STREET SCENE, TOP-KHANEH
Top-Khaneh is a continuation of Galata.
No one, of course, undervalues the advantages of steam navigation, or suggests a return to sailing ships. At the same time it remains true, that never again will men see the Bosporus so beautiful as it looked in days when its waters were untroubled by steam. Owing to the prevalence of northerly winds in these regions, ships bound for the Black Sea were liable to long detention on their way up from the Mediterranean. Great fleets of merchantmen were accordingly apt to collect in the Dardanelles and in the Golden Horn, waiting for a favourable breeze. They had sometimes to wait six weeks ere they could stir. When at length the south wind did come, every stitch of canvas the ships could carry was unfurled, and an immense procession of winged sea-coursers and chariots rode through the Bosporus day after day so long as the south wind blew. In an hour, a hundred, two hundred, vessels might pass a given point, all panting to reach the open sea before the wind failed, and racing one another to get there first. Ships of all sizes and of every form, European and Oriental, sails and rigging of every style; huge three-masted merchantmen, “signiors and rich burghers on the flood,” schooners, brigs, barges, caïques, “petty traffickers,” with their white wings stretched over the blue waters, from one green bank across to the other, flew before the wind, and formed a spectacle solemn and stately as a royal or religious ceremonial. It was a magnificent scene of colour, motion, and variety of form; of eagerness and achievement.
When we think of the means of communication with the outer world, the change is extraordinary. For the voyage from England to Constantinople a sailing vessel took usually thirty to sixty days. It might be even three months, as an Englishman still living in the city found, in 1845, in his own case. To-day one travels by rail to London in three and a half days. Letters from England took ten days. There was a weekly European mail viâ Trieste, and three times a month viâ Marseilles. Now, a European mail arrives daily. The postage on a letter was 1s. 4d. where now it is 2½d. It is impossible to exaggerate the influence upon the life of the place due to this close connection by steamship and by rail with the Western world. The Ottoman authorities were not altogether mistaken, from their point of view, when they looked with disfavour upon the junction of the railroads in Turkey with the European railway system. That junction, it was thought, would facilitate the military invasion of the country. But ideas travel by rail, as well as soldiers. And the invasion of a country by new ideas may have consequences as formidable and far-reaching as any that arms can introduce. The completion of the railroad between Constantinople and Vienna in 1888 may be regarded as the conquest of the city by foreign thought and enterprise. Little, perhaps, did the crowds, that gathered at the Stamboul railway station on the 14th of August in that year to witness the arrival of the first train from the Austrian capital, appreciate the significance of that event. But it was the annexation of Constantinople to the Western world. New ideas, new fashions now rule, for better and for worse. And soon the defects and the charms of the old Oriental city will be a dream of the past.
Owing to the narrowness and steepness of the streets of Constantinople, the transportation of heavy loads through the city by means of wheeled vehicles has always been a difficult, and often an impossible, undertaking. Much has been done in recent years to widen and grade the chief thoroughfares. The authorities are even accused of having occasionally secured that improvement, by setting fire to the houses along an old narrow but picturesque lane in order to take advantage of the law, that when a house is rebuilt the municipality has the right to appropriate a part of the old site to broaden the public way, without giving compensation to the owner of the ground. Moreover, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1876-77, the Moslem refugees from Bulgaria introduced the use of a rough four-wheeled cart drawn by one horse, and that conveyance is now extensively employed. The old-fashioned, long, narrow, wagon drawn by a pair of oxen or buffaloes, so primitive that it might be a wagon which the Huns left behind in their march through the land, still crawls and creaks under a pile of the household furniture of a family removing from one house to another, or from town to country, or from country to town. But the means of transportation most characteristic of the place are the backs of animals and of men. To an extent seen nowhere else, at all events, in Europe, the streets are obstructed by long trains of donkeys and horses carrying planks, or stones, or lime, or bricks, to some building in course of erection, or hurrying back from it for fresh loads. It is, however, in the employment of human beings as beasts of burden that Constantinople excels.
A STEP STREET
A typical street in the old Turkish quarter; the houses are built almost entirely of wood, brilliantly painted, and hardly two in the street are on the same level; the lattice work at the windows indicates the women’s quarters.