And yet, overpowering as this disaster appeared at the time, as is always the case in Oriental countries, not many months had elapsed before it was completely forgotten. When I visited Constantinople four years later no traces of it were to be seen except certain tracts of bare ground at the far end of Pera, below the heights of Tataola, and the fire was referred to by the inhabitants as something which had occurred in the remote past. For some little time—that is, as long as the ruins were still warm—the papers were filled with demands that the government should be made to take some precautions against a recurrence of the same thing. They suggested the reorganization of the fire department, the purchase of new pumps, increase of the water-supply, and that regulations should be enacted controlling the manner in which houses were to be built in the future; but, finding that the government turned a deaf ear to these proposals, the Europeans soon ceased to make them, and continued to live in the Turkish fashion; that is, trusting a little to the good God and a little to good luck.
And so, as nothing or next to nothing has been done to improve the conditions, we may assume pretty confidently that the fire of 1870 was not the last of those great conflagrations which, “it is written,” are in the course of every few years or so to devastate the City of the Sultans. It is true that many of the houses in Pera are now built of masonry, but most of these are wretchedly constructed by architects without either knowledge or experience, sometimes by any one who happens to come along; and, the authorities not attempting to exercise any sort of supervision in the matter, it is not unusual for them to fall down before being completed, while those which remain standing are not in any way fitted to resist fire. Water, too, is always scarce, especially in Pera, and is everywhere subjected to the most shameful monopoly, and, being mainly derived from the reservoirs built by the Romans in the village of Belgrâd, the supply fails altogether unless abundant rains fall in both spring and autumn; then the rich pay its weight in gold to get it, while the poor people drink mud. The fire-brigade might be likened more to an army of malefactors than an organized corps of employés: it is composed of men of every nationality, accountable, more in name than in actual fact, to the Seraskerat, from which they receive nothing but a ration of bread—untaught, undisciplined, dishonest, feared and dreaded by the people quite as much as the flames which they do not know how to extinguish, and suspected, not without cause, of hoping for fires as affording opportunities for pillage. As for the pumps, while there seems to be plenty of them, and the Turks pride themselves upon these wonderful machines, they are in reality absurd playthings, holding about a dozen quarts of water, which they throw out in gentle little rivulets more suitable for watering flower-beds than extinguishing fires.
Aqueduct of Valens.
And yet the inhabitants of Constantinople might consider themselves fortunate were these the only evils existing in this connection. There is doubtless no foundation for the reports—credited, however, by some—that the government instigates many of the fires with a view to widening the streets: the dangers and inconveniences of such a method would be too great in comparison with the advantages; nor does it now happen, as it has sometimes in the past, that the “opposition” sets fire to a certain quarter in order to intimidate the sultans, or the army to enforce its demands for higher pay; but the general suspicion that many fires are started deliberately by persons who have something to gain thereby has but too often been verified, and hence the people of Constantinople live in a continual state of dread. They are afraid of the water-carriers, porters, architects, lumber- and lime-merchants, and, more than all the rest, of their servants, who are the evil geniuses of Constantinople: these people are all in league with organized bands of thieves, they in turn being in communication with various other secret organizations which manage the sale of every kind of stolen property and facilitate the commission of all manner of crimes, while the local police treat them all alike with a leniency which savors strongly of complicity. No incendiary was ever known to be punished, and thieves are rarely arraigned after a fire; more rarely still are the stolen goods restored to their rightful owners. Moreover, Constantinople being a rendezvous for miscreants from all over the world, the course of justice is constantly being blocked by international complications: consuls demand the surrender of criminals of their own countries; trials drag on for centuries; and so many delinquents escape altogether that the fear of punishment as a restraining influence upon the criminal class is almost nil, and they have come to look upon the plundering of houses during a fire much in the light of a privilege tacitly acknowledged by the authorities to be theirs, just as soldiers were formerly allowed to sack and plunder a vanquished city. And so the word “Fire” still means for the inhabitants of Constantinople “every misfortune,” and the cry Yanghen Vahr is charged with a dread meaning, terrible, fateful, carrying with it dismay—a cry at which the entire city is moved to its very depths, and pours forth as at the announcement of a scourge from God. And who can tell how often yet the great metropolis is doomed to fall before the flames and rise again ere European civilization shall have planted its triumphant ensign upon the imperial palace of Dolmabâghcheh?
* * * * *
In the old days, when a fire broke out in Constantinople, if the Sultan happened to be at that moment in the harem, news of the disaster was sent to him in the person of an odalisque dressed in scarlet from head to foot, with orders to present herself before him wherever he might be, were it even in the embraces of the favorite. She had only to appear upon the threshold: the flaming color of her attire would do the rest and be the mute announcement of her errand. Will any one believe that among all the striking and terrible pictures which my mind conjures up at the thought of a Constantinople fire the figure of that odalisque moves my artistic sense the most, and makes me long to be a painter that I might depict the scene as it rises before me? At all events, I shall go on begging every artist I meet to do it for me, until I come across one whose fancy will be struck with the idea, and who will earn my undying gratitude. The picture will represent an apartment in the imperial harem flooded with soft light. Seated upon a broad divan by the side of a fair young pearl-bedecked Circassian, Selim I., the mighty Sultan, suddenly disengages himself from the arms of his companion, and fixes his great black eyes upon the scarlet-clad odalisque standing in the doorway, mute, erect, immovable as a statue, one hand holding back the curtain beyond which is seen the open terrace, and in the blue distance the great smoking city, while her pallid, terror-stricken face would seem to say, “King of kings, Allah summons you to go to the relief of your unhappy people.”