LETTER XL.
Beauties of the Bosphorus—Summer-Palace of the Sultan—Adventure with an old Turkish Woman—The Feast of Bairam—The Sultan his own Butcher—His evil Propensities—Visit to the Mosques—A formidable Dervish—Santa Sophia—Mosque of Sultan Achmet—Traces of Christianity.
From this elevated point, the singular effect of a desert commencing from the very streets of the city is still more observable. The compact edge of the metropolis is visible even upon the more rural Bosphorus, not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing to protrude beyond the closely pressed limit. To repeat the figure, it seems, with the prodigious mass of habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of both Europe and Asia were swept to their respective borders, or as if the crowded masses upon the long extending shores were the deposit of some mighty overflow of the sea.
From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly light and fantastic architecture to the never-wearying Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, upon that silver link between the two seas, there are fifty valleys and thirty rivers, and an imperial palace on every loveliest spot from the Black Sea to Marmora. The Italians say, “See Naples and die!” but for Naples I would read Stamboul and the Bosphorus.
Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, we entered a long glen, closed at the water’s edge by the Sultan’s summer-palace, and present residence of Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a Wordsworthian passion for all things humble and simple, gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and inquired her business at the village. She had been to Stavros, to sell ten paras’ worth of herbs—about one cent of our currency. He put a small piece of silver into her hand, while, with the still strong habit of Turkish modesty, she employed the other in folding her tattered yashmack so as to conceal her features from the gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity. “What is this for?” she asked, looking at it with some surprise. “To buy bread for your children, mother!” “Effendi!” said the poor old creature, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, “My children are all dead! There is no one now between me and Allah!” It were worth a poet’s while to live in the East. Like the fairy in the tale, they never open their lips but they “speak pearls.”
We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, at Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial palace. Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and long blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the court-yard of the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly at the fine lattices above, concealing so many of the picked beauties of the empire. A mandolin, very indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings, betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and there was a single moment when we could see, by the relief of a corner window, the outline of a female figure; but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for their reward. As we approached the central façade the polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on the terrace beneath the palace-windows, announcing, in their first flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust his fingers into his pilaw, and his subjects were at liberty to dine. Not finding their music much to our taste, we ordered the caikjees to assist the current a little, and shooting past Stavros, we cut across the Strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the vizier, and, in a few minutes, I was once more in my floating home, under the “star-spangled banner.”
Constantinople was in a blaze last night, with the illumination for the approach of the Turkish feast of Bairam. The minarets were extremely beautiful, their encircling galleries hung with coloured lamps, and illuminated festoons suspended from one to the other. The ships of the fleet were decked also with thousands of lamps, and the effect was exceedingly fine, with the reflection in the Bosphorus, and the waving of the suspended lights in the wind. The Sultan celebrates the festa by taking a virgin to his bed, and sacrificing twenty sheep with his own hand. I am told by an intelligent physician here, that this playing the butcher is an every-day business with the “Brother of the Sun,” every safe return from a ride, or an excursion in his sultanethe caique, requiring him to cut the throat of his next day’s mutton. It may account partly for the excessive cruelty of character attributed to him.
Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be very avaricious. It is related of his youth, that he was permitted occasionally, with his brother (who was murdered to make room for him on the throne), to walk out in public on certain days with their governor; and that, upon these occasions, each was intrusted with a purse to be expended in charity. The elder brother soon distributed his piastres, and borrowed of his attendants to continue his charities; while Mahmoud quietly put the purse in his pocket, and added it to his private hoard on his return. It is said, too, that he has a particular passion for upholstery, and in his frequent change from one serai to another, allows no nail to be driven without his supervision. Add to this a spirit of perverse contradiction, so truculent that none but the most abject flatterers can preserve his favour, and you have a pretty handful of offsets against a character certainly not without some royal qualities.
With one of the reis effendi’s and one of the seraskier’s officers, followed by four kervasses in the Turkish military dress, and every man a pair of slippers in his pocket, we accompanied the commodore, to-day, on a visit to the principal mosques.
Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we entered the court of the new mosque built by the present sultan, whose elegant exterior of white marble and two freshly-gilded minarets we had admired daily, lying at anchor without sound of the muezzin. The morning prayers were just over, and the retiring Turks looked, with lowering brows at us, as we pulled off our boots on the sacred threshold.
