There are numerous khans in the city, which are constructed in the form of a hollow square, and are two or three stories in height. The various rooms are occupied as offices, by jobbers, wholesale merchants, and bankers.
Goods are sold in wholesale, usually at two or three installments of 31 days each, which are seldom liquidated in less than 6 or 8 months.
The trades are divided into different guilds, called esnafs; each one governed by its own laws and officers. The chiefs of these guilds are always Mussulmans, and appointed out of the corps of superannuated palace attendants, such as boatmen, cooks, and scullions, who are thus pensioned off.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
KAHVÉS.
We have desires to which we are impelled by nature, and their attainment is indispensable to the continuation of life; but we have desires also which are the results of acquired tastes, and which habit often makes as impulsive as our natural wants. Thus are created the luxuries of life, and to increase the delight which we derive from such sources of enjoyment, we endeavor to refine, to etherealize their forms, and to divest them of all sensual and grosser accompaniments.
Among such luxuries, coffee and tobacco are pre-eminent, which are made even the basis of hospitality and the bond of social intercourse by all the Osmanlis. Tobacco, when imbibed in its exquisite forms, is the source of the most refined enjoyments, creating those reveries and dreamy sensations which float for the moment about our listless senses, beclouding with a silvery vapor some of life’s dull realities.
Tobacco, ever since its first introduction to the civilized world, has become so indispensable an item of consumption that it has long been ranked among the staple commodities of life, and seems to claim the double title of a natural and artificial taste. Yet, no form of pleasure and exhilaration has ever been the subject of so much study, as the ways and means of enjoying this fragrant weed.
All the world are well aware of the different forms in which tobacco is used, viz., inhaling in the form of smoke, titillating the nostrils by its powder called snuff, or imbibing the juice into the system by the process of mastication. The two latter forms of enjoying this luxury, seem to admit of no refinement, as time has rolled on, and snuffing and chewing yet remain in their pristine state of simplicity.