Constantinople, v. 1 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

Idleness.

Although at certain hours of the day Constantinople wears an air of bustle and activity, in reality it is probably the laziest city in Europe, and in this respect both Turk and Frank meet on common ground. Every one begins by getting up at the latest possible hour in the morning. Even in summer, at a time when our cities are up and doing from one end to the other Constantinople is still buried in slumber. It is difficult to find a shop open or so much as to procure a cup of coffee until the sun is well up in the heavens. Hotels, offices, bazârs, banks, all snore together in one joyous chorus, and nothing short of a cannon would arouse them. Then the holidays! The Turks keep Friday, the Jews Saturday, and the Christians Sunday, besides which regular weekly ones are all the feast-days of the innumerable saints of the Greek and Armenian calendars, which are scrupulously observed; and although all of these holidays are supposed to affect only certain parts of the community respectively, in reality they provide large numbers, with whom, properly speaking, they have nothing whatever to do, with an excuse for being idle. You can thus form some idea of the amount of work accomplished in the course of a week. There are some offices which are only open twenty-four hours in the seven days. Each day some one of the five nationalities who go to make up the population of Constantinople is rambling about over the big city with no other object in the world than to kill time. In this art, however, the Turk yields to none. He can make a cup of coffee, costing two sous, last half a day, and sit immovable for five hours at a stretch at the foot of a cypress tree in one of the innumerable cemeteries. His indolence is a thing absolute and complete, an inertia resembling death or sleep, in which all the faculties seem to be suspended—an utter absence of any sort of emotion, a phase of existence completely unknown among Europeans. Turks dislike so much as to have the idea of movement presented to their minds. At Stambul, for instance, where there are no public walks, it is extremely unlikely that the Turks would frequent them if there were: to go to a place designed expressly for the purpose of being walked about in would, to their way of thinking, resemble work entirely too much. They enter the nearest cemetery or turn down the first street they come to, and follow, without any objective point, wherever their legs or the windings of the path or the people ahead may lead them. A Turk rarely goes to any spot merely for the purpose of seeing it. There are those among them, living in Stambul, who have never been farther than Kassim Pasha; Mussulman gentlemen who have never gotten beyond the Isles of the Princes, where they happen to have a friend living, or their own villa on the Bosphorus. For them the height of bliss consists in complete inactivity of body and mind; hence they abandon to the restless Christian all those great industries which require care and thought and travelling about from one place to another, and content themselves with such small trades as can be conducted sitting down in the same spot, and where sight can almost take the place of speech. Labor, which with us governs and regulates all the conditions of life, is a thing of quite secondary importance there, subordinated to what is pleasant and convenient. We look upon repose as a necessary interruption to work, while to them work is merely a suspension of repose. The first object, at all costs, is to sleep, dream, and smoke for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four; whatever time is left over may be employed in gaining one’s livelihood. Time, as understood by the Turks, signifies something altogether different from what it does to us. The hour, day, month, year, has not a hundredth part of the value there that it has in other parts of Europe. The very shortest period required by any official of the Turkish government in which to answer the simplest form of inquiry is two weeks. These people do not know what it is to desire to finish a thing for the mere pleasure of having done with it, and, with the single exception of the porters, one never sees a Turk employed on any business hurrying in the streets of Stambul. All walk with the same measured tread, as though their steps were regulated by the beat of a single drum. With us life is a seething torrent; with them, a sleeping pool.

A Turkish Official.

Night.

As by day Constantinople is the most brilliant, so by night it is the gloomiest, city in Europe. Occasional street-lamps, placed at long distances one from the other, hardly suffice to pierce the gloom of the principal streets, while the others are as black as caves, and not to be ventured into by one who carries no light in his hand. Hence by nightfall the city is practically deserted: the only signs of life are the night-watchmen, prowling dogs, the skulking figure of some law-breaker, parties of young men coming out of a subterranean tavern, and mysterious lights which appear and vanish again like ignis fatui down some narrow side-street or in a distant cemetery. This is the hour in which to look at Stambul from the heights of Pera or Galata. Each one of her innumerable little windows is illuminated, and, with the lights from the shipping, reflections in the water and the starry heavens, helps to light up four miles of horizon with a great quivering sea of sparkling points of fire, in which port, city, and sky melt imperceptibly one into another until they all seem to be part of one starry firmament. When it is cloudy, and through a break the moon appears, you see above the dark mass of the city, above the inky blots which mark the woods and gardens, the glittering rows of domes surmounting the imperial mosques, shining in the moonlight like great marble tombs, and suggesting the idea of a necropolis of giants. But most impressive of all is the view when there is neither moon nor star nor any light at all. Then one immense black shadow stretches from Seraglio Point to Eyûb, a great dark profile, the hills looking like mountains and their many pointed summits assuming all manner of fantastic shapes—forests and armies, ruined castles, rocky fortresses—so that one’s imagination travels off into the region of dreams and fairy tales. Gazing across at Stambul on some such night as this from a lofty terrace in Pera, one’s brain plays all sorts of mad pranks. In fancy you are carried into the great shadowy city; wander through those myriad harems, illuminated by soft, subdued lights: behold the triumphant beauty of the favorite, the dull despair of the neglected wife; watch the eunuch who hangs trembling and impotent outside the door; follow a pair of lovers as they thread some steep winding byway; wander through the deserted galleries of the Grand Bazâr; traverse the great silent cemeteries; lose yourself amid the interminable rows of columns in the subterranean cisterns; imagine that you have been shut up in the gigantic mosque of Suleiman, and make its shadowy corridors echo again with lamentations and shrieks of terror, tearing your hair and invoking the mercy of the Almighty; and then suddenly exclaim, “What utter nonsense! I am here on my friend Santoro’s terrace, and in the room below there not only awaits me a supper for a sybarite, but a gathering of the most amusing wits in Pera to help me eat it.”

Constantinople Life.

Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my good friend Santoro—lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants—among whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed! Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted the threads of an international love-affair,—each separate experience as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims on entering: “the government has just paid the employés’ salaries, due for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!” A third tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked, it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear good. ——;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still——,” and he said it again.

The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me. They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,” I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless. Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthful than in any other city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil, surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights, an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.