Constantinople, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

All of the army stationed at Constantinople, in addition to the innumerable brigades of firemen, were pressed into service, being formed into long chains and immense semicircles, which, under the direction of the viziers, officials of the court, pashas, and ulemas, endeavored to surround whole quarters, or, by concentrating their efforts upon some special spot, check the advance of the fire in that direction. Row after row of buildings would fall in the space of a few minutes; the roofs swarmed with intrepid men waging the unequal conflict at close quarters, and ever and anon falling into the yawning crater at their feet, only to be succeeded by others, as when some daring attack is making upon a powerful enemy, sending up hoarse cries and waving their singed fezzes in the midst of the smoke and flames. But, notwithstanding all these efforts, the fire still advanced triumphant, lit up the thousand streams of water directed against it, and leaped at a bound across the gardens, open squares, small cemeteries, and great stone buildings which lay in its path, forcing back soldiers, firemen, and citizens on all sides, like an army in retreat, and beating them about the shoulders as with red-hot muskets. Yet even in all that frightful panic and confusion there were those who preserved their self-possession sufficiently to perform noble acts of heroism and devotion. White-veiled Sisters of Charity could be seen in the midst of blazing ruins leaning over the prostrate forms of the dying; Turks threw themselves into the flames and reappeared bearing in their scorched and blackened arms the bodies of Christian children; other Mussulmans were known to have stood, apparently unmoved, with folded arms watching a burning house, and, while the families of Christians around them, utterly beside themselves with fright, filled the air with useless lamentations, would coldly offer a reward of a hundred Turkish francs to any one who would rescue a European boy who had failed to escape with the rest; and others, again, who made it their business to look after the injured children whom they found in the streets, binding up their wounds with strips torn from their own turbans, and seeing that they were restored to their parents; and still others who generously threw open their doors to the half-naked fugitives; while more than one was seen to set an example of courage and indifference to the things of this world by seating himself upon a rug in front of his burning domicile, calmly smoking a narghileh, and only moving farther off as the flames advanced.

But neither courage nor indifference, real or assumed, availed to check that fiery tempest. Now and then, with some temporary dying down of the wind, it would seem to abate a little of its fury, but not for long: the wind rising again with renewed violence, the flames, which had hardly begun to subside, would burst forth afresh, shooting out their sharp points like well-directed arrows, and accompanied by a deep, rumbling roar, broken from time to time by sharp explosions from the petroleum shops or gas in the dwellings, where the pipes were transformed into streams of molten lead; or when roofs would suddenly fall as though borne down by an avalanche; or a grove of cypress trees all at once begin to twist and writhe, and then burst into flame, sending down showers of burning resin; or some group of old wooden houses explode simultaneously like rockets, and emit such a fury of flame that it would seem as though the bellows of a thousand workshops were being turned upon them. It was a scene of ruin and wholesale destruction and disaster such as might result from fire, flood, earthquake, and the sacking of the city by a victorious army, all going on at once. No one had ever seen or imagined such horrors, and the effect upon the whole population was as though it had gone stark mad. In the streets of Pera the wildest confusion reigned, such noise and panic as are found on the deck of a vessel about to founder. There, in the midst of heaps of overturned furniture, beneath the flashing blades of the officers’ swords, the knocks and blows of porters and water-carriers, the hoofs of the pashas’ horses, gangs of firemen advancing at a dead run, overturning and treading down all they came in contact with,—were French, Italian, Greek, and Armenian families, rich and poor, old and young, men, women, and children, lost, distraught, groping blindly about in search of missing relatives, filling the air with shrieks and lamentations, choked with smoke and blinded with sparks; or a foreign ambassador followed by a troop of servants laden with books and valuable documents; or monks holding the crucifix aloft above the heads of the terrified throng; groups of Turkish women, their arms filled with costly objects from the harem; processions of men bending beneath the spoils of mosque and school, church or theatre; and from time to time a suffocating cloud of smoke, blown down by some sudden gust, would wrap everything in temporary darkness and increase still more the general terror and confusion.

