LETTER XXXIV.
The Bosphorus—Turkish Palaces—The Black Sea—Buyukdere.
We left the ship with two caïques, each pulled by three men, and carrying three persons, on an excursion to the Black Sea. We were followed by the captain in his fast-pulling gig with six oars, who proposed to beat the feathery boats of the country in a twenty miles’ pull against the tremendous current of the Bosphorus.
The day was made for us. We coiled ourselves à la Turque, in the bottom of the sharp caique, and as our broad-brimmed pagans, after the first mile, took off their shawled turbans, unwound their cashmere girdles, laid aside their gold-broidered jackets, and with nothing but the flowing silk shirt and ample trowsers to embarrass their action, commenced “giving way,” in long energetic strokes—I say, just then, with the sunshine and the west wind attempered to half a degree warmer than the blood (which I take to be the perfection of temperature), and a long, long autumn day, or two, or three, before us, and not a thought in the company that was not kindly and joyous—just then, I say, I dropped a “white stone” on the hour, and said, “Here is a moment, old Care, that has slipped through your rusty fingers! You have pinched me the past somewhat, and you will doubtless mark your cross on the future—but the present, by a thousand pulses in this warm frame laid along in the sunshine, is care-free, and the last hour of Eden came not on a softer pinion!”
We shot along through the sultan’s fleet (some eighteen or twenty lofty ships-of-war, looking, as they lie at anchor in this narrow strait, of a supernatural size), and then, nearing the European shore to take advantage of the counter-current, my kind friend, Mr. H., who is at home on these beautiful waters, began to name to me the palaces we were shooting by, with many a little history of their occupants between, to which in a letter, written with a traveller’s haste, and in moments stolen from fatigue, or pleasure, or sleep, I could not pretend to do justice.
The Bosphorus is quite—there can be no manner of doubt of it—the most singularly beautiful scenery in the world. From Constantinople to the Black Sea, a distance of twenty miles, the two shores of Asia and Europe, separated by but half a mile of bright blue water, are lined by lovely villages, each with its splendid palace or two, its mosque and minarets, and its hundred small houses buried in trees, each with its small dark cemetery of cypresses and turbaned head-stones, and each with its valley stretching back into the hills, of which every summit and swell is crowned with a fairy kiosk. There is no tide, and the palaces of the sultan and his ministers, and of the wealthier Turks and Armenians, are built half over the water, and the ascending caique shoots beneath his window, within the length of the owner’s pipe; and with his own slender boat lying under the stairs, the luxurious oriental makes but a step from the cushions of his saloon to those of a conveyance, which bears him (so built on the water’s edge is this magnificent capital) to almost every spot that can require his presence.
A beautiful palace is that of the “Marble Cradle,” or Beshiktash, the sultan’s winter residence. Its bright gardens with latticed fences (through which, as we almost touched in passing, we saw the gleam of the golden orange and lemon-trees, and the thousand flowers, and heard the splash of fountains, and the singing of birds) lean down to the lip of the Bosphorus, and declining to the south, and protected from everything but the sun by an enclosing wall, enjoy, like the terrace of old King René, a perpetual summer. The brazen gates open on the water, and the palace itself, a beautiful building, painted in the oriental style, of a bright pink, stands between the gardens, with its back to the wall.
The summer palace, where the “unmuzzled lion,” as his flatterers call him, resides at present, is just above on the Asian side, at a village called Beylerbey. It is an immense building, painted yellow, with white cornices, and has an extensive terrace-garden, rising over the hill behind. The harem has eight projecting wings, each occupied by one of the sultan’s lawful wives.
Six or seven miles from Constantinople, on the European shore, stands the serai of the sultan’s eldest sister. It is a Chinese-looking structure, but exceedingly picturesque, and like everything else on the Bosphorus, quite in keeping with the scene. There is not a building on either side, from the Black Sea to Marmora, that would not be ridiculous in other countries; and yet, here, their gingerbread balconies, imitation perspectives, lattices, bird-cages, and kiosks, seem as naturally the growth of the climate as the pomegranate and the cypress. The old maid sultana lives here with a hundred or two female slaves of condition, a little empress in an empire sufficiently large (for a woman); seeing no bearded face, it is presumed, except her black eunuchs’ and her European physician’s, and having, though a sultan’s sister, less liberty than she gives even her slaves, whom she permits to marry if they will. She can neither read nor write, and is said to be fat, indolent, kind, and childish.
A little farther up, the sultan is repairing a fantastical little palace for his youngest sister, Esmeh Sultana, who is to be married to Haleil Pacha, the commander of the artillery. She is about twenty, and, report says, handsome and spirited. Her betrothed was a Georgian slave, bought by the sultan when a boy, and advanced by the usual steps of favouritism. By the laws of imperial marriages in this empire, he is to be banished to a distant pachalick after living with his wife a year, his connexion with blood-royal making him dangerously eligible to the throne. His bride remains at Stamboul, takes care of her child (if she has one), and lives the remainder of her life in a widow’s seclusion, with an allowance proportioned to her rank. His consolation is provided for by the Mussulman privilege of as many more wives as he can support. Heaven send him resignation—if he needs it notwithstanding.
