Part 15

My expectations were very great and my curiosity was all on fire, and yet I realized then, as I do now, that the actual sight of a world-renowned object, no matter how fully it may justify its reputation, never quite comes up to the keen enjoyment one experiences when on his way to see it. If I could live over again one hour out of each of those days on which I saw some great sight for the first time, I would unhesitatingly choose the one which intervenes between the moment of saying, “Now let us start,” and that in which the goal is reached. Those are the traveller’s most blissful hours. As you walk along you can feel your soul expand, preparing, as it were, to receive the streams of enthusiasm and delight soon to well up in it. You recall your boyhood’s dreams, which then seemed so hopelessly far from realization; you remember how a certain old professor of geography, after pointing out Constantinople on the map of Europe, traced the outline of the great basilica in the air, a pinch of snuff between his thumb and fore finger; you see that room, that hearth, in front of which, during the coming winter, you will describe to a circle of wondering and attentive faces the famous building; you hear that name, St. Sophia, ringing in your head, your heart, your ears like the voice of a living person who calls, and awaits your coming to reveal some mighty secret: you see above your head dim, prodigious outlines of arch and pilaster and column, mighty buildings which reach to the heavens, and when, at last, but a few steps more are wanted to bring you face to face with the reality, you linger to examine a pebble, watch the passage of a lizard, tell some trifling anecdote--anything that may serve to postpone, if but for a few seconds, that moment to which for twenty years you have been looking forward, and which you will remember for the rest of your life. And, truly, if you take away what goes before and what follows after, not so very much remains of the much-talked-of joys of seeing and admiring. It is almost always a delusion, followed by a slight awakening, after which we obstinately delude ourselves again.

The mosque of St. Sophia stands opposite the main entrance of the old Seraglio. On reaching, however, the open square which lies between the two, the first object to attract attention is, not the mosque, but the famous fountain of Sultan Ahmed III., one of the richest and most characteristic examples of Turkish art. This exquisite little building is not so much a monument as a caress in marble imprinted in a moment of passionate adoration by an enamored sultan upon the forehead of his beloved Stambul. I doubt if any but a woman’s pen can do it justice: mine, I feel convinced, is far too coarse and heavy to trace those delicate outlines. At first sight it hardly looks like a fountain at all, being in the form of a little square temple with a Chinese roof, whose undulating rim extends for some distance beyond the walls, and lends to the whole something of the character of a pagoda. At each corner rises a round tower furnished with small screened windows, or, rather, they are more like four charming kiosks, corresponding to the graceful cupolas on the roof which encircle the main central cupola. In each of the four walls are two niches, flanking a pointed arch, beneath which the water flows from a spout into a small basin. Around the edifice there runs an inscription which reads as follows: “This fountain speaks to you in the following verse by Sultan Ahmed: Turn the key of this pure and tranquil spring and call upon the name of God; drink of these inexhaustible and limpid waters and pray for the Sultan.” The little building is composed entirely of white marble, which, however, is almost hidden beneath the mass of ornamentation with which its walls are covered--arches, niches, tiny columns, roses, polygons, garlands, fretwork, gilding on a background of blue. Carving around the cupolas, inlaid-work below the roof, mosaics of a hundred different combinations of color, arabesques of every conceivable form,--all seem to vie with one another to attract attention and arouse admiration, until one’s powers of seeing and admiring are well-nigh exhausted. Not so much as a hand’s breadth of space is left free from carving, painting, gilding, or ornament of some sort. It is a prodigy of richness, beauty, and patience, which should, by rights, be preserved under a glass case; and, as though it were too perfect to delight but one sense alone, you are tempted to break off a piece and put it in your mouth, feeling that it must taste good as well--a casket designed, as one would suppose, to guard some priceless treasure, and you long to open it and find the--what? Infant goddess, magic ring, or fabulous pearl. Time has to some extent faded the brilliant colors, dimmed the gilding, and darkened the marble; think, then, what this colossal jewel must have been when first unveiled, all fresh and sparkling, before the eyes of the Solomon of the Bosphorus a hundred and sixty years ago! But, old and faded as it is, it undoubtedly occupies the first place among the lesser wonders of Constantinople, and is, moreover, an object so distinctively Turkish that, once seen, it claims a prominent position among that certain number of others which will dwell for ever in one’s memory, ready to rise up at the sound of the word “Stambul;” the background for all time against which will be thrown out one’s dreams and visions of the Orient.

