CHAPTER VIII--TURKISH CURIOSITY SHOPS--SIGHTS AND SCENES IN THE BAZAARS.

_Locomotion in Constantinople--Horses, Donkeys, Shank’s Mare and Sedan Chairs Turkish Street Cars--Women in Public--The Veiled Queens of Seraglios--The Drugs of the Orient--Henna and its Uses--Ottar of Roses, Musk and Bergamot--Shawls and Silks of price--The Treasures of Ormus and of lad--The Workers in Precious Metals--Vases of Gold and Platters of Silver--An Aureole of Gems--Loot for Soldiers and Swag for Burglars--The Weapons of Ancient Islam--Blades of Damascus and Swords of Mecca--A Wonderful Collection--Old Clothes and New Truck--A Seedy Moslem Swindler--An Exorbitant “Backsheesh”--What happened to the Judge--A Dispenser of Justice in the Lockup._

DOUBTLESS one of the most attractive features of Constantinople in the eyes of a stranger is a visit to the bazaars.

To reach there from Pera, where all the hotels are situated, it is necessary to descend the steep hill to Golata and cross the Golden Horn to Stamboul. You can go on foot, on horseback, in a carriage, or in a sedan chair; on foot is the least expensive and is the method employed by the majority of visitors as it furnishes an opportunity for a leisurely survey of the route which is always interesting, providing the rain is not falling and the sun is not pouring down an intense heat.

Saddle horses are to be found all over the city, and you can hire them by the day or hour or by the course from one place to another. A man accompanies the horses, and no matter how fast you may ride, he will keep close to the animal’s heels without apparent fatigue.

Carriages are a comparatively recent feature of Constantinople; they are decidedly expensive, and as they jolt along over {136}the rough pavements you are shaken up in a way to make Dyspepsia turn pale in the face.

The sedan chair is borne by two men and is not an uncomfortable mode of locomotion; all things considered it is the most agreeable if one does not wish to go on foot, and has an aversion to a violent shaking up.

The sedan chair waiting at the door of the theatres near the conclusion of the performance presents a curious spectacle, and reminds you of the stories of London two hundred years ago when chairs and link boys were the mode.

Omnibusses and street cars are in use. The latter are divided into three compartments, first, second, and women’s. The first class has leather cushions on the seat, and are generally dirty; the second class has no cushions on the seats and are generally dirtier. In the women’s compartment no man is allowed to enter; the women sit there in silence and seclusion after the Turkish custom, and each wears the veil.

The veil of the Turkish women of fashion is of the thinnest gauze; it allows the full outline of the features to be distinctly seen, and if the wearer is pretty you are sure to know it. And between you and me many who are not altogether pretty are made so by the veil which softens the hard outlines and tempers any excess of color.

The street car dropped us at the point indicated by our guide, and we entered the bazaar through a gateway possessing an architectural feature worthy of notice. The first place we visited was {137}the bazaar of drugs, and as we entered it a thousand peculiar odors saluted our nostrils; some of them possessing great pungency and power of penetration. For a minute or so the odor was almost intoxicating; it was much like that which we experience in America on entering a drug and perfumery establishment on a large scale.

The street or passage-way is quite narrow and on either side are small shops with open fronts. The floor of the shop is about three feet above the ground, and is so arranged that the merchant squatted within can use the front part of the floor as a counter for the display of his wares.

For storage purposes there were shelves, and the merchant could reach whatever was wanted without rising from his place. On the projecting platform at either side of the shop, there were {138}sacks of _henna_--used for coloring a great many things, the eyebrows and finger-nails of women included--and there were other sacks containing dates and various kinds of nuts. Drugs of unknown names and quantities were exhibited, and in many respects each shop appeared very much like its neighbor.

Immediately on entering we find ourselves in the place set apart for perfumery, and if we wish to purchase ottar of rose, musk, essence of bergamot, oil of sandal wood, or any of that kind of goods, now is our chance. The merchants here seem to think that the chief end of foreign man and especially woman is to buy ottar of rose, and you are offered the article in all sorts of flasks and bottles They have a curious looking bottle, shaped like one’s finger but longer in proportion to its width, which holds only a few drops of the precious liquid.

Each man assures you that his is the only genuine article of the kind in the city, and that you will be cheated if you go elsewhere. You are allowed to smell of the merchandise, and by way of convincing you of the genuineness of what they offer, they show you a small bottle of the counterfeit with the assurance that they never sell it and only keep it to show.

There is more humbug and nonsense in the purchase and sale of ottar of rose than in anything else that is dealt in, in the Orient. Every guide can take you to the only merchant in the city who sells the genuine article, and no two guides take you to the same merchant.

