Part 4

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.

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.