LETTER XLI.
Unerring Detection of Foreigners—A Cargo of Odalisques—The Fanar, or Quarter of the Greeks—Street of the Booksellers—Aspect of Antiquity—Purchases—Charity for Dogs and Pigeons—Punishment of Canicide—A Bridal Procession—Turkish Female Physiognomy.
Pulling up the Golden Horn to-day in a caique without any definite errand (a sort of excursion particularly after my own heart), I was amused at the caikjee’s asking my companion, who shaves clean like a Christian, and has his clothes from Regent-street, and looks for aught I can see, as much like a foreigner in Constantinople as myself, “in what vessel I had arrived.” We asked him if he had ever seen either of us before. “No!” How then did he know that my friend, who had not hitherto spoken a word of Turkish, was not as lately arrived as myself? What is it that so infallibly, in every part of the world, distinguishes the stranger?
We passed under the stern of an outlandish-looking vessel just dropping her anchor. Her deck was crowded with men and women in singular costumes, and near the helm, apparently under the protection of a dark-visaged fellow in a voluminous turban, stood three young, and, as well as we could see, uncommonly pretty girls. The captain answered to our hail that he was from Trebizond, and his passengers were slaves for the bazaar. How redolent of the East! Were one but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of surprise and innocence!
We landed at the Fanar. Bow-windows crowded with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked shoulders (which I am already so orientalised as to think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists, reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and miserable suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece, the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, intriguing, but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes. One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root of Palæologus or some equally boasted blood of the Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G—— at the baths of Lucca last year, whom I except from every disparaging remark), that he is a little disappointed with the dirty alleys and the stuffed windows shown him as hereditary homes of these very sounding names. There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar, that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter that would pass in our country for a respectable barn. In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior to any other race of their own nation. The Albanians and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were (except the North American Indians) the finest people, physically, I have ever been among; while it would be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate-looking body of men and women, than swarm in this nest of Grecian princes.
We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and caïques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward the bazaar. Always discovering new passages in that labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves, after an hour’s rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rather the oldest and narrowest part of the bazaar, and the light of heaven meets with the additional interruption of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in the middle of the street. On entering the literary twilight of the passage in the rear of these columns, the classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odour of manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding; and the trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries, wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complexion of a shelf at the Harpers’, or the Hendees’, or the Careys’—no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem, no political pamphlet or gay souvenir! And the priceless treasures of learning are not here doled out by a talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in sombre and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspondence of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumbed tomes of Arabic or Persian; while the venerable bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his grey beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind, and murmur a low “pekke!” of approbation.
We had stepped back into the last century. Here was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed, not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less than the purchase of a whole scrivener’s furniture, from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed, by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbours: for in Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar. A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the old man’s knees, while from a wooden bowl he was eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evidently an interruption. He had not even laid aside his book.
There was something in his handling the volume, as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an affection for the author. He turned it over with a slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I took it from him open at the place, and marked the passage with my nail, to look for it in the translation.
With my cheaply-bought treasures in my pockets, we turned up the street of the diamond merchants, and making a single purchase more in the bazaar, of a tesbih or Turkish rosary of spice-wood, emerged to the open air in the neighbourhood of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet.
Whether slipping the pagan beads through my fingers affected me devoutly, or whether it was the mellow humour of the moment, I felt a disposition to forgive my enemies, and indulge in an act of Mohammedan piety—feeding the unowned dogs of the street. We stepped into a baker’s shop, and laid out a piastre in bread, and were immediately observed and surrounded, before we could break a loaf, by twenty or thirty as ill-looking curs, as ever howled to the moon. Having distributed about a dozen loaves, and finding that our largess had by no means satisfied the appetites of the expecting rabble, we found ourselves embarrassed to escape. Nothing but the baker’s threshold prevented them from jumping upon us, in their eagerness, and the array of so many formidable mouths ferocious with hunger, was rather staggering. The baker drew off the hungry pack at last, by walking round the corner with a loaf in his hand, while we made a speedy exit, patted on the back in passing by several of the assembled spectators.
