Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Yet Constantinople has remained, comparatively to her two great rivals, an undiscovered country. The Russians are alone to maintain there such a centre of research as the schools of Rome and Athens, and excavaters take it for granted that Stamboul hides nothing worth their trouble. They would have more reason if the emperors had not collected so many of the masterpieces of antiquity. For about Athens will always linger some glamour of the Periclean age, and its sculpture, like its literature, remains the high-water mark of a certain artistic achievement. The case of Rome, however, is more complicated. Rome never created an art so original as Byzantine architecture or Byzantine mosaic; and Justinian it was, not Cæsar or Augustus, who carried Roman law to such a point that no principle has been added to it since. I think the old odium theologicum must have something to do with the fact that the age of Justinian and one or two great periods that followed it enjoy so little general renown. The split between the churches originally destroyed the tradition of renown; and because we are of the West, because we are descended from the crusaders, because we derive our religious traditions from Rome, we still entertain some vague ancestral prejudice against Orthodoxy and its capital. The present masters of Constantinople have, of course, greatly encouraged this prejudice by taking no interest themselves in the history of the city or allowing others to do so. Then other details of accessibility enter into the matter, and of language, and a thousand subtleties of association. Rome, for instance, has long been a province of European literature. Keats and Shelley and Browning, to mention only later English poets, and I know not how many others, besides generations of novelists and playwrights and historians and travellers and painters and sculptors, have made a whole public that knows or cares very little about the Cæsars feel at home in Rome; whereas Gibbon and Byron and Lady Mary Montagu are the sole greater English names that attach themselves to the Bosphorus. It waters, to be sure, a much larger corner of French literature. And the immense learning of Gibbon has perhaps done more than any amount of ignorance and prejudice to weight the scale against Constantinople.

The Rome of literature is not an Augustan Rome. It is the Rome of the popes, the Rome of the Renaissance, the Rome of galleries and haunted palaces and enchanted villas that had no being till Constantinople was at an end. Or it is a simpler Rome still, of the liquid light, of shops and theatres and hotels and a friendly court. Against these Romes I am the last to set up a cry. I merely point out that for most eyes they fill up the picture of the Eternal City; whereas Constantinople can be looked at through no such magnifying-glass. Sacked of her wealth, home of the arts no more, guarded by jealous keepers, and lacking most that is dear to the modern wanderer’s heart, how should she compete with Rome? Only in one respect can she hold her own unchallenged against that potent rival, for by no stretch of the imagination can Rome, crouching on her seven ant-hills beside her muddy river, be given the palm of place over Constantinople. And the campagna of Rome, that stretches so vast and melancholy on many an eloquent page, is but a dooryard to the campagna of Constantinople, which also has imperial aqueducts, and which regards older than Alban hills and the shining spaces of the Marmora dotted by high islands, and far away behind them, like Alps seen across a Venetian lagoon, the blue range, capped three parts of the year with snow, of the Bithynian Olympus.

I follow, however, but an unprofitable trail. Rome is Rome and Constantinople is Constantinople. And a day will no doubt come for the latter when some other impressionist will sigh for the unexploited days of yore. One of the charms of Constantinople, indeed, is that mystery still has room there and one may always hope for treasure-trove. The sacks of 1204 and 1453 undoubtedly made away with the better part of the statuary and other precious things of which Constantinople was so unparalleled a museum, but some buried Greek marble may yet come to light. The soil of Stamboul is virgin so far as excavation is concerned, and you have no more than to scratch it to pick up something—if only a coin or a bit of broken pottery. Until very recently, digging for foundations was the sole thing of the sort permitted. Some most interesting discoveries have been made in this casual way. Quite a museum, for example, could have been formed of the different objects found in the grounds where the American missionaries have their headquarters. While digging, in 1872, for the foundations of the main building, an ancient burial-ground was unearthed. The bones, with lamps and other small objects, were protected by great tiles set triangularly together, and inside each skull was a Roman coin of early imperial times, which once paid, I suppose, a passage over Styx. Near by were ruins of masonry which indicated by their shape a church. Under a later building coins and tiles of the period of Constans were found. A beautiful Corinthian column also came to light, and a life-sized marble statue. When ground was broken for the third building, on the site of a Turkish konak, an old man came to the American in charge and asked for a private interview. He then introduced himself as an Armenian whose ancestors had been courtiers of the last emperor Constantine. From them, he said, a tradition had been handed down in his family about the ground where the Turkish house had stood. “When you dig into the ground,” he said, “you will come to an iron door. When you open the door you will see stone steps. When you go down the steps you will come into a sort of room. Then you will find a passage leading underground in the direction of St. Sophia—and in it gold, jewels, statues, all manner of things that the emperor and his friends put there for safety during the last siege. I only ask you to give me half!” The missionary thought the Armenian mad and treated him accordingly. But the old man spent all his time watching the work. And one day the diggers uncovered a metal door lying horizontally in the earth. With some difficulty they succeeded in jacking the door off the masonry in which the hinges were embedded, and underneath steps appeared, going down into a black void. At that the missionary began to be interested. When the workmen were out of the way he went down with the Armenian to explore. They descended into the subterranean vault they expected. It was held up by marble pillars with crosses on the capitals. But when they came to look for the passage they discovered that one end of the vault, the end toward St. Sophia, had been cut off by a wall of more recent date. That wall, as it happens, belongs to the great building known as the Valideh Han, erected by the famous valideh soultan Kyössem. After her death were found, among other property of hers stored there, twenty chests of ducats. And when I read about them I could not help wondering whether any of those ducats came from the passage which the sultana’s workmen must accidentally have struck into in the seventeenth century.

