anything about Constantinople, I am afraid he will have to make up his mind to go too, with the clear understanding, however, that whenever he finds himself getting bored he is at perfect liberty to leave us.

Galata.

On reaching Galata the excursion begins. Galata is situated on the hill which forms the promontory between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, the former site of ancient Byzantium’s great cemetery. It is now the “city” of Constantinople. Its streets, almost all of them narrow and tortuous, are lined with restaurants, confectioners’, barbers’, and butchers’ shops, Greek and Armenian cafés, business-houses, merchants’ offices, workshops, counting-houses—dirty, ill-lighted, damp, and narrow, like the streets in the lower parts of London. A hurrying, pushing throng of foot-passengers comes and goes all day long, now and then crowding to right and left to make room in the middle of the street for the passage of porters, carriages, donkeys, or omnibuses. Almost all the business conducted in Constantinople flows through this quarter. Here are the Bourse, the custom-house, the offices of the Austrian Lloyd and the French express company, churches and convents, hospitals and warehouses. An underground railroad connects Galata and Pera. Were it not for the ever-present turban or fez, one would hardly know he was in the East at all. On every side is heard French, Italian, and Genoese. The Genoese are, in fact, almost on their native soil here, and are still somewhat inclined to assume the airs of proprietors, as in the days when they opened and closed the harbor at their will and replied to the emperor’s threats with volleys from their cannon. Of this ancient glory, however, nothing now remains except a few old houses supported on great pilasters and heavy arches, and the ancient edifice which was once the residence of the Podesta.

Old Galata has almost entirely disappeared. Thousands of squalid houses have been razed to the ground to make room for two wide streets, one of which mounts to the summit of the hill toward Pera, while the other runs parallel with the sea-wall from one end of Galata to the other. My friend and I took the latter, seeking refuge from time to time in some shop or other when a huge omnibus rolled by, preceded by Turks stripped to the waist, who cleared the street by means of long sticks, with which they laid about them. At every step some fresh cry assailed the ear, Turkish porters yelling, “Sacun ha!” (Make room!); Armenian water-carriers calling out, “Varme su!” and the Greek, “Crio nero!” Turkish donkey-drivers crying, “Burada!” venders of sweetmeats, “Scerbet!” newsboys, “Neologos!” Frankish cab-drivers, “Guarda! guarda!”

After walking for ten minutes we were completely stunned. Coming to a certain place, we noticed with surprise that the paving of the street suddenly ceased: it had evidently been removed quite recently. We stopped to examine the roadway and discover, if possible, some reason for this eccentricity, when an Italian shopkeeper, seeing what we were about, came to the rescue and satisfied our curiosity. This street, it seemed, led to the Sultan’s palace, and a few months previously, while the imperial cortège was passing along it, the horse of His Majesty Abdul-Aziz stumbled and fell. The good Sultan, much annoyed by this circumstance, commanded that the pavement should be removed all the way from the spot where the accident occurred, to the palace; which of course had been done. Fixing upon this memorable spot as the eastern boundary of our walk, we now turned our backs upon the Bosphorus and proceeded, by a series of dark, crooked little streets, in the direction of the

Tower of Galata.

The city of Galata is shaped like an open fan, of which the tower, placed on the crest of the hill, represents the pivot. This tower is round, very lofty, dark in color, and terminates in a conical point formed by a copper roof, directly beneath which runs a line of large glazed windows, forming a sort of gallery enclosed with glass, where a lookout is kept night and day ready to give warning of the first appearance of fire in any part of the immense city. The Galata of the Genoese extended as far as this tower, which stands on the exact line of the walls which once divided it from Pera—walls of which at present no trace remains;[F] nor is the present tower the same as that ancient Tower of Christ, erected in memory of the Genoese who fell in battle, having been rebuilt by Mahmûd II., and prior to that restored by Selim III.,[G] but it is none the less a monument to the glory of Genoa, and one upon which no Italian can gaze without feeling some pride at the thought of that handful of soldiers, merchants, and sailors—haughty, audacious, proud, stubborn—who for centuries floated the flag of the mother republic from its summit and treated with the emperors of the East as equals.

[F] A few traces of these walls may still be seen near the Galata Tower.—Trans.

[G] The Galata Tower, called in the Middle Ages the Tower of Christ or of the Cross, was built in 1348, probably on the foundations of an earlier Byzantine tower ascribed to Anastasius Dicorus, and in the present century was repaired by Mahmûd II.—Trans.

Tower of Galata.

Immediately beyond the tower we came upon a Mussulman cemetery.

The Galata Cemetery.

This is called the Galata Cemetery. It is a great forest of cypress trees, extending from the summit of the hill of Pera all the way down the steep declivity, nearly to the edge of the Golden Horn, and casting its thick shadows over myriads of little stone and marble pillars—inclining at every angle and scattered irregularly over the hillside. Some of these are surmounted by round turbans on which may be seen traces of coloring and inscriptions; others are pointed at the top, many lie prone upon their sides, while from others the turbans have been cut clean off, making one fancy that they belong to Janissaries, whom, even after death, Sultan Mahmûd took occasion to degrade and insult. The greater part of the graves are merely indicated by square mounds of earth, having a stone at either end, upon which, according to Mussulman belief, the two angels Nekir and Munkir take their seats to judge the soul of the departed. Here and there may be seen small enclosures surrounded by a low wall or railing, in the middle of which stands a column surmounted by a huge turban, and all around it other smaller columns: this is the grave of some pasha or person of distinction buried in the midst of his wives and children. Footpaths wind in and out among the graves and trees, crossing and recrossing one another in all directions from one end of the cemetery to the other. A Turk seated in the shade smokes tranquilly; boys run about and chase each other among the tombs; here and there cows are grazing, and a multitude of turtle-doves bill and coo among the branches of the cypress trees; groups of veiled women pass from time to time; and through the leaves and branches glimpses are caught of the blue waters of the Golden Horn streaked with long white reflections from the minarets of Stambul.

Pera.

Coming out of the cemetery, we passed once more close to the base of the Galata Tower and took the principal street of Pera. Pera lies more than three hundred feet above the level of the sea, is bright and cheerful, and overlooks both the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. It is the “West End” of the European colony, the quarter where are to be found the comforts and elegancies of life. The street which we now followed is lined on both sides with English and French hotels, cafés of the better sort, brilliantly lighted shops, theatres, foreign consulates, clubs, and the residences of the various ambassadors, among which towers the great stone palace of the Russian embassy, commanding Galata, Pera, and the village of Fundukli on the shore of the Bosphorus, for all the world like a fortress.

The crowds which swarm and throng these streets are altogether unlike those of Galata. Hardly any but stiff hats are to be seen, unless we except the masses of flowers and feathers which adorn the heads of the ladies: here are Greek, Italian, and French dandies, merchant princes, officials of the various legations, foreign navy officers, ambassadors’ equipages, and doubtful-looking physiognomies of every nationality. Turkish men stand admiring the wax heads in the hairdressers’ windows, and the women pause open-mouthed before the showcases of the milliners’ shops. The Europeans talk and laugh more loudly here than elsewhere, cracking jokes in the middle of the street, while the Turks, feeling themselves, as it were, foreigners, carry their heads less high than in the streets of Stambul.

As we walked along my friend suddenly called my attention to the view, behind us, of Stambul. Sure enough, there lay the Seraglio hill, St. Sophia, and the minarets of the mosque of Sultan Ahmed, all faintly veiled in blue mist—an altogether different world from the one in which we stood. “And now,” said he, “look there!” Following the direction of his finger, I read the titles of some of the books displayed in the window of an adjacent stationer’s shop—La Dame aux Camelias, Madame Bovary, Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme—and experienced so curious a sensation at the rapid and violent contrast thus presented that for some moments I was obliged to stand quite still in order to adjust my ideas. At another time I stopped my companion to make him look in a wonderful café we were passing. It was a long, wide, dim corridor, ending in a large open window, through which we beheld, at what seemed to be an immense distance, Skutari flooded with sunlight.

When we had proceeded for some distance along the Grande Rue de Pera and nearly reached the end, we were startled by hearing a voice, quite close at hand, exclaiming in tones of thunder, “Adèle, I love thee! I love thee better than life itself! I love thee even as much as it is given to men to love upon earth!” We gazed at one another in astonishment. Where on earth did the voice come from? Looking about us, we discovered on one side of the street a wooden fence through the cracks of which a large garden could be seen filled with benches, and at the farther end a stage on which a troupe of actors were rehearsing the performance for the evening. A Turkish lady not far from us stood peeping in as well, and laughed with great enjoyment at the scene, while an old Turk, passing by, shook his head disapprovingly. Suddenly with a loud shriek the lady fled down the street; other women in the neighborhood echoed the shriek and turned their backs rapidly. What could have happened? Turning around, we beheld a Turk about fifty years old, well known throughout all Constantinople, who elected to go about the streets clad with the same severe simplicity which the famous monk Turi was so anxious to impose upon all good Mussulmen during the reign of Muhammad IV.; that is, stark naked from head to foot. The wretched creature advanced, leaping on the stones, shouting and breaking forth into loud bursts of laughter, followed by a crowd of ragamuffins making a noise like that of the infernal regions. “It is to be devoutly hoped that he will be promptly arrested,” said I to the doorkeeper of the theatre. “Not the smallest likelihood of anything of the sort,” replied he; “he has been going about like that for months.” In the mean while I could see people all the way down the street coming to the doors of the shops, women getting out of the way, young girls covering their faces, doors being shut, heads disappearing from the windows. And this thing goes on every day, and no one so much as gives it a thought!

* * * * *

On issuing from the Grande Rue de Pera we find ourselves opposite another large Mussulman cemetery shaded by groves of cypress trees and enclosed between high walls. Had we not been informed later on of the reason for those walls, we should certainly never have guessed it. They had evidently been quite recently erected, to prevent, it would seem, the woods consecrated to the repose of the dead from being converted into a trysting-spot where the soldiers from the neighboring artillery barracks were wont to meet their sweethearts. A little farther on we came upon the barracks, a huge, solid, rectangular structure, built by Shalil Pasha in the Moorish style of the Turkish Renaissance, its great portal flanked by light columns and surmounted by the crescent and golden star of Muhammad, and having balconies and small windows ornamented with carving and arabesques. In front of the barracks runs the Rue Dgiedessy, a continuation of the Grande Rue de Pera, on the other side of which stretches an extensive parade-ground; beyond that, again, are other suburbs. During the week this neighborhood is buried in the most profound silence and solitude, but on Sunday afternoons it is crowded with people and equipages, all the gay world of Pera pouring out to scatter itself among the beer-gardens, cafés, and pleasure-resorts which lie beyond the barracks. It was in one of these cafés that we broke our fast—the café Belle Vue, a resort of the flower of Pera society, and well deserving its name, since from its immense gardens, extending like a terrace over the summit of the hill, you have, spread out before you, the large Mussulman village of Fundukli, the Bosphorus covered with ships, the coast of Asia dotted over with gardens and villages, Skutari with her glistening white mosques—a luxuriance of color, green foliage, blue sea, and sky all bathed in light, which form a scene of intoxicating beauty. We arose at last unwillingly, and both of us felt like niggards as we threw our eight wretched sous on the counter, the bare price of a couple of cups of coffee after having been treated to that celestial vision.

The Great Field of the Dead.

Coming out of the Belle Vue, we found ourselves in the midst of the Grand Champs des Morts, where the dead of every faith except the Jewish are buried in distinct cemeteries. It is a vast, thick wood of cypress, sycamore, and acacia trees, in whose shadow are thousands of white tombstones, having the appearance, at a little distance, of the ruins of some great building. In between the trunks of the trees distant views are caught of the Bosphorus and the Asiatic coast. Broad paths wind in and out among the graves, along which groups of Greeks and Armenians may be seen passing to and fro. On some of the tombs Turks are seated cross-legged, gazing fixedly at the Bosphorus. One experiences the same delicious sense of refreshment and peace and rest, as on entering a vast, dim cathedral on some hot summer’s day.

We paused in the Armenian cemetery. The stones here are all large, flat, and covered with inscriptions cut in the regular and elegant characters of the Armenian language, and on almost every one there is some figure to indicate the trade or occupation of the deceased. There are hammers, chairs, pens, coffers, and necklaces; the banker is represented by a pair of weights and scales, the priest by a mitre, the barber has his basin, the surgeon a lancet. On one stone we saw a head detached from the body, which was streaming with blood: it was the grave of either a murdered man or else one who had been executed. Alongside it was stretched an Armenian, sound asleep, with his head thrown back.

We passed on next to the Mussulman cemetery. Here were to be seen the same multitude of little columns, either in rows or standing about in irregular groups, some of them painted and gilded on top, those of the women culminating in ornamental bunches of flowers carved in relief, many of them surrounded with shrubs and flowering plants. As we stood looking at one of them, two Turks, leading a child by the hand, passed down the path to a tomb some little distance off, on reaching which they paused, and, having spread out the contents of a package one of them carried under his arm, they seated themselves on the tombstone and began to eat. I stood watching them. When the meal was ended the elder of the two wrapped what appeared to be a fish and a piece of bread in a scrap of paper, and with a gesture of respect placed it in a hole beside the grave. This having been done, they both lit their pipes and fell to smoking tranquilly, while the child ran up and down and played among the trees. It was explained to me later that the fish and bread were that portion of their repast which Turks leave as a sign of affection for relatives probably not long dead; the hole was the small opening made in the ground near the head of every Mussulman grave in order that the departed may hear the sobs and lamentations of their dear ones left on earth, and occasionally receive a few drops of rose-water or enjoy the scent of the flowers. Their mortuary smoke concluded, the two pious Turks arose, and, taking the child once more by the hand, disappeared among the cypress trees.

Pankaldi.

On coming out of the cemetery we found ourselves in another Christian quarter—Pankaldi—traversed by wide streets lined with new buildings and surrounded by gardens, villas, hospitals, and large barracks. This is the suburb of Constantinople farthest away from the sea. After having seen which, we turned back to redescend to the Golden Horn. On reaching the last street, however, we came unexpectedly upon a new and strikingly solemn scene. It was a Greek funeral procession, which advanced slowly toward us between a dense and perfectly silent crowd of people packed together on either side of the street. Heading the procession came a group of Greek priests in their long embroidered garments; then the archimandrite wearing a crown upon his head and a long cape embroidered in gold; behind him were a number of young ecclesiastics clad in brilliant colors, and a group of friends and relatives, all wearing their richest garments, and in their midst the bier, covered with flowers, on which lay the body of a young girl of about fifteen dressed in satin and resplendent with jewels. The face was exposed—such a dear little face, white as snow, the mouth slightly contracted as if in pain, and two long tresses of beautiful black hair lying across the shoulders and breast. The bier passes, the crowd closes in behind the procession, which is quickly lost to sight, and we find ourselves standing, sobered and thoughtful, in the midst of the deserted street.

