Constantinople, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

I determined to make the circuit of the ancient walls of Stambul entirely alone, and this plan I recommend to all Italians visiting Constantinople, as the sight of those majestic and beautiful ruins cannot make a profound and lasting impression upon the mind unless one is altogether intent upon receiving it and can freely follow his own train of thought. It is a question of tramping about fifteen Italian miles through deserted streets and exposed to the full blaze of the sun. “Very possibly,” said I to my friend, “when I have gone halfway I shall be seized with such a desperate attack of loneliness that I will invoke you like one of the saints, but, all the same, I want to go by myself.” And so, having first lightened my purse for fear some suburban pick-pocket might do it for me, and thrown something to the “eager dogs within,” so that I might say to myself later on, “Be still, then, accursed wolf!” I set forth in the direction of the Validêh Sultan bridge at eight in the morning, beneath a sky washed clean and bright by a shower which had fallen during the night.

My plan was to leave Stambul by the gate in the Blachernæ, to follow the line of the walls from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers, and to return along the shore of the Sea of Marmora, thus completing the triangle of the Mussulman city.

Crossing the bridge, I turned to the right and plunged into that vast district known as Istambul disciaré, or Outer Stambul, a long strip of the city shut in between the walls and the harbor, composed of miserable little houses and wood and oil-shops, and more than once destroyed by fire; flights of stairs lead from the banks down to little inlets crowded with boats and shipping, and in the space between these on the one hand, and the narrow lanes and alleyways of the city on the other, there is a constant passing back and forth of porters, asses, and camels, the same mixture of strange people and dirty things which, as well as the unintelligible clamor of tongues, is to be found in those wonderful ports of the Chinese and Indian seas where the people and merchandise of two hemispheres meet and mingle. Those walls which are still standing on this side are five times a man’s height, castellated, strengthened every hundred paces by small quadrangular towers, and in many places falling into ruins. They are, from an historic or artistic standpoint, however, the least noteworthy of any of the fortifications of Stambul.

Traversing the Greek quarters, I skirted the bank among the various pastry-cook, fruit, and fritter stalls, passing by groups of handsome Greek sailors standing in the attitudes of their own ancient gods around some cook carrying on his avocation in the open; then, making a circuit around the vast Ghetto of Balata and threading the silent Blachernæ quarter, I finally quitted the city by the gate called Egri Kapou, not far from the banks of the Golden Horn. While all this may be said in a few words, to do it requires an hour and a half, now mounting, now descending, passing around lakes of mud and over heaps of stones, through an endless maze of narrow streets and dark passage-ways, across vast desolate wastes, with nothing to guide you but the points on the minarets of the Selim mosque: at a certain place you begin to notice fewer and fewer European faces and costumes; then European houses disappear, then pavements, then the signs on the shops, then names on the streets, then every indication of labor; and the farther you go the more surly the dogs become, the more impudently do the Turkish ragamuffins stare you in the eye, and the common women take pains to conceal their faces; until at last you find yourself in the heart of barbarous Asia, and, instead of a two hours’ walk, you seem to have made a two days’ journey.

On issuing from the Egri Kapou I turned to the left, and came quite unexpectedly upon a long stretch of those famous walls which formed Stambul’s defences upon the land side. Three years have elapsed since that moment, but to this day I can never recall it without a fresh sensation of wonder. There is no other spot in the East, so far as I know, which presents so vividly before the mind the memories of the past, the grandeur of human achievement, the majesty of power, the glory of the centuries, the mystery of decay, and the beauties of nature. You are filled with awe and terror and admiration at this sight, worthy of a canto of Homer, and involuntarily uncover, exclaiming “All honor!” as though called upon to salute the mutilated ranks of some mighty band of heroes.

The line of walls and lofty towers extends as far as the eye can reach, rising and falling according to the natural character of the land, at some points seeming to sink into the earth, and at others to crown the summit of a mountain: it is diversified by an endless variety of color, and ruin in every stage of advancement, in some places nearly black, in others almost as yellow as gold, and overgrown by a rich, deep-green vegetation, which, scaling the walls to their very summits, falls back in waving garlands from the battlements and loopholes, rears itself in feathery plumes upon the tops of the towers, and overflows in green cascades from curtain and crumbling breach, its billowy waves filling the moat and lapping the very roadside.