We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I should have taken for rather a superb ball-room. An unencumbered floor carpeted gaily, a small arabesque gallery over the door quite like an orchestra, chandeliers and lamps in great profusion, and walls painted of the brightest and most varied colours, formed an interior rather wanting in the “dim religious light” of a place of worship. We were shuffling around in our slippers from one side to the other, examining the marble mihrab and the narrow and towering pulpit, when a ragged and decrepid dervish, with his papooshes in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from a very dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers, and began walking backward and forward, eyeing us ferociously and muttering himself into quite a passion. His charity for infidels was evidently at a low ebb. Every step we took upon the holy floor seemed to add to his fury. The kervasses observed him, but his sugar-loaf cap carried some respect with it, and they evidently did not like to meddle with him. He followed us to the door, fixing his hollow grey eyes with a deadly glare upon each one as he went out, and the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry us out of his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mounted a handsome marble staircase to a suite of apartments above, communicating with the sultan’s private gallery. The carpets here were richer, and the divans with which the half dozen saloons were surrounded, were covered with the most costly stuffs of the East. The gallery was divided from the area of the mosque by a fine brazen grating curiously wrought, and its centre occupied by a rich ottoman, whereon the imperial legs are crossed in the intervals of his prostrations. It was about the size and had the air altogether of a private box at the opera.
We crossed the Golden Horn, and passing the eunuch’s guard, entered the gardens of the seraglio on our way to Santa Sophia. An inner wall still separated us from the gilded kiosks, at whose latticed windows peering above the trees, we might have clearly perused the features of any peeping inmate; but the little cross-bars revealed nothing but their own provoking eye of the size of a rose-leaf in the centre, and we reached the upper gate without even a glimpse of a waved handkerchief to stir our chivalry to the rescue.
A confused mass of buttresses without form or order, is all that you are shown for the exterior of that “wonder of the world,” the mosque of mosques, the renowned Santa Sophia. We descended a dark avenue, and leaving our boots in a vestibule that the horse of Mohammed the Second, if he was lodged as ambitiously living as dead, would have disdained for his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A long breath and an admission of its almost attributable supernatural grandeur, followed our too hasty disappointment. It is indeed a “vast and wondrous dome!” Its dimensions are less than those of St. Peter’s at Rome, but its effect, owing to its unity and simplicity of design, is, I think, superior. The numerous small galleries let into its sides add richness to it without impairing its apparent magnitude, and its vast floor, upon which a single individual is almost lost, the sombre colours of its walls untouched probably for centuries, and the dim sepulchral light that struggles through the deep-niched and retiring windows, form altogether an interior from which the imagination returns, like the dove to the ark, fluttering and bewildered.
Our large party separated over its wilderness of a floor, and each might have had his hour of solitude, had the once Christian spirit of the spot (or the present pagan demon) affected him religiously. I found, myself, a singular pleasure in wandering about upon the elastic mats (laid four or five thick all over the floor), examining here a tattered banner hung against the wall, and there a rich cashmere which had covered the tomb of the prophet; on one side a slab of transparent alabaster from the temple of Solomon (a strange relic for a Mohammedan mosque!) and on the other, a dark mihrab surrounded by candles of incredible proportions, looking like the marble columns of some friezeless portico. The four “six-winged cherubim” on the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace as they are of the religion to which the building was first dedicated, had better been left to the imagination. They are monstrous in mosaic. It is said that the whole interior of the mosque is cased beneath its dusky plaster with the same costly mosaic which covers the ceiling. To make a Mohammedan mosque of a Christian church, however, it was necessary to erase Christian emblems from the walls; besides which the Turks have a superstitious horror of all imitative arts, considering the painting of the Iranian features particularly, as a mockery of the handiwork of Allah.
We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sultan Achmet, which is in imitation of Santa Sophia within, but its own beautiful prototype in exterior. Its spacious and solemn court, its six heaven-piercing minarets, its fountains, and the mausoleums of the sultans, with their gilded cupolas and sarcophagi covered with cashmeres (the murdering sultan and his murdered brothers lying in equal splendour side by side!), are of a style of richness peculiarly oriental and imposing. We visited in succession Sultan Bajazet, Sulymanye, and Sultana Valide, all of the same arabesque exterior, and very similar within. The description of one leaves little to be said of the other, and, with the exception of Santa Sophia, of which I should like to make a lounge when I am in love with my own company, the mosques of Constantinople are a kind of “lion” well killed in a single visit.