Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The place of the mosque in the Turkish community is symbolised, like that of the mediæval cathedral, by its architectural pre-eminence. Mark, however, that Stamboul has half a dozen cathedrals instead of one. It would be hard to overestimate how much of the character of Stamboul depends on the domes and minarets that so inimitably accident the heights between the Golden Horn and the Marmora. And on closer acquaintance the mosques are found to contain almost all that Stamboul has of architectural pretension. They form an achievement, to my mind, much greater than the world at large seems to realise. The easy current dictum that they are merely more or less successful imitations of St. Sophia takes no account of the evolution—particularly of the central dome—which may be traced through the mosques of Konia, Broussa, and Adrianople, and which reaches its legitimate climax in Stamboul. The likelier fact is that the mosque of Stamboul, inspired by the same remote Asiatic impulse as the Byzantine church, absorbed what was proper to it in Byzantine art, refining away the heaviness or overfloridness of the East, until in the hands of a master like Sinan it attained a supreme elegance without losing any of its dignity. Yet it would be a mistake to look for all Turkish architecture in Sinan. The mosques of Atik Ali Pasha and of Sultan Baïezid II are there to prove of what mingled simplicity and nobility was capable an obscure architect of an earlier century. His name is supposed to have been Haïreddin, and he, first among the Turks, used the monolithic shaft and the stalactite capital. How perfect they are, though, in the arcades of Baïezid! Nothing could be better in its way than the forecourt of that mosque, and its inlaid minarets are unique of their kind. Nor did architecture die with Sinan. Yeni Jami, looking at Galata along the outer bridge, is witness thereof. The pile of the Süleïmanieh, whose four minarets catch your eye from so many points of the compass, is perhaps more masculine. But the silhouette of Yeni Jami, that mosque of princesses, has an inimitable grace. The way in which each structural necessity adds to the general effect, the climactic building up of buttress and cupola, the curve of the dome, the proportion of the minarets, could hardly be more perfect. Although brought up in the vociferous tradition of Ruskin, I am so far unfaithful to the creed of my youth as to find pleasure, too, in rococo mosques like Zeïneb Sultan, Nouri Osmanieh, and Laleli Jami. And the present generation, under men like Vedad Bey and the architects of the Evkaf, are reviving their art in a new and interesting direction.

To give any comprehensive account of the mosques of Stamboul would be to write a history of Ottoman architecture, and for that I lack both space and competence. I may, however, as an irresponsible lounger in mosque yards, touch on one or two characteristic aspects of mosques and their decoration which strike a foreigner’s eye. The frescoing or stencilling of domes and other curved interior surfaces, for instance, is an art that has very little been noticed—even by the Turks, judging from the sad estate to which the art has fallen. Some people might object to calling it an art at all. Let such a one be given a series of domes and vaults to ornament by this simple means, however, and he will find how difficult it is to produce an effect both decorative and dignified. The restorers of the nineteenth century spoiled many a fine interior by their atrocious baroque draperies or colour-blind colour schemes. If I were a true believer I could never pray in mosques like Ahmed I or Yeni Jami, because the decorator evidently noticed that the prevailing tone of the tiles was blue and dipped his brush accordingly—into a blue of a different key. Yet there are domes which prove how fine an art the Turks once made of this half-mechanical decoration. One of the best in Stamboul is in the tomb of the princes, behind the Shah-zadeh mosque. The stencilling is a charming arabesque design in black, dark red, pale blue, and orange, perhaps happily toned by time, which a recent restoration was wise enough to spare. The tomb of Roxelana and the great tomb beside Yeni Jami also contain a little interesting stencilling. But the most complete example of good work of this kind is outside Stamboul, in the Yeni Valideh mosque of Scutari. The means used are of the simplest, the colours being merely black and dull red, with a little dull yellow; but the lines are so fine and so sapiently spaced on their broad background of white that the effect is very much that of a Persian shawl. A study of that ceiling should be made compulsory for every decorator of a mosque—and might yield suggestions not a few to his Western cousin.

