Constantinople, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

It is not owing to any architectural beauty that the interest of the whole world is directed toward the Seraglio. Unlike the Alhambra, it is not a great artistic monument: the Court of the Lions alone in the Arabian palace is worth all the kiosks and towers of the Turkish one put together. No, the value of the Seraglio lies wholly in its great historic interest: it illustrates and gives life to almost the entire history of the Ottoman dynasty; upon its walls and the trunks of its century-old trees are engraved the most secret and intimate records of the empire. Nothing but the period covered by the past thirty[E] years and the two centuries preceding the conquest of Constantinople are wanting to complete the chronicle. From Muhammad II., who laid its foundations, to Abdul-Megid, who abandoned it to take up his residence in the palace of Dolmabâghcheh, twenty-five sultans have dwelt there. Hardly had the dynasty conquered its European metropolis when it planted its foot upon this spot; here it climbed to the apex of its glory, and here its decadence began. It was at once a palace, a fortress, and a sanctuary; here was the brain of the empire and the heart of Islamism; it was a city within a city, an imposing and magnificent stronghold, inhabited by a people, guarded by an army, embracing within its walls an infinite variety of buildings, pleasure-grounds, and prisons, city, country, palaces, arsenals, schools, offices, and mosques, where fêtes, executions, religious ceremonies, love affairs, state functions, and wild revels succeeded one another with startling rapidity; here sultans were born, elevated to the throne, deposed, imprisoned, strangled; here were woven the tangled webs of every conspiracy that threatened the empire; here resounded the hoarse cry of every popular tumult; hither flowed the purest gold and bluest blood of the Turkish dominions; here was wielded that shining blade that flashed above the heads of a hundred different peoples; and upon this spot, for nearly three centuries, was concentrated the gaze of uneasy Europe, suspicious Asia, and cowering Africa, as upon some smoking crater which threatened at any moment to overflow and engulf the whole earth.

[E] This was written in 1874.—Trans.

This huge royal residence is situated upon the most eastern of Stambul’s seven hills, the one which inclines gently to the edge of the Sea of Marmora, the mouth of the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn. It is the site formerly occupied by the Acropolis of Byzantium, a part of the ancient city and one wing of the great imperial palace, and is by far the most beautiful hill in Constantinople, as well as the promontory most favored by nature of the whole European shore. Here converge as to a common centre two seas and two straits; to this spot led all the great military and commercial high-roads of Eastern Europe; torrents of water poured into it through the aqueducts constructed by the Byzantine emperors; the hills of Thracia protect it from the north winds; the sea bathes it on three sides; Galata watches over it from the harbor; Skutari mounts guard from across the Bosphorus; and the snow-crowned heights of Bithynia close in the Asiatic horizon. Standing alone at the extreme end of the great metropolis in an almost isolated position, in its beauty and strength it seems formed by nature to act as the pedestal of a great monarchy, and to encircle and screen the life of those princes who were half gods.

Panorama of the Seraglio.

The entire hill is surrounded at its base by a high battlemented wall flanked by massive towers. On the sides toward the Sea of Marmora and the Golden Horn this is identical with the city wall. On the land side it was erected by Muhammad II., and shuts the Seraglio Hill off from that one on which the mosque of Nûri Osmaniyeh stands. Describing a right angle near the Sublime Porte, it passes in front of St. Sophia, and then, making a wide outward curve, joins the walls of Stambul on the shore. This is the outer enclosure of the Seraglio. Properly speaking, what is meant by the Seraglio is only that part which occupies the summit of the hill, shut in behind high walls of its own—the central redoubt, as it were, of the great fortress of the hill.

It would be, however, nothing but wasted time and energy to enter into a detailed description of this spot such as it is at present. The railroad crosses its outer walls; a disastrous fire destroyed many of the buildings in 1865; the gardens are largely despoiled of their beauty; hospitals, barracks, and military schools have been established within its precincts; and of the old buildings which are still standing many have been either so altered or their original function so changed that, although the most salient features still remain, and one finds the outline of the Old Seraglio clearly defined, yet the number and nature of the minor alterations and the abandonment and neglect of the past thirty years have so changed the character of the whole place that it would be impossible to render a faithful description of it as it now appears without disappointing even the most modest expectations.

It will, then, be better for his sake who writes, as well as his who reads, to describe this famous Seraglio such as it was at the most glorious period of the Ottoman power.

Any one who in those old days—say from a lofty tower or one of the minarets of St. Sophia—could take in the entire Seraglio Hill must have enjoyed a sight of extraordinary beauty. Framed by the deep blue of the sea, the Bosphorus, and the harbor, with their semicircle of white sails, arose the great green mass of the hill, girdled by walls and towers and crowned by guns and sentinels. From the centre of this forest of lofty trees, through which innumerable footpaths glistened and flower-beds flaunted their gay colors, rose the vast rectangle of the Seraglio buildings, divided into three large courtyards, or rather little towns, built around three irregular squares, whose roofs showed in a confused, many-colored mass—terraces filled with flowers, gilded cupolas, white minarets, airy pinnacles of kiosks, great arched doorways, alternating with gardens and groves, and half buried in foliage. It was a little white metropolis, glittering, irregular, light as an encampment of tents, through which there breathed a spirit at once voluptuous, pastoral, and warlike. In one part it was all life and movement, in another silent and deserted as a necropolis; here open and bathed in sunlight, there plunged in perpetual gloom and hidden from human gaze. A thousand zephyrs fanned it, while its unending succession of contrasting lights and shadows, its brilliant coloring, and subdued tints of blue and gray were alike reflected in its marble buildings and tiny lakes, above which soared flocks of doves and swallows.

Such was the external aspect of the imperial city, not, perhaps, so very large to the eye of one overlooking it from above, but within so divided and subdivided, so intricate and irregular, that servants familiar with its inner courts for upward of fifty years would still grow confused and take the wrong turn, and the Janissaries when they invaded it for the third time again lost their way.