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.