Speaking of the Turks

by bey K. Ziya Mufti-zada

They were of course of great help to us when we were settling down in our house in Stamboul. Ours was a large stone house with nine good-sized rooms, one on the ground floor and four on each other floor. It had a large brick-covered entrance hall with two separate stairways which in the old days were used, one as the Harem stairway and the other as the Selamlik stairway, but of course we modernized this by using one of them for service. The walls and ceilings had been all replastered and with the exception of the entrance hall which was painted in Turkish blue, were all calsomined in gray. Of course we had electric light throughout and a telephone. The real innovation for Constantinople, however, was that we changed the kitchen from the basement, where it generally is located, to the first floor, near the dining-room where we had a regular American kitchenette built. Then we had a shower put in the spacious bathroom. So really the house is as comfortable as possible. As for the furniture, we had mostly some of the antique furniture collected by my father and myself in Western Europe, with here and there some Turkish embroideries, old pieces that have been in the family for many generations, and of course Turkish and Persian carpets. Despite our western furniture and some pictures we have on the walls we endeavoured to keep throughout the Oriental atmosphere of the house—not the kind of Turkish interior one sees in exhibitions, adorned with a lot of bric-a-brac and hangings, but the simple Oriental interior. This has been rather an easy task as our house is typically Turkish with large rooms of perfect proportions and big latticed windows. Therefore, by just placing a very few pieces of furniture in each room, by having straight hangings of pale Oriental colours in the windows, and by placing the few really valuable Turkish antiques in the most prominent place in each room, we have tried to keep the Turkish atmosphere which has so much charm and without which it would be sacrilegious to live in Stamboul, especially in a house like the one we have. Our friends and our guests have told us that we have succeeded in our endeavours and I believe this to be true, as an American lady with whom we have grown to be very good friends since; confided us that the first day she called on us bringing with her a letter of introduction from a mutual friend she was struck by the severe Turkish atmosphere of our house and—it being her first day in Constantinople and her imagination being full of all the horrid things she had heard about the Turks in America—she was rather nervous until she met my wife who breezed in to greet her in a perfectly American way. Needless to say that a short while after she was laughing with us at the reputation of being “terrible” which the Turks have abroad.

Certainly no one who has lived in Stamboul can even conceive where this reputation originated. Stamboul is the Turkish section of the city and is peopled exclusively by Turks. Its streets are so quiet, its crowds are so calm, that they really deserve much more the adjective of “peaceful” than that of “terrible.” Anyone who has been in Constantinople prefers Stamboul to any other section of the city with the possible exception of some parts of Nishantashe which are also exclusively inhabited by Turks and have therefore the same atmosphere of peace and quiet one finds in Stamboul.

Stamboul has the dignity of a queen. It has the same refinement, the same poise, the same nobility that a great lady always has no matter what her circumstances. Many of the houses are tumbling down. Alas! too many of the people living there are shabbily dressed—nay even some of them are now in rags. But her smallest streets, her humblest shacks have an inexpressible dignity which is at once apparent. Stamboul is a thoroughbred. Despite her misery and her intense sufferings, despite all her ruins and the poverty of her inhabitants, Stamboul is a queen. She has a soul of her own, very much alive and very compassionate—a soul which appeals to foreigners and to the Turks alike—perhaps because of the feeling of love and compassion which emanates from her and wins for her the hearts of Turks and foreigners. She loves her children: more than thirty thousand families have in the last ten years seen their houses destroyed by fire but somehow or other not one member of those thirty thousand families has remained without shelter. Stamboul has provided them with a roof and there they are, all her children, somewhat crowded it is true, but all living within her hospitable walls. She loves the foreigners and receives them with the greatest hospitality, she adopts those who can understand her and treats them even better than her own children: she has named, two of her streets after Pierre Loti and Claude Farrère, her great French friends, so that their names will remain forever alive within her walls. All who come to her fall in love with her, and my wife and myself fell immediately under her spell: she is so good, so sad, so peaceful!

Our house is on one of her principal streets, a wide avenue which leads to the Sublime Porte and then on to the Mausoleum of Sultan Mahmoud. The avenue, like most of the principal streets of Stamboul, is bordered with old plane trees where pigeons, and nightingales, have made their home. From our windows we see the court of the Sublime Porte, a big tumbled-down building where all the principal government departments are concentrated. The gates of the Sublime Porte are night and day guarded by Turkish soldiers and policemen, clean-cut young Turks, tanned from the sun and the invigorating air of their birthplace in Anatolia. Every hour of the day or of the night two of them tramp before the gate opposite our house, in rain or in sunshine, in snow or in fog. At the corner of the court there is a little mosque built especially for their use so that they can go five times a day to prayer. Five times a day the “muezzin” appears atop the slender minaret and in his soulful chant calls the soldiers and the neighbourhood to prayer and they all pray: when the sun rises and when it goes down, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the afternoon and in the middle of the night. Five times a day they give thanks to the Almighty, fervently confirm their faith that there is no god but God, and beg Him to assist them in following the straight path, the path to salvation. Can people of this kind be as black as they are represented abroad? Is it not monstrous to accuse them of so many dark crimes? Is it not criminal to even give credence—without investigating—to all of the deeds they are represented as doing by people who must have an ulterior motive? For my part I can't believe these people capable of even hurting a fly or of killing a wolf, unless it be in self-defense and I can truthfully say that my belief is not based on sentimental reasons or influenced by patriotic motives. I know the people, I have watched them for days and months from our windows in Stamboul, these Turkish peasant soldiers of Anatolia; I have read in their eyes only resignation, passivity, and love. I have seen how they treat little children, how they take care of poor stray dogs. No, they cannot possibly harm anyone unless it be in self-defense.