San Dmitri.

We now descended the hill, and, after crossing the dry bed of a torrent and climbing up the ascent on the other side, found ourselves in another suburb, San Dmitri. Here almost the entire population is Greek. On every side may be seen black eyes and fine aquiline noses; patriarchal-looking old men and slight, sinewy young ones; girls with hair hanging down their backs, and bright intelligent-looking lads, who disport themselves in the middle of the street among the chickens and pigs, filling the air with their musical cries and harmonious inflections. We approached a group of these boys who were engaged in pelting one another with pebbles, all chattering at the same time. One of them, about eight years old, the most impish-looking little rascal of the lot, kept tossing his little fez in the air, every few minutes calling out, “Zito! zito!” (Hurrah! hurrah!) Suddenly he turned to another little chap seated on a doorstep near by, and cried, “Checchino! buttami la palla!” (Checchino! throw me the ball). Seizing him by the arm as though I were a gypsy kidnapper, I said, “So you are an Italian?”—“Oh no, sir,” he answered; “I belong to Constantinople.”—“Then who taught you to speak Italian?”—“Oh that?” said he; “why, my mother”—“And where is your mother?” Just at that moment, though, a woman carrying a baby in her arms approached, all smiles, and explained to me that she was from Pisa, that she and her husband, an engraver from Leghorn, had been in Constantinople for eight years past, and that the boy was theirs. Had this good woman had a handsome matronly face, a turretted crown upon her head, and a long mantle floating majestically from her shoulders, she could not have brought the image of Italy more forcibly before my eyes and mind. “And how do you like living here?” I asked her. “What do you think of Constantinople on the whole?”—“How can I tell?” said she, smiling artlessly. “It seems to be like a city that—well, to tell you the truth, I can never get it out of my head that it is the last day of the Carnival;” and then, giving free rein to her Tuscan speech, she explained to us that “the Mussulman’s Christ is Mahomet,” that a Turk is allowed to marry four wives, that the Turkish language is admirable for those who understand it, and various other pieces of equally valuable information, but which, told in that language and amid those strange surroundings, gave us more pleasure than the choicest bits of news—so much so, indeed, that on parting we were fain to leave a small monetary expression of our esteem in the hand of the little lad, and exclaimed simultaneously as we walked off, “After all, there is nothing that sets one up so as a mouthful of Italian now and then.”

Totaola.

Recrossing the little valley, we came to another Greek quarter, Totaola, where our stomachs gave us a hint that this would be a favorable moment in which to investigate the interior of one of those innumerable restaurants of Constantinople, all of which, built on the same plan, present the same extraordinary appearance. There is one huge room, which might on occasion be turned into a theatre, lighted, as a rule, only by the door through which you enter; around it runs a high wooden gallery furnished with a balustrade. On one side is an enormous stove at which a brigand in shirt-sleeves fries fish, bastes the roast, mixes sauces, and devotes himself generally to the business of shortening human life; at a counter on the other side another forbidding-looking individual serves out red and white wine in glasses with handles; in the middle and front of the apartment are low stools without backs and little tables scarcely higher than the stools, looking for all the world like cobblers’ benches. We entered with some slight feeling of hesitation, not knowing whether the groups of Greeks and Armenians of the lower orders already assembled might not evince some disagreeable signs of curiosity; on the contrary, however, no one deigned so much as to look at us. It is my belief that the population of Constantinople is the least inquisitive of any on the face of the globe. You must be the Sultan at least, or else promenade through the streets without any clothes on, like the madman of Pera, for people to show that they are so much as aware of your existence. Taking our seats in a corner, we waited some time, but, as nothing happened, we finally concluded that it must be the custom in Constantinopolitan restaurants for every one to look out for himself. Advancing then boldly to the stove, we each got a portion of the roast—Heaven only knows from what quadruped—and then, providing ourselves with a glass apiece of the resinous Tenedos wine, we returned to our corner, spread the repast out on a table barely reaching to our knees, and, with a sidelong glance at one another, fell to and consumed the sacrifice. After resignedly settling the account we walked out in perfect silence, afraid on our lives to open our lips for fear a bray or a bark should escape them, and resumed our walk in the direction of the Golden Horn, somewhat chastened in spirit.

Panorama of the Arsenal and Golden Horn.

Kassim Pasha.

A walk of ten minutes brought us once more into real Turkey, the great Mussulman suburb of Kassim Pasha, a city in itself, filled with mosques and dervishes’ monasteries, which, with its kitchen-gardens and shaded grounds, covers an entire hill and valley, and, extending all the way to the Golden Horn, includes all of the ancient bay of Mandsacchio, from the cemetery of Galata quite to the promontory which overlooks the Balata quarter on the other shore. From the heights of Kassim Pasha a most exquisite view is to be had. Beneath, on the water’s edge, stands the enormous arsenal of Tersâne; beyond it extends for more than a mile a labyrinth of dry-docks, workshops, open squares, storehouses, and barracks, skirting all that part of the Golden Horn which serves as a port of war. The admiralty building, airy and graceful, seeming to float upon the surface of the water, stands out clearly against the dark-green background of the Galata cemetery; in the harbor innumerable small steamboats and käiks, crowded with people, shoot in and out among the stationary iron-clads and old frigates of the Crimea; on the opposite bank lie Stambul, the aqueduct of Valens, bearing aloft its mighty arches into the blue heavens above, the great mosques of Muhammad and Suleiman, and innumerable houses and minarets. In order to take in all the details of this scene we seated ourselves in front of a Turkish café and sipped the fourth or fifth of the dozen or more cups of coffee which, whether you wish to or not, you are bound to imbibe in the course of every day of your stay in Constantinople. This café was a very unpretending place, but, like all such establishments—Turkish ones, that is—most original, probably differing but little from those very first ones started in the time of Suleiman the Great, or those others into which the fourth Murad used to burst so unexpectedly, cimeter in hand, when he made his nocturnal rounds for the purpose of wreaking summary vengeance upon venders of the forbidden beverage. What numbers of imperial edicts, theological disputes, and bloody quarrels has this “enemy of sleep and fruitfulness,” as it has been termed by ulemas of the strict school, “genius of dreams and quickener of the mind,” as the more liberal sects have it, been the cause of! And now, after love and tobacco, it is the most highly prized of all luxuries in the estimation of every poor Osman. To-day coffee is drunk on the summits of the Galata and Serasker towers; you find it on the steamboats, in the cemeteries, in the barber-shops, the baths, the bazârs. In whatever part of Constantinople you may happen to be, if you merely call out, “Café-gi!” without taking the trouble to leave your seat, in three minutes a cup is steaming before you.

The Café.

Our café was a large whitewashed room, with a wooden wainscoting five or six feet high, and a low divan running around the four walls. In one corner stood a stove at which a Turk with a hooked nose was making coffee in little brass coffee-pots, from which he poured it into tiny cups, adding the sugar himself: this is the universal custom in Constantinople. The coffee is made fresh for every new-comer and handed to him already sweetened, together with a glass of water, which the Turk always drinks before approaching the cup to his lips. At one side hung a small looking-glass, and beside it a rack filled with razors: almost all the cafés in Constantinople are barber-shops as well, the head of the establishment combining these duties with those of leech and dentist, and operating upon his victims in the same apartment as that in which his guests are drinking their coffee. On the opposite wall hung another rack filled with crystal narghilehs, their long, flexible tubes wound around like snakes, and terra-cotta pipes with cherry-wood stems. Five Turks were seated on the divan thoughtfully smoking their narghilehs, and in front of the door three others sat upon very low straw-bottomed stools, their backs against the wall, side by side, with pipes in their mouths; a youth belonging to the establishment was engaged in shaving the head of a big, fat dervish clad in a camel’s-hair tunic. No one looked up as we took our seats, no one spoke, and, with the exception of the coffee-maker and the young man, no one made the slightest movement of any sort. The gurgling sound of the water in the narghilehs, something like the purring of cats, was all that broke the profound stillness. Every one gazed fixedly into vacancy, with faces absolutely devoid of all expression, like an assembly of wax figures. How many just such scenes as this have impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind! A wooden house, a cross-legged Turk, broad shafts of light, an exquisite far-away view, profound silence,—there you have Turkey. Every time I hear that word pronounced these objects rise up before me in the same way that one sees a canal and a windmill when any one mentions Holland.

Piale Pasha.

From there, skirting along the edge of a large Mussulman cemetery which extends from the top of the Kassim Pasha hill to Tersâne, we proceeded again in a northerly direction, and, descending into the valley, reached the little district of Piale Pasha, almost buried in her trees and gardens, and paused before the mosque from which the quarter takes its name. It is white and surmounted by six graceful domes; the courtyard is surrounded by arches supported on airy columns; there is a charming minaret, and surrounding the whole a circle of enormous cypress trees. At that hour all the neighboring houses were tightly closed, the streets empty, and even the courtyard of the mosque itself deserted; the drowsiness and heat of noonday brooded over everything, and, except for the dull buzzing of the insects, not a sound was to be heard. Looking at our watches, we found it wanted just three minutes to twelve o’clock, one of the Mussulman’s five canonical hours, at which the muezzin, appearing upon the gallery of every minaret, announces to the four quarters of the globe the religious formula of Islam. We were perfectly well aware that in all Constantinople there is not a minaret upon which, punctual as clockwork, the messenger of the Prophet does not appear at his appointed hour; at the same time we could hardly bring ourselves to believe that in that farthest outpost of the immense city, on that solitary, out-of-the-way mosque as well, and amid that profound silence and apparent desertion, the figure would rise up, the message be delivered. Watch in hand, I stood waiting with lively curiosity the stroke of the hour, glancing now at the minute-hand, now at the small doorway opening out on the gallery of the minaret, about as high from the ground as the fourth story of an ordinary house. Presently the minute-hand reaches the sixtieth little black speck: no one appeared. “He is not there,” said I.—“There he is,” replied Yunk; and, true enough, there he stood. The balustrade of the gallery concealed all his person but the face, of which the distance was too great to distinguish the features clearly. For a few seconds he stood perfectly motionless: then, closing both ears with his fingers and raising his face toward heaven, he chanted slowly, in high, piercing accents, solemnly, mournfully, the sacred words which at the same moment were resounding from every minaret in Africa, Asia, and Europe: “God is great! there is but one God! Mahomet is his Prophet! Come to prayer! come and be saved! God is great! there is none other! Come to prayer!” Then, proceeding a part of the way around the balcony, he repeated the same words toward the north, then to the west, and then to the east, and finally disappeared as he had come. At the same instant we caught the faint far-away tones of a similar voice in the distance, sounding like some one calling for help. Then all was still, and we two were left standing motionless and silent, with a vague feeling of hopelessness, as though those two voices had been addressed solely to us, calling upon us to fall down and pray, and with the disappearance of the vision we had been left alone in that still valley, like beings abandoned by God and man. No tolling or chime of bells has ever appealed to me so strongly, and I then understood for the first time why it was that Mahomet decided in favor of the human voice as a means of summoning the faithful to their devotions, rather than the ancient trumpet of the Israelites or tymbal of the Christians. He hesitated for some time before making up his mind, so that the entire Orient narrowly escaped wearing an aspect totally different from that of the present day. Had he selected the tymbal, which must inevitably have become a bell later on, it is very certain that the minaret would have gone, and with it would have disappeared for ever one of the most charming and distinctive features of both town and country in the East.

Ok-Meidan.

Mounting the hill to the west of Piale Pasha, we reached a vast open plain from which there is a view of Stambul and the entire length of the Golden Horn from Eyûb to Seraglio Point, four miles of mosque and garden—a scene so overpoweringly beautiful that one is tempted to fall upon his knees as before some heavenly vision. On the Ok-Meidan (Place of Arrows) the sultans used formerly to practise shooting with the bow and arrow, after the custom of the Persian kings. A number of small stone obelisks and pillars scattered about irregularly bear inscriptions each to the effect that upon that spot some imperial arrow has fallen. The beautiful kiosk is still standing from whose tribune the sultan was wont to draw his bow; on the right were drawn up a long line of pashas and beys, living exclamation-points indicative of the admiration excited by their lord’s dexterity; to the left stood a group of twelve pages belonging to the imperial family, whose duty it was to run after and pick up the arrows, marking the spots on which they fell; hidden behind the surrounding trees and shrubbery a few venturesome Turks peeped out who had stolen thither to gaze fearfully upon the sublime countenance of the vicar of God; while in the tribune, in the attitude of some haughty athlete, stood the sultan Mahmûd, the mightiest archer of the empire, his flashing eye compelling the bystanders to avert their gaze, and that famous beard, black as the raven’s feathers of Mt. Taurus, gleaming afar against the white tunic all spotted with the blood of the Janissaries. All this has now changed and become utterly commonplace. The Sultan practises with a revolver in the courtyard of his palace, while Ok-Meidan is used by the infantry for target-practice. On one side stands a dervish monastery, on the other a solitary café, and the whole place is as melancholy and deserted as a steppe.

Piri Pasha.

Descending from the Ok-Meidan toward the Golden Horn, we came to another little Mussulman quarter called Piri Pasha, possibly after the famous vizier of the time of the first Selim, who educated Suleiman the Magnificent. Piri Pasha faces the Jewish quarter of Balata, situated on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn. We met nothing as we passed through it except a few dogs and occasionally an old Turkish beggar; we did not regret this, however, as it gave us an opportunity to examine its construction at our leisure. It is a very curious fact that on entering any quarter of Constantinople, after having seen it from the water or some adjacent height, you invariably experience precisely the same shock of astonishment as on going behind the scenes of a theatre after having witnessed some beautiful spectacular effect from the stalls. You are filled with amazement to find that the combination of all these mean and ugly objects is what has just produced so charming a whole. I suppose there is no other city in the world whose beauty is so entirely dependent on general effect as Constantinople. Seen from Balata, Piri Pasha is the prettiest little village imaginable, smiling, radiant with color, decked with foliage, its charming image reflected in the Golden Horn like the features of some beautiful nymph, awakening dreams of love and pleasure in the breast. Enter it and the whole thing changes: you find nothing but rude, mean little houses colored like booths at a country fair, filthy courts looking like witches’ dens, groups of dusty fig and cypress trees, gardens littered with rubbish, narrow, deserted streets—dirt, misery, wretchedness. But run down the hillside, jump into a käik, and give half a dozen strokes with the oars, behold! the fairy city has reappeared, beautiful and fascinating as before.

Haskeui.