It is surprising that the Turks can tolerate this filthy breed of curs, in such extraordinary numbers. They have a whimsical punishment for killing one of them. The dead dog is hung by his heels, so that his nose just touches the ground, and the canicide is compelled to heap wheat about him, till he is entirely covered; the wheat is then given to the poor, and the dog buried at the expense of the culprit. There are probably five dogs to every man in Constantinople, and besides their incessant barking, they often endanger the lives of children and strangers. MacFarlane, I think, tells the story of a drunken sea-captain, who was entirely devoured by the dogs at Tophana; nothing being found of him in the morning but his “indigestible pig-tail!”
We entered the court of Sultan Bajazet, and found the majestic plane-trees that shadow its arabesque fountains, bending beneath the weight of hundreds of pensionary pigeons. Here, as at several of the mosques, an old man sits by the gate, whose business it is to expend the alms given him in distributing grain to these sacred birds. Not to be outdone in piety, my friend gave the blind Turk a piastre; and, as he arose and unlocked the box beneath him, the pigeons descended about us in such a cloud, as literally to darken the air. Handful after handful was then thrown among them, and the beautiful creatures ran over our feet and fluttered round us with a fearlessness that sufficiently proved the safety in which they haunted the sacred precincts. In a few minutes they soared altogether again to the trees, and their Mussulman-feeder resumed his seat upon the box to wait for another charity.
A crowd of women at the harem gate, in the rear of the seraskier’s palace, attracted our attention. Upon inquiry, we found that he had married a daughter to one of the sultan’s military officers, and the bridal party was expected presently to come out in arubas, and make the tour of the Hippodrome, on the way to the house of the bridegroom. We wiled away an hour returning the gaze of curiosity bent upon us from the idle and bright eyes of a hundred women, and the first of the gilded vehicles made its appearance; though in the same style of ornament with the one I have already described, it differed in being drawn by horses, and having a frame top, with small round mirrors set in the corners. Within sat four very young women, one of whom was the bride; but which, we found no one who could tell us. It is no description of a face in the East to say, that the eyes were dark, and the nose regular—all that the jealous yashmack permitted us to ascertain of the beauty of the bride. Their eyes are all dark, and their noses are all regular; the Turkish nose differing from the Grecian, as that of the Antinous from the Apollo, only in its more voluptuous fulness, and a nostril less dilated. Four darker pairs of eyes, however, and four brows of whiter orb, never pined in a harem, or were reflected in those golden-rimmed mirrors; and as the twelve succeeding arubas rattled by, and in each suite four young women, with the same eternal dark eyes, “full of sleep,” and the same curved and pearly forehead, and noses like the Antinous, I thought of toujours perdrix, and felt that if there had been but one with a slight toss in that prominent member, it would not have been displeasing.
In a conversation with a Greek lady the other day, she remarked that the veils of the Turkish ladies conceal no charms. Their mouths, she says, are generally coarse, and their teeth, from the immoderate use of sweetmeats, or neglect, or some other cause, almost universally defective. How far the interest excited by these hidden features may have jaundiced the eyes of my fair informer, I cannot say; but, as a general fact, uneducated women, whatever other beauties they may possess, have rarely expressive or agreeable mouths. Nature forms and colours the nose, the eyes, the forehead, and the complexion; but the character, from the cradle up, moulds gradually to its own inward changes, the plastic and passion-breathing lines of the lips. Allowing this, it would be rather surprising if there was a mouth in all Turkey that had more than a pretty silliness at the most—the art of dyeing their finger nails, and painting their eyebrows, being the highest branches of female education. How they came by these “eyes that teach us what the sun is made of,” the vales of Georgia and Circassia best can tell.
And so having rambled away a sunny autumn day, and earned some little appetite, if not experience, we will get out of Stamboul, before the sunset guard makes us prisoners, and climb up to our dinner in Pera.