Constantinople is full of stories and legends of the same sort, in most of which figures a secret passage leading underground to St. Sophia. I have poked my own nose into two or three such tunnels, which no Turk ever constructed, and can vouch for their existence. In reality, however, there is nothing very mysterious about them. The soil of Stamboul is honeycombed with cisterns of all sizes, from the enormous ones picturesquely called by the Turks the Sunken Palace and the Thousand and One Columns to the small one of the Bible House and Valideh Han. Others, like the cistern beside the mosque of Sultan Selim I, were always uncovered. These are usually called choukour bostan, hollow garden, from the fact that vegetable gardens are wont to flourish in the accumulated silt of their centuries. Brick conduits connect many of the reservoirs with a water-system which Hadrian is known to have installed or enlarged while Rome was still the capital of the empire. And it was only natural for such conduits to lead toward St. Sophia, the civic centre of the town. We also know that Constantine constructed deep sewers, on the lines of the cloaca of Rome. But as no one has ever been able to study these systems thoroughly, there remains something half mythic about them.

The Myrelaion

Another casual but more dramatic way in which old Constantinople proves her temper of eternity is by means of the fires that periodically ravage Stamboul. There is no more striking suggestion of Stambouls within Stamboul than to look at the ashes of some familiar, of some regretted quarter, and discover there a solid piece of antiquity about which houses have been built and burned who knows how many times. In my own day the Column of Marcian has reappeared on its hilltop overlooking the Marmora, having long been lost in the yard of a Turkish house. And I have seen the obscure mosque of Boudroun Jami gallantly reassert itself above the ruin of its quarter as the charming little tenth-century church of the Myrelaion—the convent of Myrrh and Oil. The fires which an archæologist might best have been suspected of setting were those of 1912 and 1913, which swept the slope between the Hippodrome and the Marmora. This was the site of the Sacred Palace of the later Roman emperors. No complete account of it remains, but from the reports of ambassadors and other visitors of note, from references of historians, and from the Book of Ceremonies of the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, scholars have been able to reconstitute that city of palaces, churches, terraces, and gardens that overlapped on one side a corner of the present Seraglio grounds and reached on the other nearly to the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Constantine the Great was the founder of this imperial residence. His Palace of Daphne, so called from a statue of the nymph he brought from Rome, stood on the site of the mosque of Sultan Ahmed I, and other structures bordered the Hippodrome, opening by a monumental gateway into the Augustæum, now the square of St. Sophia. To Constantine also was attributed the magnificent hall of the Magnaura, which Ebersolt places a little south and west of the present Ministry of Justice. Here was the throne of Solomon, imitated from the one described in the Book of Kings, whose fame has come down in the memoirs of more than one amazed ambassador. It was guarded by golden lions which, during audiences of state, rose to their feet, beat their tails on the floor, and roared, while golden birds in a tree behind the throne began to chirp and flutter among the golden boughs. Still another construction attributed to Constantine was the Porphyra, the little porphyry palace near the sea where the imperial children were born.

I cannot attempt even to catalogue the other splendours of this unparalleled enclosure or the names of those who continued, during six hundred years, to add palace to palace, one richer than another in jewelled furniture, in the new jewelry of mosaic, in the spoils of ancient art. Nicephorus Phocas was the last emperor to do so, when he enlarged and fortified the waterside Palace of Bucoleon. By the eleventh century the emperors had begun to prefer the Palace of Blacherne. But Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, found the great ladies of the court assembled in the Bucoleon when the crusaders occupied the city in 1204, and after the restoration of 1261 Michael Palæologus lived there until Blacherne could be put in order. From that time on the Great Palace fell rapidly into decay. When the Florentine Buondelmonte visited it early in the fifteenth century it was already a ruin. Its condition in 1453 suggested to the Turkish conqueror the Persian distich which has been so often requoted: “The spider has woven his web in the palace of kings, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.” By the sixteenth century little was left of it but a few columns and the ruins of the Bucoleon. The colossal group of a lion and a bull, which gave the smaller palace its name, still stood on the old quay of the imperial galleys in 1532, when it was turned around by an earthquake. Is it impossible that that marble might yet be recovered from the sand of the shore? The westernmost of the palaces composing the Bucoleon, the one associated with the name of the Persian prince Hormisdas, who came as an exile to the court of Constantine the Great, was pulled down as late as 1871, when the Roumelian railway was built. Two lions from a balcony of its sea façade now flank the east staircase of the Imperial Museum. The ruins of the eastern palace, the so-called House of Justinian, where the great emperor may very well have lived before he came to the throne, were barely saved by the Friends of Stamboul when the railway was double-tracked in 1912. To-day this pile of ancient brickwork, rising from the edge of the Marmora, is almost the last vestige of the palace whose legendary splendour filled so many mediæval pages. On the slope behind it the fires to which I have referred laid bare several Byzantine terraces, the entrances to a number of vaulted substructures, and a tower which had been incorporated into the surrounding houses. Might it be, perhaps, the tower of the Great Admiral Apocaucus, which he built as a prison for John Cantacuzene but in which he himself was murdered in 1345? I am not the one to say. But that Palatine Hill, so long the centre of the world, where so much has been enacted that is most coloured and passionate of life, and which now looks so quietly at its quiet sea—and there is a blue keeps no trace of all the keels that have scarred it from the time of the Argonauts!—that Palatine Hill has an immense attraction for me. And I marvel that no one has yet taken advantage of its present accessibility to learn precisely what, after so many fires and earthquakes and other spoilers, may be left of its old arrangement.

The House of Justinian