You can buy the stuff anywhere from one to twenty dollars an ounce; the price you pay is only limited by your willingness to pay it, and the amount of money that your guide and the merchants (who are invariably “in cahoots”) think they can squeeze out of you. You can just as well buy for five dollars an ounce as for twenty; the genuine article, unadulterated in any way, is worth fifty dollars an ounce at the place of manufacture, and as the Orient demands large profits, you should expect to pay a hundred dollars for it in Constantinople.

You can set it down as a certainty that no stranger can possibly buy the genuine ottar of rose in the bazaars of Constantinople or Cairo.

Near these perfume bazaars are the shops where you can buy-all sorts of Oriental luxuries in the shape of shawls and silks, {139}sandal and rosewood, Persian mirrors framed in fine paintings, articles of ivory, or ebony, or pearl, little odds and ends of filagree work; in fact, an endless variety of things of more or less value.

The merchants are not so ready to show their goods as those we have just passed, for the reason that the articles may be damaged by much handling, and customers are not very easy to obtain. If you show a disposition to trade, they will accommodate you; but they do not rush to strip their shelves at your approach.

We did not want to buy drugs, and so we went rather hastily through this bazaar to visit the “Grand Bazaar,” as it is generally known among foreigners as well as natives. Do not imagine that it is a single house; it is so in one sense, and in another is far from it. It is a sort of city within a city; it has streets, lanes, alleys, and squares, which are all roofed over, so that you might walk upon the housetops from one side of the bazaar to the other. Light is admitted through holes in the street roofs, some of them open and others covered with glass.

There is not light enough to go around and give a good supply to everybody, and sometimes you have to strain your eyes to see distinctly, and then you don’t. A good many of the shop-keepers in America are up to the same dodge; if you don’t believe it, just enter a ready-made clothing store in New York or Boston, and observe in what part of the establishment they endeavor to fit you.

Further on you find the shops where the silks of Broussa are sold, an article for which Constantinople has long been famous.

There are two kinds of Broussa goods, one entirely of silk and the other half silk and half linen; the latter is much the cheaper of the two, and greatly in demand for dresses after the European model. The merchants endeavor to tempt the masculine visitor with dressing-gown and wrappers of Broussa silks, and then with slippers and other articles which would make a sensation at home. There is a great supply of ready-made clothing of the Turkish pattern, especially for children; and you could rig out a small boy there in a very short time with garments that fit him exactly, from slippers up to head dress.

And so you go on. You can wander for hours in the bazaars, days will not exhaust their treasures, and I think I should be {140}content to spend my odd moments there for at least half a year. The whole wealth of Ormus and of Ind seems to be stored there; and the eyes are frequently dazzled by some object of great value, whose existence is almost an enigma, and its uses still more so. You pass from the centre of one trade to that of another; now you are among the rows of shops where are sold the curiously-shaped shoes of the Orient. Thousands and thousands of shoes are exposed there, and you think if all Turkey should become by some miracle barefoot to-morrow morning, it could be newly shod before nightfall from this bazaar alone.

You enter the bazaar of the workers in gold and silver, and there you see enough of the precious metal to pay the national debt of any reasonably economical country, or at all events, to go far in that direction. You enter the bazaar of precious stones and see the light flashing and sparkling from thousands of diamonds of “purest ray serene,” and should you show a desire to purchase, they will bring forth from dusty and iron-bound coffers tens and hundreds of thousands of other diamonds, larger and more brilliant than those which hang or lie in the showcases. Collars, ear-drops, rings, and pins of diamonds and other precious stones are on exhibition, and many of them, in spite of their oriental mounting in semi-barbaric taste, are of great beauty.

The wealth stored here is something incredible. The loot of the place would make many and many a fortune, and enable the robbers to live comfortably and honestly for the rest of their days.

One of the most interesting places is the Arms Bazaar. It is not exactly what its name indicates, as it contains a great many things besides weapons of war or the chase. In the other bazaars you find an attempt now and then to conform to Occidental taste, but here everything is Oriental. You can find here every sort of weapon which the Orient has known in the past ten or twenty centuries. There are swords of Damascus, of a fineness unknown to the best steel of the present day, and which may have flashed in the hands of Saladin or Haroun-al-Raschid. There are knives and lances that are said to have pierced through coats of mail, and whose handles are crusted and covered with {141}pearls and precious stones. There are spears, hatchets, lances, sabres, curious old match-locks, with barrels of immense length--all the weapons of the Islam of the past and going back to the time when Mohammed, at Mecca, believed himself commissioned from heaven to reform the world.

Saddles and housings, sparkling with precious stones, are placed where the light falling from the vaulted roof will show them to the best advantage; and as you look around you see thousands of objects covered with jewels and with barbaric pearl and gold. There are garments lined with costly furs, or embroidered in the most elaborate manner, and there are articles of furniture of fabulous value.

So great is the wealth contained in the Arms Bazaar that no fire is allowed there under any circumstances. Smoking is prohibited; the place where a Turk forbids himself to smoke must be sacred in the highest degree.