Looking across from the fountain, St. Sophia can be seen occupying one side of the intervening square. About the exterior there is nothing especially noteworthy. The only points which attract the eye are the lofty white minarets, which rise at the four corners from pedestals each the size of a house. The celebrated dome looks small, and it seems impossible that this can be the same as that which we are wont to see, from the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmora and the hillsides of Asia, rearing its mighty form like the head of some Titan against the blue heavens. It is a flattened dome overlaid with lead, flanked by two semi-domes, and pierced at the base by a row of small windows. The four walls which support it are painted in broad bands of white and red and strengthened by enormous masses of masonry. A number of mean-looking buildings, baths, schools, hospitals, mausoleums, and soup-kitchens, crowd around the base and effectually conceal the ancient architectural form of the basilica. Nothing can be seen but a heavy, irregular edifice, faded and bare as a fortress, and apparently totally inadequate to embrace the mighty expanse of St. Sophia’s great nave. Of the original basilica only the dome is visible, and even that has been despoiled of the silver splendor which, according to the Greeks, could once be seen from the summit of the Olympus. All the rest is Mussulman: one minaret was erected by Muhammad the Conqueror, another by Selim II., the two others by the Third Murad, the same who toward the close of the sixteenth century added the buttresses to strengthen the walls shaken by an earthquake, and placed the huge bronze crescent on the summit of the dome, the gilding alone of which cost fifty thousand ducats. The ancient atrium has disappeared, and the baptistry has been converted into a mausoleum where are interred the remains of Mustafa I. and Ibrahim, while nearly every one of the other small buildings which adjoined the Greek church have been either destroyed outright or else, by the erection of new walls or some other alteration, changed past recognition: on all sides the mosque crowds, pushes, and bears down upon the church, of which the head alone remains free, and even around that the imperial minarets mount guard like four gigantic sentinels. On the east side there is a doorway flanked by six marble and porphyry columns; another on the south leads into a courtyard surrounded by low, irregular buildings, in the midst of which a fountain for ablutions plays beneath a little arched canopy supported on eight, small columns. Viewed from the outside, there is nothing to distinguish St. Sophia from the other great mosques of Stambul, except that it is heavier and dingier; far less would it ever enter one’s head to name it “the greatest temple on earth after St. Peter’s.”

Our guides conducted us by a narrow street skirting the northern wall of the edifice to a bronze door, which, swinging slowly back on its hinges, admitted us to the eso-narthex. This is a very long and lofty hall lined with marbles, and still glowing here and there with ancient mosaics. Nine doors on the eastern side give access to the body of the church, opposite which five others formerly led to the exo-narthex, which, in turn, communicated by thirteen doors with the atrium. We had barely crossed the threshold when a turbaned sacristan demanded our firmans, and then, after donning slippers, at a sign from the guides we approached the middle door on the eastern side, which stood half open to receive us. The first effect is certainly quite overpowering, and for some moments we remained stunned and speechless. In a single glance one is confronted by an enormous space and a bold architecture of semi-domes which seem to hang suspended in the air, enormous pilasters, mighty arches, gigantic columns, galleries, tribunes, arcades, over which floods of light are poured from a thousand great windows--a something I hardly know how to define of theatrical and regal rather than sacred; an ostentation of size and strength; a look of worldly pomp; a mixture of the classic, barbarous, fanciful, arrogant, and magnificent; a stupendous harmony in which, with the formidable and thunderous notes of the pilasters and cyclopean arches, recalling the cathedrals of the North, there mingle soft, subdued strains of some Oriental air, the noisy music of the revels of Justinian and Heraclitus, echoes of pagan chants, the choked voice of an effeminate and wornout race, and distant cries of Goth, of Vandal, and of Avar; a mighty defaced majesty, a sinister nakedness, a profound peace--St. Peter’s shrunken and plastered over, St. Mark’s enlarged and abandoned; a quite indescribable mingling of church, mosque, and temple, severe in aspect, puerile in adornment--of things old and new, faded colors, and curious, unfamiliar accessories: a sight, in short, so bewildering, so awe-inspiring, and at the same time so full of melancholy, that for a time the mind cannot grasp its full meaning, but gropes about uncertainly, trying to find first what it is, and then words in which to express it.

The plan of the edifice nearly approaches an equilateral rectangle, over the centre of which rises the great dome, supported on four mighty arches resting upon massive pilasters: these form, as it were, the skeleton of the entire building. From the arches on the right and left of the entrance there rise, before and beyond the great dome, two semi-domes, the three covering the entire nave, these semi-domes have six exedræ, of which the four on the sides are also covered with semi-domes, making four small circular temples enclosed in the large one. Between the two exedræ at the east end of the building is the apse, which projects beyond the external wall, and is likewise covered with a domed roof. Thus seven semi-domes encircle the main one, two just beyond it and five more beyond these, all of them without any apparent support, and presenting an extraordinary impression of lightness, as though they actually were, as a Greek poet once said, suspended by seven cords from the roof of the sky. All these domes are lighted by large windows arched and symmetrical. Between the four great pilasters, which form a square in the centre of the basilica, there rise to the right and left of the entrance eight wonderful columns of green marble, from which spring graceful arches richly carved with foliage, forming charming porticos on either side of the nave, and supporting at a great height two vast galleries, where are to be seen two other lines of columns and sculptured arches. A third gallery, communicating with the first two, runs above the narthex, and opens out on the nave by means of three enormous arches supported on double columns. Other smaller galleries, resting upon porphyry columns, intersect the four small temples at the extremities of the nave, and from them rise other columns supporting tribunes.

