Edmondo De Amicis

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.

Idleness.

Although at certain hours of the day Constantinople wears an air of bustle and activity, in reality it is probably the laziest city in Europe, and in this respect both Turk and Frank meet on common ground. Every one begins by getting up at the latest possible hour in the morning. Even in summer, at a time when our cities are up and doing from one end to the other Constantinople is still buried in slumber. It is difficult to find a shop open or so much as to procure a cup of coffee until the sun is well up in the heavens. Hotels, offices, bazÂrs, banks, all snore together in one joyous chorus, and nothing short of a cannon would arouse them. Then the holidays! The Turks keep Friday, the Jews Saturday, and the Christians Sunday, besides which regular weekly ones are all the feast-days of the innumerable saints of the Greek and Armenian calendars, which are scrupulously observed; and although all of these holidays are supposed to affect only certain parts of the community respectively, in reality they provide large numbers, with whom, properly speaking, they have nothing whatever to do, with an excuse for being idle. You can thus form some idea of the amount of work accomplished in the course of a week. There are some offices which are only open twenty-four hours in the seven days. Each day some one of the five nationalities who go to make up the population of Constantinople is rambling about over the big city with no other object in the world than to kill time. In this art, however, the Turk yields to none. He can make a cup of coffee, costing two sous, last half a day, and sit immovable for five hours at a stretch at the foot of a cypress tree in one of the innumerable cemeteries. His indolence is a thing absolute and complete, an inertia resembling death or sleep, in which all the faculties seem to be suspended—an utter absence of any sort of emotion, a phase of existence completely unknown among Europeans. Turks dislike so much as to have the idea of movement presented to their minds. At Stambul, for instance, where there are no public walks, it is extremely unlikely that the Turks would frequent them if there were: to go to a place designed expressly for the purpose of being walked about in would, to their way of thinking, resemble work entirely too much. They enter the nearest cemetery or turn down the first street they come to, and follow, without any objective point, wherever their legs or the windings of the path or the people ahead may lead them. A Turk rarely goes to any spot merely for the purpose of seeing it. There are those among them, living in Stambul, who have never been farther than Kassim Pasha; Mussulman gentlemen who have never gotten beyond the Isles of the Princes, where they happen to have a friend living, or their own villa on the Bosphorus. For them the height of bliss consists in complete inactivity of body and mind; hence they abandon to the restless Christian all those great industries which require care and thought and travelling about from one place to another, and content themselves with such small trades as can be conducted sitting down in the same spot, and where sight can almost take the place of speech. Labor, which with us governs and regulates all the conditions of life, is a thing of quite secondary importance there, subordinated to what is pleasant and convenient. We look upon repose as a necessary interruption to work, while to them work is merely a suspension of repose. The first object, at all costs, is to sleep, dream, and smoke for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four; whatever time is left over may be employed in gaining one’s livelihood. Time, as understood by the Turks, signifies something altogether different from what it does to us. The hour, day, month, year, has not a hundredth part of the value there that it has in other parts of Europe. The very shortest period required by any official of the Turkish government in which to answer the simplest form of inquiry is two weeks. These people do not know what it is to desire to finish a thing for the mere pleasure of having done with it, and, with the single exception of the porters, one never sees a Turk employed on any business hurrying in the streets of Stambul. All walk with the same measured tread, as though their steps were regulated by the beat of a single drum. With us life is a seething torrent; with them, a sleeping pool.

Night.

As by day Constantinople is the most brilliant, so by night it is the gloomiest, city in Europe. Occasional street-lamps, placed at long distances one from the other, hardly suffice to pierce the gloom of the principal streets, while the others are as black as caves, and not to be ventured into by one who carries no light in his hand. Hence by nightfall the city is practically deserted: the only signs of life are the night-watchmen, prowling dogs, the skulking figure of some law-breaker, parties of young men coming out of a subterranean tavern, and mysterious lights which appear and vanish again like ignis fatui down some narrow side-street or in a distant cemetery. This is the hour in which to look at Stambul from the heights of Pera or Galata. Each one of her innumerable little windows is illuminated, and, with the lights from the shipping, reflections in the water and the starry heavens, helps to light up four miles of horizon with a great quivering sea of sparkling points of fire, in which port, city, and sky melt imperceptibly one into another until they all seem to be part of one starry firmament. When it is cloudy, and through a break the moon appears, you see above the dark mass of the city, above the inky blots which mark the woods and gardens, the glittering rows of domes surmounting the imperial mosques, shining in the moonlight like great marble tombs, and suggesting the idea of a necropolis of giants. But most impressive of all is the view when there is neither moon nor star nor any light at all. Then one immense black shadow stretches from Seraglio Point to EyÛb, a great dark profile, the hills looking like mountains and their many pointed summits assuming all manner of fantastic shapes—forests and armies, ruined castles, rocky fortresses—so that one’s imagination travels off into the region of dreams and fairy tales. Gazing across at Stambul on some such night as this from a lofty terrace in Pera, one’s brain plays all sorts of mad pranks. In fancy you are carried into the great shadowy city; wander through those myriad harems, illuminated by soft, subdued lights: behold the triumphant beauty of the favorite, the dull despair of the neglected wife; watch the eunuch who hangs trembling and impotent outside the door; follow a pair of lovers as they thread some steep winding byway; wander through the deserted galleries of the Grand BazÂr; traverse the great silent cemeteries; lose yourself amid the interminable rows of columns in the subterranean cisterns; imagine that you have been shut up in the gigantic mosque of Suleiman, and make its shadowy corridors echo again with lamentations and shrieks of terror, tearing your hair and invoking the mercy of the Almighty; and then suddenly exclaim, “What utter nonsense! I am here on my friend Santoro’s terrace, and in the room below there not only awaits me a supper for a sybarite, but a gathering of the most amusing wits in Pera to help me eat it.”

Constantinople Life.

Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my good friend Santoro—lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants—among whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed! Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted the threads of an international love-affair,—each separate experience as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims on entering: “the government has just paid the employÉs’ salaries, due for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!” A third tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked, it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear good. ——;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still——,” and he said it again.

The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me. They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,” I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless. Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthful than in any other city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil, surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights, an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.

The apathy of that people is something incredible; they live, as a poet has said, in a sort of intimate familiarity with death, looking upon life as a pilgrimage too short to attempt, even were it worth their while anyhow, great undertakings requiring long and sustained effort; and sooner or later this fatalism attacks the European as well, inducing him to live in a certain sense from day to day, without troubling himself more than necessary about the future, and playing in the world, so far as lies in his power, the simple and reposeful part of a spectator. Then the constant intercourse with so many nationalities, whose language you must speak and whose views to a certain extent you must adopt, does away with many of those fixed rules and conventionalities which have in our countries become iron-bound laws governing society, and whose observance or non-observance causes endless vexations and heartburnings.

The Mussulman population forms of itself a never-ending source of interest and curiosity, always at hand to be seen and studied, and so stimulating and enlivening to the imagination as to drive away all thought of ennui. The very plan of Constantinople helps to this end. Where in other cities the eye and mind are almost always imprisoned, as it were, in one street or narrow circuit, there every step presents a new outlet through which both may roam over immeasurable distances of space and scenes of entrancing beauty, and, finally, there is the absolute freedom of that life, governed by no one set of customs. One can do absolutely as he pleases; nothing is looked upon as out of the way, and the most astounding performances hardly cause a ripple of talk, forgotten almost as soon as told in that huge moral anarchy. Europeans live there in a sort of republican confederacy, enjoying a freedom from all restraint such as would only be possible in one of their own cities during some period of disorder. It is like a continual Carnival, a perpetual Shrove Tuesday, and it is this, even more than her beauty, which endears Constantinople so greatly to the foreigner, so that, thinking of her after long absence, one experiences a feeling almost amounting to home-sickness; while those Europeans who have made their homes there strike down deep roots and become as devotedly attached to her as her legitimate sons. The Turks are certainly not far wrong when they call her “the enchantress of a thousand lovers,” or say in their proverb that for him who has once drunk of the waters of Top-KhÂneh there is no cure—he is infatuated for life.

The Italians.

The Italian colony at Constantinople, while it is one of the most numerous, is far from being the most prosperous there. It numbers among it but few rich persons, and many who are wretchedly poor, especially those who come from Southern Italy and are unable to find work: it is also the colony most poorly represented by the press, when indeed it is represented at all, its newspapers only making their appearance to promptly vanish again. When I was there the colony was awaiting the issue of the Levantino, and meanwhile a sample copy was put in circulation setting forth the academic titles and personal gifts of the editor: I made out seventy-seven in all, without counting modesty.

One should walk down the Rue de Pera of a Sunday morning, when the Italian families are on their way to mass: you hear every dialect in Italy. Sometimes I used to enjoy it, but not always: it was too depressing to see so many of one’s fellow-countrymen homeless wanderers on the face of the earth; many of them, too, must have been cast up on those shores by storms of misfortune and strange, uncomfortable adventures. And then the old people who would never see Italy again; the children in whose ears that name meant nothing more than a place—dear, no doubt, but distant and unknown; and those young girls, many of whom must inevitably marry men of other nationalities and found families in which nothing Italian will survive beyond a proper name or two and the fond memories of the mother. I encountered pretty Genoese, looking as though they might just have come down from the gardens of Acquasola; charming Neapolitan faces; graceful little heads which I seemed to have seen a hundred times beneath the porticoes of Po or the Milanese arcades. I felt like gathering them all into a bunch, tying them together with rose-colored ribbons, and marching them two by two on shipboard, conveying them back to Italy at the rate of fifteen knots an hour. I would also have liked to take back with me, as a curiosity, a sample of the language spoken by those born in the Italian colony, especially those of the third or fourth generation. A Crusca academician, on hearing it, would have taken to his bed with a raging fever. A language formed by mingling the Italian spoken by a Piedmontese doorkeeper, a Lombardy hack-driver, and a Romagnol porter would, I think, be less outrageous than that spoken on the banks of the Golden Horn. It is Italian which, impure at the outset, has been mixed with four or five other languages, each impure in their turn; and the most singular part of it is that in the midst of all these barbarisms you suddenly come plump upon some such scholarly word or phrase as puote, imperocche, a ogni pie sospiuto, havvi, puossi, witnesses to the efforts made by some of our worthy compatriots, who by dipping into anthologies seek to preserve the celestial Tuscan speech. But, as compared with the rest, these might well lay claim, as Cesari said, to a reputation for using choice language. Some of them can hardly be understood at all. One day I was being escorted, I don’t remember just where, by an Italian youth of sixteen or seventeen, a friend of a friend of mine, who was born in Pera. As we walked along I began asking him some questions, but soon found that he did not want to talk; he answered me in a low tone and as shortly as possible, growing red in the face as he did so and hanging his head; he was so evidently unhappy that I presently asked him what it was that troubled him so much. “Oh,” said he with a despairing sigh, “I talk so badly!” As we continued our conversation I found that he spoke indeed a strange dialect, full of outlandish words and strongly resembling the so-called Frank language, which, as a French wit once said, consists in pouring out as rapidly as possible a quantity of Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek nouns and tenses until you happen to strike one the listener understands. It is, however, seldom necessary to go to so much trouble in Pera or Galata, where almost every one, including the Turks, can speak, or at least understand, some Italian, though this language, if you can call it a language, is almost exclusively a spoken one, if you can call it speaking. The tongue generally employed for writing is French. Of Italian literature there is none. I recollect on one solitary occasion, in a Galata cafÉ crowded with merchants, finding at the foot of the commercial intelligence and quotations of the Bourse, printed in French and Italian, eight mournful little verses all about zephyrs and stars and sighs. Unhappy poet! it seemed as though I could see you before me, buried beneath huge piles of merchandise, composing those verses with your last breath.

