Constantinople of the Future.
Often, while gazing at Constantinople from the bridge of the Sultan Validéh, I would be confronted by the question, “What is to become of this city in one or two centuries, even if the Turks are not driven out of Europe?” Alas! there is but little doubt that the great holocaust of beauty at the hands of civilization will have been already accomplished. I can see that Constantinople of the future, that Oriental London, rearing itself in mournful and forbidding majesty upon the ruins of the most radiant city in the world. Her hills will be levelled, her woods and groves cut down, her many-colored houses razed to the ground; the horizon will be shut in on all sides by long rows of palatial dwellings, factories, and workshops, broken here and there by huge business-houses and pointed spires; long, straight streets will divide Stambul into ten thousand square blocks like a checker-board; telegraph-wires will interlace like some monster spider-web above the roofs of the noisy city; across the bridge of the Sultan Validéh will pour a black torrent of stiff hats and caps; the mysterious retreats of the Seraglio will become a zoological garden, the Castle of the Seven Towers a penitentiary, the Hebdomon Palace a museum of natural history; everything will be solid, geometrical, useful, gray, hideous, and a thick black cloud of smoke will hide the blue Thracian heavens, to which no more ardent prayers will be addressed nor poets’ songs nor longing eyes of lovers. At such thoughts as these I could not help feeling my heart sink within me, but then quickly there came the consoling fancy that possibly—who knows?—some charming Italian bride of the next century, coming here on her wedding journey, may be heard to exclaim, “What a pity! what a dreadful pity it is that Constantinople has changed so from what it was at the period of that old torn book of the nineteenth century I found in the bottom of my grandmother’s clothes-press!”
The Dogs.
In those coming days another feature of Constantinopolitan life will also have disappeared, which is now one of the most curious of her curiosities—the dogs. And, as this is a subject which really merits attention, I am going to devote some little space to it. Constantinople is one huge dog-kennel; every one can see this for himself as soon as he gets there. The dogs constitute a second population in the city, and, while they are less numerous than the first, they are hardly less interesting as a study. Every one knows how the Turks love and protect them, but just why they do so is not so easy to decide. I could not, for my own part, make out whether it is because the Koran recommends all men to be merciful to animals, or because they are supposed, like certain birds, to bring good luck, or because the Prophet loved them, or because they figure in their sacred books, or because, as some insist, when Muhammad the Conqueror made his victorious entry into the city through the breach in the gate of St. Romanus he was accompanied by a following composed principally of dogs. Be this as it may, the fact remains that many Turks leave considerable sums at their death for their maintenance, and when Sultan Abdul-Mejid had them all transported to the island of Marmora the people murmured, so that they were brought back amid public rejoicings, and the government has not attempted to interfere with them since. At the same time, the dog, having been pronounced by the Koran to be an unclean animal, not one out of all the innumerable hordes which infest Constantinople has an owner; any Turk harboring one would consider his house defiled. They are associated together in a great republic of freebooters, without collars or masters or kennels or homes or laws. Their entire lives are passed in the streets. There, scratching out little dens for themselves, they sleep and eat, are born, nourish their young, and die; and no one, at least in Stambul, interferes in the smallest degree with their occupations or their repose. They are the masters of the road. With us it is customary for the dogs to withdraw to allow horses and people to pass by. There it is quite different, people, camels, horses, donkeys, and vehicles making sometimes quite a considerable circuit in order not to disturb the dogs: sometimes in one of the most crowded quarters of Stambul four or five of them, curled up fast asleep directly in the middle of the street, will make the entire population turn out for half a day. And in Pera and Galata it is nearly as bad, only there it is done less out of respect for the dogs themselves than for their numbers. Were you to attempt to clear the road, you would have to keep up an uninterrupted series of blows and kicks from the moment you set out until your return. The utmost they will do voluntarily is, when they see a carriage and four coming like the wind down some level street, at the last moment, when there is no possible hope of its turning out and the horses’ hoofs are fairly grazing their backs, they will slowly and unwillingly drag themselves a couple of feet to one side, nicely calculating the least possible distance necessary to save their precious necks. Laziness is the distinguishing quality of the Constantinople dogs. They lie down in the middle of the street, five or six or a dozen of them in a row or group, curled up in such a manner as to look much more like heaps of refuse than living animals, and there they will sleep away the entire day, undisturbed by the din and clamor going on about them, and not rain or sun, wind or cold, has the least power to affect them. When it snows, they sleep under the snow; when it rains, they stay on until they are so completely covered with mud that when they finally get up they look like unfinished clay models of dogs, with nothing to indicate eyes, ears, or mouth.