Continuing along the shore of the Golden Horn, we descended into another suburb, vast, populous, wearing an entirely different aspect from the last, and where we saw quite plainly, after taking half a dozen steps, that we were no longer among Mussulmans. On all sides dirty children covered with sores were rolling about on the ground; bent, ragged old crones sat working with their skinny fingers in the doorways, through which glimpses could be caught of dusky interiors cluttered up with heaps of old iron and rags; men clad in long, dirty cloaks, with tattered handkerchiefs wound around their heads, skulked along close to the wall, glancing furtively about them; thin, meagre faces peered out of the windows as we went by; old clothes dangled from cords suspended between the houses; mud and litter everywhere. It was Haskeui, the Jewish quarter, the Ghetto of the northern shore of the Golden Horn, facing that on the other shore, with which, at the time of the Crimean War, it was connected by a wooden bridge, all traces of which have since disappeared. From here stretches another long chain of arsenals, military schools, barracks, and drill-grounds, extending nearly all the way to the end of the Golden Horn. But of these we saw nothing, our heads and our legs having given out equally. Of all that we had seen, there only remained a confused jumble of places and people; it seemed as though we had been travelling for a week, and we thought of far-away Pera with a slight sensation of home-sickness. At this point we should certainly have turned back had not our solemn compact made upon the bridge come into our minds, and Yunk, according to his helpful custom, revived my drooping spirits by chanting the grand march from Aida.

Kaliji Oghlu.

Forward, then! Traversing another Turkish cemetery and climbing still another hill, we found ourselves in the suburb of Kaliji Oghlu, inhabited by a mixed population. In this little city, at every street-corner, you come upon a new race or a new religion. You mount, descend, climb up, pass among tombs and mosques, churches and synagogues. You skirt gardens and cemeteries, encounter handsome Armenian women with fine matronly figures, slender Turkish ones who steal a look at you through their veils; all around you hear Greek, Armenian, Spanish—the Spanish of the Jews—and you walk on and on and on. “After all, you know,” we say to one another, “Constantinople must end somewhere.” Everything on earth has an end. We have been told so ever since we were children. On and on and on, and now the houses of Kaliji Oghlu grow fewer, woods begin to appear; there is but one more group of dwellings. Quickening our pace, we passed them by, and at last reached—

Sudludji.

Merciful Heavens! what did we reach? Nothing in the world but another suburb, the Christian settlement of Sudludji, built on a hill surrounded by woods and cemeteries, the same hill at whose base was formerly one end of the only bridge which in ancient times connected the two banks of the Golden Horn. But this suburb, by a merciful providence, was actually the last, and our excursion had finally come to an end. Quitting the houses, we cast about us for some spot where we might seek a little much-needed repose. Back of the village there rises a bare, steep ascent, up which dragging our weary limbs, we found before us the largest Jewish cemetery in Constantinople. It is a vast open space, filled with innumerable flat gravestones, presenting the desolate appearance of a city destroyed by an earthquake, and unrelieved by a tree or flower or blade of grass, or even so much as a footpath—a desert solitude as depressing to look upon as the scene of some great disaster. Seating ourselves upon one of the tombs, we turned in the direction of the Golden Horn, and while resting our tired bodies feasted our eyes upon the superb panorama which lay spread out before us. At our feet lay Sudludji, Kaliji Oghlu, Haskeui, Piri Pasha, a chain of picturesque villages set in the midst of green gardens and cemeteries and blue water; to the left, the solitary Ok-Meidan and the hundred minarets of Kassim Pasha, and farther on the huge, indistinct outlines of Stambul; beyond, fading away into the distant sky, the blue line of the mountains of Asia; directly facing us on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn lay the mysterious quarter of Eyûb, whose gorgeous mausoleums, marble mosques, deserted streets, and shady inclines, dotted with tombstones, could be clearly distinguished from where we sat, rural-looking solitudes full of a melancholy charm; to the right of Eyûb lay still other villages covering the hillsides and peeping at their own reflections in the water; and then the final bend of the Golden Horn, lost to view between two lofty banks covered with trees and flowers.

Half asleep, exhausted in mind and body, we sat there, allowing our eyes to wander at will over the whole exquisite scene; put all we had done and seen to music, and chanted antiphonally a rigmarole of I don’t know what nonsense; discussed the history of the dead man upon whose tomb we were sitting; poked into an ant-hill with bits of straw; talked of all manner of foolish and irrelevant things; asked ourselves from time to time if it were really true that we were in Constantinople; reflected upon the shortness of life and vanity of all human desires, at the same time drawing in deep breaths of pleasure and delight; but away down in the bottom of our secret souls we each realized through it all that nothing on earth, no matter how charming and beautiful it may be, can quite satisfy a man, provided he does not while enjoying it feel in his the hand of the woman he loves.

In a Kaik.

Toward sunset we descended to the Golden Horn, and, taking our places in a four-oared käik, had scarcely pronounced the word “Galata!” before the graceful little boat was already in mid-stream. Of all varieties of boats which skim over the surface of the water, there is certainly none so delightful as the käik. Longer than the gondola, but narrower and lighter, carved, painted, and gilded, it is without seats or rudder; you sit in the bottom upon a cushion or bit of carpet, only your head and shoulders visible above the sides; both ends are shaped alike, so that it can be propelled in either direction, and it is easily upset by any sudden movement. Shooting out from the shore like an arrow from the bow, it seems to fly like a swallow, barely touching the water; overtakes and passes all other craft, and disappears in the distance, its bright and varied colors reflected in the waves like a dolphin flying from its pursuer. Our oarsmen were a couple of good-looking young Turks dressed in white trousers, light blue shirts, and red fezzes, with bare arms and legs—a pair of lusty athletes of twenty or so, bronzed, clean, cheerful, and frank. At each stroke the boat bounds forward its whole length. Other käiks fly by, hardly seen before they are lost sight of; we pass flocks of ducks; large covered barges filled with veiled women; clouds of birds circle over our heads; from time to time the tall sea-grass shuts out everything from view.

Seen thus from the other end of the Golden Horn and at that hour, the city presents an entirely new aspect. The Asiatic coast, owing to the bend of the shore, is entirely hidden, Seraglio Point shutting in the Golden Horn as though it were a great lake. The hills on either bank seem to have grown larger, and Stambul, far, far away, is a blending of delicate blues and grays, huge and indistinct. Like an enchanted city, it seems to float upon the water and lose itself among the clouds. The käik flies on; the two banks recede, inlet after inlet, grove after grove, suburb after suburb; our surroundings widen out. The colors of the city grow dim, the horizon seems to be on fire, the water is full of purple and gold reflections; on and on, until at last a profound lethargy steals over us, a sense of boundless content, in which we remain silent and happy, until finally the boatman is obliged to call in our ears, “Monsù! arrivar!” before we can arouse ourselves sufficiently to know where we are.

THE GREAT BAZÂR.

After giving a superficial glance over all of Constantinople, including both banks of the Golden Horn, it seemed now time to penetrate into the heart of Stambul, to explore that world-embracing, perpetual fair, that hidden city, dim, mysterious, crammed with associations, wonders, and treasures, which, extending from the Nùri Osmaniyeh to the Serasker hill, is called The Great Bazâr.

We will start from the square in front of the Validêh Sultan mosque. Here the epicurean reader may like possibly to pause long enough to inspect the Baluk Bazâr, that fish-market famous ever since the days of thrifty old Andronicus Palæologus, who, we are told, met the entire culinary expenses of his court with the profits made from fish caught only along the walls of the city, where, indeed, they are still most plentiful, and, seen on one of its principal days, the Baluk Bazâr would afford as succulent and tempting a subject for the author of the Ventre de Paris as one of those well-covered tables one sees in old Dutch pictures. The venders, almost without exception Turks, are drawn up all around the square behind their fish, which are spread out on mats stretched upon the ground or else on long tables, around which a crowd of customers and an army of dogs fight for precedence. Here may be found the delicious mullet of the Bosphorus, four times the size it attains to in our waters; oysters from the island of Marmora, which the Greeks and Armenians alone understand how to cook properly, broiling them on the live coals; sprats and tunnies, the salting of which is an industry confined almost entirely to the Jews; anchovies, which the Turks have learned how to put up in the Marseillaise fashion; sardines, with which Constantinople provides the entire Archipelago; the loufer, that most delicious of all the Bosphorus fish, which is caught by moonlight; mackerel from the Black Sea, which make seven invasions successively into the waters of the city, accompanied by a noise so loud that it can be heard in the towns on both shores; the colossal isdaurid; enormous sword-fish; turbots, or, as they are called by the Turks, kalkau-baluk; shellfish, and a thousand and one other varieties of the smaller kinds of fish which dart and frisk about from one to the other of the two seas, chased by dolphins and falianos, and preyed upon by innumerable kingfishers, from whose very mouths the booty is often snatched by the piombini.

Cooks from great houses, old Mussulman bons-vivants, slaves, and young employés from the various restaurants surround the tables, examine the fish with a meditative air, bargain in monosyllables, and walk off, each carrying his purchase suspended by a bit of twine, grave, taciturn, self-contained as though it were the head of an enemy. By mid-day the square is deserted and the venders have repaired to the various cafés in the neighborhood, where they will sit with their backs against the wall and the mouthpiece of a narghileh between their lips, in a sort of waking sleep, until sunset.

To reach the Great Bazâr we take a street opening out of the fish-market, so narrow that the projecting parts of the opposite houses almost touch one another; on either side are rows of low, ill-lighted tobacconist shops, that “fourth support of the tent of voluptuousness,” coming after coffee, opium, and wine, or “the fourth of pleasure’s couches,” as it is sometimes called. Like coffee, tobacco has been blasted by imperial edicts and denounced by the mufti, with the usual result of adding fresh zest to its use and making it a fruitful source of tumult and punishment; and now this entire street is devoted to traffic in it alone. The tobacco is displayed upon long shelves in pyramids and round piles, each one surmounted by a lemon. All kinds are to be found here: latakia from Antioch; Seraglio tobacco as fine and smooth as spun silk; tobacco for pipe and cigarette of every grade of strength and flavor, from that smoked by the gigantic porter of Galata to that used by the indolent odalisques of the Seraglio to put them to sleep. There is the tombeki, so powerful that it would set the head of even a veteran smoker spinning did its fumes not reach his mouth first purified by the water of the narghileh, and which is kept in glass jars like a drug. The tobacconists are all Greeks or Armenians, with ceremonious manners, somewhat inclined to give themselves airs. The customers assemble before the shops in groups. Many of them are employés of the various foreign ambassadors or of the Seraskerat, and occasionally one sees some personage of importance. It is a great place for gossip of all kinds; politics are discussed; the doings of the great world talked over; and merely to walk through this little, retired, aristocratic bazâr leaves a strong impression upon one’s mind of the joys to be obtained from conversation and tobacco.

We now pass beneath an old arched doorway festooned with vines, and come out opposite a large stone edifice, from which opens a long, straight, covered street lined with dimly-lighted shops and filled with people, packing-boxes, and heaps of merchandise. Entering this, we are immediately assailed by an odor so powerful as to fairly knock one down: this is the Egyptian Bazâr, where are deposited all the wares of India, Syria, Egypt, and Arabia, which later on, converted into essences, pastilles, powders, and ointments, serve to color little hands and faces, perfume apartments and baths and breaths and beards, reinvigorate worn-out pashas, dull the senses of unhappy married people, stupefy smokers, and spread dreams, oblivion, and insensibility throughout the whole of the vast city. After going but a short distance in this bazâr your head begins to feel dull and heavy, and you get out of it as fast as you can; but the effect of that hot, close atmosphere and those penetrating odors clings long to your clothing, and remains for all time in your memory as one of the most vivid and characteristic impressions of the East.

After escaping from the Egyptian Bazâr you pass among a crowd of noisy coppersmiths’ shops, Turkish restaurants, from which issue endless nauseous smells, and all manner of wretched booths, shops, and stands, dark little dens containing trash of all sorts, and finally come to the Great Bazâr itself, not, however, before you have been obliged to defend yourself from a vigorous attack.

About a hundred feet from the main entrance there lie in ambush like so many cutthroats the agents or middlemen of the merchants and the agents of the agents. These fellows are so well up in their business that at a single glance they learn not only that this is your first visit to the bazâr, but usually make so clever a guess as to your nationality that they rarely make a mistake in the language which they first address you in.

Approaching, fez in hand, they proceed, with an engaging smile, to offer their services.

There usually then follows a conversation something like this: the traveller, declining the proffered service, remarks,

“I do not propose to make any purchases.”

“Oh, sir, what difference does that make? I only want to show you the bazâr.”

“I don’t care to see the bazâr.”

“But I will escort you gratis.”

“I don’t wish to be escorted gratis.”

“Very well; then I will just go to the end of the street with you, merely to give you certain points, which you will find very useful some other day when you come to buy.”

“But suppose I don’t want to even hear you talk about buying?”

“Very well, then, let us talk about something else. How long have you been in Constantinople? Is your hotel comfortable? Have you gotten permits to visit the mosques?”

“But when I tell you that I don’t want to talk about anything—that I wish, in short, to be alone—”

“All right; then I will leave you alone, and follow a dozen steps behind you.”

“But why should you follow me at all?”

“Merely to prevent you from being cheated in the shops.”

“But I tell you I am not going into the shops.”

“Well, then, to save you from annoyance on the street.”

And so you must finally either pause to take breath and collect your ideas, or else yield and allow him to accompany you.

There is nothing about the exterior of the Great Bazâr to either attract the eye or give the faintest idea of what it is within. It is an immense stone edifice in the Byzantine style, irregular in form and surrounded by high gray walls, lighted by means of hundreds of small lead-covered domes in the roof. The principal entrance is through a high, vaulted doorway of no architectural pretensions. Outside, in the neighboring streets, no sounds can be heard of what is going on within, and half a dozen steps away from the entrance one might easily believe that only silence and solitude reigned within those prison-like walls; once inside, however, this delusion is quickly dispelled. You find yourself not in a building at all, but in a labyrinth of streets with vaulted roofs, lined with columns and carved pilasters—a veritable city, with mosques and fountains, thoroughfares and open squares, pervaded with the dim, subdued light of the forest, where no ray or gleam of sunshine ever penetrates, and thronged with immense crowds of people. Every street is a bazâr, generally leading out of the principal thoroughfare—a street covered by a roof composed of white and black stone arches and decorated with arabesques like the nave of a mosque. Processions of horses, camels, and carriages pass up and down the dimly-lighted streets, in the midst of the throng of foot-passengers, with a deafening, reverberating noise. On all sides attempts are being made by word and gesture to attract your attention. The Greek merchant hails you with loud, imperious voice, while his Armenian rival, by far the greater knave of the two, assumes a modest, retiring manner, addressing you in soft, obsequious tones; the Jew murmurs gently in your ear; while the Turk, silent and reserved as ever, squats on a cushion in his doorway and contents himself with addressing you solely with his eye, leaving the results to Fate. Ten voices appeal to you at once: “Monsieur! captain! caballero! signore! eccelenza! kyrie! milor!” Down every cross-street you catch glimpses of new vistas, long lines of columns and pilasters, corridors, other streets opening out of these again, arcades and galleries, confused far-off views of new bazârs, shops, merchandise suspended on the walls and from the roofs, bustling merchants, heavily-laden porters, figures of veiled women, noisy groups, which constantly form, dissolve, and form again—a mingling of sights, sounds, colors, and movement to set one’s head in a whirl. The confusion, however, is only apparent: in reality, this enormous mart is arranged with as much system and order as a barracks, and it takes but a few hours for one to become sufficiently at home in it to find his way to any object without difficulty or the help of a dragoman. Every separate kind of merchandise has its own especial quarter, its little street, corridor, and square; there are a hundred small bazârs opening one into another like the rooms in some vast suite of apartments, and each bazâr is at the same time a museum, a promenade, a market, and a theatre, in which you can look at all without buying anything, can drink your cup of coffee, enjoy the open air, chat in a dozen different languages, and make eyes at the prettiest girls to be found in the East.