The Theatres.

Any one who is blessed with a pretty strong stomach can pass his evenings while at Constantinople at the play: he may, moreover, choose among quite a number of almost equally wretched little theatres of various sorts, many of which are beer-gardens and wine-shops as well. At some one of these one can always find the Italian comedy, or rather a troupe of Italian actors, whose efforts frequently make one wish the whole arena could be converted into a vegetable market. The Turks, however, frequent by preference those theatres in which certain bare-necked, brazen-faced, painted French women sing light songs to the accompaniment of a wretched orchestra. One of these theatres was the Alhambra, situated in the Grande Rue de Pera: it consisted of a long apartment, always crowded to the utmost, and red with fezzes from stage to entrance. The nature of those songs, and the bold gestures which those intrepid ladies employed in order to make their meaning perfectly clear, no one could either imagine or credit unless indeed he had been to the Capellanes at Madrid. At anything especially coarse or impudent all those great fat Turks, seated in long lines, broke into loud roars of laughter, and then the habitual mask of dignity and reserve would drop from their faces, exposing the depths of their real nature and every secret of their grossly sensual lives. There is nothing that the Turk conceals so habitually and effectually as the sensual nature of his tastes and manner of life. He never appears in public accompanied by a woman, rarely looks at, and never speaks to, one, and considers it almost an insult to be inquired of concerning his wives. Judging merely by outside appearances, one would take this to be the most austere and straitlaced people in the world, but it is only in appearance. The same Turk who colors to the tips of his ears if one so much as asks if his wife is well, sends his boys, and his girls too, to listen to the coarse jests of Kara-gyuz, corrupting their minds before their senses are fairly awakened, while he himself is fully capable of abandoning the peaceful enjoyments of his own harem for such excesses as Bayezid the Thunderbolt set the first example of, and MahmÛd the Reformer was doubtless not the last to follow. And, indeed, were proof needed of the profound corruption which lurks beneath this mask of seeming austerity, one need go no farther than to that selfsame Kara-gyuz. It is a grotesque caricature of a middle-class Turk, a sort of ombra chinese, whose head, arms, and legs are made to accompany with appropriate gestures the developments of some extravagant burlesque having usually a love-intrigue for its plot. The marionette is worked behind a transparent curtain, and resembles a depraved Pulcinello, coarse, cynical, and cunning. Sensual as a satyr, foul-mouthed as a fishwife, he throws his audience into paroxysms of laughter and enthusiasm by every sort of indecent jest and extravagant gesture. Before the censorship curbed to some small extent the hitherto unbridled looseness of this performance, the figure was made to give visible proof of its corporeal resemblance to Priapus, and not infrequently upon this lofty and elevating point the whole plot hinged.

Turkish Cooking.

Wishing to investigate for myself the Turkish manner of cooking, I got my good friends of Pera to take me to a restaurant ad hoc where every kind of Turkish dish is to be had, from the most delicious delicacies of the Seraglio to camel’s meat prepared as the Arabians eat it, and horseflesh dressed according to the Turkoman fashion. Santoro ordered the breakfast, severely Turkish from the opening course to the fruit, and I, invoking the names of all those intrepid spirits who have faced death in the cause of science, conscientiously swallowed a part of each without so much as a groan. There were upward of twenty dishes, the Turks being a good deal like children in their liking to peck at a quantity of different kinds of food, rather than satisfy their appetite with a few solid dishes. Shepherds of the day before yesterday, they seem to disdain a simple table as though it were a trait of rustic niggardliness. I cannot give a clear account of each dish, many of them being now no more than a vague and sinister memory. I do, however, remember the kibab, which consisted of little scraps of mutton roasted on the coals, seasoned with a great deal of pepper and cloves, and served on two soft, greasy biscuits—a dish not to be named among the lesser sins. I can also recall vividly the odor of the pilav, the sine qu non of a Turkish meal, consisting of rice and mutton, meaning to the Turk what maccaroni does to the Neapolitan or cuscussu to the Arab or puchero to the Spaniard. I have not forgotten either—and it is the sole pleasant memory connected with that repast—the rosh’ab, which is sipped with a spoon at the end of the meal: it is composed of raisins, plums, apples, cherries, and other fruits, cooked in water with a great deal of sugar, and flavored with essence of musk, citron, and rose-water. Then there were numberless other preparations of mutton and lamb, cut in small pieces and boiled until no flavor remained; fish swimming in oil; rice-balls wrapped in grape-leaves; sugar syrups; salads served in pastry; compÔtes; conserves; sauces, flavored with every sort of aromatic herb—a list as long as the articles of the penal code for relapsed criminals; and finally the masterpiece of some Arabian pastry-cook, a huge dish of sweetmeats, among which were conspicuous a steamboat, a fierce-looking lion, and a sugar house with grated windows. When all was over I felt a good deal as though I had swallowed the contents of a pharmacist’s shop or assisted at one of those feasts which children prepare with powdered brickdust, chopped grass, and stale fruit—not unattractive-looking when seen at a distance. All the dishes are served rapidly, four or five at a time. The Turks dive into each with their fingers, the knife and spoon only, being in common use among them, and one drinking-goblet serves for the whole company, the waiter keeping it constantly filled with flavored water.