The conditions of society, however, in Pera and Galata are not quite so favorable to the contemplative life as in Stambul, owing to the greater difficulty in obtaining food: in the latter place they live en pension, while in the former they eat à la carte. They take the place of scavengers, falling with joy upon refuse which hogs would decline as food, willing, in fact, to eat pretty much everything short of stones. No sooner have they swallowed sufficient to sustain life than they compose themselves to slumber, and continue to sleep until aroused again by the pangs of hunger. And they almost always sleep in the same spot. The canine population of Constantinople is divided into settlements and quarters, just as the human population is. Every street and neighborhood is inhabited, or rather held possession of, by a certain number of dogs, the relatives and friends of one family, who never leave it themselves or allow strangers to come in. They have a sort of police force, with outposts and sentries, who go the rounds and act as scouts. Woe to that dog who, emboldened by hunger, dares to adventure his person across the boundaries of his neighbors’ territory! A crowd of infuriated curs give chase the instant his presence is discovered; if he is caught, they make short work of him; otherwise he is pursued as far as the confines of their own quarter, but no farther, as the enemy’s country is nearly always both feared and respected. It would be impossible to convey any just idea of the skirmishes and pitched battles which arise over a disputed bone, a reigning belle, or an infringement of territorial rights. Two dogs encounter one another; a dispute follows, and instantly reinforcements pour in from every street, lane, and alley; nothing can be seen but a confused, moving mass enveloped in clouds of dust, out of which there issues such a deafening hurlyburly of howls, yelps, and snarls as would crack the ear-drums even of a deaf man. At last the group breaks up again, and, as the dust subsides, the bodies of the fallen may be seen extended on the ground. Love-passages, jealousies, duels, bloodshed, broken limbs, and lacerated skins are the affairs of every hour. Occasionally they assemble in such noisy troops in front of some shop that the owner and his assistants are obliged, in the interests of trade, to arm themselves with stools and bars and sally forth in approved military style, taking the enemy by storm; and then there follows a pandemonium of howls, yells, and lamentations mingling with the sound of cracked heads and ribs, enough to fairly make the welkin ring. In Pera and Galata especially these wretched beasts are so ill treated, so accustomed to expect a blow whenever they see a stick, that at the mere sound of a cane or umbrella on the sidewalk they make preparations for flight: even when they seem to be fast asleep they frequently have the corner of one eye, just the point of a pupil, open, with which to watch attentively, for a quarter of an hour at a time, the slightest movement of some distant object bearing a resemblance, no matter how slight, to a stick. So unused are they to humane treatment that if you pat the head of one of them in passing, a dozen others come running up, fawning and gambolling and wagging their tails, to receive a like caress, and accompany the generous patron all the way to the end of the street, their eyes shining with joy and gratitude.
Group of Dogs.
The condition of a dog in Pera and Galata is worse, all said, than that of a spider in Holland, and their’s is usually admitted to be the most persecuted race in all the animal kingdom. When one sees the existence led by these miserable dogs, it is impossible not to think that there must be for them, as well, some compensation in another world. Like everything else in Constantinople, the sight of them recalled an historical reminiscence, but in their case it seemed like the bitterest irony to picture the life of Bayezid’s famous hunting-pack, who ran about the imperial forests of Olympia wearing purple trappings and collars set with pearls. What a contrast of social conditions! Their unfortunate state has no doubt a great deal to do with their hideous appearance, but, apart from that, they are almost all of the mastiff breed or wolf-dogs, bearing some resemblance to both foxes and wolves, or rather they do not bear a resemblance to anything, but are a horrible race of mongrels, spotted over with strange colors—about as large as the so-called butcher’s dog, and so thin that each rib can be counted twenty feet off. Most of them, moreover, have become so reduced in the course of a life of incessant warfare that if you did not see them moving about you would be apt to take them for the mutilated remains of dogs. You find them with their tails cut off, ears torn, with skinned backs, sides laid open, blind in one eye, lame in two legs, covered with wounds, devoured by flies, reduced to the last possible stages to which a living dog can be brought—veritable types of war, famine, and pestilence. The tail may be spoken of, in connection with them, as an article of luxury: rare is it, indeed, for a Constantinople dog to enjoy the possession of one for more than a couple of months, at most, of public life. Poor creatures! they would move a heart of stone to pity, and yet at times they are so grotesquely maimed and altered, you see them going along with such a singular gait, such odd, ungainly movements, that it is almost impossible not to laugh outright. And, after all, neither hunger nor blows, nor even warfare, constitutes their most serious trial, but a cruel custom which has prevailed for some time in Pera and Galata. Sometimes in the middle of the night the peaceful inhabitants of a quarter are aroused from their slumbers by a diabolical uproar: rushing to their windows, they behold a crowd of dogs leaping and dancing about in agony, bounding high in the air, striking their heads against the walls, or rolling over and over in the dust: presently the uproar subsides, and in the morning, by the early light, the street is seen all strewn with dead bodies. It is the doctor or apothecary of the quarter, who, being in the habit of studying at night, has distributed a handful of pills in order to obtain a fortnight’s quiet. Through these and other means it happens that there is some slight decrease in the number of dogs in Pera and Galata; but what does this avail, since at Stambul they are so rapidly on the increase that it is merely a question of time when the supply of food there will prove insufficient for their support, and colonists will be sent over to the other shore to supply the places of those families which have been exterminated and fill up all blanks caused by war, famine, or poison.