CHAPTER XI
TURKISH PRISONS
Old castles used as prisons—The Castle of Europe—The Seven Towers and the “Well of Blood”—The Seraglio and the Bagnio—The Zaptie—Lack of prison discipline—Midhat Pasha and the Constitution—His disgrace and death—The Young Turk movement—Horrible massacres at Adana—The provincial prisons all bad—Fetters and other modes of torture—Little improvement under new sultan.
There are few notable buildings in Turkey constructed primarily as prisons. In fact there are few buildings of any sort constructed for that purpose. But every palace had, and one may almost say, still has its prison chambers; and every fortress has its dungeons, the tragedies of which are chiefly a matter of conjecture. Few were present at the tortures, and in a country where babbling is not always safe, witnesses were likely to be discreet.
In and around Constantinople, if walls had only tongues, strange and gruesome stories might be told. On the Asiatic side of the Bosporus still stand the ruins of a castle built by Bayezid I, known as “the Thunderbolt” when the Ottoman princes were the dread of Europe. Sigismund, King of Hungary, had been defeated, and Constantinople was the next object of attack, though not to fall for a half century. This castle was named “the Beautiful,” but so many prisoners died there of torture and ill-treatment that the name “Black Tower” took its place in common speech.
Directly opposite, on the European side of the Bosporus, is Rumili Hissar, or the Castle of Europe, which Muhammad II, “the Conqueror,” built in 1452 when he finally reached out to transform the headquarters of Eastern Christendom into the centre of Islam. The castle was built upon the site of the state prison of the Byzantine emperors, which was destroyed to make room for it. The three towers of the castle, and the walls thirty feet thick, still stand. In the Tower of Oblivion which now has as an incongruous neighbour, the Protestant institution, Robert College, is a fiendish reminder of days hardly yet gone. A smooth walled stone chute reaches from the interior of the tower down into the Bosporus. Into the mouth of this the hapless victim, bound and gagged perhaps, with weights attached to his feet, was placed. Down he shot and bubbles marked for a few seconds the grave beneath the waters.
The Conqueror built also the Yedi Kuleh, or the “Seven Towers,” at the edge of the old city. This imperial castle, like the Bastile or the Tower of London, was also a state prison, though its glory and its shame have both departed. The Janissaries who guarded this castle used to bring thither the sultans whom they had dethroned either to allow them to linger impotently or to cause them to lose their heads. A cavern where torture was inflicted and the rusty machines which tore muscles and cracked joints, may still be seen. The dungeons in which the prisoners lay are also shown. A small open court was the place of execution and to this day it is called the “place of heads” while a deep chasm into which the heads were thrown is the “well of blood.”
Several sultans, (the exact number is uncertain) and innumerable officers of high degree have suffered the extreme penalty here. It was here too that foreign ambassadors were always imprisoned in former days, when Turkey declared war against the states they represented. The last confined here was the French representative in 1798.
Another interesting survival of early days is the Seraglio, the old palace of the sultans, and its subsidiary buildings, scattered over a considerable area. In the court of the treasury is the Kafess, or cage, in which the imperial children were confined from the time of Muhammad III, lest they should aspire to the throne. Sometimes however the brothers and sons of the reigning sultan were confined, each in a separate pavilion on the grounds. A retinue of women, pages and eunuchs was assigned to each but the soldiers who guarded them were warned to be strict. The present sultan was confined by his brother Abdul Hamid within the grounds of the Yildiz Kiosk, where he had many liberties but was a prisoner nevertheless. Absolutism breeds distrust of all, no matter how closely connected by ties of blood.
An interesting prison was the old Bagnio, once the principal prison of Constantinople. The English economist, N. W. Senior, describes it as it was sixty years ago, in his “Journal.” It was simply an open court at one end of which was a two-story building. Each story was composed of one long room divided into stalls by wooden partitions, the whole, dark, unventilated and dirty beyond description. Some turbulent prisoners were chained in their stalls which they were not permitted to leave.
The chief interest lay in the court-yard, however, which was the common meeting place. No rules as to cleanliness or regularity of hours existed. No one was compelled to work and the great majority preferred to lounge in the sun. In the court were coffee and tobacco shops, while sellers of sweetmeats made their way through the crowds. Though capital punishment was nominally inflicted, it was never imposed unless there were eye witnesses of the crime, and seldom then. So of the eight hundred inmates of the Bagnio, six hundred were murderers, some of them professionals. Nearly all wore chains, some of which were heavy, and as several prisoners were attached to one chain occasionally conflicts arose as different members of the group exhibited divergent desires.