An added feature of the horrors of that fearful time were the armies of thieves and desperadoes, who, having assembled, in obedience to some secret code of signals in use among them, from every hole and den in Constantinople, arrayed themselves in the guise of porters, soldiers, or respectable citizens, and then, boldly entering houses on pretence of lending assistance, made off with armsful of plunder: sometimes these gentry, being detected, would be pursued as they fled with their booty to Kassim Pasha or Tataola by parties of soldiers, and on being overtaken and surrounded pitched battles would ensue.

Firemen, porters, and water-carriers, reinforced by their numerous families and relatives, organized into bands, and before the very eyes of the distracted owners would all at once strike for higher wages, utterly declining to go on working unless their pay were doubled or quadrupled. Furniture and household goods heaped in the narrow streets and guarded by the families who owned them would be captured by crews of armed plunderers, the owners driven away, and the defences strengthened to afford resistance against other bands of blackguards. Troops of fugitives escaping with some of their personal property, encountering similar parties in some narrow thoroughfare, would dispute the right of way fiercely, desperately, abandoning in their mad flight those who were overthrown or injured in the onslaught.

But by the time the fire had raged for four hours it had gained such headway that few gave further thought to their property: to escape alive was the most that could be hoped for; two-thirds of Pera were in flames, and the fire had now reached such volume, and was advancing in so many different directions at once, that a whole quarter would suddenly be surrounded and cut off by a girdle of flame before the inhabitants had become aware of its approach. Hundreds of terrified creatures, flying in disorder up some narrow, steep, winding street, intent only on escaping from the hungry fiend in their rear, would at some sudden turn be confronted by a whirlwind of smoke and flame bearing relentlessly down upon them, and turn shrieking back to seek wildly for some other road of escape; entire families, one numbering twenty-two persons, were all at once surrounded, suffocated, burned, charred; some, beside themselves with terror, would take refuge in cellars, where they were soon choked to death; others threw themselves into wells and cisterns, climbed trees, or, after searching vainly through their houses for some spot or corner where they might hope for protection, suddenly losing their heads, would be seen to rush out and fling themselves voluntarily into the flames. Looking down the hillsides of Pera from some high point, families could be seen assembled upon their roofs, who, kneeling in close groups and with outstretched arms in the centre of an ever-narrowing circle of flame, invoked that aid from Heaven which man was powerless to give; herds of frantic people, rushing from the heights of Pera to scatter themselves throughout Galata, Topkhâneh, Fundukli, and the cemeteries in the lower parts of the town, ever running farther and farther, looking for still more distant and protected spots in which to hide themselves from the enemy, whom they imagined to be still pursuing them; children streaming with blood; wild-looking women, with singed hair and torn flesh, bearing dead or dying infants in their arms; men with faces and limbs frightfully burned, who writhed on the ground in their agony; old people sobbing like children; men of wealth reduced in the course of a few moments to penury, who beat their heads against the stones; youths yelling like maniacs, who fell unconscious on the banks of the Golden Horn, spent with excitement and horror; families bearing the blackened corpses of their dead; poor creatures, driven crazy by the sights around them, who hurried along dragging chairs after them attached to strings, or clasped bits of rags or broken pottery to their bosoms as though they were of priceless value, at the same time giving vent to loud lamentations or bursts of insane laughter.

And still from the lower quarters of Galata, from the arsenals of Tersane and Topkhâneh, from barrack, mosque, and imperial palace, there swarmed fresh battalions of nizam, crews of robbers, bands of firemen, shouting “Yanghen Vahr” or “Allah,” advancing as to an attack, scaling the hills under the steady rain of sparks and cinders and burning brands, and through streets filled with smouldering débris, and with them generals, dervishes, messengers from the court, families who had turned back to search for missing members, blackguards and heroes, misery, crime, and charity,—all mingled together in a confused, inextricable torrent which swept through the narrow streets with a roar like that of the ocean in a storm, its surface lighted up with the crimson glare of that mighty furnace.