These customs, however, were not followed by the party who were breakfasting at the table adjoining ours. They were evidently Turks who valued their ease, even to the extent of poising their slippers upon the table: each had a plate to himself, and they plied their forks very skilfully, drinking liquors freely in despite of Mahomet. I observed, moreover, that they failed to kiss the bread before beginning to eat, as every good Mussulman should, and that more than one longing glance was sent in the direction of our bottles, although the muftis pronounce it a sin to so much as cast the eye upon a bottle of wine. There is, indeed, no doubt that this “father of abominations,” one drop of which is sufficient to bring down upon the head of the sinning Mussulman the “curses of every angel in heaven and earth,” gains new disciples among the Turks every day, and that nothing but the fear of public opinion prevents its open use. Were a thick cloud to descend upon Constantinople some day, and after an hour suddenly be lifted, I have little doubt that the sun would surprise fifty thousand Turks, each one in the act of lifting the bottle to his lips. In this, as in almost every other shortcoming of the Turks, it was the sultans who were the stone of stumbling and rock of offence. Singular to relate, it is that very dynasty which rules over a people among whom it is considered a sin in the sight of God to drink wine at all, which has produced more drunkards than any other line of rulers in Europe; so sweet is forbidden fruit even in the estimation of the “shadow of God upon earth.” It was, we are told, Bayezid I. who headed the long list of imperial tipplers, and here, as in the case of the first sin, woman was the temptress, the wife of this Bayezid, a daughter of the king of Servia, offering her husband his first glass of Tokay. Next Bayezid II. got intoxicated on Cypress and Schiraz wines; then the selfsame Suleiman I. who fired every ship in the port of Constantinople that was laden with wine, and poured molten lead down the throats of those who drank the forbidden liquor, himself died when drunk, shot by one of his own archers. Then comes Selim II., surnamed the messth (sot), whose debauches lasted three days, and during whose reign men of the law and men of religion drank openly. In vain did Muhammad III. thunder against this “abomination devised by Satan;” in vain did Ahmed I. close all the taverns and destroy every wine-press in Stambul; in vain did Murad IV. patrol the city accompanied by an executioner, who beheaded in his presence every unfortunate whose breath witnessed against him, while he himself, ferocious hypocrite that he was, staggered about the apartments of the seraglio like any common frequenter of the pothouse. Since his day the bottle, like some gay little black imp, has crept into the seraglio, lurks in the bazÂr, hides beneath the pillow of the soldier, thrusts its little silver or purple neck from beneath the divan of the beauty, and, crossing the threshold of the very mosques themselves, has stained the yellow pages of the Koran with sacrilegious drops.

Mohammed.

Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them that there was any difference between the religion of this people and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference—the blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking to the first followers of Mohammed—which divides the two religions, and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair, ardent, with black eyes and musical voice—he lacked the force to dominate his own passions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts the rich, oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?—perhaps we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a century nearer universal civilization.

Ramazan.

Happening to be in Constantinople in the month of RamazÂn, the ninth month in the Turkish calendar, in which the twenty-eight days’ fast falls, I was able to enjoy every evening a spectacle so exceedingly comical that I think it merits a description. Throughout the entire fast the Turks are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke from sunrise to sunset. Most of them make it up by feasting all night, but as long as the sun is shining the rule is very generally observed, and no one dares, in public at any rate, to transgress it.

One morning my friend and I went to call upon a friend of ours, a young aide-de-camp of the Sultan, who prided himself upon his liberal views. We found him in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the imperial palace with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Why,” said Yunk, “how do you dare to drink coffee hours after sunrise?” The young man shrugged his shoulders, and remarked carelessly that he did not care a fig for RamazÂn or the fast; but just at that moment, a door near by suddenly opening, he was in such a hurry to hide the telltale cup that half its contents were spilled at his feet. One can readily imagine from this incident how rigorously all those must abstain whose entire day is passed beneath the public eye, the boatmen for instance. To get a really good idea of it one should stand on the Sultan ValidÉh bridge at about sunset. What with the boats at the landings and those which are going from one place to another, the ones near at hand and those in the distance, there must be very nearly a thousand in sight. Every boatman has fasted since sunrise, and by this time is ravenously hungry. His supper is all ready in the kÄik, and his eyes travel constantly from it to where the sun is nearing the horizon, and then back again, while he has the restless, uneasy air of a wild animal who paces about his cage as the feeding-hour approaches. Sunset is announced by the firing of a gun, and until that signal is heard not so much as a crumb of bread or drop of water crosses the lips of one of them. Sometimes in a retired spot in the Golden Horn we would try to induce our boatman to eat something, but the invariable answer was, “Jok! jok! jok!” (No! no! no!), accompanied by an uneasy gesture toward the western horizon. When the sun gets about halfway down behind the mountains the men begin to finger their pieces of bread, inhaling its smell voluptuously. Then it gets so low that nothing can be seen but a golden arc, and the rowers lay down their oars. Those who are busy and those who are idle, some midway across the Golden Horn, some lying in retired inlets, others on the Bosphorus, others over near the Asiatic shore, others, again, who are plying on the Sea of Marmora, one and all, turning toward the west, remain immovable, their eyes fixed on the fast-disappearing disk with mouth open, kindling eye, and bread firmly clasped in the right hand. Now nothing can be seen but a tiny point of fire: a thousand hunks of bread are held close to a thousand mouths, and then the fiery eye drops out of sight, the cannons thunders, and on the instant thirty-two thousand teeth tear a thousand huge mouthsful from a thousand loaves! But why say a thousand, when in every house and cafÉ and restaurant a similar scene is being enacted at precisely the same moment, and for a short time the Turkish city is nothing but a huge monster whose hundred thousand jaws are all tearing and devouring at once?

Ancient Constantinople.