Such is the basilica. The mosque is, so to speak, spread over its surface and hung upon its walls. The _mihrab_--that is, the niche which indicates the direction in which Mecca lies--is hollowed out of one of the pilasters of the apse; to the right of it, high up on the wall, hangs one of the four prayer-carpets of the Prophet. In the angle of the apse nearest to the mihrab, reached by a steep little flight of stairs whose marble balustrade is carved with the most marvellous delicacy of workmanship, is the pulpit, surmounted by a queer conical roof and hung on either side with victorious banners of Muhammad II. Here the _rhatib_ ascends to read the Koran,[H] and carries in his hand a drawn simeter, to signify that St. Sophia is a mosque acquired by the force of arms. Opposite the pulpit is the Sultan’s tribune enclosed within a gilded grating. Other pulpits or species of balconies, having railings of open-work carving, and supported on small marble columns and arabesqued arches, protrude here and there along the walls or toward the centre of the nave. On either side of the entrance stand two huge alabaster jars, found among the ruins of Pergamum and brought to Constantinople by Murad III. Enormous green disks, bearing inscriptions from the Koran[I] in letters of gold, are hung below the pendentives, beneath which great mural slabs of porphyry bear the names of Allah, Mohammed, and the first four khalifs. In the pendentives may still be seen the gigantic wings of the four mosaic seraphim, whose faces are now concealed beneath golden roses. From the roofs of the domes hang innumerable silken cords, measuring almost the entire height of the building, from which are suspended ostrich eggs, lamps of wrought bronze, and crystal globes. Here and there stand cassia-wood reading-desks, inlaid with copper and mother-of-pearl, on which lie manuscript copies of the Koran. On the pavement are spread great numbers of rugs and mats. The walls are bare, whitish, yellowish, gray, still adorned in some places with discolored mosaics. The general aspect is inexpressibly mournful.

[H] This pulpit is the _minbir_, used only on Friday, and then by the rhatib to read a prayer for the Sultan, Khalîf, and Islam.--TRANS.

[I] The names of Allah, the Prophet, and four khalifs mentioned below are on these green disks, not verses from the Koran.--TRANS.

The great marvel of the mosque is the central dome. Gazing up at it from the middle of the nave, it truly seems, as Mme. de Staël said of the dome of St. Peter’s, as though a vast abyss were suspended over one’s head. It is very lofty, with an enormous circumference, and is made to appear still larger from the fact that its depth is but one-sixth of its diameter.[J] Around its base runs a small gallery, above which are a row of forty arched windows, and around the crown are inscribed the words pronounced by Muhammad II. when he drew his horse up opposite the high altar on the day of the conquest of Constantinople: “Allah is the light of heaven and earth.” These letters, white on a dark background, are some of them more than twenty-seven feet long. As is well known, this aërial prodigy could never have been constructed had ordinary materials been employed. The roofs were built of pumice-stone, which floats on the surface of water, and of bricks from the Isle of Rhodes, five of which hardly weigh as much as one ordinary brick; on each of them was inscribed the sentence from David, “_Deus in medio eius non commovebitur. Adiuvabit eam Deus vultu suo_,” and with every twelfth row relics of various saints were walled in. During the progress of the building operations the priests chanted and Justinian attended in person clad in a coarse linen tunic, while immense crowds looked on in admiration; and this is hardly to be wondered at when we consider that the construction of this “second firmament,” which even at the present time is an object of wonder, was an undertaking without parallel in the sixth century. The common people believed it to be the result of magic, and the Turks must have had much ado for a long period after the conquest to keep their gaze fixed upon the east when praying in St. Sophia, instead of resting it upon that “stone heaven” above their heads. The dome covers, indeed, nearly half the nave, in such a manner as to light up and dominate the entire edifice: it can be seen, at least in part, from every point, and, wander where you will, you invariably bring up beneath it to find your gaze attracted for the hundredth time to that immeasurable space, where eye and mind float with ecstatic delight as though borne on wings.

[J] This is a mistake: the great dome of St. Sophia is 107 feet across by 46 in height. (See Fergusson, _Hist. Architecture_.)--TRANS.