And just across from this region of torment lay Stambul, peaceful, smiling, and serene as ever, while on the other side the tranquil beauties of the Asiatic shore were mirrored in the waters of the Bosphorus, on whose unmoved bosom the ships rode peacefully at anchor. Enormous crowds of people, blackening the banks for miles, stood silent and impassive witnesses of the horrible sight; the sing-song voice of the muezzin was heard as usual announcing from every minaret the setting of the sun; flocks of birds soared lazily above the mosques on the Seven Hills; and venerable Turks, seated in the shade of plane trees on the verdant heights of Skutari, murmured placidly to themselves, “And so the final hour of the City of the Sultans has sounded? That day which was foretold has come: let Allah’s will be done.—So be it, so be it!”

Happily, with nightfall came the beginning of the end. At seven o’clock the last building took fire—the English embassy—and just after that, the wind suddenly dying down, the fire was either extinguished or went out of its own accord. It had been burning six hours, and in that time two-thirds of Pera were reduced to ashes, nine thousand houses destroyed, and two thousand lives lost.

Next to the famous fire of 1756, which demolished, in the reign of Osman III. eighty thousand houses and wiped out two-thirds of Stambul, no such disaster as this has ever visited the city, nor from the time Constantinople was conquered up to the present day has any one fire been the cause of so much loss of life.

On the following day Pera presented a spectacle which, if less terrifying, was in no sense less heart*-rending, than that during the actual progress of the fire. Wherever the flames had passed there was nothing to be seen but grim wastes broken only by the naked outlines of great hills; unfamiliar views were opened up; broad sheets of light poured down upon vast open spaces covered with ashes, while here and there the melancholy column of a blackened and half-ruined chimney stood like a gravestone marking the site of a desolated hearth. Whole quarters had disappeared as completely as though they had been Bedouin encampments swept away by a cyclone. Through many streets, which could only be traced by the double line of black, smoking ruins, thousands of the homeless wandered up and down, ragged and dishevelled, imploring aid from the hurrying throng of soldiers and doctors, Sisters of Charity, and priests of every religion, while employés of all ranks distributed the food and money or directed the placing of the mattresses, bedding, and army tents issued by order of the government for the use of the entirely destitute. The heights of Tataola and the great Armenian cemetery swarmed with dense crowds of persons formed into a huge encampment; everywhere one stumbled upon piles of household goods, whose owners, utterly exhausted with what they had been through, lay stretched out upon them. The vast Galata cemetery looked like a bazâr which had been turned upside down: piled along the walks and among the tombs was a bewildering mass of household stuff—divans, pillows, bedding, pianos, books, pictures, broken carriages; the gilded sedan chair of an ambassadress; parrot-cages out of the harems; and horses who had sustained injuries tied to the cypress trees,—all watched over by porters and servants blackened with smoke and dropping with fatigue. The dregs and offscourings of the city employed themselves in searching through the ruins for stray valuables, locks off the doors, nails, and bits of iron, avoiding the outstretched forms of soldiers and firemen, who, unable to hold out any longer against sleep and fatigue, had dropped wherever they might happen to be. Here and there persons might be seen endeavoring by the aid of pieces of board and strips of canvas to erect temporary places of shelter above their ruined dwellings; groups of people kneeling before the blackened altar of some roofless church; and men and women passing in review the long lines of charred and disfigured bodies, who, finally recognizing in some pitiful blackened heap the object of their search, would burst into shuddering sobs and wails of despair, while others would suddenly be seen to drop as though they had been shot from their places in some long procession of biers and litters; and over all clouds of dust and smoke and the dense, suffocating atmosphere heavy with the sickening smell of charred human flesh. Now and then the men working with picks and shovels among the ruins would dislodge showers of ashes and cinders upon the close, silent, awe-stricken crowds collected from all parts of Stambul, above whose heads would appear groups of consuls and ambassadors, drawn up at the corners of the streets and gazing in pale-faced consternation at the surrounding ruin.