But think what this city must have been in the great days of the Ottoman glory! I kept thinking of that all the time. How it must have looked when not a single cloud of smoke arose from the Bosphorus, all white with sails, to make ugly, black marks against the blue of sky and water! In the port and the inlets of the Sea of Marmora, among the picturesque battle-ships of that period with their lofty carved prows, silver crescents, violet standards, and gilded lanterns, floated the battered and blood-stained hulks of Spanish, Genoese, and Venetian galleys. No bridges spanned the Golden Horn, which was covered with myriads of gayly-decorated boats plying constantly from one shore to the other, among which could be distinguished afar off the snowy-white launches of the Seraglio, covered with gold-fringed scarlet hangings and propelled by rowers dressed in silk. Skutari was then no more than a village: seen from Galata, she only appeared to have a few houses scattered about on the hillside; no lofty palaces as yet reared their heads above the hilltops of Pera; the appearance of the city was doubtless less impressive than now, but far more Oriental in character: the law prescribing the use of colors being then in full force, one could determine accurately the religion of the occupant from the color of each house. Except for its public and sacred edifices, which were white as snow, Stambul was entirely red and yellow; the Armenian quarters were light, and the Greek quarters dark gray; the Hebrew quarter, purple. As in Holland, the passion for flowers was universal, so that the gardens were like huge bouquets of hyacinths, tulips, and roses. The exuberant vegetation not having been as yet checked on the surrounding hillsides by the growth of new suburbs, Constantinople presented the appearance of a city built in a forest. The public thoroughfares were nothing but lanes and alleys, but they were rendered picturesque by the varied and brilliant crowds which thronged them. The huge turbans worn by the men lent them all an air of dignity and importance. The women, with the single exception of the Sultan’s mother, were so rigorously veiled as to show nothing but the eyes, and so formed a population apart, anonymous, enigmatical, which lent to the entire city a certain air of secresy and mystery. Severe laws controlled the dress of every individual, so that from the shape of his turban or color of his caftan one could tell the precise rank, occupation, office, or condition of every one he met, as though the city had been one great court. The horse being as yet almost “man’s only coach,” thousands of cavaliers filled the crowded streets, while long files of camels and dromedaries belonging to the army traversed the city in all directions, giving it something of the savage and imposing air of an ancient Asiatic metropolis. Gilded arabas, drawn by oxen, passed carriages hung with the green cloth of the ulemi or scarlet cloth of the kÂdi-aschieri, and light talike hung with satin and fantastically painted. Troops of slaves marched along, representing every country from Polonia to Ethiopia, clanking the chains riveted on them in the field of battle. On the street-corners, in the squares and the courtyards of the mosques, groups of soldiers collected, clad in glorious rags, displaying their battered arms and scars still fresh from wounds received at Vienna, Belgrade, Rodi, and Damascus. Hundreds of orators recounted to rapt and enthusiastic audiences the heroic deeds and brilliant victories achieved by the army fighting at a distance of three months’ march from Stambul. Pasha, bey, agha, musselim, numberless dignitaries and personages of high rank, clad with theatrical display and accompanied by throngs of attendants, made their way through the crowds, who bowed before them like grain before the wind. Ambassadors representing every court in Europe, accompanied by princely retinues, who had come to Stambul to sue for peace or arrange an alliance, swept by. Caravans laden with propitiatory gifts from Asiatic and African kings filed slowly along the principal thoroughfares. Companies of silidars and spahis, haughty and insolent, swaggered by, their sabres stained with the blood of twenty different nations, while the handsome Greek and Hungarian Seraglio pages, dressed like little kings, pushed haughtily through the obsequious multitude, who, recognizing in them the unnatural caprices of their lord, respected them accordingly. Here and there a trophy of knotted clubs before some doorway indicated the presence of a corps of Janissaries, who at that time acted as police in the interior of the city. Parties of Hebrews would be seen hurrying to the Bosphorus with the dead bodies of the victims of justice. Every morning a body would be found in the Baluk BazÂr, lying with the head under the right armpit, a stone holding in place the sentence affixed to the breast. Law-breakers to whom summary justice had been meted out would dangle from a beam or hook in the public highway, while after nightfall one was liable to stumble over the body of some unfortunate who, after having his hands and feet pounded with clubs, had been thrown from the window of the torture-chamber. In the broad light of day merchants, caught in the act of cheating, would be nailed through the ear to their own shop-doors, and, there being no law controlling the free right of sepulture, the work of digging graves and burying the dead was carried on at all hours and in all places—in the gardens, in the lanes and open squares, and before the doors of dwellings. The cries of lambs and sheep could be heard from the courtyards where they were being slaughtered in sacrifice to Allah on the occasion of a circumcision or a birth. From time to time a troop of eunuchs, galloping by with warning cries, would be the signal for a general stampede; the streets would become deserted; doors and windows fly to, blinds be drawn down, and an entire neighborhood suddenly assume the look and air of a city of the dead. Then in long procession files of gorgeously-decorated coaches filled with the ladies of the imperial harem would pass by, scattering around them an atmosphere of perfume and laughter. Sometimes it would happen that an official of the court, making his way through some thoroughfare, would suddenly encounter six quite ordinary-looking individuals about to enter a shop, and at that sight grow unaccountably pale. These six, however, would be the Sultan, four officers of his court, and an executioner making their rounds from shop to shop in order to verify the weights and measures.

Throughout the whole of the city’s huge body there coursed an exuberant and feverish life; the treasury overflowed with jewels, the arsenal with arms, the barracks with soldiers, the caravanseries with strangers; the slave-market was thronged with merchants and lofty personages come to inspect the crowds of beautiful slaves. Scholars pressed to examine the archives of the great mosques; long-winded viziers prepared for the delectation of future generations the interminable annals of the Empire; poets, pensioned by the Seraglio, assembled in the baths, where they sang the imperial loves and wars; swarms of Bulgarian and Armenian workmen toiled at the erection of mighty mosques, employing huge blocks of granite and Paros marble, while by sea, columns from the temples of the Archipelago, and by land, spoils from the churches of Pesth and Ofen, were brought to contribute to their splendor. In the harbor a fleet of three hundred sail made ready to carry terror and dismay to every coast in the Mediterranean; between Stambul and Adrianapolis companies of falconers and gamekeepers, to the number of seven thousand, were stationed; and in the intervals between military uprisings at home, foreign wars, and conflagrations which would reduce twenty thousand houses to ashes in a single night, revels would be celebrated, lasting thirty days, in honor of the representatives of every court in Asia, Africa, and Europe. On these occasions the glorifications of the Mussulmans degenerated into folly: sham battles were fought by the Janissaries in the presence of the Sultan and the court, amid huge palme di nozze laden with birds, mirrors, and fruits of various kinds, in order to make room for which walls and houses were ruthlessly destroyed; and processions of lions and sugar mermaids, borne on horses whose trappings were of silver damask, and mountains of royal gifts sent from every part of the Empire and every court in the world; dervishes executed their furious dances, and bloody massacres of Christian prisoners were followed by public banquets where ten thousand dishes of cuscussÙ were served to the populace; trained elephants and giraffes danced in the Hippodrome, while bears and wolves, with fireworks tied to their tails, were let loose among the people; allegorical pantomimes, grotesque masquerades, wanton dances, fantastic processions, games, comedies, symbolic cars, rustic dances, followed each other in rapid succession. Little by little as night descended the festival degenerated into a mad orgy, and then the lights from five hundred brilliantly illuminated mosques spread a great aureole of fire over the entire city and announced to the watching shepherds on the mountain-heights of Asia and the wayfarers on the Propontis the revels of this new Babylon.

