LETTER XLIII.
Punishment of Conjugal Infidelity—Drowning in the Bosphorus—Frequency of its occurrence accounted for—A Band of Wild Roumeliotes—Their Picturesque Appearance—Ali Pacha, of Yanina—A Turkish Funeral—Fat Widow of Sultan Selim—A Visit to the Sultan’s Summer Palace—A Travelling Moslem—Unexpected Token of Home.
A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the Bosphorus this morning. I was idling away the day in the bazaar and did not see her. The ward-room steward of the “United States,” a very intelligent man, who was at the pier when she was brought down to the caique, describes her as a young woman of twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful; and with the exception of a short quick sob in her throat, as if she had wearied herself out with weeping, she was quite calm and submitted composedly to her fate. She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress, her yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was drawn over her without resistance. The plash of her body in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had followed her to the water.
It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions, knowing as we do, that the poor victim is taken before the judge, upon the least jealous whim of her husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspicion, and hurried instantly from the tribunal to this violent and revolting death. Any suspicion of commerce with a Christian particularly, is, with or without evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants of Arnaout-keni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus, were shocked with the spectacle of a Turkish woman and a young Greek, hanging dead from the shutters of a window on the water’s side. He had been detected in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less than an hour the unfortunate lovers had met their fate. They are said to have died most heroically, embracing and declaring their attachment to the last.
Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople, and it is not wonderful, considering the superiority of the educated and picturesque Greek to his brutal neighbour, or the daring and romance of Europeans in the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The liberty of going and coming, which the Turkish women enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by their secrecy, is temptingly favourable to intrigue, and the self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the demand for it.
An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of the sultan’s sister, consisting of a great number of women, tells me that their time is principally occupied in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers, with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These platonic passions for persons whom they have only seen from their gilded lattices, are their only amusement, and they are permitted by the sultana, who has herself the reputation of being partial to Franks, and, old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to obtain their society. My intelligent informant thinks the Turkish women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat remarkable for their sentiment of character.
With two English travellers, whom I had known in Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran down under the wall of the city, on the side of the sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath the wall of the seraglio, whose small water-gates, whence so many victims have found
“Their way to Marmora without a boat,”
are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with the dramatis personæ of a thousand tragedies. One smiles to detect himself gazing on an old postern, with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end, in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of September!
We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven Towers, and dismissed our boat to walk across to the Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the triple walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers look as if they were toppling after an earthquake, and are overgrown superbly with ivy. Large trees, rooted in the crevices, and gradually bursting the thick walls, overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for the whole length of the five or six miles across, it is one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no country such beautiful ruins.
At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of horsemen, armed in the wild manner of the East, who had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the mountains. They were not allowed to enter the city, and, with their horses picketed upon the plain, were lying about in groups, waiting till their leader should conclude his audience with the seraskier. They were as cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see. The extreme richness of eastern arms, mounted showily in silver, and of shapes so cumbersome, yet picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged capotes, and torn leggings, and their way-worn and weary countenances. Yet they were almost without exception fine-featured, and with a resolute expression of face, and they had flung themselves, as savages will, into attitudes that art would find it difficult to improve.
Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs, indicating the spots in which are buried the heads of Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three sons and grandson. The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head for having dared to aspire to independence. He was a brave old barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief of the most warlike people of modern times, one stands over his grave with regret. It would have been a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event in his travels made more impression on his mind than the pacha’s detecting his rank by the beauty of his hands. His fine description of the wild court of Yanina, in “Childe Harold,” has already made the poet’s return of immortality, but had he survived the revolution in Greece, with his increased knowledge of the Albanian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen whether the age or the language will produce another Byron to take up the broken thread.
As we were poring over the Turkish inscription, four men, apparently quite intoxicated, came running and hallooing from the city gate, bearing upon their shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the cemetery, they went stumbling on over the foot-stones, tossing the corpse about so violently, that the helpless limbs frequently fell beyond the limits of the rude barrow, while the grave-digger, the only sober person, save the dead man, in the company, followed at his best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These extraordinary bearers set down their burden not far from the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like men who had merely engaged in a moment’s frolic by the way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed a little the posture of the disordered body, and sat down to get breath for his task.
My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces on its way to the grave. The poor are thus carried out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after they have completed their prescribed paces, change with the first individual whose reckoning with heaven may be in arrears.
The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last journey, was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He had neither shroud nor coffin, but
“Lay like a gentleman taking a snooze,”
in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his bosom the only token that he was dressed for any particular occasion. We had not time to stay and see his grave dug, and “his face laid toward the tomb of the prophet.”
We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the triangle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line approaching its hypothenuse. Though in a city so thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a street; and the perfect silence, and the cheerless look of the Turkish houses, with their jealously closed windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by the plague. The population of Constantinople is only seen in the bazaars or in the streets bordering on the Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy apartments opening on their secluded gardens, or are hidden from the gaze of the street by their fine dull-coloured lattices. It strikes one with melancholy after the gay balconies and open doors of France and Italy!
We passed the Eskai Serai, the palace in which the imperial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude; and, weary with our long walk, emerged from the silent streets at the bazaar of wax-candles, and took caique for the Argentopolis of the ancients, the Silver City of Galatia.
The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman fleet in the Bosphorus announced, some days since, that the sultan had changed his summer for his winter serai, and the commodore received yesterday a firman to visit the deserted palace of Beylerbey.
We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party of officers increased by the captain of the “Acteon,” sloop-of-war, some gentlemen of the English ambassador’s household, and several strangers who took advantage of the commodore’s courtesy to enjoy a privilege granted so very rarely.
As we pulled up the Strait, some one pointed out the residence, on the European shore, of the once favourite wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan Selim. She is called by the Turks, the “boneless sultana,” and is the model of shape by the oriental standard. The poet’s lines,
“Who turned that little waist with so much care,
And shut perfection in so small a ring?”
though a very neat compliment in some countries, would be downright rudeness in the East. Near this jelly in weeds lives a venerable Turk, who was once ambassador to England. He came back too much enlightened, and the mufti immediately procured his exile, for infidelity. He passes his day, we are told, in looking at a large map hung on the wall before him, and wondering at his own travels.
We were received at the shining brazen gate of Beylerbey, by Hamik Pacha (a strikingly elegant man, just returned from a mission to England), deputed by the sultan to do the honours. A side-door introduced us immediately to the grand hall upon the lower floor, which was separated only by four marble pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at will, from the gravel walk of the garden in the rear. We ascended thence by an open staircase of wood, prettily inlaid, to the second floor, which was one long suite of spacious rooms, built entirely in the French style, and thence to the third floor, the same thing over again. It was quite like looking at lodgings in Paris. There was no furniture, except, an occasional ottoman turned with its face upon another, and a prodigious quantity of French musical clocks, three or four in every room, and all playing in our honour with an amusing confusion. One other article, by the way—a large, common, American rocking-chair! The poor thing stood in a great gilded room all alone, looking pitiably home-sick. I seated myself in it, malgré a thick coat of dust upon the bottom, as I would visit a sick countryman in exile.
The harem was locked, and the polite pacha regretted that he had no orders to open it. We descended to the gardens, which rise by terraces to a gimcrack temple and orangery, and having looked at the sultan’s poultry, we took our leave. If his pink palace in Europe is no finer than his yellow palace in Asia, there is many a merchant in America better lodged than the padishah of the Ottoman empire. We have not seen the old seraglio, however, and in its inaccessible recesses, probably, moulders that true oriental splendour which this upholsterer monarch abandons in his rage, for the novel luxuries of Europe.