Constantinople, v. 1 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

Constantinople possesses a grace and gayety all her own emanating from her myriads of birds of every species, objects of especial veneration and affection among the Turks. Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on. Sparrows come boldly into the houses and eat from the women’s and children’s hands; swallows build their nests over the doorways of cafés and beneath the roofs of bazârs; innumerable flocks of pigeons, maintained by means of legacies from different sultans as well as private individuals, form black and white garlands around the cornices of the domes and terraces of the minarets; gulls circle joyously about the granaries; thousands of turtle-doves bill and coo among the cypress trees in the cemeteries; all around the Castle of the Seven Towers ravens croak and vultures hover significantly; kingfishers come and go in long lines between the Black Sea and Sea of Marmora; while storks may be seen resting upon the domes of solitary mausoleums. For the Turk each one of these birds possesses some pleasing quality or lucky influence. The turtle-dove is the patron of lovers; the swallow will protect from fire any building where her nest is built; the stork performs a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca; while the halcyon carries the souls of the faithful to Paradise. Hence they feed and protect them both from religious motives and from gratitude, and in return the birds make a continual festival around their houses, on the water, and among the tombs. In every quarter of Stambul they soar and circle about, grazing against you in their noisy flights, and filling the entire city with something of the joyous freedom of the open country, constantly bringing up before one’s mind images of nature.

Associations.

In no other city of Europe do the sites and monuments, either legendary or historical, act so forcibly upon the imagination as at Stambul, because in no other spot do they record events at once so recent and so picturesque. Elsewhere, in order to get away from the prose of modern every-day life, one is obliged to go back for several centuries; at Stambul a few years suffice. Legend, or what has all the character and force of legend, dates from yesterday. It is not many years since, in the square of Et-Meidan, the celebrated massacre of the Janissaries took place; not many years since the waters of the Sea of Marmora cast up upon the banks of the imperial gardens those twenty sacks containing each the body of a beauty of Mustafa’s harem; not long since Brancovano’s family was executed in the Castle of the Seven Towers, or European ambassadors were pinioned between two kapuji-basci in the presence of the Grand Seigneur, upon whose half-averted countenance there glowed a mysterious light; or within the walls of the old Seraglio that life—so extraordinary—a mingling of horrors, love, and folly, ceased finally to exist, which now seems to belong to such a far-distant past. Wandering about the streets of Stambul and reflecting upon all these things, you cannot help a feeling of astonishment at the calm, cheerful aspect of the city, gay with color and vegetation. “Ah, traitoress!” you cry, “what have you done with all those mountains of heads, those lakes of blood? How is it possible that everything has been so cleverly concealed, so wiped out and obliterated, that not a trace remains?”

On the Bosphorus, beneath the Seraglio walls and just opposite Leander’s Tower, which rises from the water like a lover’s monument, you may still behold the inclined plane down which the bodies of the unfaithful beauties of the harem were rolled into the sea; in the middle of the Et-Meidan the serpentine column still bears witness to the force of Muhammad the Conqueror’s famous sabre; on the Mahmûd bridge the spot is still pointed out on which the fiery sultan annihilated at a single blow the adventurous dervish who had dared to fling an anathema in his face; in the Holy Well of the Balukli church the miraculous fish still swim about which foretold the fall of the City of the Palæologi; beneath the trees of the Sweet Waters of Asia you can visit those shady retreats where a dissolute sultana was wont to bestow upon the favorite of the hour that fatal love whose certain sequence was death. Every doorway, every tower, every mosque and park and open square, records some strange event—a tragedy, a love-story, a mystery, the absolutism of a padishah or the reckless caprice of a sultana; everything has a history of its own, and wherever you turn the near-by objects, the distant view, the balmy perfumed air, the silence, all unite to transport him whose mind is stored with these histories of the past out of himself, his era, and the city of to-day, so that not infrequently, when suddenly confronted with the suggestion that it is high time to think of returning to the hotel, he asks himself confusedly what it means, how can there be a “hotel.”

Serpentine Column of Delphi.

Resemblances.