Such was once Stambul, a haughty sultaness, voluptuous, formidable, wanton, as compared with which the city of to-day is little more than some weary old queen, peevish and hypochondriacal.

The Armenians.

Absorbed as I was by the Turks, I had, as may be readily understood, but little time left in which to study the characteristics of the three other nationalities—Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew—which go to make up the population of Constantinople—a study requiring a certain amount of time, too, since all of these people, while preserving to a certain extent their national character, have outwardly conformed to the prevailing Mussulman coloring around them, now in its turn fading into a uniform tint of European civilization. Thus it is as difficult to catch a vivid impression of any one of the three as it would be of a view that was constantly changing. This is true in a special sense of the Armenians, “Christians in spirit and faith, Asiatic Mussulmans by birth and carnal nature,” whom it is not only hard to study intimately, but even to distinguish at sight, since those among them who have not adopted the European costume dress like Turks in all except some very minor points. All of them have abandoned the ancient felt cap which was formerly, with certain special colors, the distinctive sign of their nation. In appearance they closely resemble the Turks, being for the most part tall, robust, and corpulent, with a grave, sedate carriage, but their complexion is light, and the two striking points of their national character can usually be read in their faces—the one, a quick, open, industrious, and persevering spirit, which fits them in a peculiar way to commercial enterprises; and the other that adaptability, called by some servility, which enables them to gain a foothold among whatever people they may be thrown with from Hungary to China, and renders them particularly acceptable to the Turks, whose confidence they readily succeed in winning, making them faithful subjects and obsequious friends. There is nothing heroic or bellicose either about their appearance or disposition: formerly this may have been otherwise. Those parts of Asia whence they came are at present inhabited by a people, descendants of a common stock, who, it is said, resemble them but little. Certainly those members of the race who have been transplanted to the shores of the Bosphorus are a prudent and managing people, moderate in their manner of life, intent only upon their trade, and more sincerely religious, it is affirmed, than any other nation which inhabits Constantinople. They are called by the Turks the “camels of the Empire,” and the Franks assert that every Armenian is born an accountant. These two sayings are, to a great extent justified by the facts, since, thanks to their great physical strength and their quickness and intelligence, they furnish, in addition to a large proportion of her architects, engineers, doctors, and clever and painstaking mechanics, the greater part of Constantinople’s bankers and porters, the former amassing fabulous fortunes, and the latter carrying enormous loads. At first sight, though, one would hardly be aware that there was an Armenian population in Constantinople, so completely has the plant, so to speak, assumed the color of the soil. Their women, on whose account the house of the Armenian is almost as rigorously closed to strangers as that of the Mussulman, have likewise adopted the Turkish dress, and none but the most expert eye could distinguish them among their Mohammedan neighbors. They are generally fair and stout, with the aquiline Oriental profile, large eyes and long lashes; many of them are tall, with matronly figures, and, surmounted by turbans, might well be mistaken for handsome sheiks. They are universally modest and dignified in their bearing, and if anything is lacking it is the intelligence which beams from the eyes of their Greek sisters.

The Greeks.

Difficult as it may be to single out the Armenian at sight, there is no such trouble about the Greek, who differs so essentially in character, bearing, appearance, everything, from all the other subjects of the Empire that he can be told at once without even looking at his dress. To appreciate this diversity, or rather contrast, one need only watch a Turk and a Greek who happen to be seated beside one another on board a steamboat or in a cafÉ. They may be about the same age and rank, both dressed in the European fashion, and even resemble each other somewhat in feature, and yet it is quite impossible to mistake them. The Turk sits perfectly motionless; his face wears a look of quietude and repose, void of all expression, like a fed animal; if by any chance some shadow of a thought appears, it seems to be a reflection as lifeless and inert as his body; he looks at no one, and is apparently quite unconscious that any one is looking at him, expressing by his entire bearing an utter indifference to his surroundings, a something of the resigned melancholy of a slave and the cold pride of a despot; hard, closed, completed, he seems incapable of altering any resolution once taken, and it would drive any one to the verge of madness who should undertake the task of persuading him to any course. In short, he appears to be a being hewn out of a single block, with whom it would only be possible to live either as master or servant, and no amount of intercourse with whom would ever justify the taking of a liberty. With the Greek it is altogether different. His mobile features express every thought that passes through his mind, and betray a youthful, almost childish ardor, while he tosses his head with the free action of an uncurbed and restive horse. On finding himself observed he at once strikes an attitude, and if no one looks at him he tries to attract attention; he seems to be always wanting or imagining something, and his whole person breathes of shrewdness and ambition. There is something so attractive and sympathetic about him that you are inclined to give him your hand even when you would hesitate about trusting him with your purse. Seen side by side, one can readily understand how it is that one of these men considers the other a proud, overbearing, brutal savage, and is looked down upon in his turn as a light creature, untrustworthy, mischievous, and the cause of endless trouble, and how they mutually despise and hate one another from the bottom of their hearts, finding it impossible to live together in peace. And so with the women. It is with a distinct feeling of gratification and pleasure that one first encounters amid the handsome, florid Turkish and Armenian types, appealing more to the senses than the mind, the pure and exquisite features of the Greek women, illuminated by those deep serious eyes whose every glance recalls an ode, while their exquisite shapes inspire an immediate desire to clasp them in one’s arms—with the object of placing them on pedestals, however, rather than in the harem. Among them can still be occasionally found one or two who, wearing their hair after the ancient fashion—that is, hanging over the shoulders in long wavy locks, with one thick coil wound around the top of the head like a diadem—are so noble-looking, so beautiful and classic, that they might well be taken for statues fresh from the chisel of a Praxiteles or a Lysippus, or for youthful immortals discovered after twenty centuries in some forgotten valley of Laconia or unknown island of the Egean. But even among the Greeks these examples of queenly beauty are exceedingly rare, and are found only in the ranks of the old aristocracy of the Empire, in the silent and melancholy quarter of Fanar, where the spirit of ancient Byzantium has taken refuge. There one may occasionally see one of these magnificent women leaning on the railing of a balcony or against the grating of some lofty window, her eyes fixed upon the deserted street in the attitude of an imprisoned queen; and when a crowd of lackeys is not lounging idly before the door of one of these descendants of the PalÆologi and the Comneni, one may, watching her from some place of observation, fancy that a rift in the clouds has revealed for an instant the face of an Olympian goddess.