Date Seller.

Dropping at random into any one of these bazârs, half a day goes by without your so much as knowing it: take, for instance, the bazâr of stuffs and costumes. Here are displayed such a dazzling array of beautiful and rare objects that you at once lose your head, to say nothing of your purse, and the chances are that, should you in any unguarded moment be tempted to satisfy some small caprice, you will end by having to telegraph home for assistance. You pass between pyramids and heaps of Bagdad brocades; rugs from Caramania; Brusa silks; India linens; muslins from Bengal; shawls from Madras; Indian and Persian cashmeres: the variegated fabrics of Cairo; gold-embroidered cushions; silken veils striped with silver; striped blue and red gauze scarfs, so light and transparent as to look like clouds; stuffs of every variety of color and design, in which blue and green, crimson and yellow, all the colors which disagree most violently, are combined and blended together in a harmony so perfect and exquisite that you can only gaze in open-mouthed admiration; table-covers of all sizes upon whose background of red or white cloth are outlined intricate silken designs of flowers, verses from the Koran, and imperial monograms, which it would take a day to examine, like a wall in the Alhambra. Here one has as good an opportunity to see and admire, one by one, each of the various articles which go to make up the costume of a Turkish lady as though it were the alcove of a harem, from the green or orange or purple mantles which are thrown over everything in public down to the silken chemise, gold-embroidered kerchief, and even the satin girdle upon which no eye of man other than that of the husband or eunuch is ever allowed to fall. Here may be seen red-velvet caftans edged with ermine and covered with stars; yellow satin bodices; trousers of rose-colored silk; white damask undervests thickly covered with gold flowers; wedding veils sparkling with silver spangles; little greencloth jackets edged with swan’s down; Greek, Armenian, Circassian costumes of a thousand fantastic shapes, so thickly covered with ornamentation as to be as hard and glittering as breastplates; and mixed in with all this magnificence the sombre, commonplace, serviceable stuffs of England and France, producing much the same effect upon the mind as would the sight of a tailor’s bill introduced into the pages of a volume of poems. If there is a woman anywhere in the world whom you care for, you cannot walk through this bazâr without longing to be a millionaire or else feeling the passion for plunder blaze up within you, if only for a moment.

To free yourself from these unhallowed desires you have but turn a little to one side and you find yourself in the pipe-bazâr, where the soul is gently conducted back to more tranquil pastures. Here you come upon collections of cherry, maple, rosewood, and jessamine pipes, and of yellow amber mouth-pieces from the Baltic Sea, polished until they shine like crystal, and of every grade of color and transparency, some of them set with diamonds or rubies; pipes from Cæsarea, their stems wrapped with silk and gold thread; tobacco-pouches from Lybia decorated with many-colored lozenges and gorgeous embroidery; silver, steel, and Bohemian glass narghilehs of exquisite antique shapes, engraved and chased and studded with precious stones, their morocco tubes glittering with rings and gilding, all wrapped in raw cotton and under the constant surveillance of two glittering eyes whose gaze never wavers; but let any one short of a vizier or a pasha who has spent years in bleeding some province of Asia Minor approach, and the pupils dilate in such a manner as to cause the modest inquiry as to the price to die away upon one’s lips. Here the purchaser must be some envoy of the sultana anxious to present a slight token of her appreciation to the pliable grand vizier; or a high court dignitary, who on assuming the cares of his new office is obliged, in order to maintain his dignity, to expend the sum of fifty thousand francs upon a rack of pipes; or a newly-appointed foreign ambassador who on departing for some European court wishes to take to its royal master a magnificent memento of Stambul. The Turk of modest means gazes mournfully upon these treasures and passes by on the other side, paraphrasing for his consolation that saying of the Prophet, “The flames of the infernal regions shall rage like the bellowing of the camel in the stomach of him who shall smoke a pipe of gold or silver.”

Passing from here into the perfumery bazâr, we once more find ourselves beset with temptations. It is one of the most distinctively Oriental in character of all the bazârs, and its wares were very dear to the heart of the Prophet, who classes together women, children, and perfumes as the three things which gave him the greatest pleasure. Here are to be had those famous Seraglio pastilles designed to perfume kisses; packages of the scented gum prepared by the hardy daughters of Chio to be used in strengthening the gums of delicate Mussulman women; exquisite essence of jessamine and of bergamont and powerful attar of roses, enclosed in red-velvet, gold-embroidered cases, and sold at prices that make one’s hair stand on end; here can be bought ointment for the eyebrows, antimony for the eyes, henne for the nails, soap to soften the Syrian beauty’s skin, and pills to prevent hair from growing on the face of the too masculine Circassian; cedar and orange-water, scent-bags of musk, sandal oil, ambergris, aloes to perfume cups and pipes—a myriad of different powders, pomatums, and waters with fanciful names and destined to uses undreamed of in the prosaic West, each one representing in itself some amorous fancy or seductive caprice, the very refinement of voluptuousness, and exhaling, all together, an odor at once penetrating and sensual, and dreamily suggestive of great languid eyes, soft caressing hands, and the subdued murmur of sighs and embraces.

These fancies are quickly dispelled on turning into the jewelry bazâr, a narrow, dark, deserted street, flanked by wretched-looking little shops, the last places on earth where one would expect to find the fabulous treasures which, as a matter of fact, they do contain. The jewels are kept in oaken coffers, hooped and bound with iron, which stand in the front of the shops under the ever-watchful gaze of the merchant, some old Turk or Hebrew with long beard, and piercing eyes which seem to penetrate into the very recesses of your pocket and examine the contents of your purse; occasionally one or another of them, standing erect before his door, as you pass close by first regards you fixedly in the eye, and then with a rapid movement flashes before your face a diamond of Golconda, a sapphire from Ormus, or a ruby of Gramschid, which at the slightest negative movement on your part is as quickly withdrawn from sight. Others, circulating slowly about, stop you in the middle of the street, and, after casting a suspicious glance all around, draw forth from their bosoms a dirty bit of rag in whose folds is hidden a fine Brazilian topaz or Macedonian turquoise, watching like some tempting demon to see its effect upon you. Others, again, after scrutinizing you closely, come to the conclusion that you have not the precious-stones look, as it were, and do not trouble themselves to offer you anything, and you may wear the face of a saint or the airs of a Crœsus, and it will not avail to open those oaken boxes. The opal necklaces, emerald stars and pendants, the coronets and crescents of pearls of Ophir, the dazzling heaps of beryls, agates, garnets, of crystals, aventurine, and lapis lazuli remain inexorably hidden from the eyes of the curious, provided he has no money, or, at all events, from those of a poor devil of an Italian writer. The utmost such an one can accomplish is to ask the price of a coral or sandal-wood or amber tespi which he runs through his fingers, as the Turk does, to pass away the time in the intervals of his forced labors.

If you want to be really amused, though, just go into the Frankish shops, those which deal in everything, and where there are goods to suit all pockets. Hardly has your foot crossed the threshold before a crowd of people spring up from you don’t know where, and in an instant you are surrounded. It is out of the question to transact your business with one single person. What between the merchant himself, his partners, his agents, and the various hangers-on of the establishment, you never have to do with less than a half dozen at least. If you escape being floored by one, you are, so to speak, strung up by another. There is no way by which final defeat can be warded off. Words fail to describe their patience, art, and persistency, the diabolical subterfuges to which they resort in order to force you to buy what they choose. Finding everything put at an exorbitant price, you offer a third, upon which they drop their arms in sign of profound discouragement or beat their foreheads in dumb despair, or else they burst into an impassioned torrent of appeal and expostulation calculated to touch your feelings as a man and a brother. You are hard and cruel; you are evidently determined to force them to close their shops; your object is to reduce them to misery and want; you have no compassion for their innocent children; they wonder plaintively what injury they could ever have done you that you should be so bent upon their ruin. While you are being told the price of an article an agent from a neighboring shop hisses in your ear, “Don’t buy it; you are being cheated.” Taking this for a piece of honest advice, you soon discover that there is an understanding between him and the shopkeeper; the information that you are being imposed upon in the matter of a shawl is only given in order to fleece you far worse in the purchase of a hanging. While you are examining the various articles they talk in broken sentences among themselves, gesticulating, striking their breasts, casting looks full of dark meaning. If you understand Greek, the conversation is in Turkish; if you are familiar with that, it is in Armenian; if you show any knowledge of Armenian, they employ Spanish; but whatever language is adopted, they know enough of it to cheat you. If after some time you still preserve an unbroken front, they begin stroking you down—tell you how beautifully you talk their tongue; that you have all the air and manner of a real gentleman; that they will never be able to forget your attractive face. They talk of the land of your birth, where they have passed so many happy years. They have, in fact, been everywhere. Then they make you a cup of fresh coffee and offer to accompany you to the custom-house when you leave in order to interpose between you and the overbearing authorities; which means, being interpreted, in order to secure a final opportunity for cheating you and your fellow-travellers, in case you may have any. They turn their whole shop upside down for you, and should you finally leave without having bought anything, you get no black looks, as they have a sustaining conviction that the harvest is only deferred; if not to-day, then some other day: you are certain to return to the bazâr, when their bloodhounds will scent you out, and should you escape falling into their clutches, you will undoubtedly be caught in the toils of one of their associates; if they do not fleece you as shopkeepers, they will flay you as agents; if they fail to overreach you in the bazâr, they will get the better of you at the custom-house. Of what nationality are these men? No one knows: by dint of having a smattering of so many different languages they have lost their original accent, and the constant habit of acting a part has ended by altering the natural lines of their faces to such a degree as to efface their national traits. They belong to any race you choose, and their profession is whatever you may have need of at the moment—shopkeeper, guide, interpreter, money-lender, and, above all, past master in the art of gulling the universe.

The Mussulman shopkeepers present an altogether different field of observation. Among them may still be found examples of those venerable Turks, rarely enough to be seen now-a-days in the streets of Constantinople, who look like living representatives of the days of the Muhammads and Bayezids, remnants left intact of that mighty Ottoman edifice whose walls received their first rude shock in the reforms of Mahmûd, and which since then, year by year, stone by stone, have been crumbling into ruins. One must now go to the Great Bazâr and search in the dimmest shops of the most obscure streets to behold those enormous turbans of the time of Suleiman, shaped like the dome of a mosque, and beneath them the impressive face, the expressionless eye, hooked nose, long white beard, antique purple or orange caftan, full, plaited trousers confined about the waist by a huge sash, and the haughty and melancholy bearing of a once all-powerful people. With expressions dulled by opium or lighted up with the fire of fanaticism, they sit all day in the backs of their dens with crossed legs and folded arms, calm and unmoved like idols, awaiting with closed lips the predestined purchaser. If business is brisk, they murmur, “Mach Allah!” (God be praised!); if dull, “Ol-sun!” (So be it!), and bow their heads resignedly. Some employ their time in reading the Koran; others run the beads of the tespi through their fingers, murmuring under their breath the hundred epithets of Allah; others, whose affairs have prospered, drink their narghilehs, as the Turks express it, slowly revolving around them their sleepy, voluptuous-looking eyes; others sit with drooping lids and bent brow in an attitude of profound meditation. Of what are they thinking? Possibly of their sons killed beneath the walls of Sebastopol, of their far-off caravans, of the lost pleasures of youth, or possibly of the eternal gardens promised by the Prophet, where, in the shade of the palm and the pomegranate, they will espouse those dark-eyed brides never yet profaned by mortal or geni. There is about each individual one of them something striking and original, and all are picturesque. The shop forms a framework for a picture full of color and suggestion; one’s mind is instantly filled with images taken from history or what is known of the domestic life of this strange people. This spare, bronzed man with a bold, alert expression is an Arab; he has led his train of camels laden with gems and alabaster from the interior of his far-off country, and more than once has felt the balls of the robbers of the desert whiz past him. This one in the yellow turban, bearing himself with an air of command, has crossed the solitudes of Syria on horseback, carrying with him treasures of silk from Tyre and Sidon. Yonder negro, with his head enveloped in an old Persian shawl, is from Nubia; his forehead is covered with scars made by magicians to preserve him from death, and he holds his head aloft as though still beholding before him the Colossus of Thebes or summits of the Pyramids. This good-looking Moor, with his black eyes and pallid skin, wrapped in a long snow-white cloak, has carried his caic and his carpets from the uttermost western limits of the Atlas chain. That green-turbaned Turk, with the emaciated face, has this very year returned from the great pilgrimage. After seeing relatives and companions die of thirst amid the interminable plains of Asia Minor, he finally reached Mecca in the last stages of exhaustion, and, after dragging himself seven times around the Kaaba, finally fell half swooning upon the Black Stone, covering it with impassioned kisses. This giant with a pale face, arched brows, and piercing eyes, who has far more the air of a warrior than of a merchant, his entire bearing breathing nothing but pride and arrogance, has brought his furs hither from the northern regions of the Caucasus, and in his day struck at a blow the head from off the shoulders of more than one Cossack. And this poor wool-merchant, with his flat face and small oblique eyes, active and sinewy as an athlete, it is not so long since he was saying his prayers in the shadow of that immense dome which rises above the sepulchre of Tamerlane. Starting from Samarcand, he crossed the desert of Great Bûkharia, and, passing safely through the midst of the Turkoman hordes, crossed the Dead Sea, escaped the balls of the Circassians, and, after returning thanks to Allah in the mosques of Trebizond, has at last come to seek his fortune in Stambul, from whence, as he grows old, he will surely return once more to his beloved Tartary, which always claims the first place in his heart.