Yeni Jami

The windows of mosques are another detail that always interests me. They are rarely very large, but there are a great many of them and they give no dim religious light, making up a great part as they do of the human sunniness of the interior. A first tier of square windows stand almost at the level of the floor, and are provided with folding shutters which are carved with many little panels or with a Moorish pattern of interlaced stars. Higher up the windows are arched and are made more interesting by the broad plaster mullions of which I have already spoken. These make against the light a grille of round, oval, or drop-shaped openings which are wonderfully decorative in themselves. The same principle is refined and complicated into a result more decorative still when the plaster setting forms a complete design of arabesques, flowers, or writing, sometimes framing symmetrically spaced circles or quadrangles, sometimes composing an all-over pattern, and filled in with minute panes of coloured glass. Huysmans compared the windows of Chartres to Persian rugs, because the smallness of the figures and their height above the floor make them merely conventional arrangements of colour. Here, however, we have the real principle of the Oriental rug. Turkish windows contain no figures at all, nor any of that unhappy attempt at realism that mars so much modern glass. The secret of the effect lies in the smallness of the panes used and the visibility of the plaster design in which they are set. And what an effect of jewelry may be produced in this way is to be seen in the Süleïmanieh, and Yeni Jami—where two slim cypresses make delicious panels of green light above the mihrab—besides other mosques and tombs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Mosques are even more notable than private houses for the inscriptions on their walls. Every visitor to St. Sophia remembers the great green medallions bearing the names of the chief personages of Islam in letters of gold. In purely Turkish mosques similar medallions may be seen, or large inscriptions stencilled like panels on the white walls, or small texts hanging near the floor. But there is a more architectural use of writing, above doors and windows or in the form of a frieze. When designed by a master like Hassan Chelibi of Kara Hissar, the great calligrapher of Süleïman’s time, and executed in simple dark blue and white in one of the imperial tile factories, this art became a means of decoration which we can only envy the Turks. Such inscriptions are always from the Koran, of course, and they are often happily chosen for the place they occupy. Around the great dome of the Süleïmanieh, and lighted by its circle of windows, runs this verse: “God is the light of the heavens and of the earth. His light is like a window in the wall, wherein a lamp burns, covered with glass. The glass shines like a star. The lamp is kindled from the oil of a blessed tree: not of the east, not of the west, it lights whom he wills.”

It is not only for inscriptions, however, that tiles are used in mosques. Stamboul, indeed, is a museum of tiles that has never been adequately explored. Nor, in general, is very much known about Turkish ceramics. I suppose nothing definite will be known till the Turks themselves, or some one who can read their language, takes the trouble to look up the records of mosques and other public buildings. The splendid tiles of Süleïman’s period have sometimes been attributed a Persian and sometimes a Rhodian origin—for they have many similarities with the famous Rhodian plates. The Turks themselves generally suppose that their tiles came from Kütahya, where a factory still produces work of an inferior kind. The truth lies between these various theories. That any number of the tiles of Constantinople came from Persia is impossible. So many of them could not have been safely brought so far overland, and it is inconceivable that they would have fitted into their places as they do, or that any number of buildings would have been erected to fit their tiles. The Rhodian theory is equally improbable, partly for similar reasons though chiefly because the legend of Rhodes is all but exploded. The Musée de Cluny is almost the last believer in the idea that its unrivalled collection of Rhodian plates ever came from Rhodes. Many of them probably came from different parts of Asia Minor. That tiles were produced in Asia Minor long before the capture of Constantinople we know from the monuments of Broussa, Konia, and other places. They were quite a different kind of tile, to be sure, of only one colour or containing a simple arabesque design, which was varied by a sort of tile mosaic. Many of them, too, were six-sided. The only examples of these older tiles in Constantinople are to be seen at the Chinili Kyöshk of the imperial museum—the Tile Pavilion—and the tomb of Mahmoud Pasha. It is a notorious fact, however, that the sultans who fought against the Persians brought back craftsmen of all kinds from that country and settled them in different parts of the empire. Selim I, for instance, when he captured Tabriz, imported the best tile makers of that city, as well as from Ardebil and Kashan—whence one of the words for tiles, kyashi—and settled them in Isnik. This is the city which under an older name had already produced the historian Dion Cassius and the Nicene Creed. Other factories are known to have existed in Kastambol, Konia, Nicomedia, and Constantinople itself. One is supposed to have been in Eyoub, though no trace of it remains to-day unless in the potteries of Chömlekjiler. Another, I have been told, flourished at Balat. I know not whether it may have been the same which Sultan Ahmed III transferred in 1724 from Nicæa to the ruined Byzantine palace of Tekfour Seraï. A colony of glass-blowers there are the last remnant to-day of the tile makers of two hundred years ago.