The Hebrews.

With regard to the Hebrews I am prepared to assert, having been to Morocco myself, that those of Constantinople have nothing in common with their fellows of the northern coast of Africa, where observing experts say they have discovered in all its primitive purity the original Oriental type of Hebrew beauty. In the hope of finding some traces of this same beauty, I summoned up all my courage and thoroughly explored the vast Ghetto of Balata, which winds like an unclean reptile along the banks of the Golden Horn. I penetrated into the most wretched purlieus, among hovels “encrusted with mould” like the shores of the Dantesque pool; through passageways which nothing would induce me to enter again except on stilts, and, holding my nose; I peered through windows hung with filthy rags into dark, malodorous rooms; paused before damp courtyards exhaling a smell of mould and decay strong enough to take one’s breath away; pushed my way through groups of scrofulous children; brushed up against horrible old men who looked as though they had died of the plague and come to life again; avoiding now a dog covered with sores, now a pool of black mud, dodging under rows of loathsome rags hung from greasy cords, or stumbling over heaps of decaying stuff whose smell was enough to make one faint outright. And, after all, my heroism met with no reward. Among all the many women whom I encountered wearing the national kalpak—an article resembling a sort of elongated turban, covering the hair and ears—I saw, it is true, some faces in which could be discovered that delicate regularity of feature and the expression of gentle resignation which are supposed to characterize the Constantinopolitan Jewess; some vague profiles of a Rebecca or a Rachel, with almond-shaped eyes full of a soft sweetness; an occasional graceful, erect figure standing in Raphaelesque attitude in an open doorway, with one delicate hand resting lightly on the curly head of a child; but for the most part my investigations revealed nothing but discouraging evidences of the degradation of the race. What a contrast between those pinched faces and the piercing eyes, brilliant coloring, and well-rounded forms which aroused my admiration a year later in the MellÀ of Tangiers and Fez! And the men—thin, yellow, stunted, all their vitality seems centred in their bright cunning eyes, never still for a moment, but which roll restlessly about as though constantly attracted by the sound of chinking money.

At this point I am quite prepared to hear my kind critics among the Israelites—who have already rapped me over the knuckles in regard to their co-religionists of Morocco—take up the burden of their song, laying all the blame of the degeneration and degradation of the Hebrews of Constantinople at the door of the Turkish oppressor. But it should be remembered that the other non-Mussulman subjects of the Porte are all on a precisely similar footing, both political and civil, with themselves; and, even were it otherwise, they would find some difficulty in proving that the filthy habits, early marriages, and complete abandonment of every sort of hard work, considered as primal causes of that degeneration, are the logical results of the loss of liberty and independence. And should they assert that it is not so much Turkish oppression as the universal scorn and petty persecutions which they have had to endure on all hands that have brought about such complete loss of self-respect, let them pause and first ask themselves if the exact opposite may not be nearer the truth, and the general obloquy in which they are held be not so much the cause as the result of their manner of life; and then, instead of trying to cover up the sore, themselves be the ones to apply the knife.

The Bath.

After making the tour of Balata the most appropriate thing to take next seems to be a Turkish bath. The bath-houses may be easily recognized from without: they are small, mosque-shaped buildings, without windows, surmounted by cupolas, and have high conical chimneys, from which smoke is constantly rising. So much for the exterior, but he who desires to penetrate farther and explore the mysteries of the interior would do well to pause and ask himself, Quid valeant humeri? since not every one is able to endure the aspro governo to which he who enters those salutary walls must be subjected. I am free to confess that, after all I had been told, I approached them with some feeling of trepidation, which I think the reader will admit was not wholly unjustifiable before he has done. As I recall it all now, two great drops of perspiration stand out on my forehead, ready to roll down when I shall be in the heat of my description. Here then is what was done to my unhappy person. Entering timidly, I find myself in a large apartment which leaves one in doubt for a few moments as to whether he has gotten by mistake into a theatre or a hospital. A fountain plays in the centre, decorated on top with flowers; a wooden gallery runs all around the walls, upon which some Turks, stretched upon mattresses and enveloped from head to foot in snow-white cloths, either slumber profoundly or smoke in a dreamy state between waking and sleeping. Looking about for some attendant, I become suddenly aware of two robust mulattoes, stripped to the waist, who appear from nowhere like spectres and ask in deep tones and both together, “Hammamun?” (bath?). “Evvet” (yes), I reply in a very weak voice. Motioning me to follow, they lead the way up a small wooden stair to a room filled with mats and cushions, where I am given to understand that I must undress, after which they proceed to wrap a strip of blue and white stuff about my loins, tie my head up in a piece of muslin, and, placing a pair of huge slippers on my feet, grasp me under the arms like a drunken man, and conduct, or rather drag, me into another room, warm and half lighted, where, after laying me on a rug, they stand with arms akimbo, waiting until my skin shall have become moist. These preparations, so distressingly suggestive of some approaching punishment, fill me with a vague uneasiness, which changes into something even less admirable when the two cutthroats, after touching me on the forehead, exchange a meaning glance, as who should say, “Suppose he resists?” and then, as though exclaiming, “To the rack!” again seize me by the arms and lead me into a third room. This apartment makes a very singular impression at first sight: it is as though one found himself in a subterranean temple, where, through clouds of vapor, high marble walls, rows of columns, arches, and a lofty vaulted roof, can be indistinctly seen, colored green and blue and crimson by the rays of light falling from the cupola, white spectral figures slide noiselessly back and forth close to the walls. In the centre half-naked forms are extended upon the pavement, while others, also half naked, bend over them in the attitude of doctors making an autopsy. The temperature is such that no sooner have we entered than I break out into a profuse perspiration, and it seems most probable that should I ever get out at all it will be in the form of a running stream like the lover of Arethusa.