The shoe bazâr is one of the most resplendent of all, and possibly fills the brain more than any other with wild longings and riotous desires. It consists of two glittering rows of shops, which make the street in which it is situated look like a suite of royal apartments or like one of those gardens in the Arabian fairy-stories where the fruit trees are laden with pearls and have golden leaves. There are shoes enough there to supply the feet of every court in Europe and Asia. The walls are completely covered with slippers of the sauciest shapes and most striking and fanciful colors, made out of skins, velvet, brocade, and satin, ornamented with filigree-work, gold, tinsel, pearls, silken tassels, swan’s down; flowered and starred in gold and silver; so thickly covered with intricate embroidery as to completely hide the original texture; and glittering with emeralds and sapphires. You can buy shoes there for the boatman’s bride or for the Seraglio belle; you may pay five francs a pair or a thousand. There are morocco shoes destined to walk the paved streets of Pera, and beside them Turkish slippers which will one day glide over the thick carpets of some pasha’s harem; light wooden shoes which will resound on the marbles of the imperial baths; tiny slippers of white satin on which ardent lovers’ kisses will be showered; and it may well be that yonder pair encrusted with pearls will some day stand beside the couch of the Padishâh himself, awaiting the pretty feet of some beautiful Georgian. But how, you ask yourself, is it possible for any feet to get into such tiny little receptacles? Some of them seem intended to fit the houris and fairies—long as the leaf of a lily, wide as the leaf of a rose, of such dimensions as to throw all Andalusia into despair; graceful as a dream—not slippers at all, but jewels, toys, objects to stand on one’s table full of bonbons or to keep billetsdoux in. Once allow your imagination to dwell upon the foot which could wear them, and you are seized with an insane desire to behold it yourself, to stroke and caress it like some pretty plaything. This bazâr is one of those most frequented by strangers: it is not unusual to encounter young Europeans wandering about with slips of paper in their hands upon which are inscribed the measurements of some small French or Italian foot, of which they are possibly quite proud, and it is amusing to see their faces fall and the look of incredulous astonishment which follows the discovery that some slipper which has attracted their fancy is far too small; while others, having asked the price of a pair they had thought of buying, receive so overwhelming a reply that they make off without a word. Here, too, may sometimes be seen Mussulman ladies (hanum) with long white veils, and one can often catch, in passing, fragments of their lengthy dialogues with the shopkeepers, brief sentences of that beautiful language, uttered in sweet, clear tones, which fall upon the ear like the notes of a mandolin: “Buni catscia verersin!” (How much is this?) “Pahalli dir” (It is too high). “Ziade veremem” (I won’t pay any more). And then a childish, ringing laugh, which makes you feel like patting them on the head or pinching their cheeks.

But the richest and most picturesque of all is the armory bazâr. It is more like a museum, really, than a bazâr, overflowing with treasures and filled with objects which at once transport the imagination into the realms of history and legend. Every sort and shape of weapon is there, fantastic, horrible, cruel-looking, which has ever been brandished in defence of Islamism from Mecca to the Danube, polished and set out in warlike array, as though but now laid down by the fanatical soldiery of Muhammad and Selim. You seem to see the glittering eyes of those formidable sultans, those savage Janissaries, those spahis and azabs, drunk with blood, amid the gleaming blades—those silidars, to whom pity and fear were alike unknown, and who strewed Europe and Asia Minor with severed heads and stiffened corpses. Here are displayed those renowned cimeters capable of cutting through a floating feather or striking off the ears of audacious ambassadors; those heavy Turkish daggers which cleaved downward at a blow from the skull to the very heart; mighty clubs which crashed through Servian and Hungarian helmets; yataghans, their handles inlaid with ivory and encrusted with amethysts and rubies, and on their blades the engraved record of the number of heads they have cut off; poniards with silver, velvet, or satin sheaths and agate or ivory handles set with coral, turquoise, and garnets, inscribed in golden lettering with verses from the Koran, their blades curved backward as though feeling for a heart. Who can tell whether amid all this strange and terrible array there may not be the cimeter of Orcano or the sabre with which the powerful arm of the warrior-dervish Abd-el-Murad struck off the heads of his enemies at a single blow; or that famous yataghan with which Sultan Moussa clove asunder the body of Hassan from shoulder to heart; or the huge cimeter of the Bulgarian giant who set the first ladder in place against the walls of Constantinople; or the club with which Muhammad II. felled his rapacious soldiers beneath the roof of St. Sophia; or the mighty Damascus sabre with which Scanderbeg cut down Firuzi Pasha beneath the walls of Stetigrad? All the most horrible massacres and blood-curdling murders of Ottoman history, revolts of the Janissaries, and black deeds of treachery come crowding into one’s mind at the mere sight of these terrific weapons, and one fancies that bloodstains can be detected upon the gleaming blades, and that those old Turks lurking in the dim recesses of their shops have gathered them from the field of battle—yes, and the bodies of their owners as well—and that even now their shattered skeletons are occupying some obscure corner close at hand. In among the arms are great blue and scarlet velvet saddles, worked with gold stars and crescents and embroidered in pearls, with plumed frontals and chased silver bits; saddle-cloths magnificent as royal mantles; trappings which remind one of the Thousand and One Nights, seemingly intended for the use of a king of the genii making his triumphal entry into a golden city in the land of dreams. Suspended on the walls above all these treasures are antique firelock muskets, clumsy Albanian pistols, long Arabian guns worked and chased like pieces of jewelry; ancient shields made out of bark, tortoise-shell, or hippopotamus skin; Circassian armor, Cossack shields, Mongolian head-pieces, Turkish bows, executioners’ axes, great blades of uncouth shape and full of horrible suggestions, each one of which seems to bear witness to a crime committed, and brings before one frightful visions of death-agonies.

Seated cross-legged in the midst of all these objects of magnificence and horror are the merchants who, of all those to be found in the Great Bazâr, present the most striking and distinctive examples of the true Mussulman. They are, for the most part, old, of forbidding aspect, lean as anchorites, haughty as sultans, belonging apparently to another age and wearing the dress of a bygone era: it would seem as though they had arisen from the dead for the purpose of recalling their degenerate descendants to the forgotten austerities of their ancient race.

Another spot well worth seeing is the old-clothes bazâr. Rembrandt would simply have taken up his abode here, and Goya have expended his last peseta. Any one who has never been in an Oriental second-hand shop can form no idea of the variety and richness of the rags, pomp of color, and irony of contrast to be found in them—a sight at once fantastic, melancholy, and repellent. They are a sort of rag-sewer, in which the refuse of harem, barrack, court, and theatre await together the moment when some artist’s caprice or beggar’s necessity shall once more call them forth into the light of day. From long poles fastened to the walls depend antique Turkish uniforms, swallow-tailed coats, fine gentlemen’s cloaks, dervishes’ tunics, Bedouins’ mantles, all greasy, torn, and faded, looking as though they had been taken by force from their former owners, and strongly resembling the booty found on footpads and assassins which may be seen on exhibition in the Court of Assizes. In among all these rags and tatters one catches the glitter of an occasional bit of gold embroidery; old silk scarfs and turbans, all unwrapped, dangle to and fro; a rich shawl with ragged edges; a velvet corsage looking as though some rude hand had torn off its trimming of pearls and fur; slippers and veils which may once have belonged to some beautiful sinner, whose body, sewn up in a bag, now sleeps quietly enough beneath the rippling waters of the Bosphorus;—these and countless other feminine garments and adornments, of all manner of charming shapes and colors, hang imprisoned between rough Circassian caftans, long black Jewish capes, rusty cartridge-boxes, heavy cloaks and coarse tunics beneath whose folds who knows how often the bandit’s musket or dagger of the assassin may have been hidden? On toward evening, when the subdued light from the roof above becomes still more uncertain, all these garments, as they sway back and forth in the wind, assume the look and air of human bodies strung up there by some murderer’s hand, and just then, as your eye catches the sinister glance of one of those old Jews seated watchfully in the rear of his gloomy den of a shop, you cannot avoid fancying that the skinny claw with which he scratches his forehead can be no other than the one which tightened the rope—a soothing idea which causes you to glance involuntarily over your shoulder to see if the entrance to the bazâr is still open.

One day of wandering here and there will not suffice if you really wish to see every part of this strange city. There is the fez bazâr, in which are to be found fezzes of every country in the world, from that of Morocco to the Vienna fez, ornamented with inscriptions from the Koran, which serve to ward off evil spirits; the fez which is worn perched on the tops of their heads by the pretty Greek girls of Smyrna, surmounting their coils of black hair intertwined with coins; the little red fez of the Turkish women; soldiers’, generals’, sultans’, dandies’ fezzes, of all shades of red and every style, from the primitive ones worn in the days of Orcano to the large and elegant fez of Mahmûd, emblem of reform and an abomination in the eyes of Mussulmans of the old school.

Then there is the fur bazâr, where may be seen the sacred fur of the black wolf, which at one time none but the Sultan himself and his grand vizier were allowed to wear; the marten, used to trim state caftans; skins of white and black bears; astrakhan, ermine, blue wolf, and rich sable skins, upon which in old times the sultans would expend fabulous sums of money.

Then the cutlery bazâr is worth a visit, if only to examine those huge Turkish shears whose bronzed and gilded blades, adorned with fantastic designs of birds and flowers, open with a murderous sweep wide enough to swallow up entirely the head of an unfavorable critic.

There are the gold-thread embroidery, china, household utensils, and tailors’ bazârs, all differing from one another in size, shape, and character, but all in one respect alike, that in none of them do you ever see a woman either attending to the customers or working apart. At the very most, it may occasionally happen that a Greek woman, seated for a moment in front of some tailor’s shop, will timidly offer to sell you a handkerchief she has just finished embroidering. Oriental jealousy forbids shopkeeping to the fair sex, as offering too wide a field for coquetry and intrigue.

In other parts of the Great Bazâr it is as well for a stranger not to venture unless he is accompanied by a dragoman or one of the shopkeepers. Those are the interior parts of the various districts into which this strange city is divided—the islands, as it were, about which wind and twist the rapid currents of streets and byways. If it is a difficult matter to keep from losing your way among the main thoroughfares, in here it is quite impossible. From passage-ways scarcely wider than a man’s shoulders, where it is necessary to stoop to avoid striking your head, you come out upon tiny courtyards encumbered with bales and boxes, where hardly so much as a single ray of light can penetrate. Feeling your way down flights of wooden steps, you come to other courts lighted only by lanterns, from which you descend below ground, or, climbing up again into what passes for the light of day, stumble with bent head through long, winding corridors, beneath damp roofs and between black and moss-grown walls, to come at last upon some small hidden doorway, and suddenly find yourself exactly where you started. Everywhere shadowy forms are seen coming and going; dusky shapes stand immovable in dark corners, outlines of persons handling merchandise or counting money; lights which flash ahead of you at one moment, and the next, disappear; a sound of hurrying footsteps, of low, eager voices, coming from you don’t know where; reflections thrown from unseen lights; suspicious encounters; strange odors like those one might expect to escape from a witch’s cave; and apparently no possible means of escape from it all. The dragoman is very apt to conduct his victim through these quarters on his way to those shops, usually somewhat apart, which contain a little of everything, like Great Bazârs in miniature or a superior sort of second-hand shop, extremely curious and interesting, but extremely perilous as well, since they contain such a variety of rare and attractive objects as to woo the money out of the pocket of the veriest miser. The shopkeepers here are great solemn knaves, thoroughly well versed in every art appertaining to their business, and, polyglot like their brothers of the trade, have a certain dramatic power which they employ in the most entertaining manner to tempt people to buy, sometimes rising to the level of genuinely good acting. Their shops usually consist of dark little holes cluttered up with boxes and chests of drawers, where lights have to be lit in order to see anything, and there is barely enough space to turn around in. After displaying a few trifles inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, some bits of Chinese porcelain, a Japanese vase or two, and some other things of the same sort, the shopkeeper informs you with an impressive air that he sees what sort of person you are, and will now bring out something especially suited to you. He then proceeds to pull out a certain drawer, whose contents he empties upon the table. There are all manner of knick-knacks and gewgaws—a peacock-feather fan, a bracelet made of old Turkish coins, a little leather cushion with the Sultan’s monogram embroidered upon it in gold, a Persian hand-glass painted with a scene from the Book of Paradise, one of those tortoise-shell spoons with which Turks eat cherry compôte, an ancient decoration of the Order of Osmanieh. You don’t care for any of these, either? Very well. He turns out the contents of another, and this is a drawer which, as a matter of fact, was being reserved for your eye alone. There is a broken elephant’s tusk; a Trebizond bracelet, looking as though it had been made from a lock of silver hair; a Japanese idol; a sandal-wood comb from Mecca; a large Turkish spoon, chased and filigreed; an antique silver narghileh, gilded and inscribed; bits of mosaic from St. Sophia; a heron’s feather, which once ornamented the turban of Selim III.: for the truth of this last statement the merchant, as a man of honor, is willing to vouch. And still there is nothing which suits your fancy? Here, then, is another drawer, crammed full of treasures—an ostrich egg from Sahara; a Persian inkstand; a chased ring; a Mingrelian bow, with its quiver made out of an elk’s skin; a Circassian two-pointed head-piece; a jasper rosary; a smelling-bottle of beaten gold; a Turkish talisman; a camel-driver’s knife; a box of attar-gul. In Heaven’s name, is there still nothing that tempts you? Have you no presents to make? no beloved relatives? no dear friends? Perhaps, though, your tastes run to stuffs and carpets. Well, here too he can assist you as a friend. “Behold, milor, this striped Kurdistan mantle, this lion skin; yonder rug is from Aleppo, with its little steel fastenings, while this Casablanca carpet, three fingers thick, is guaranteed to last for four generations; here, Your Excellency, are old cushions, old brocade scarfs, old silken coverlids, a little faded, a little frayed out at the edges, it is true, but such embroidery as you could not get in these days, even if you were to offer a fortune. You, caballero, have been brought here by a friend of mine, and for that reason I am going to let you have this ancient sash for the sum of five napoleons, and live myself on bread and garlic for one week in order to make up the loss.” Should even this magnificent offer fail to move you, he whispers in your ear that he has in his possession, and is moreover willing to sell, the very rope with which the terrible Seraglio mutes strangled Nassuh Pasha, Muhammad Third’s grand vizier. And if you laugh in his face and decline to swallow it, he gives it up at once like a sensible man, and proceeds to make his final effort, displaying before you, in rapid succession, a horse’s tail such as were once carried before and after every pasha; a janissary’s helmet, spattered with blood, which his own father picked up on the day of the famous massacre; a scrap of one of the flags carried in the Crimea, showing the silver star and crescent; a wash-basin studded with agates; a brazier of beaten copper; a dromedary-collar with its shells and bells; a eunuch’s whip made of hippopotamus leather; a gold-bound Koran; a Khorassan scarf; a pair of slippers from a kadyn’s wardrobe; a candlestick made from the claw of an eagle,—until at length your imagination is fired. The longing to possess breaks forth, and you are seized with a mad impulse to throw down your purse, watch, overcoat, everything you have, and fill your pockets with booty. One must indeed be an uncommonly well-balanced person, a very mountain of wisdom, to be able to withstand the temptations of this place, whence many an artist has come forth as poor as Job, and where more than one rich man has thrown away his fortune.