From the upper story of our house we can see the entrance of the Bosphorus, that enchanting piece of blue water which lures all that have seen it once. We see it through the branches of trees, between the Sublime Porte and a brick building on the left, the headquarters of some newspaper. Towering above it are the houses of Galata and Pera forming an amphitheatre much more pleasing to the eye at a distance than from nearby. We also see the dark-green trees of the park of the Old Seraglio, where a few slender towers, a few slanting gray roofs mark the position of its imperial buildings. Truly our house is situated in the heart of Stamboul, that is why we can feel it throbbing so plainly, that is why we can learn to know her so well.

The famous Santa Sophia, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed with its six slender minarets, the Square of the Hippodrome, where the decadent emperors of Byzance held horse races nearly six centuries ago, even the famous bazaars are all within our range, almost within view of our house and we pass our first weeks after we have settled in visiting all these places, not as tourists, but for the purpose of knowing them, of communing with them so that we will feel that we have become one with our surroundings. We go time and again to the Old Seraglio, whose nooks and corners become as familiar to us as if we had lived there, the Old Seraglio whose every building, every kiosk, every room is still alive with the history of Turkey's past grandeur, whose garden still glows with the life of all the great Sultans and of their courtiers who lived and died there. From its outer court with its long alley of tall cypresses and poplars gently swaying to the breeze as if bewailing past splendours, from its outer Council Room where generations of grave Pashas robed in sable furs covered with silk brocades and with bejeweled turbans have discussed affairs of State and international policies while powerful Sultans were listening from behind the golden lattices of a small balcony, from the informal audience room from which a Sultan chased the Ambassador of Louis XIV, King of France, for having dared to sit in his presence, to the court where another Sultan was murdered by his Janissaries, to the Kiosk of the Lilacs to the laboratory where learned doctors prepared drugs for their august masters, to the very trunk of the old plane tree in the shade of which a resentful Sultan signed the decree condemning to death one of his generals who had failed to capture Vienna, and to the marble terrace of the Badgad kiosk where a poet Sultan improvised his immortal verses to his Sultana, the place seems to be full of living shadows and remembrances. It seems as if it were only asleep and semi-consciously waiting a signal to people again all its buildings and its gardens with Princes and soldiers continuing their interrupted earthly existence.

We go time and again to all the different mosques of the neighbourhood, places renowned the world over for their architecture and which are so impregnated by the prayers Which generations of faithful believers have made within their walls five times a day for centuries and centuries, that they vibrate with spirituality and force you to meditation—not a sad meditation with visions of everlasting fires to expiate earthly sins, but encouraging meditation which whispers into your ears that God who has created such beautiful surroundings for a city like Constantinople, God who has given the power to human beings to conceive and construct such cheerful and elevating temples of worship and prayer cannot and will not create another life where the miseries of this one are continued and multiplied eternally. A meditation which makes you realize that if winter comes, spring cannot be far behind!

Then again we go often to the Bazaars, not necessarily to hunt for antiques or to purchase things, but to get acquainted with the little old shopkeepers, the second-hand booksellers with white beards and turbans, sitting placidly in their small stores surrounded by books—hand-written books in Turkish, Arabic or Persian, illuminated with delicate multi-hued designs and covered with priceless old leather bindings; little old shopkeepers who receive you as a guest and as a friend, offer you tea and talk with you for hours on such and such a book, this or the other school of philosophy, this or the other Arabic, Persian or Turkish writer—without even thinking of selling you a book. In our visits to the Bazaars we carefully avoid the Jew, Armenian or Greek antique dealers hunting in the covered streets of the place for foreigners and other easy prey. After a visit or two we are known even by them and we can freely wander in the streets without being molested by their employees who try to induce strangers to visit their shops. We make friends with two or three dealers in the Bedesten, the central hall of the Bazaars, a huge circular place covered with a round dome where stands are like wide shelves and where shopkeepers sit cross-legged surrounded by genuine works of art, jewels and furniture piled in a beautiful disorder one on top of the other. We make friends with a few of these vendors—old men who have kept their stands since their early youth, people who knew my father, or an uncle or a cousin of mine, who adopt us as if we were one of them. Thereafter we have no more need of worrying; if we want to purchase something we have only to tell them and they will get it for us if it exists in Stamboul, if we see something that we want in one of the antique stores and are afraid that it is not genuine or that the storekeeper will ask us a price above its real value, we just have to speak of it to one of our friends and he will expertise it for us and purchase it for us at its real value. You see we are related to the late Reshad Bey—may the Mercy of God be on his soul—and all these old merchants were friends of his, and he had through their offices and with their cooperation made the most precious collection of Turkish antiquities that exists to this day in Constantinople and for the peace of Reshad Bey's soul, for friendship to him, these good old people want to help us whenever they can.

Thus we have gradually entered into the inner life of Stamboul and identified ourselves with it. And we love it the more for the way it has treated us. But who would not? People in Stamboul are so different from those in Pera. Even the ordinary storekeepers, the butcher, the grocer and the candlestick maker are honest and courteous here, whereas honesty and politeness are as rare in Pera as the mythical stone of the Alchemists. The Levantines, Greeks and Armenians of Pera think they have found a speedier and better way to change everything they touch into gold, and judging by their prosperity their system may be efficient in so far as it secures gains. But the Turks in Stamboul do not worry about material gains. All they want is peace and tranquillity. And how can you secure peace with your neighbours, how can you secure the tranquillity of your own mind if you are not courteous to every one and if you are not honest?