Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The lightermen are by no means the only guild in the Golden Horn, though I suppose they are doomed to follow the way of the others. These old organisations still persist among the different kinds of watermen. Each guild has its own station, like the traghetti of Venice, each has a headquarters, or lonja—which is a corruption of the Italian loggia—and each a series of officers headed by a kehaya. This dignitary takes no actual part, as a usual thing, in the work of the guild, but earns the lion’s share of the profits, and in return therefor protects the guild in high quarters. Under the old régime the kehayas of the principal guilds were members of the palace camarilla. In older times still the guilds were required to contribute heavily to the expenses of war in recognition of their privileges, and even now the lightermen and the custom-house porters are obliged to give the War Department so many men on so many days a week.

Sandals

The outer bridge draws a sharp boundary-line between the cosmopolitan part of the harbour and the part where local colour is the rule. For any one who takes an interest in boats and those who have to do with them, the bit of water between Yeni Jami and the Arsenal is one of the happiest hunting-grounds in the world. This is the true home of the water guilds. The lightermen’s headquarters are here, and their four anchored flotillas are a distinct note of the scene. Here also are the headquarters of many lesser watermen such as row you across the Horn for a piastre—or even less if you do not insist on a boat to yourself. The smartest ones have their station just inside the bridge. Most of their boats are trim skiffs, gay with carving and gilding, and fitted out with velvet cushions and summer awnings. This skiff, called a sandal, has almost ousted the true boat of the Golden Horn, which is the legendary caïque. I am sorry to say it, because I do not like to see the Turks change their own customs for European ones, but truth compels me to add that I have lolled too much in gondolas to be an unbridled admirer of the caïque. A gondola is infinitely more roomy and comfortable, and it has the great advantage of not forcing you to sit nose to nose with a perspiring boatman. The caïque is swifter and easier in its gait, however, and, when long enough for two or three pairs of oars, not even a gondola is more graceful. Caïques still remain at the ferries higher up the Golden Horn—and grubby enough most of them are, for they have fallen greatly in the world since bridges were built and steamers began to ply.

Caïques

If I were really to open the chapter of caïques I would never come to the end. The word is a generic one, and applies to an infinity of boats, from the stubby little single-oared piadeh kaïk of the Golden Horn ferries to the big pazar kaïk. You may admire this boat, and the carving that decorates it, and its magnificent incurving beak, and the tassel that should dangle therefrom, at the wharves of Yemish, off the Dried Fruit Bazaar. They all come, early in the morning, from different villages on the Bosphorus, rowed by men who stand to the heavy-handled oars and drop with them to their backs. There are also caïques with sails, undecked boats built on the lines of a fishing caïque, that bring fruit and vegetables from the villages of the Marmora. They are prettier to look at than to navigate, for they have no keel and their mainsail is a balloon, to be pulled from one side to the other of a fearsome stick, boom and gaff in one, that spears the heavens. The human part of the caïque has its picturesque points as well. The sail caïques are navigated more often than not by Greeks. As with fishing caïques, it depends on the village they come from. The men of the bazaar caïques are all Turks, and none of them ever saw a boat till he took ship for Constantinople. What is odder yet, the same is true of most of the ordinary boatmen of the inner Horn. Many of them are Laz; many others are Turkish peasants from the hinterland of the Black Sea. Those from one village or district enter one guild, serving a long apprenticeship before they can be masters of their own craft.

Sailing caïques

Another boundless chapter is that of the larger vessels that frequent the inner Horn. You get an inkling of how boundless it is when you stand on the bridge in front of Yeni Jami and look at the shipping that crowds along the shores. A perfect museum of navigation is there. Modern steamers lie beside the caravels of Columbus—as a matter of fact, the Greeks still call them karavia—and motor-boats make way for vessels whose build and rig can have changed very little since the days of the Argo. One notable armada is anchored off Odoun Kapan, the wood market, under the mosque of Süleïman, and the most notable part of it, for me, is always made up of certain ships called gagalî because their bows have the curve of a parrot’s beak. They have two eyes, like the bragozzi of the Adriatic, and their tremendously tilted bowsprit starts from a little one side of the bow. But what is most decorative about them is the stern, a high triangle adorned with much painting and carving and an open balustrade along the top, from either end of which a beam juts out horizontally over the sea in the line of the hull.