But before the Great Bazâr closes let us take a turn around to see how it looks at the end of the day. The crowd moves along more hurriedly; shopkeepers call out to you and gesticulate more imperiously than ever; Greeks and Armenians run through the streets calling aloud, with shawls or rugs hung over their arms, or form into groups, bargaining and discussing as they move about, then break up and form again into other groups farther off; horses, carriages, beasts of burden, all moving in the direction of the gateway, pass by in endless files. At this hour all those tradespeople with whom you have had fruitless negotiations during the day start to life again, circling around you in the dusk like so many bats: you see them peeping out from behind columns; come suddenly upon them at every turn; they cross in front of you or pass close by you gazing abstractedly in the air, to remind you by their presence of that certain rug or that bit of jewelry, and, if possible, reawaken your desire to possess it. Sometimes you are followed by a whole troop of them at once: if you stop, they do the same; if you slip down a side street, you find them there before you; turning suddenly, you are aware of a dozen sharp eyes fixed upon you which seem to fairly devour you whole. But already the fading light warns the crowd to disperse. Beneath the vaulted roof can be heard the voice of an invisible muezzin announcing the sunset from some wooden minaret. Some Turks have spread strips of carpet in the street before their shop-doors and are murmuring the evening prayer; others perform their ablutions at the fountains. The centenarians of the armor bazâr have already shut to their great iron doors; the smaller bazârs are empty; the farther ends of the corridors are lost in shadow, and the openings of the side streets look like the mouths of caves. Camels suddenly loom up close to you in the uncertain light; the voices of the water-carriers echo distantly among the arched roofs; the Turk quickens his step and the eunuch’s eyes grow more alert; strangers are seen hurrying away; the entrance is closed; the day ended.

And now on all sides I can hear the questions: What about St. Sophia? and the old Seraglio? and the Sultan’s palaces? and the Castle of the Seven Towers? and Abdul-Aziz? and the Bosphorus. All in good time: each one of them shall be fully described in turn, but for still a little while longer let us wander here and there about the city, touching at every page upon some new theme just as some new idea strikes our fancy at every step.

LIFE IN CONSTANTINOPLE.

The Light.

View of Stamboul. Mosque of Validêh and Bridge.

And first of all I must speak of the light. One of my chief pleasures at Constantinople was to watch the sun rise and set from the bridge of the Validéh Sultan. At daybreak in the autumn there is almost always a light fog hanging over the Golden Horn, through which the city can only be seen indistinctly, as though one were looking through those thin gauze curtains which are lowered across the stage of a theatre in order to hide the details of some grand spectacular effect. Skutari is quite invisible; only her hills, a vague outline, can be faintly traced against the eastern sky. The bridge, as well as both banks, is deserted. Constantinople is buried in slumber, and the profound silence and solitude lend solemnity and impressiveness to the scene. Presently behind the Skutari hills the sky begins to show streaks of gold, and, one by one, against that luminous background, the inky points of the cypress trees stand out clear and defined, like a company of giants drawn up in battle-array on the heights of her vast cemetery. Now a single ray of light flashes from one end to the other of the Golden Horn, like the first faint sigh of returning consciousness, as the great city stirs and slowly awakens once more to life. Then, behind the cypresses on the Asiatic shore, a fiery eye shines forth, and immediately upon the white summits of St. Sophia’s four minarets an answering blush is seen. In rapid succession from hill to hill, from mosque to mosque, to the farthest end of the Golden Horn, every minaret turns to rose, every dome to silver. The crimson flush creeps down from one terrace to another; the light increases, the veil is lifted, and all of Stambul lies revealed, rosy and resplendent on the heights, tinged with blue and violet shadows on the water’s edge, but everywhere fresh and sparkling as though just risen from the waves. In proportion as the sun rises higher and higher the delicacy of the first coloring disappears, swallowed up in the flood of dazzling light, which becomes so white and blinding as in turn to slightly obscure everything, until toward evening, when the glorious spectacle recommences. So clear does the atmosphere then become that from Galata you can easily distinguish each separate tree on the farthermost point of Kadi-keui. The huge profile of Stambul is thrown out against the sky with such distinctness and accuracy of detail that it would be quite possible to note one by one every minaret, every spire and cypress tree, that crowns her heights from Seraglio Point to the cemetery of Eyûb. The waters of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn turn to a marvellous ultramarine; the sky, of the color of amethysts in the east, grows fiery as it reaches Stambul, lighting up the horizon with a hundred tints of crimson and gold, making one think of the first day of creation. Stambul grows dim, Galata golden, while Skutari, receiving the full blaze of the setting sun upon her thousand casements, looks like a city devoured by flames. And this is the most perfect moment in all the twenty-four hours in which to see Constantinople. It is a rapid succession of the most exquisite tints—pale gold, rose, and lilac—mingling and blending one with another on the hillsides and water’s surface, lending to first one part of the city and then to another the finishing touch to its perfect beauty, and revealing a thousand modest charms of hill- and country-side, which were too shy to thrust themselves into notice beneath the blaze of the noonday sun. It is then that you see the great melancholy suburbs losing themselves amid the shadows of the valleys—little purple-tinted hamlets smiling on the hilltops; towns and villages which languish and droop as though their life were ebbing away; others disappear from view, as you look at them, like fires which have been suddenly extinguished; others, again, apparently quite dead, come unexpectedly to life again, all aglow, and sparkle joyously for still some moments longer in the last rays of the sun. Finally, however, nothing remains but two shining summits on the Asiatic shore—Mt. Bûlgurlù and the point of the cape which guards the entrance to the Propontis. At first they are two golden coronets, then two little crimson caps, then two rubies; and then Constantinople is plunged in shadow, while ten thousand voices from ten thousand minarets announce that the sun has set.

The Birds.

Constantinople possesses a grace and gayety all her own emanating from her myriads of birds of every species, objects of especial veneration and affection among the Turks. Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on. Sparrows come boldly into the houses and eat from the women’s and children’s hands; swallows build their nests over the doorways of cafés and beneath the roofs of bazârs; innumerable flocks of pigeons, maintained by means of legacies from different sultans as well as private individuals, form black and white garlands around the cornices of the domes and terraces of the minarets; gulls circle joyously about the granaries; thousands of turtle-doves bill and coo among the cypress trees in the cemeteries; all around the Castle of the Seven Towers ravens croak and vultures hover significantly; kingfishers come and go in long lines between the Black Sea and Sea of Marmora; while storks may be seen resting upon the domes of solitary mausoleums. For the Turk each one of these birds possesses some pleasing quality or lucky influence. The turtle-dove is the patron of lovers; the swallow will protect from fire any building where her nest is built; the stork performs a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca; while the halcyon carries the souls of the faithful to Paradise. Hence they feed and protect them both from religious motives and from gratitude, and in return the birds make a continual festival around their houses, on the water, and among the tombs. In every quarter of Stambul they soar and circle about, grazing against you in their noisy flights, and filling the entire city with something of the joyous freedom of the open country, constantly bringing up before one’s mind images of nature.

Associations.

In no other city of Europe do the sites and monuments, either legendary or historical, act so forcibly upon the imagination as at Stambul, because in no other spot do they record events at once so recent and so picturesque. Elsewhere, in order to get away from the prose of modern every-day life, one is obliged to go back for several centuries; at Stambul a few years suffice. Legend, or what has all the character and force of legend, dates from yesterday. It is not many years since, in the square of Et-Meidan, the celebrated massacre of the Janissaries took place; not many years since the waters of the Sea of Marmora cast up upon the banks of the imperial gardens those twenty sacks containing each the body of a beauty of Mustafa’s harem; not long since Brancovano’s family was executed in the Castle of the Seven Towers, or European ambassadors were pinioned between two kapuji-basci in the presence of the Grand Seigneur, upon whose half-averted countenance there glowed a mysterious light; or within the walls of the old Seraglio that life—so extraordinary—a mingling of horrors, love, and folly, ceased finally to exist, which now seems to belong to such a far-distant past. Wandering about the streets of Stambul and reflecting upon all these things, you cannot help a feeling of astonishment at the calm, cheerful aspect of the city, gay with color and vegetation. “Ah, traitoress!” you cry, “what have you done with all those mountains of heads, those lakes of blood? How is it possible that everything has been so cleverly concealed, so wiped out and obliterated, that not a trace remains?”

On the Bosphorus, beneath the Seraglio walls and just opposite Leander’s Tower, which rises from the water like a lover’s monument, you may still behold the inclined plane down which the bodies of the unfaithful beauties of the harem were rolled into the sea; in the middle of the Et-Meidan the serpentine column still bears witness to the force of Muhammad the Conqueror’s famous sabre; on the Mahmûd bridge the spot is still pointed out on which the fiery sultan annihilated at a single blow the adventurous dervish who had dared to fling an anathema in his face; in the Holy Well of the Balukli church the miraculous fish still swim about which foretold the fall of the City of the Palæologi; beneath the trees of the Sweet Waters of Asia you can visit those shady retreats where a dissolute sultana was wont to bestow upon the favorite of the hour that fatal love whose certain sequence was death. Every doorway, every tower, every mosque and park and open square, records some strange event—a tragedy, a love-story, a mystery, the absolutism of a padishah or the reckless caprice of a sultana; everything has a history of its own, and wherever you turn the near-by objects, the distant view, the balmy perfumed air, the silence, all unite to transport him whose mind is stored with these histories of the past out of himself, his era, and the city of to-day, so that not infrequently, when suddenly confronted with the suggestion that it is high time to think of returning to the hotel, he asks himself confusedly what it means, how can there be a “hotel.”

Serpentine Column of Delphi.

Resemblances.

In those early days, fresh from reading masses of Oriental literature, I kept recognizing in the people I met on the streets famous personages who figure in the legends and history of the East: sometimes they answered so entirely to the picture I had drawn in my own mind of some celebrated character that I would find myself stopping short in the street to gaze after them. How often have I seized my friend’s arm, and, pointing out some passer-by, exclaimed, “There he goes, by Jove! Don’t you recognize him?” In the square of the Sultan Validéh I have many a time seen the gigantic Turk who hurled down rocks and stones upon the heads of Baglione’s soldiers before the walls of Nicea; near one of the mosques I came across Unm Dgiemil, the old witch of Mecca who sowed thorns and brambles in front of Mohammed’s house; coming out of the book bazâr one day, I ran against Digiemal-eddin, the great scholar of Brusa, who knew all the Arabian dictionary by heart, walking along with a volume tucked under his arm; I have passed close enough to Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, to receive a steady look from those eyes “like twin stars reflected in a well.” I recognized in the Et-Meidan the beautiful and unfortunate Greek killed at the foot of the serpentine column by a ball from the huge guns of Orban; turning a sharp corner of one of the narrow streets of Phanar, I found myself suddenly face to face with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsomest young Turk of the days of Orkhan; I have seen Coswa, Mohammed’s she-camel, and recognized Kara-bidut, Selim’s black charger; I have encountered poor Fighani, the poet, who was condemned to go about Stambul harnessed to an ass for having made Ibrahim’s grand vizier the subject of a lampoon; I saw in one of the cafés the unwieldy form of Soliman, the fat admiral, whom the united efforts of four powerful slaves could with difficulty drag up from his divan; and Ali, the grand vizier, who failed to find throughout all Arabia a horse fit to carry him; and Mahmûd Pasha, that ferocious Hercules who strangled Suleiman’s son; and, established before the entrance of the copyists’ bazâr near the Bayezid square, that stupid Ahmed II., who would say nothing all day but “Kosc! kosc!” (Very well! very well!) Every character in the Thousand and One Nights—the Aladdins, the Zobeids, the Sinbads, the Gulnars, the old Jew dealers with their magic lamps and their enchanted carpets for sale—passed before me one after another like a procession of so many phantoms.

Costumes.

This is perhaps the very best period in which to study the dress of the Mussulman population of Constantinople. In the last generation, as will probably be the case in the next, it presented too uniform an appearance. You find it in a sort of transition stage, and presenting, consequently, a wonderful variety of form and color. The steady advance of the reform party, the resistance of the conservative Turks, the uncertainty and vacillation of the great mass of the people, hesitating between the two extremes—every aspect, in short, of the conflict which is being waged between ancient and modern Turkey—is faithfully reflected in the dress of her people. The old-fashioned Turk still wears his turban, his caftan and sash, and the traditional yellow morocco slippers, and, if he is one of the more strict and precise kind, a veritable Turk of the old school, the turban will be of vast proportions. The reformed Turk wears a long black coat buttoned close up under the chin, and dark shoes and trousers, preserving nothing Turkish in his costume but the fez. Some among the younger and bolder spirits have even gone farther, and, discarding the black frock-coat, substitute for it an open cut-away, light trousers, fancy cravat and jewelry, and carry a cane, and a flower in the buttonhole. Between these and those, the wearers of the caftan and the wearers of the coat, there is a deep gulf fixed. They no longer have anything in common but the name of Turk, and are in reality two separate nations. He of the turban still believes implicitly in the bridge Sirat, finer than a hair, sharper than a cimeter, which leads to the infernal regions; he faithfully performs his ablutions at the appointed hours, and at sunset shuts himself into his house. He of the frock-coat, on the contrary, laughs at the Prophet, has his photograph taken, talks French, and spends his evening at the theatre. Between these two extremes are those who, having departed somewhat from the ancient dress of their countrymen, are still unwilling to Europeanize themselves altogether. Some of them, while wearing turbans, yet have them so exceedingly small that some day they can be quietly exchanged for the fez without creating too much scandal; others who still wear the caftan have already adopted the fez; others, again, conform to the general fashion of the ancient costume, but have left off the sash and slippers as well as the bright colors, and little by little will get rid of the rest as well. The women alone still adhere to their veils and the long mantles covering the entire person; but the veil has grown transparent, and not infrequently reveals the outline of a little hat and feathers, while the mantle as often as not conceals a Parisian costume of the latest mode. Every year a thousand caftans disappear to make room for as many black coats; every day sees the death of a Turk of the old school, the birth of one of the new. The newspaper replaces the tespi, the cigar the chibuk; wine is used instead of flavored water, carriages instead of the arabà; the French grammar supersedes the Arabian, the piano the timbur; stone houses rise on the sites of wooden ones. Everything is undergoing change and transformation. At the present rate it may well be that in less than a century those who wish to find the traces of ancient Turkey will be obliged to seek for them in the remotest provinces of Asia Minor, just as we now look for ancient Spain in the most out-of-the-way villages of Andalusia.

