“It is a great pleasure having Gerard Lowther here; and the other attachés, Finlay and Tower, are charming.”
“May 12.—As I have felt stronger, each day here has been more full of interest. On alternate mornings I stay quietly in the Embassy garden or the adjoining cemeteries and have luncheon with my kind hosts, with whom I have several times been out afterwards to the bazaars, steep, rugged, stony lanes, arched overhead, and a blaze of colour from their shops and costumes. Here we have been served with cups of coffee in the inner den of Marchetto, the tradesman of ‘Paul Patoff,’[487] whilst going through the wearisome routine of bargaining for old silver, weighing and reweighing, and only discovering one had concluded a purchase when one had utterly despaired of it. How forcibly the truth of that verse of Proverbs strikes one here—‘It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer, but when he goeth his way, he boasteth thereof.’ The whole bazaar seems like an inextricable web to outsiders, yet any one or anything can be found there in ten minutes by one who knows the place; and, amid all the bustle and confusion, one sees many a charming picture of an old Turk with snowy beard and robes, sitting cross-legged at an angle of his counter, poring over an ancient parchment Koran, and as utterly absorbed in it as if he were in the Great Desert. How the names Aladdin, Mustapha, Scheherazade, Zobeide, recalled the large edition of the ‘Arabian Nights’ which was at Hurstmonceaux Rectory in my childhood.
“On other days I have gone off immediately after breakfast with a cavass from the Embassy—Dimitri—as my guard, making much use of the trams, from which one sees so much that is curious, and in which one has so many experiences of Turkish life, from the ladies like bundles of green, brown, or shot silk, who are huddled behind the curtain at the end of the carriage, to the child-pasha well provided with copper coins to quiet the numerous clamourers for baksheesh. Thus I have twice reached Yedi Kouli, the Seven Towers, where the triple walls of the town make their farthest angle close to the Sea of Marmora—bluest of blue waters melting into chrysoprase-green near the shore. Here I was drawing an old gate in pencil in my little book, heedless of an old Turk who had been cursing the ‘christian dog’ as a breaker of the second commandment, when suddenly, with a spring, he flew upon me, and in an instant his long talons would have torn out my eyes, if Dimitri, throwing himself upon him, had not hurled him on his back in the gutter, after which he got up, and went away quite quietly. Another day, after we had made the circuit of the wonderful walls, I was sitting to draw in the middle of the white dusty road near the Adrianople gate, and Dimitri had fallen asleep on a tombstone a few steps behind me, when suddenly he called out with a rueful voice that he had been robbed, plundered of his watch and chain, whilst I, rather more in evidence in the sunshine, had escaped. It is near this gate, the Polyandria of the Greeks, that we saw the curious mosque, once a church covered with mosaics like St. Mark’s, and still retaining many of them. One was shown as the Virgin waiting for her Teskerei, or passport, to go into Egypt!
“All around the walls are tombs: the woods are filled, the hillsides are powdered, with them. The woods are all of cypress, which is supposed to neutralise effluvia. When a death occurs, a body is hurried to the grave as soon as possible, for the soul is always in torment, it is believed, between the death and burial. Little parcels of food are laid in holes by the side of the grave, and large headstones are always erected, stones on which the angels Nebir and Munkir sit to judge the souls of the dead. We saw many touching little funerals—young girls being carried to the grave without any coffin or shroud. The blocks of stone on the road date from the time of Justinian. At an angle of the cemetery opposite the gate of Silivri a row of head-stones marks the graves of the heads of Ali Pacha (de Tébelin) and his four sons, cut off in 1827. Close to this a lane turns off through the tombs and cypresses to the monastery of Baloukli. Here, from a courtyard, filled, like everything else, with tombs, we descended a staircase at the head of which an old priest was squatting as guardian of a number of huge brass alms-dishes. In the subterranean chapel below are more alms-dishes, and a fountain with the ‘miraculous fish,’ black on one side, red on the other. On the 29th of May 1455, a monk was engaged in frying them, when a man rushed in and announced the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. ‘I shall believe it,’ said the monk, ‘when these fish leap out of the frying-pan,’ and they leapt out immediately, and have remained half-cooked to this day! At the little restaurant close to the monastery, shaded by pink Judas-trees and strewn with white sand, we had our luncheon, bread, pilaf, galetta, hard eggs, wine, and syrup of roses.
“Beyond the Adrianople Gate the walls and cemetery descend together to Eyoub, a hamlet at the head of the Golden Horn, with a very sacred mosque, which heretics are not allowed to enter, as it contains the sword of Mahomet, with which the Sultan girds himself on the day of his installation, and in its court, shaded by noble plane-trees, the tomb of Eyoub, standard-bearer of the Prophet, near whose resting-place are grouped a number of royal turbé, those of the Valide Sultana, mother of Selim III., and of Hussein Pacha being the most remarkable. We made a separate excursion hither, finding the rugged streets round the mosque occupied by the gay booths of a fair shaded by banksia roses in full bloom, and the keeper of the sanctuary standing at the gate with a drawn sword to prevent the entrance of the giaours. But we wandered behind, by the steep ascent between the eternal burial-grounds, where there was a grand view down the Golden Horn between the old cypresses, all the mosques of Stamboul embossed upon an aërial sunset sky.