There are bazaars where they sell pipes of all kinds, and where you buy all kinds of tin-ware. There are book bazaars, seed bazaars, glass bazaars, and so on through a long list. And there is a second-hand bazaar, where you can buy anything from a set of false teeth to a suit of clothes. It is a wonderful mass of stuff, not altogether inviting; as you walk around, you have suspicions of plague, cholera, and other diseases of the Orient, and are not altogether sorry to get away. To most visitors to this place, the request “please not handle” would be quite superfluous, as they have no wish to form a very intimate acquaintance with the articles exposed for sale. But the Turk never puts up a notice of this sort, and seems quite indifferent on the subject.

We inquired for the slave bazaar, and were told it no longer existed.

A few years ago there was such a bazaar near the mosque of Mohammed II, where negro children were sold, and occasionally one could find an adult, man or woman, to be disposed of. The bazaar for white slaves is also gone, but the commerce is still carried on clandestinely. The business is conducted by Circassians established in the Pera quarter; they claim that the girls sold by them, come voluntarily to Constantinople, and the prices they demand is simply to cover the expense of importation. {142}It was the month of Ramadan, or Ramazan, when I arrived at Constantinople. There may be some ignorant wretch who doesn’t know what Ramadan is.

Well, the Mohammedan year is divided into twelve months, composed alternately of twenty-nine and thirty days, or three hundred and fifty-four days in all. Consequently the year begins sometimes in the spring, sometimes in the summer, and so on, with a constant variation. This may seem absurd to our notions, but on second thought we see that it gives every month a fair show, and is really a very just system.

Suppose we had the same kind of year, we could have January begin, once in a while, in August, and March could have a chance to set up for September. May could not put on airs over November, because they would change places from time to time, and December could be in haying time, just as often as it is the period for skating. Think of planting potatoes in November and cutting ice in August, of eating your Christmas dinner and going a Maying in October! Mohammed had a level head after all.

Ramadan is the most sacred month in the year, and every Moslem is directed to fast every day during that month. From sunrise to sunset he must abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and smelling perfumes, and from all indulgence of a worldly character.

The Prophet neglected to prohibit his followers from taking presents or swindling their customers during this month; at all events, I found them entertaining the most extraordinary notions of the value of their services, and asking about four times the real worth of what they had to sell and what I wanted to buy.

The first afternoon we were in Constantinople we went to the Tower of Golata, which overlooks the city; there were six of us, and we went without a guide. We climbed the steps until we reached the platform, where the police authorities keep a detachment constantly on the lookout for fires, and I may here remark, by the way, that their vigilance is well rewarded, as they have more fires, and very destructive ones they are, in Constantinople than in any other city of its size on the face of the globe.

When we reached this platform a seedy Turk approached us and asked what we wanted. {143} “Can we go to the top?” I asked in French, as he was more likely to understand that language than any other with which I was familiar.

The seedy Moslem extended his hand and uttered, “_backsheesh!_” in a very imperative tone.

I gave him a franc, and he then counted six on his fingers, and intimated that he wanted six francs for the party. I paid no more attention to him, and continued up the stairs to the top, calling on the rest to follow.

We remained there an hour or more studying the beautiful, or as the French would say, _bizarre_ picture which included the whole of Constantinople, the Golden Horn, Scutari, with much of the Asiatic side and portions of the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmora. We watched the sun go down, and when his rays had ceased to gild the domes and minarets of Stamboul we were ready to descend.

The Judge had gone down before the sun, as he was not much on sight-seeing, and had spied a Greek beer-shop near the foot of the tower, and intimated that he would sit down in front of it and wait for us. When the rest of us went down our seedy Turk was on the lookout, and demanded more francs; he wanted five and I gave him one, and intimated that I would break his Osmanli skull if he didn’t shut up. We were more numerous than he, and he didn’t trouble us farther, except by howling “backsheesh” as long as we were within hearing.

And what do you suppose the Judge told us when we joined him?

That scoundrelly Oriental had locked the door on the Judge and refused to let him descend until he paid the five francs, which {144}he afterward demanded of us, and the good-natured ex-dispenser of justice actually paid the fellow three francs, and then grew wrathy and threatened to break the door if it was not opened.

The Turk saw he meant business, and then unlocked the door, not without a final demand, which he repeated while our friend descended.

We learned at the hotel that half a franc would have been a sufficient “back sheesh” for the whole party. Had we paid that and no more when we entered, the fellow would have seen that we knew the price, and would have made no further demand. But my gift of a franc--double the proper fee--coupled with my question showed him that we were a lot of modest idiots who might be swindled. It was our first experience with the Moslem, and you can wager that we learned a good lesson from it.

Now, this happened in the month of Ramadan, and that Turk was keeping the fast with religious exactness. Yet we shouldn’t have been swindled any more by a Christian hackman in New York or Chicago, unless we had given the hackman an equal chance.

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