There are three lines of fortifications, forming as it were three gigantic ruined steps. The inner one, which is the highest, is strengthened at short regular intervals by massive square towers; that in the middle by round ones; the outer wall, much lower than the others, is protected by a deep, wide moat, formerly filled with water drawn from the Golden Horn and Sea of Marmora, and now choked with grass and shrubbery. These walls, as we see them now, are almost precisely as they were the day after the conquest of Constantinople. The restorations made by Muhammad and Bayezid II. amount to very little. There can be still seen the breaches made by Orbano’s powerful guns, the marks left by the catapults and battering-rams, the great rents where mines were fired, and all the various indications which mark those spots where the attack was most furious, the defence most desperate. Almost all the round towers of the middle wall are ruined from base to summit, and while those of the inner wall are most of them still standing, they are broken at the corners, dismantled, dwindling off to points at the top, like huge tree-trunks sharpened at the end with blows from some giant axe, or else cracked from top to bottom or hollowed out at the base like cliffs worn by the sea-waves. Great masses of masonry detached from the curtains have rolled down upon the platforms of the middle and outer walls and choke up the moat. Little footpaths wind in and out amid the heaps of stones and thick underbrush, lost to view in the deep shadows of the overhanging vegetation between huge stones and bare patches of earth torn up by the falling of some heavy mass. Each portion of walls between any two towers comprises in itself a complete and wonderful example of ruins and of vegetation, full of power and majesty, wild, colossal, forbidding, and adorned with a melancholy and imposing beauty which impels a feeling of reverence. One seems to be looking at the ruins of an endless chain of feudal castles, or of one of those mighty girdles of wall which encircled the fabulous empires of Eastern Asia. Constantinople of to-day disappears, and before us rises the City of the Constantines; we breathe the air of the fifteenth century, and as our thoughts become more and more centred upon the day of her tremendous fall, we find ourselves for a few moments dazed, bewildered, and turned, as it were, to stone.

The Egri Kapou through which I had come is identical with the famous Charsian gate used by Justinian when he made his triumphal entry into the city, and later by Alexius Comnenus when he seized the throne: before it lies a Mussulman cemetery, and here, during the early days of the siege, were placed the gigantic cannon of Orbano, which kept four hundred artillerymen employed and required a hundred oxen to move. The gate was defended by Teodoro di Caristo and Giovanni Greant against the attacks of the left wing of the Turkish army, which reached clear to the Golden Horn. From this point to the Sea of Marmora there are no longer any hamlets, not so much as a group of houses, and, as the road consequently runs between the walls and the open country, there is nothing whatever to distract one’s thoughts from the mighty ruins themselves. Setting forth on the road, I walked for some time between two cemeteries, a Christian one on my left, lying directly beneath the walls, and an enormous Mussulman one on my right, shaded by a forest of cypress trees; overhead the sun poured down in straight, direct rays; before me stretched the highway, white, solitary, and rising by a gentle incline, until on the summit of the opposite heights it divided the limpid horizon with a sharp, clear-cut line. On one hand tower succeeded tower, on the other tombstone followed tombstone; not a sound broke the stillness save my own measured tread and the occasional rustle of a lizard in the grass by the roadside. After walking thus for some distance, I suddenly found myself opposite a beautiful square gateway surmounted by a great arch in an excellent state of preservation, and flanked by two massive octagonal towers. This was the Adrianopolis Gate, the Polyandrion of the Greeks, which was made the principal point of attack when the Avars besieged Constantinople during the reign of Heraclius in 625. During the attack under Muhammad II. it was defended by the brothers Paoli and Antonino Troilo Bochiardi, and later on was the gate through which the Turks made their victorious exits and entries. Neither ahead nor about me was there a living soul to be seen: all at once a couple of Turkish cavalrymen came through the gate and disappeared down the Adrianopolis road at a full gallop, enveloped in a thick cloud of dust, after which everything returned to the same death-like stillness. Following their lead, I too took the Adrianopolis road, and, turning my back for a time upon the walls, descended into the valley of the Lycus, climbed the opposite ascent, and found myself looking out over the vast undulating and arid plain of Dahud-Pasha, where, during the siege of Constantinople, Muhammad II. established his head-quarters. Here I stood for some time, shading my eyes with my hand and searching about as if expecting to find some traces still of the imperial camp to aid me in picturing to myself the strange and imposing spectacle which that spot must have presented toward the close of the spring of 1453. Just here the life of all that mighty army flowed back as to its heart, clasping in its fatal embrace the great dying metropolis; from this point those orders were issued which fell on all sides like thunderbolts, set in motion the arms of a hundred thousand workmen, directed the overland transportation of two hundred galleys[A] from the Bay of Beshiktash to the bay of Kassim-Pasha, thrust armies of Armenian miners into the bowels of the earth, despatched heralds in all directions whose flags announced the hour of attack, and in the time it would take to tell the beads of a tespi bent three hundred thousand bows and caused three hundred thousand cimeters to flash in the air. Here the trembling envoys of Constantine came face to face with their Genoese countrymen from Galata selling oil with which to grease Orbano’s mighty cannon, and Mussulman scouts stationed upon the banks of the Sea of Marmora in order that they might give warning when the European fleet should appear upon the horizon bringing the last relief of Christianity to the last defences of the Constantines. There too were to be found a swarm of renegade Christians, Asiatic adventurers, old sheikhs, and lean, ragged dervishes, wasted away by long marches, going restlessly back and forth among the tents of the fourteen thousand Janissaries; and interminable troops of horse already harnessed, long files of camels standing motionless in the midst of catapults and battering-rams, and cannons lying overturned where they had exploded, and great pyramids of huge granite balls, among which wound long processions of begrimed and blackened soldiers bearing two by two from the neighborhood of the walls to the open country beyond the mutilated bodies of the dead and groaning forms of the wounded; while over all there hung a perpetual cloud of smoke.

[A] There were eighty galleys, according to Ducas.—Trans.