Constantinople of the Future.

Often, while gazing at Constantinople from the bridge of the Sultan Validéh, I would be confronted by the question, “What is to become of this city in one or two centuries, even if the Turks are not driven out of Europe?” Alas! there is but little doubt that the great holocaust of beauty at the hands of civilization will have been already accomplished. I can see that Constantinople of the future, that Oriental London, rearing itself in mournful and forbidding majesty upon the ruins of the most radiant city in the world. Her hills will be levelled, her woods and groves cut down, her many-colored houses razed to the ground; the horizon will be shut in on all sides by long rows of palatial dwellings, factories, and workshops, broken here and there by huge business-houses and pointed spires; long, straight streets will divide Stambul into ten thousand square blocks like a checker-board; telegraph-wires will interlace like some monster spider-web above the roofs of the noisy city; across the bridge of the Sultan Validéh will pour a black torrent of stiff hats and caps; the mysterious retreats of the Seraglio will become a zoological garden, the Castle of the Seven Towers a penitentiary, the Hebdomon Palace a museum of natural history; everything will be solid, geometrical, useful, gray, hideous, and a thick black cloud of smoke will hide the blue Thracian heavens, to which no more ardent prayers will be addressed nor poets’ songs nor longing eyes of lovers. At such thoughts as these I could not help feeling my heart sink within me, but then quickly there came the consoling fancy that possibly—who knows?—some charming Italian bride of the next century, coming here on her wedding journey, may be heard to exclaim, “What a pity! what a dreadful pity it is that Constantinople has changed so from what it was at the period of that old torn book of the nineteenth century I found in the bottom of my grandmother’s clothes-press!”

The Dogs.

In those coming days another feature of Constantinopolitan life will also have disappeared, which is now one of the most curious of her curiosities—the dogs. And, as this is a subject which really merits attention, I am going to devote some little space to it. Constantinople is one huge dog-kennel; every one can see this for himself as soon as he gets there. The dogs constitute a second population in the city, and, while they are less numerous than the first, they are hardly less interesting as a study. Every one knows how the Turks love and protect them, but just why they do so is not so easy to decide. I could not, for my own part, make out whether it is because the Koran recommends all men to be merciful to animals, or because they are supposed, like certain birds, to bring good luck, or because the Prophet loved them, or because they figure in their sacred books, or because, as some insist, when Muhammad the Conqueror made his victorious entry into the city through the breach in the gate of St. Romanus he was accompanied by a following composed principally of dogs. Be this as it may, the fact remains that many Turks leave considerable sums at their death for their maintenance, and when Sultan Abdul-Mejid had them all transported to the island of Marmora the people murmured, so that they were brought back amid public rejoicings, and the government has not attempted to interfere with them since. At the same time, the dog, having been pronounced by the Koran to be an unclean animal, not one out of all the innumerable hordes which infest Constantinople has an owner; any Turk harboring one would consider his house defiled. They are associated together in a great republic of freebooters, without collars or masters or kennels or homes or laws. Their entire lives are passed in the streets. There, scratching out little dens for themselves, they sleep and eat, are born, nourish their young, and die; and no one, at least in Stambul, interferes in the smallest degree with their occupations or their repose. They are the masters of the road. With us it is customary for the dogs to withdraw to allow horses and people to pass by. There it is quite different, people, camels, horses, donkeys, and vehicles making sometimes quite a considerable circuit in order not to disturb the dogs: sometimes in one of the most crowded quarters of Stambul four or five of them, curled up fast asleep directly in the middle of the street, will make the entire population turn out for half a day. And in Pera and Galata it is nearly as bad, only there it is done less out of respect for the dogs themselves than for their numbers. Were you to attempt to clear the road, you would have to keep up an uninterrupted series of blows and kicks from the moment you set out until your return. The utmost they will do voluntarily is, when they see a carriage and four coming like the wind down some level street, at the last moment, when there is no possible hope of its turning out and the horses’ hoofs are fairly grazing their backs, they will slowly and unwillingly drag themselves a couple of feet to one side, nicely calculating the least possible distance necessary to save their precious necks. Laziness is the distinguishing quality of the Constantinople dogs. They lie down in the middle of the street, five or six or a dozen of them in a row or group, curled up in such a manner as to look much more like heaps of refuse than living animals, and there they will sleep away the entire day, undisturbed by the din and clamor going on about them, and not rain or sun, wind or cold, has the least power to affect them. When it snows, they sleep under the snow; when it rains, they stay on until they are so completely covered with mud that when they finally get up they look like unfinished clay models of dogs, with nothing to indicate eyes, ears, or mouth.

The conditions of society, however, in Pera and Galata are not quite so favorable to the contemplative life as in Stambul, owing to the greater difficulty in obtaining food: in the latter place they live en pension, while in the former they eat à la carte. They take the place of scavengers, falling with joy upon refuse which hogs would decline as food, willing, in fact, to eat pretty much everything short of stones. No sooner have they swallowed sufficient to sustain life than they compose themselves to slumber, and continue to sleep until aroused again by the pangs of hunger. And they almost always sleep in the same spot. The canine population of Constantinople is divided into settlements and quarters, just as the human population is. Every street and neighborhood is inhabited, or rather held possession of, by a certain number of dogs, the relatives and friends of one family, who never leave it themselves or allow strangers to come in. They have a sort of police force, with outposts and sentries, who go the rounds and act as scouts. Woe to that dog who, emboldened by hunger, dares to adventure his person across the boundaries of his neighbors’ territory! A crowd of infuriated curs give chase the instant his presence is discovered; if he is caught, they make short work of him; otherwise he is pursued as far as the confines of their own quarter, but no farther, as the enemy’s country is nearly always both feared and respected. It would be impossible to convey any just idea of the skirmishes and pitched battles which arise over a disputed bone, a reigning belle, or an infringement of territorial rights. Two dogs encounter one another; a dispute follows, and instantly reinforcements pour in from every street, lane, and alley; nothing can be seen but a confused, moving mass enveloped in clouds of dust, out of which there issues such a deafening hurlyburly of howls, yelps, and snarls as would crack the ear-drums even of a deaf man. At last the group breaks up again, and, as the dust subsides, the bodies of the fallen may be seen extended on the ground. Love-passages, jealousies, duels, bloodshed, broken limbs, and lacerated skins are the affairs of every hour. Occasionally they assemble in such noisy troops in front of some shop that the owner and his assistants are obliged, in the interests of trade, to arm themselves with stools and bars and sally forth in approved military style, taking the enemy by storm; and then there follows a pandemonium of howls, yells, and lamentations mingling with the sound of cracked heads and ribs, enough to fairly make the welkin ring. In Pera and Galata especially these wretched beasts are so ill treated, so accustomed to expect a blow whenever they see a stick, that at the mere sound of a cane or umbrella on the sidewalk they make preparations for flight: even when they seem to be fast asleep they frequently have the corner of one eye, just the point of a pupil, open, with which to watch attentively, for a quarter of an hour at a time, the slightest movement of some distant object bearing a resemblance, no matter how slight, to a stick. So unused are they to humane treatment that if you pat the head of one of them in passing, a dozen others come running up, fawning and gambolling and wagging their tails, to receive a like caress, and accompany the generous patron all the way to the end of the street, their eyes shining with joy and gratitude.

Group of Dogs.

The condition of a dog in Pera and Galata is worse, all said, than that of a spider in Holland, and their’s is usually admitted to be the most persecuted race in all the animal kingdom. When one sees the existence led by these miserable dogs, it is impossible not to think that there must be for them, as well, some compensation in another world. Like everything else in Constantinople, the sight of them recalled an historical reminiscence, but in their case it seemed like the bitterest irony to picture the life of Bayezid’s famous hunting-pack, who ran about the imperial forests of Olympia wearing purple trappings and collars set with pearls. What a contrast of social conditions! Their unfortunate state has no doubt a great deal to do with their hideous appearance, but, apart from that, they are almost all of the mastiff breed or wolf-dogs, bearing some resemblance to both foxes and wolves, or rather they do not bear a resemblance to anything, but are a horrible race of mongrels, spotted over with strange colors—about as large as the so-called butcher’s dog, and so thin that each rib can be counted twenty feet off. Most of them, moreover, have become so reduced in the course of a life of incessant warfare that if you did not see them moving about you would be apt to take them for the mutilated remains of dogs. You find them with their tails cut off, ears torn, with skinned backs, sides laid open, blind in one eye, lame in two legs, covered with wounds, devoured by flies, reduced to the last possible stages to which a living dog can be brought—veritable types of war, famine, and pestilence. The tail may be spoken of, in connection with them, as an article of luxury: rare is it, indeed, for a Constantinople dog to enjoy the possession of one for more than a couple of months, at most, of public life. Poor creatures! they would move a heart of stone to pity, and yet at times they are so grotesquely maimed and altered, you see them going along with such a singular gait, such odd, ungainly movements, that it is almost impossible not to laugh outright. And, after all, neither hunger nor blows, nor even warfare, constitutes their most serious trial, but a cruel custom which has prevailed for some time in Pera and Galata. Sometimes in the middle of the night the peaceful inhabitants of a quarter are aroused from their slumbers by a diabolical uproar: rushing to their windows, they behold a crowd of dogs leaping and dancing about in agony, bounding high in the air, striking their heads against the walls, or rolling over and over in the dust: presently the uproar subsides, and in the morning, by the early light, the street is seen all strewn with dead bodies. It is the doctor or apothecary of the quarter, who, being in the habit of studying at night, has distributed a handful of pills in order to obtain a fortnight’s quiet. Through these and other means it happens that there is some slight decrease in the number of dogs in Pera and Galata; but what does this avail, since at Stambul they are so rapidly on the increase that it is merely a question of time when the supply of food there will prove insufficient for their support, and colonists will be sent over to the other shore to supply the places of those families which have been exterminated and fill up all blanks caused by war, famine, or poison.

The Eunuchs.

But there are other beings in Constantinople who arouse a far more profound sentiment of pity than the dogs. The eunuchs, who were first introduced among the Turks in spite of the clear and unmistakable voice of the Koran, which denounced this infamous form of degradation in no measured terms, continue to exist in defiance of recent legislation prohibiting the inhuman traffic, since stronger than either law or religion are the abominable thirst for gold which induces the crime and the cowardly egotism which derives advantage from it. These unfortunates are to be met at every street-corner, just as they are encountered on every page of history. In the background of every historical scene in Turkey may be traced one of these sinister forms grasping the threads of a conspiracy, laden with gold, or stained with blood—victim, favorite, or instrument of vengeance; if not openly formidable, secretly so; standing like a spectre in the shadow of the throne or blocking the approach to some mysterious doorway. And the same way in Constantinople: in the midst of a crowded bazâr, among the throng of pleasure-seekers at the Sweet Waters, beneath the columns of the mosques, beside the carriages, on the steamboats, in käiks, at all the festivals, wherever people are assembled together, one sees these phantoms of men, these melancholy countenances, like a dark shadow thrown across every aspect of gay Oriental life. With the decline of the absolutism of the Sultan their political power has waned, just as the relaxing of Oriental jealousy has diminished their importance in private life; the advantages they once enjoyed have consequently become greatly reduced, and it is only with considerable difficulty that they are now able to acquire sufficient wealth or power to in any measure compensate them for their misfortune. No Ghaznefér Aghà would now be forthcoming to submit voluntarily to mutilation in order to become chief of the white eunuchs; all those of the present day are unwilling victims, and victims who receive no adequate compensation. Bought or stolen as children in Abyssinia or Syria, about one in every three survives the infamous knife, to be sold in defiance of the law, and with a pretence of secresy far more revolting than if it were done openly. There is no need to have them pointed out: any one can recognize them at a glance. They are usually tall, fat, and flabby, with smooth, colorless faces, short waists, and long legs and arms. They wear fezzes, long black coats, and European trousers, and carry a whip made of hippopotamus skin, their badge of office, walking with long strides, and softly like big children. When on duty they accompany their mistresses on foot or horseback, sometimes preceding, sometimes following after, the carriage, either singly or in pairs, and looking around them with an ever-watchful eye, which, at the slightest suggestion of disrespect either by look or gesture on the part of a passer-by, becomes so full of angry menace as to send a cold chill down one’s backbone; but, except in some such case as this, they have either no expression at all or else an utter weariness of everything in the world. I cannot recollect ever having seen one of them laugh. Some among them, while very young, look fifty years old, and others, again, give one the impression of youths who have suddenly, in the course of a few hours, grown into old men; many of them, sleek, soft, and well-rounded, look like carefully-fattened animals. They wear fine clothing, and are as scrupulously neat and redolent of perfume as some vain young girl. There are men so heartless as to laugh in the faces of these unhappy creatures as they pass them on the street; possibly they imagine that, having been accustomed to it from infancy, they are unconscious or nearly so of the gulf which divides them from the rest of the human family. But it is perfectly well known that this is not the case; and, indeed, who, after giving the subject a moment’s thought, could suppose that it was? To belong to neither sex; to be merely the phantom of a man; to live in the midst of life, and yet not of it; to feel the billows of human passion surging all about you and be obliged to remain cold, impassive, unmoved, like a reef in the storm; to have your very thoughts, the natural, promptings of your whole being, held in check by an iron band that no amount of virtuous effort on your part will ever avail to bend or break; to have constantly presented before your eyes a picture of happiness toward which all around you tends, the centre about which everything circulates, the illuminating cause of all the conditions of life, and to know yourself immeasurably far away in the outside darkness, in a cold immensity of space, like some wandering spirit accursed of God; and to be, moreover, yourself the guardian of that happiness in which you can never participate, the actual barrier which the jealousy of man has reared between his own felicity and the outside world, the bolt with which he makes fast his door, the cloth he uses to conceal his treasures; to be obliged to live in the very midst of that sensuous, perfumed existence of youth and beauty and enjoyment, with shame upon your brow and fury in your soul, despised, set aside, without name, without family, without a mother or so much as one tender memory, cut off from the common ties of nature and humanity,—who could doubt for one instant that theirs is a life of torment which the mind is powerless to grasp, like living with a dagger thrust into one’s heart?

