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