The hakim, or chief physician to the sultan, has a handsome palace on the same side of the Bosphorus; and the Armenian seraffs, or bankers, though compelled, like all rayahs, to paint their houses of a dull lead colour (only a Mussulman may live in a red house in Constantinople), are said, in those dusky-looking tenements, to maintain a luxury not inferior to that of the sultan himself. They have a singular effect, those black, funereal houses, standing in the foreground of a picture of such light and beauty!
We pass Orta-keni, the Jew village; the Arnaout-keni, occupied mostly by Greeks; and here, if you have read “The Armenians,” you are in the midst of its most stirring scenes. The story is a true one, not much embellished in the hands of the novelist; and there, on the hill opposite, in Anatolia, stands the house of the heroine’s father, the old seraff Oglou, and, behind the garden, you may see the small cottage, inhabited, secretly, by the enamoured Constantine; and here, in the pretty village of Bebec, lives, at this moment, the widowed and disconsolate Veronica, dressed ever in weeds, and obstinately refusing all society but her own sad remembrance. I must try to see her. Her “husband of a night” was compelled to marry again by the hospidar, his father (but this is not in the novel, you will remember), and there is late news that his wife is dead, and the lovers of romance in Stamboul are hoping he will return and make a happier sequel than the sad one in the story. The “orthodox catholic Armenian, broker and money-changer to boot,” who was to have been her forced husband, is a very amiable and good-looking fellow, now in the employ of our chargé d’affaires as second dragoman.
We approach Roumeli Hissar, a jutting point almost meeting a similar projection from the Asian shore, crowned, like its vis-a-vis, with a formidable battery. The Bospborus here is but half an arrow-flight in width, and Europe and Asia, here at their nearest approach, stand looking each other in the face, like boxers, with foot forward, fist doubled, and a most formidable row of teeth on either side. The current scampers through between the two castles, as if happy to get out of the way, and, up-stream, it is hard pulling for a caique. They are beautiful points, however, and I am ashamed of my coarse simile, when I remember how green was the foliage that half-enveloped the walls, and how richly picturesque the hills behind them. Here, in the European castle, were executed the greater part of the janisaries, hundreds in a day, of the manliest frames in the empire, thrown into the rapid Bosphorus, headless and stripped, to float, unmourned and unregarded, to the sea.
Above Roumeli-Hissar, the Bosphorus spreads again, and a curving bay, which is set like a mirror, in a frame of the softest foliage and verdure, is pointed out as a spot at which the crusaders, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Raymond of Toulouse, encamped on their way to Palestine. The hills beyond this are loftier, and the Giant’s Mountain, upon which the Russian army encamped at their late visit to the Porte, would be a respectable eminence in any country. At its foot, the Strait expands into quite a lake; and on the European side, in a scoop of the shore, exquisitely placed, stand the diplomatic villages of Terapia and Buyukdere. The English, French, Russian, Austrian and other flags were flying over half-a-dozen of the most desirable residences I have seen since Italy.
We soon pulled the remaining mile or two, and our spent caikjees drew breath, and lay on their oars in the Black Sea. The waves were breaking on the “blue Symplegades,” a mile on our left; and, before us, toward the Cimmerian, Bosphorus; and, south, toward Colchis and Trebizond, spread one broad, blue waste of waters, apparently as limitless as the ocean. The Black Sea is particularly blue.
We turned our prow to the west, and I sighed to remember that I had reached my farthest step into the East. Henceforth I shall be on the return. I sent a long look over the waters to the bright lands beyond, so famed in history and fiction, and wishing for even a metamorphosis into the poor sea-bird flying above us (whose travelling expenses Nature pays), I lay back in the boat with a “change in the spirit of my dream.”
We stopped on the Anatolian shore to visit the ruins of a fine old Genoese castle, which looks over the Black Sea, and after a lunch upon grapes and coffee, at a small village at the foot of the hill on which it stands, we embarked and followed our companions. Running down with the current to Buyukdere, we landed and walked along the thronged and beautiful shore to Terapia, meeting hundreds of fair Armenians and Greeks (all beautiful, it seemed to me), issuing forth for their evening promenade, and, with a call of ceremony on the English ambassador, for whom I had letters, we again took to the caique, and fled down with the current like a bird. Oh what a sunset was there!
We were to dine and pass the night at the country-house of an English gentleman at Bebec, a secluded and lovely village, six or eight miles from Constantinople. We reached the landing as the stars began to glimmer, and, after one of the most agreeable and hospitable entertainments I remember to have shared, we took an early breakfast with our noble host, and returned to the ship. I could wish my friends no brighter passage in their lives than such an excursion as mine to the Black Sea.