Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

There is another tomb behind another mosque of Süleïman, which is, perhaps, the most perfect monument of its kind in Stamboul. I did not always think so. But the more I look at its fluted dome and at the scheme of its interior tiling, the more I seem to see that here again Sinan, or the great decorator who worked with him, exquisitely found means to express an idea of individuality. This tomb was built, like the mosque to which it belongs, in memory of Süleïman’s second and best-beloved son, the young Prince Mehmed. The mosque—so-called of the Shah-zadeh, the Prince—has lost its original decoration, but its graceful lines and its incrusted minarets combine with the smaller buildings and the trees about it to make one of the happiest architectural groups in Stamboul. As for the türbeh, it fortunately remains very much as Sinan left it. The design of the tiles is more abstract and masculine than those in Roxelana’s türbeh, being mainly an intricate weaving of lines and arabesques. But there is about them a refinement, a distinction, which, it is hardly too fantastic to say, insensibly suggest the youth and the royal station of the boy whose burial chamber they beautify. For the colour—rarest of all in Turkish tiles—is a spring green and a golden yellow, set off by a little dark blue. The tomb is also remarkable, as I have already said, for the stencilling of its dome, as well as for the lovely fragments of old stained glass in the upper windows and for a sort of wooden canopy, perforated in the wheel pattern common to the balustrades of the period, covering the prince’s catafalque. It is supposed to symbolise the throne which Süleïman hoped his son might inherit. Beside the prince, but not under the canopy, rests his humpbacked younger brother Jihangir. As for the unhappy Prince Moustafa, he was buried in Broussa, in the beautiful garden of the Mouradieh.

The türbeh of Prince Mehmed has, in my mind, another pre-eminence which perhaps it does not deserve. As in most other public buildings of Stamboul, an inscription is carved over the door. These inscriptions are generally in poetry and sometimes very long. The uninitiated reader would never guess that the last verse of many of them is also a date, for the Arabic letters, like certain Roman letters, have a numerical value. And the date of many a Turkish monument is hidden in a chronogram, always the last line of the inscription, in which the arithmetical sum of the letters is equivalent to the numeral of the year in which the monument was erected. I am not learned enough to say when this recondite fashion started, but the chronogram of this tomb is the earliest I happen to know about in Stamboul. It reads: “Grant, Lord, to him who rests here to win the grove of Eden.” The arithmetical value of the line is 950, which year of the Hegira is equivalent to 1543 of our era.

There are several other interesting tombs in this enclosure, of which the most important are those of Rüstem Pasha, builder of the tile mosque we have already noticed, and of a certain Ibrahim Pasha, Grand Vizier to Sultan Mourad III. I have a particular fancy for the latter türbeh, which seems to me in its neglected way a little masterpiece. Consider me now its door—how admirably drawn it is, provided with what green bronze knockers in the shape of lyres! The tiles of the interior, or the more important of them, are simplified from those of Prince Mehmed, transposed into another key—dark red and less dark blue on white—and set between two encircling inscriptions. There are also certain panels of flowers between high windows. But I think I am most undone by a little dado, one tile high, where two outward curving sprays of wild hyacinth that just do not fit into the breadth of a tile enclose a small cluster of tulips and carnations—inimitably conventionalised and symmetrical. Nothing more simple or more decorative was ever imagined.

Selim II, the unworthy supplanter of him who might have been Mehmed III, lies in a tomb handsomer than he deserves, in the court of a mosque built by a greater than he—St. Sophia. His large türbeh lacks the elegant proportion of his brother’s, but the tile panels of its porch are very effective. So is the tile tapestry of its inner walls, though a little monotonous—mainly white in effect, dotted with little tulips and other flowers enclosed in small Persian spindles. Four other sultans are buried in the precincts of St. Sophia, the mad Moustafa I and the dethroned Ibrahim lying in dishonourable neglect in the bare, whitewashed chamber that was once the baptistery of the cathedral. And it was through having been the slave of Ibrahim that the valideh soultan Hadijeh was able to complete Yeni Jami in her own name and build beside it the great mausoleum in which she lies!

The türbeh of Ibrahim Pasha

The court of the Conqueror

These türbehs, with the fountains of the outer courtyard and the trees that shade them and the minarets that tower above the trees, give an oddly Turkish air to the precincts of St. Sophia. It is to a real mosque, however, that one must go for a typical mosque yard. A part of it that is lacking to St. Sophia, and, indeed, to many mosques, is another inner enclosure called the haram, or sanctuary. This forecourt of the mosque is always more architectural than the “garden,” being a paved quadrangle surrounded by an arcade. In the centre of the cloister a covered fountain should bubble, sometimes under trees. I have already mentioned one of the best examples of such a court. It belongs to the old mosque of Sultan Baïezid II, more popularly known as the Pigeon Mosque. This is less of a sanctuary than any other forecourt in Stamboul. But the reason is that the mosque lacks an outer yard other than the square of the War Department. And I would be the last to find fault with the scribes who sit in the arcades, or to call them Pharisees who sell beads and perfumes there. During the month of Ramazan a busy fair is held there, open only during the afternoon, where the complicated sweetmeats of the season are sold together with other things worthy to be given as presents at Baïram. I must say, however, that I have a weakness for the court of another old mosque, that of Sultan Selim I, in a less accessible part of Stamboul. Part of its charm is perhaps due to the fact that it is more remote and therefore more subject to silence. Above the barred windows that look into the outer sunlight are lunettes of tiles, while around the fountain cypresses and grape-vines make an inimitable shade. Nor can I pass by the court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the last and greatest vizier of Süleïman I. This is supposed to be a lesser work of Sinan, but I like it almost better than any other. Within the mosque are treasures of tiles, of stained glass, of painted wood, of perforated marble. Without is one of the noblest porticoes in Stamboul, looking down upon a cloister that is a real cloister. For into its colonnade open cells where live the students of a medresseh.