In those early days, fresh from reading masses of Oriental literature, I kept recognizing in the people I met on the streets famous personages who figure in the legends and history of the East: sometimes they answered so entirely to the picture I had drawn in my own mind of some celebrated character that I would find myself stopping short in the street to gaze after them. How often have I seized my friend’s arm, and, pointing out some passer-by, exclaimed, “There he goes, by Jove! Don’t you recognize him?” In the square of the Sultan Validéh I have many a time seen the gigantic Turk who hurled down rocks and stones upon the heads of Baglione’s soldiers before the walls of Nicea; near one of the mosques I came across Unm Dgiemil, the old witch of Mecca who sowed thorns and brambles in front of Mohammed’s house; coming out of the book bazâr one day, I ran against Digiemal-eddin, the great scholar of Brusa, who knew all the Arabian dictionary by heart, walking along with a volume tucked under his arm; I have passed close enough to Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, to receive a steady look from those eyes “like twin stars reflected in a well.” I recognized in the Et-Meidan the beautiful and unfortunate Greek killed at the foot of the serpentine column by a ball from the huge guns of Orban; turning a sharp corner of one of the narrow streets of Phanar, I found myself suddenly face to face with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsomest young Turk of the days of Orkhan; I have seen Coswa, Mohammed’s she-camel, and recognized Kara-bidut, Selim’s black charger; I have encountered poor Fighani, the poet, who was condemned to go about Stambul harnessed to an ass for having made Ibrahim’s grand vizier the subject of a lampoon; I saw in one of the cafés the unwieldy form of Soliman, the fat admiral, whom the united efforts of four powerful slaves could with difficulty drag up from his divan; and Ali, the grand vizier, who failed to find throughout all Arabia a horse fit to carry him; and Mahmûd Pasha, that ferocious Hercules who strangled Suleiman’s son; and, established before the entrance of the copyists’ bazâr near the Bayezid square, that stupid Ahmed II., who would say nothing all day but “Kosc! kosc!” (Very well! very well!) Every character in the Thousand and One Nights—the Aladdins, the Zobeids, the Sinbads, the Gulnars, the old Jew dealers with their magic lamps and their enchanted carpets for sale—passed before me one after another like a procession of so many phantoms.

Costumes.

This is perhaps the very best period in which to study the dress of the Mussulman population of Constantinople. In the last generation, as will probably be the case in the next, it presented too uniform an appearance. You find it in a sort of transition stage, and presenting, consequently, a wonderful variety of form and color. The steady advance of the reform party, the resistance of the conservative Turks, the uncertainty and vacillation of the great mass of the people, hesitating between the two extremes—every aspect, in short, of the conflict which is being waged between ancient and modern Turkey—is faithfully reflected in the dress of her people. The old-fashioned Turk still wears his turban, his caftan and sash, and the traditional yellow morocco slippers, and, if he is one of the more strict and precise kind, a veritable Turk of the old school, the turban will be of vast proportions. The reformed Turk wears a long black coat buttoned close up under the chin, and dark shoes and trousers, preserving nothing Turkish in his costume but the fez. Some among the younger and bolder spirits have even gone farther, and, discarding the black frock-coat, substitute for it an open cut-away, light trousers, fancy cravat and jewelry, and carry a cane, and a flower in the buttonhole. Between these and those, the wearers of the caftan and the wearers of the coat, there is a deep gulf fixed. They no longer have anything in common but the name of Turk, and are in reality two separate nations. He of the turban still believes implicitly in the bridge Sirat, finer than a hair, sharper than a cimeter, which leads to the infernal regions; he faithfully performs his ablutions at the appointed hours, and at sunset shuts himself into his house. He of the frock-coat, on the contrary, laughs at the Prophet, has his photograph taken, talks French, and spends his evening at the theatre. Between these two extremes are those who, having departed somewhat from the ancient dress of their countrymen, are still unwilling to Europeanize themselves altogether. Some of them, while wearing turbans, yet have them so exceedingly small that some day they can be quietly exchanged for the fez without creating too much scandal; others who still wear the caftan have already adopted the fez; others, again, conform to the general fashion of the ancient costume, but have left off the sash and slippers as well as the bright colors, and little by little will get rid of the rest as well. The women alone still adhere to their veils and the long mantles covering the entire person; but the veil has grown transparent, and not infrequently reveals the outline of a little hat and feathers, while the mantle as often as not conceals a Parisian costume of the latest mode. Every year a thousand caftans disappear to make room for as many black coats; every day sees the death of a Turk of the old school, the birth of one of the new. The newspaper replaces the tespi, the cigar the chibuk; wine is used instead of flavored water, carriages instead of the arabà; the French grammar supersedes the Arabian, the piano the timbur; stone houses rise on the sites of wooden ones. Everything is undergoing change and transformation. At the present rate it may well be that in less than a century those who wish to find the traces of ancient Turkey will be obliged to seek for them in the remotest provinces of Asia Minor, just as we now look for ancient Spain in the most out-of-the-way villages of Andalusia.