And this outrage still continues: these unhappy creatures walk the streets of a European city, live among men, and, wonderful to relate, refrain from tearing, biting, stabbing, spitting in the face of that cowardly humanity which dares to look them in the eye without either shame or pity, while it busies itself with international associations for the protection of dogs and cats! Their whole existence is nothing but a series of tortures: as soon as the women of the harem find that they are unwilling to connive at their intrigues, they look upon them as spies and jailers, and hate them accordingly, punishing them by every device of coquetry that lies in their power until they sometimes drive them quite beyond all bounds, as in the case of the poor black eunuch in the Lettere persiane, who put his mistress in the bath. The very names they bear are a bitter irony, being called after flowers and perfumes, in allusion to the ladies whose guardians they are, as possessors of hyacinths, guardians of lilies, custodians of roses and of violets. And sometimes, poor wretches! they fall in love and are jealous and chafe, and become shedders of blood, or, seeing that some ardent glance directed toward their lady is returned, they lose their heads altogether and strike, as happened once during the Crimean War, when a eunuch struck a French officer in the face, and had his own head cut open in consequence by the other’s sword. Who can tell what they suffer or how the mere sight of beauty must sometimes torture them, a caress enrage, a smile torment them, the sound of a kiss given and returned cause their hands to steal toward the dagger’s hilt? It is hardly to be wondered at that in their great empty hearts little flourishes beside the cold passions of hate, revenge, and ambition; that they grow up embittered, cowardly, envious, and savage; that they have either the dumb, unreasoning devotion of an animal for their owners, or else are cunning and treacherous; or that, when they do get into power, they use it to revenge themselves upon mankind for the affront put upon them. The more desolate and isolated their lot, so much the more do they seem to feel a necessity for female companionship. Unable to be her lover, they seek to be the friend of woman. They even marry, sometimes choosing for their wives women who are pregnant, as Sunbullin, Ibrahim’s chief eunuch, did, so as to have a child to love as his own, or, like the head eunuch of Ahmed II., they have harems filled with virgins in order that they may enjoy the contemplation and society of female loveliness; others adopt young girls, so that in old age they may have a female breast upon which to recline and not go down to the grave ignorant of all tenderness and loving care, having had nothing all their lives but scorn and contempt, or at best indifference. It is not uncommon for those who have grown wealthy at court or in some princely establishment, where they have combined with the duties of chief eunuch those of intendant, to purchase in old age a pretty villa on the Bosphorus, and there to pass the remainder of their days in feasting and gayety, seeking by these means to blot out the recollection of their misfortune.

Among all the various tales and anecdotes which were told me about these unfortunate beings one stands out with peculiar clearness in my memory. It was related by a young doctor of Pera in denial of the statement, sometimes made, that eunuchs do not suffer.

“One evening,” said he, “I was leaving the house of a wealthy Mussulman, one of whose four wives was ill with heart disease; it was my third visit, and on coming away, as well as on entering, I was always preceded by a tall eunuch who called aloud the customary warning, ‘Women, withdraw,’ in order that the ladies and female slaves might know that there was a man in the harem and keep out of sight. On reaching the courtyard the eunuch returned, leaving me to make my way out alone. On this occasion, just as I was about to open the door, I felt a light touch on my arm: turning around, I found, standing close by me, another eunuch, a good-looking youth of eighteen or twenty, who stood gazing silently at me, his eyes filled with tears. Finding that he did not speak, I asked him what I could do for him. He hesitated a moment, and then, clasping my hand convulsively in both of his, he said in a hoarse voice, in which there was a ring of despair, ‘Doctor, you know some remedy for every malady; tell me, is there none for mine?’ I cannot express to you the effect those simple words produced upon me: I wanted to answer him, but my voice seemed to die away, and finally, not knowing what to do or say, I pulled the door open and fled. But all that night and for many days after I kept seeing his face and hearing those mournful words; and I can tell you that more than once I could feel the tears rising at the recollection.”

Philanthropists, journalists, ministers, ambassadors, and you, gentlemen, deputies to the Stambul Parliament and senators of the Crescent, raise an outcry in God’s name that this hideous ignominy, this black stain on the honor of mankind, may in the twentieth century be merely another dreadful memory like the Bulgarian atrocities.

The Army.

Types of Turkish Soldiers.

Although I was fully aware before going to Constantinople that no traces of the magnificent army of former days were still to be seen, nevertheless, as soldiers are always a source of lively interest to me, I had no sooner arrived than I began to look about for them with eager curiosity. What I found, however, fell short of even what I had been led to expect. In place of the ancient costume, flowing, picturesque, and eminently warlike, they have adopted an ugly, forlorn uniform, consisting of red trousers, little scant jackets, stripes like a lackey’s livery, belts like those of college students, and on every head, from the Sultan’s down to the lowest man in the ranks, that miserable fez, which, besides being undignified and puerile, especially when perched on the head of a big, stout Mussulman, is the direct cause of any amount of ophthalmia and headache. The brilliancy of the Turkish army is lost, without any of that which belongs to the European military having been gained. The soldiers looked to me a mournful, half-hearted, dirty set of men. They may be brave, but they are certainly not impressive; and as to the nature of their training, one may form some idea of that from seeing officers and men employing their fingers in the street in place of handkerchiefs. One day I saw the soldier on guard at the bridge, where smoking is not allowed, bring this fact to the knowledge of a vice-consul by snatching the cigar out of his mouth; and on another occasion, in the mosque of the Dancing Dervishes, on the Rue de Pera, a soldier informed three Europeans that they were expected to uncover by knocking their hats off before my eyes: I knew very well that to raise a protesting voice on such occasions would mean nothing less than being seized and carried off bodily, like a bundle of old rags, to the guard-house. Hence throughout my entire stay at Constantinople my attitude toward the military was one of profound deference. On the other hand, one ceases to wonder at the uncouthness of the soldiers after seeing what sort of people they are before donning the uniform. One day in Skutari a hundred or so recruits, probably brought from the interior of Asia Minor, passed close by me, and it was a sight which aroused both my compassion and my disgust. They looked like those terrible bandits of Hassin the Mad who passed through Constantinople toward the close of the sixteenth century on their way to die by the Austrian cannon on the plain of Pesth. I can see before me now their wild, sinister faces, rough shocks of hair, half-naked, tattooed bodies, and barbarous ornaments, and I seem to smell again the close, sickening odor, like that of wild animals’ dens, which they left behind them in the street. When the first news was brought of the massacres in Bulgaria, at once my thoughts turned to them. “My Skutari friends, beyond a doubt,” I said to myself. It is a fact, however, that they form the one solitary picturesque feature which I am able to recall of the Mussulman army.

O glorious pageant of Bayezid, of Suleiman, of Muhammad! could one but behold you just once from the walls of Stambul, drawn up in glittering array upon the plain of Daûd Pasha! Every time I passed the triumphal gate of Adrianapolis I would be haunted by this brilliant vision, and pause to gaze fixedly at the opening, as though expecting each moment to see the pasha quartermaster come forth, heralding the approach of the imperial troops.

It was, in fact, the pasha quartermaster who marched at the head of the army, with two horse-tails, his insignia of rank, while behind him for a great distance flashed and glistened in the sunlight certain objects which were nothing less than the eight thousand brazen spoons fastened in the folds of the Janissaries’ turbans; in their midst could be seen the waving herons’ plumes and glittering armor of the colonels, followed by a crowd of servants laden with arms and provisions. Behind the Janissaries came a small troop of volunteers and pages dressed in silk, with iron mail, and shining head-pieces, accompanied by a band of music; after them, the cannoneers, with the cannon fastened together by means of metal chains; and then another small band of aghas, pages, chamberlains, and feudal soldiers, mounted on steeds with plumes and breast-plates. All of these were only the advance-guard, above whose closely-packed ranks floated thousands of brilliantly colored standards, waving horse-tails, and such a sea of lances, swords, bows, quivers, and arquebuses that it was not easy to distinguish the lines of swarthy faces burned by exposure in the Candian and Persian wars; accompanying them was the discordant sound of drum and flute, of trombone and kettledrum, mingling with the voices of the singers who escorted the Janissaries, and, with the rattle of arms, clanking of chains, and hoarse cries of Allah, forming a mighty roar, at once inspiriting and terrible, which could be heard from the Daûd Pasha camp to the other bank of the Golden Horn. O poets and painters, you who have dwelt with loving touch upon every picturesque detail of that vanished life of the Orient! come to my aid now, that together we may recall to life the Third Muhammad’s famous army and send it forth, brilliant and complete, from the ancient walls of Stambul.

Passed the advance-guard, we see another glittering body of troops. Is it the Sultan? No, as yet the deity has barely quitted his temple. This is only the favorite vizier’s retinue, consisting of forty aghas clad in sable, and mounted upon horses caparisoned with velvet and with silver bits in their mouths; behind them are a crowd of pages and gorgeous grooms, leading other forty horses by the bridle, with gilded harness, and laden with shields, maces, and cimeters.

Another troop advances. This is not the Sultan, either, but a body of state officials—the chief treasurer, members of the council, and the high dignitaries of the Seraglio—and with them a band of players and a throng of volunteers wearing purple caps decorated with birds’ wings and dressed in furs, scarlet silk, leopard skins, and Hungarian kolpaks, armed with long lances entwined with silk and garlands of flowers.

Still another sparkling wave of horsemen pours out of the Adrianapolis gate, but it is not the Sultan yet. This is the train of the grand vizier. First comes a crowd of mounted arquebusiers, furieri, and aghas, all high in favor with the Grand Seigneur; after them forty aghas of the grand vizier, surrounded by a forest of twelve hundred bamboo lances, borne by twelve hundred pages, and then the forty pages of the grand vizier clad in orange color and armed with bows, their quivers richly ornamented with gold. Following them are two hundred more youths, divided into six bands, each band having a distinctive color, and, riding in their midst, the governors and relatives of the chief minister; after these come a throng of grooms, armor-bearers, employés, servants, pages, and aghas, wearing gold-embroidered garments, and a troop of standard-bearers carrying aloft a multitude of silken flags; and last the kiâya, minister of the interior, escorted by twelve sciau, or legal executioners, followed by the grand vizier’s band.

Another host pours out from the city-walls, and still it is not the Sultan, but a throng of sciau, furieri, and underlings, gorgeously attired and forming the retinues of the jurisconsults, the molla and muderri; close behind them are the head-masters of the falcon, vulture, hawk, and kite hunts, followed by a line of horsemen carrying on their saddles leopards trained for the chase, and a crowd of falconers, esquires, grooms with ferrets, standard-bearers, and drummers, and packs of caparisoned and bejewelled dogs.

Another brilliant concourse sweeps out: the crowds of spectators prostrate themselves. At last the Sultan? No, not yet. This is not the head of the army, but its heart, the holy flame of courage and religious enthusiasm, the sacred ark of the Mussulman, around which mountains of decapitated heads have been reared, torrents of human blood have flowed—the green ensign of the Prophet, the flag among flags, taken from its place in the mosque of Sultan Ahmed, and now floating in the midst of a ferocious mob of dervishes clad in lion and bear skins, a circle of rapt-looking preaching sheikhs in camel’s-hair cloaks, and two companies of emirs, descendants of the Prophet, wearing the green turban; all of whom together raise a hoarse clamor of shouts, prayers, shrill cries, and singing.

Another imposing troop of horsemen herald the approach, not of the Sultan yet, but of the judiciary, the judge of Constantinople and chief judge of Asia and Europe, whose enormous turbans may be seen towering above the heads of the sciau, who brandish their silver maces to clear a space for them through the crowd. With them ride the favorite vizier and vizier kaimakâm, their turbans decorated with silver stars and braided with gold; all the viziers of the Divan, before whom are borne horse-tails dyed with henné, attached to the ends of long red and blue poles; and last of all the military judges, followed by a train of attendants dressed in leopard skins and armed with lances—pages, armor-bearers, and sutlers.

The next company pours out, glittering, magnificent. Surely the Sultan? No—the grand vizier, wearing a purple caftan lined with sable and mounted upon a horse fairly covered with steel and gold, he is followed by a throng of attendants clad in red velvet, and a crowd of high dignitaries, and the lieutenant-generals of the Janissaries, among whom the muftis shine out like swans in the midst of a flock of peacocks; after these, between two lines of spearmen carrying gilded spears and two lines of archers with crescent-shaped plumes, come the gorgeous grooms of the Seraglio, leading by the bridle a long file of horses from Arabia, Turkestan, Persia, and Caramania, their saddles of velvet, reins gilded, stirrups chased, and trappings covered with silver spangles, and laden with shields and arms glittering with jewels; finally the two sacred camels are seen, bearing one the Koran, the other a fragment of the Kaaba.

The grand vizier’s retinue has passed, and a deafening clamor of drums and trumpets assails the ear. The spectators fly in every direction, cannon roar, a multitude of running footmen pour through the gate brandishing their cimeters, and here at last, in the midst of a thick forest of spears, plumes, and swords, the central point of those dazzling ranks of gold and silver head-pieces, beneath a cloud of waving satin banners, behold the Sultan of sultans, King of kings, the dispenser of thrones to the princes of the world, the shadow of God upon earth, emperor and sovereign lord of the White Sea and of the Black, of Rumelia and Anatolia, of the province of Salkadr, of Diarbekr, of Kurdistan, Aderbigian, Agiem, Sciam, Haleb, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, the coasts of Arabia and Yemen, together with all the other dominions conquered by the arms of his mighty predecessors and august ancestors or subdued by his own flaming and triumphant sword. The solemn and imposing train sweeps slowly by. Now and again, the serried columns swaying a little to right or left, a glimpse is caught of the three jewelled plumes which surmount the turban of the deity, the serious, pallid countenance, the breast blazing with diamonds; then the ranks close in once more, the cavalcade passes on, the threatening cimeters are lowered, the bystanders raise their bowed heads, the vision disappears.

After the imperial retinue a crowd of court officials come, one carrying on his head the Sultan’s stool, another his sabre, another his turban, another his mantle, a fifth the silver coffee-pot, a sixth the golden coffee-pot; then more troops of pages, and after them the white eunuchs; then three hundred mounted chamberlains in white caftans, and the hundred carriages of the harem with silvered wheels, drawn by oxen hung with garlands of flowers or horses with velvet trappings, and escorted by a troop of black eunuchs; then three hundred mules file by laden with baggage and treasures from the court; after them a thousand camels carrying water and a thousand dromedaries laden with provisions; next a crowd of miners, armorers, and workmen of various kinds from Stambul, accompanied by a rabble of buffoons and conjurers; and finally the bulk of the fighting ranks of the army—hordes of Janissaries, yellow silidars, purple azabs, spahis with red ensigns, foreign cavalry with white standards, cannon that belch forth blocks of lead and marble, the feudal soldiery from three continents, barbarian volunteers from the outlying provinces of the empire, seas of flags, forests of plumes, torrents of turbans—an iron avalanche on its way to overrun Europe like a curse sent from God, in whose track will be found nothing but a desert strewn with smoking ruins and heaps of skulls.