“On May 3 we met a large party at Dolma Baghtché, one of the great palaces which are memorials of the extravagance of Abdul Medjid. The rooms are those in which his son, the savage Abdul Aziz, used to throw everything that came to hand at those who offended him. They are only used by the present Sultan for the great reception of Beiram, when all the great dignitaries of the empire flock to kiss the hem of his garment. The palace is vast, but decorated like a French café, with glass banisters to the staircase and numbers of fifth-rate pictures: nothing but the hall is worth seeing. Close by is the mosque of Abdul Medjid, with two slender minarets, and beyond it the palace of Teheragan-Sérai, where the ex-Sultan Murad is kept a prisoner, no one being allowed to linger either on the road or in a boat in front of the building. The existing Sultan goes to see him sometimes, but asserts ‘My brother and every one belonging to him are quite perfectly mad.’
“We all went by carriage with an order to the Seraï or Seraglio near St. Sophia, which occupies at least two-thirds of the ancient Byzantium, selected by Constantine for his capital. By an unkempt ascent we reach the Bab-el-Sélam, or Gate of Safety, which had doors on either side, and in the intermediate space of which high officials condemned by the Divan were executed. Passing an avenue of cypresses, we reached a second gate, the Bab Seadet, or Gate of Happiness, guarded by white eunuchs. It was here that the sultans used to give up their unpopular ministers to the popular fury; that Murad III. gave up his favourite falconer, Mehemet, to be cut to pieces before his eyes; that Mahomet III. gave up his three chief eunuchs, and Murad IV. his grand-vizier Hafiz, who was killed by seventeen wounds. Many old aunts and cousins of sultans still reside in the inner apartments, guarded by numbers of eunuchs, the historic criminal figures of Turkish history, whose existence is expressly condemned by the Koran, and who are generally bought or stolen as children from Syria or Abyssinia. Without name, family, or sex, they often marry, and even have harems for the sake of feminine friendship.
“The treasury is full of boundless barbaric treasures, uncut emeralds, &c., and much fine armour and china. The finest single object is the throne of Selim I., taken from the Shah of Persia, of green enamel studded with pearls and rubies. In the Salle du Divan is the curious bed where the sultans received ambassadors, though they only saw him through the window. We also saw the glorious Bagdad mosque lined with blue Persian tiles, built by the Sultan Amurath in remembrance of one he had known at Bagdad. In the garden is the famous cage where, from the time of Mahomet IV., sultans shut up princes who rebelled against them: Abdul Aziz was confined there from his deposition to his death. Afterwards, I sat with Sir George Bowen on the terrace, which has an exquisite view up the Bosphorus, while immediately below us ran the railway line, which suggests the fall of Turkey. We were served with sweetmeats of rose-leaves, and coffee in golden cups studded with diamonds, by an attendant who bore an embroidered cloth upon his shoulder to conceal the empty cups which had been used by Christians, and were therefore unclean. This would sound hospitable on the part of the Sultan if one forgot to mention that we had each had to pay about fifteen francs to enter the palace, and that there were about thirty of us.
“Another day we went to the mosque of Selimyeh, beautifully situated, and afterwards I sat to draw under a bower of banksia roses, surrounded by a marvellous group of Turkish figures, in the Saddlers’ Bazaar (serra-jobane-jamissi). Here the people were good to us, as there are so many Christians in that quarter of the town, but generally the natives never cease cursing those who are breaking the second commandment by making a likeness of something in heaven or earth. In the courtyard of Suleimanyeh I was less fortunate: a number of soldiers crowded in front, wholly obstructing all view, and on Dimitri remonstrating, their officer came up quite furious, with ‘My men shall stand where they like, and if they wish to hide the man’s view they shall certainly do so.’ Twice I have toiled to the distant mosque of Mehmedyé, for Mahomet the Conqueror built it on the site of the famous church of the Holy Apostles, founded by Constantine the Great, and where he was buried with eleven other emperors. A dial over a gate near this is inscribed (from the Koran), ‘Didst thou not see thy Lord, how He extended thy shadow?’ On some of these excursions it has been most difficult to procure anything whatever for luncheon, for it is the fast of Ramazan, when no good Turk allows any food whatever to pass his lips between sunrise and sunset, on the approach of which he will begin to hold in his hands the viands which he will devour the very instant the gun fires. Wine at all times is described as ‘the father of all abominations,’ yet Solyman the Great, who burnt all the vessels laden with wine in the port, himself died drunk: Murad IV., who cut off the head of any one who smelt of wine, was a regular drunkard: Bajazet I. and II. both drank, and to Selim II. was given the surname of ‘mesth’—the drunkard: so much for the far-famed Turkish consistency.
“We went to the evening service at St. Sophia, three white-turbaned figures receiving us in the dark at a postern door, and—after exacting ten francs apiece—conducting us by a winding stair to the broad gallery, far beneath which the great chandeliers gleamed like flower-beds over the immense grey space, intersected by long lines of black figures—all males, for women are soulless—bending, curvetting, prostrating symmetrically like corn in a wind, and with the same kind of rush and rustle. It is a curious but monotonous sight, a repetition of the same movement over and over again, and the shrill harsh cry of the swaying and falling lines, even more discordant in its echo by the choir, soon grates upon one: especially as the priests never cease whispering and worrying for extra baksheesh.