After inspecting the nave and dome one has but just begun to see St. Sophia. Whoever takes the least shadow, for example, of historical interest in the building could spend an hour over the columns alone. Here may be found spoils from every temple in the world. The four columns of green marble supporting the large galleries were presented to Justinian by the magistrates of Ephesus, having formerly stood in the temple of Diana, which was burned by Herostratus. The eight porphyry columns which stand two and two between the pilasters were a part of the temple of the Sun at Baalbek, and were carried thence by Aurelian to Rome. Others are from the temple of Jupiter at Cyzicus and of Helios at Palmyra--from the temples of Thebes, of Athens, of Rome, of the Troad, the Cyclades, and from Alexandria: altogether, they present an endless variety of style, form size, and color. What between the columns, the railings and pedestals, and the portions of the ancient covering of the walls which still remain, there are marbles from every quarry of the Archipelago, Asia Minor, Africa, and Gaul: the white Bosphorus marble speckled with black contrasts with the black Celtic veined with white; the green marble of Laconia is reflected in the blue Libyan, while the Egyptian spotted porphyry, starred granite of Thessaly, the red-and-white striped stone of Mt. Jassey, and pale _caristio_ streaked with iron, mingle their colors with the purple Phrygian, red Synadian, gold of the Mauritius, and snow-white marble of Paros. Added to this wealth of color is the indescribable variety of form, as seen in the friezes, the cornices, roses, and balustrades, and odd Corinthian capitals carved with foliage, crosses, animals, and strange chimerical figures, all interlaced: others, again, belong to no order in especial, of curious design and unequal size, evidently coupled together by chance--shafts of columns, pedestals ornamented with strange sculptures, injured by time and mutilated by sabre-cuts,--altogether an effect of wild and barbarous magnificence which, while it outrages the rules of good taste, attracts the eye with an unresistible fascination.

From the nave one hardly appreciates the vast size of the building, of which it indeed forms but a comparatively small part. The two aisles beneath the large galleries are in themselves two large edifices, out of either one of which a separate temple might be formed. Each of these is divided in three and separated by large vaulted openings. Indeed, everything here, column, architrave, pilaster, roof, is gigantic. Passing beneath these arches, you can barely see the nave from between the columns of the Ephesian temple, and seem almost to be in another basilica: the same effect is produced from the galleries, reached by a winding stair with very gentle gradations, or rather it is an inclined plane, for there are two steps, and one might readily ascend it on horseback. The galleries were used as gynæconitis; that is, those parts of the church reserved for women: penitents remained without in the eso-narthex, while the mass of the faithful occupied the nave. Each one of these galleries is capable of accommodating the entire population of a suburb of Constantinople. You no longer feel as though you were in a church, but rather walking in the foyer of some Titanic theatre, expecting at any moment to hear the sudden outburst of a chorus sung by a hundred thousand voices. In order to realize the immense size and obtain a really good view of the mosque one must lean well over the railing of the gallery and look around. Arches, roofs, pilasters, have all swelled to gigantic proportions. The green disks which, seen from below, appear to measure about the length of a man’s arm, are now large enough to cover a house. The windows look like portes-cochères of palaces, the seraphim wings like the spread sails of a vessel, the tribunes like vast open squares; while it makes one’s head swim to look up at the dome at all. Casting the eyes below, one is taken aback to find how high he has mounted: the pavement of the nave is far away at the bottom of an abyss, while the pulpits, jars from Pergamum, mats, and lamps seem to have shrunken in the most extraordinary manner. One rather curious circumstance about the mosque of St. Sophia is particularly noticeable from this elevated position: the nave not being precisely in line with Mecca, toward which it is incumbent upon every good Mussulman to turn while praying, all the mats and strips of carpet are placed obliquely with the lines of the building, and produce upon the eye the same disagreeable effect as though there were some gross defect in the perspective. From there, too, one is enabled to see and observe all the life of the mosque. Turks are kneeling upon the mats with foreheads touching the pavement; others stand erect and motionless as statues, with hands held before their faces, as though interrogating their palms; some are seated cross-legged at the foot of a pilaster, much as they would rest beneath the shade of a tree; veiled women kneel in a distant corner; old men seated before the lecterns read from the Koran; an _iman_ is hearing a group of boys recite sacred verses; and here and there beneath distant arches and through the galleries the forms of _rhatib_, _iman_, or _muezzin_ and various other functionaries of the mosque glide noiselessly back and forth, as though their feet hardly touched the ground, clad in strange, unfamiliar costumes, while the vague, subdued murmur of those who pray and those who read, that clear, steady light, the thousand odd-looking lamps, the deserted apse and echoing galleries, the immensity of it all, the past associations and present peacefulness,--combine to produce such an impression of greatness and of mystery as neither words can express nor time efface.