The two mulattoes convey my body to the centre of the room and deposit it upon a sort of anatomical table consisting of a raised slab of white marble, beneath which are the stoves. The marble, being extremely hot, burns me and I see stars, but, as long as I am there, there is no choice but to go through with the penalty. My two attendants accordingly begin the vivisection, and, chanting a sort of funeral dirge the while, pinch my arms and legs, stretch my muscles, make my joints crack, pound me, rub me, maul me, and then, rolling me over on my face, begin over again, only to put me on my back later and recommence the whole process. They knead and work me like a dough figure to which they want to give a certain form they have in mind, and, not succeeding, have grown angry with; a slight pause for breath is only followed by renewed pinching, pulling, and pounding, until I begin to fear that my last hour is drawing near; and then finally, when my entire body is streaming with perspiration like a wet sponge, the blood coursing furiously through my veins, and it has become evident that I have reached the last limit of endurance, they gather up my remains from that bed of torment and carry them to a corner, where in a small alcove are a basin and two spigots from which hot and cold water are running. But, alas! fresh martyrdom awaits me here; and really the affair at this point begins to assume so serious an aspect that, joking aside, I consider whether it would not be possible to strike out to right and left, and, just as I am, make a break for life and liberty. It is too late, though: one of my tormentors, putting on a camel’s-hair glove, has fallen to rubbing my back, breast, arms, and legs with the same cheerful energy a lively groom might employ in currying a horse; after this has been prolonged for fully five minutes a stream of tepid water is poured down my back, and I take breath and return devout thanks to Heaven that it is all over at last. I soon find, however, that this is premature: that ferocious mulatto, taking the glove off, promptly falls to once more with his bare hand, until, losing all patience, I sign to him to stop, with the result that, exhibiting his hand, he proves to his own entire satisfaction and my complete bewilderment that he must still continue, and does so. Next follows another deluge of water, and after that a fresh operation: each of them, now taking a piece of tow cloth, rubs a quantity of Candia soap upon it, and then proceeds to soap me well from head to foot; then another torrent of perfumed water, followed by the tow cloths again, but, Heaven be praised! without soap this time, and the process is one of drying me off. When this has been accomplished they tie up my head again, wrap the cloth about my body, and then, enveloping me in a large sheet, reconduct me to the second room, where I am allowed to rest a few moments before being taken to the first; here a warm mattress is in readiness, upon which I stretch myself luxuriously. The two instruments of justice give a few final pinches to equalize the circulation of blood throughout all my members, and then, placing an embroidered cushion under my head, a white covering over me, a pipe in my mouth, and a glass of lemonade at my side, depart, leaving me light, fresh, airy, perfumed, with a mind serene, a contented heart, and such a sense of youth and vitality that I feel as though, like Venus, I had just been born from the foam of the sea, and seem to hear the wings of the loves fluttering above my head.

The Serasker Tower.

Feeling thus “airy and meet for intercourse with the stars,” one could not do better than ascend to the top of that stone Titan called the Serasker Tower. I think that should Satan again undertake to offer a view of the kingdoms of the world by way of a temptation, his best course would be to select this spot for the enterprise. The tower, built in the reign of MahmÛd II., is planted upon the summit of the most lofty hill in Stambul, on that spot in the centre of the vast courtyard of the War Office called by the Turks the umbilicus of the city. It is constructed mainly of white Marmora marble, on the plan of a regular polygon with sixteen sides, and rears itself aloft, erect, and graceful as a column, overtopping to a considerable extent the gigantic minarets of the adjacent mosque of Suleiman. Ascending a winding stair lighted here and there by square windows, you catch fleeting views now of Galata, now of Stambul or the villages on the Golden Horn, and before you are halfway to the top seem already to have reached the region of the clouds. It may happen that a slight noise is heard directly over your head, and almost at the same instant a something flashes by, apparently an object of some sort being hurled headlong from above; but, in reality, one of the guards stationed day and night on the summit to watch for fires and give the alarm, who, having discovered at some distant point of the horizon a cloud of suspicious-looking smoke, is taking word to the seraskier. After mounting about two hundred steps you reach a sort of covered terrace running all around the tower and enclosed with glass, where an attendant is always at hand to serve visitors with coffee. On first finding yourself in that transparent cage, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, with nothing to be seen but an immense blue space, and the wind howling and rattling the panes of glass and making the boards strain and creak, you are very apt to be attacked with vertigo and to feel strongly tempted to give up the view; but at sight of the ladder which leads to the window in the roof courage returns, and, climbing up with a beating heart, a cry of astonishment escapes you. It is an overpowering moment, and for a little while you remain silent and transfixed.