Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

It is rather surprising that the Greeks, who were always a seafaring people, should have taken over so much of the ship language of their Latin conquerors. The case of the Turks is less surprising, for they are tent men born. Nor have their coreligionaries in general ever been great adventurers upon the deep. The Caliph Omar even went so far as to forbid them sea voyages. Nevertheless, the science of navigation owes much to the Arabs, and we get from them our words arsenal and admiral—meaning “house of construction” and “prince of the sea”—while some of the greatest exploits of the Turks were connected with the sea. The deep valley of Kassîm Pasha, inside the Azap Kapou bridge, is supposed to have been the final scene of one of the most celebrated of those exploits, the one successfully carried out by Sultan Mehmed II during his siege of the city, when he hauled a squadron of eighty galleys out of the Bosphorus, dragged them over the hills in a night, and relaunched them inside the chain that locked the Golden Horn. That chain may be seen to-day in the military museum of St. Irene. Kassîm Pasha does not seem to me altogether to fit the contemporary descriptions, although it would offer the easiest route. There is no doubt, however, about the famous arsenal that sits solidly at the mouth of the valley to this day. How many days it will continue to sit there is another matter, for its long water-front may become more valuable for commercial purposes than for those of a modern shipyard. It was founded by Sultan Selim I in 1515, was enlarged by his son Süleïman the Magnificent, and reached the climax of its importance under his grandson Selim II. Those were the great days when the Captains of the White Sea were the terror of the Mediterranean, and when a disaster like the battle of Lepanto, in which the Turks lost two hundred and twenty-four ships and thirty thousand men, could not shake the empire. The Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha said to the Venetian Balio, apropos of that battle and of the conquest of Cyprus by the Turks which preceded it: “There is a great difference between your loss and ours. In taking a kingdom from you it is an arm of yours that we have cut off, while you, in beating our fleet, have merely shaved our beard.” Nor was this a piece of rodomontade. The winter after Lepanto, 1571-2, one hundred and fifty-eight galleys of different sizes were laid down in the Arsenal. And when that famous Prince of the Sea Kîlîj Ali Pasha expressed a doubt as to whether he could find the rigging and anchors he needed, the Grand Vizier said to him: “Lord Admiral, the wealth and power of the empire are such that if it were necessary we would make anchors of silver, cables of silk, and sails of satin.”

A few relics of this fallen greatness are to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal, some distance up the Horn from the Admiralty proper. Some wonderful figureheads of galleys are there, flags and pennants of different sorts, a chart of the time of the Conqueror painted on parchment, a few interesting models, and one or two of the big ship lanterns that were the sign of the dignity of an admiral, corresponding to the horsetails of the vezirs. A pasha of three lanterns, however, was a much more important personage than a pasha of three tails. Most picturesque of all are a number of great gilded caïques, with swooping bows and high sterns, in which the sultans used to go abroad. The largest of them is said to have been a Venetian galley. It has twenty-two rowlocks on either side, and each oar was rowed by three or four men. As a matter of fact, the long horizontal overhang of the bow does look rather like some of the models in the Arsenal at Venice, while two lions guard the stern. But the lions have no wings, they were always a favourite ornament of Turkish as of Byzantine galleys, and the lines of the hull are precisely those of any caïque. As to the imperial cabin at the stern there is no doubt. It is a triple cupola rather, supported by columns, and all inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl and lumps of garnet glass. Reclining under this wonderful canopy Sultan Mehmed IV used to go about the Bosphorus, while over a hundred men in front of him rose and fell with their oars. What a splash they must have made!

The Arsenal has given a certain colour to the whole suburb of Kassîm Pasha. It is chiefly inhabited by naval officers, who under Abd ül Hamid II outnumbered their men! There is a quarter of it called Kalliounjou Koullouk, which means the Guard-house of the Galleon Men. There are also a number of fountains in Kassîm Pasha carved with three ship lanterns to show who built them. And not the least famous of the Princes of the Sea lies there himself beside the mosque he raised out of the spoils of his piracies. This Pialeh Pasha was by birth a Croat and the son of a shoemaker. Captured as a boy by the Janissaries, he grew up to command the fleets of his captors, to conquer Chio and sixty-six other islands, and to marry the daughter of Sultan Selim II. But he failed to take Malta from the Knights of St. John, and it was the bitterness of his life. His mosque is almost unknown, so far does it lie in the back of Kassîm Pasha. They say that Pialeh dug a canal to its doors. They also say that he wanted to make it like a ship. The mosque, at all events, is different from all other mosques I know. The nave is shallower than it is wide, its six equal domes being held up by two central pillars like masts, while the single minaret rises out of the wall opposite the mihrab. The mihrab itself, contained in no apse, is perhaps the finest tiled mihrab I know. Some of the tiles have been stolen, however, and the mosque in general has a pillaged appearance. I thought from the bareness of the entrance wall that a large part of the magnificent frieze of blue and white tiles, an inscription by the famous Hassan Chelibi, must have been stolen too, until the imam told me that the frieze originally stopped there, as no true believer may turn his back on any part of the Koran. The outside of the mosque is also unusual, with its deep porch, two-storied at either end. It is the largest mosque on the left bank of the Golden Horn, and even without its historical and architectural interest it would be worth a visit for the charm of its plane-shaded yard and the cypress grove behind the mosque where Pialeh lies in a neglected türbeh.

The mihrab of Pialeh Pasha

I perceive that I am now embarked on a chapter more boundless than any. Yet how can one speak of the Golden Horn and be silent with regard to its shores? I have already written three chapters about one of them, to be sure, and I propose to write a fourth about the other. But the quiet inner reaches of the Golden Horn contain much less in the way of water life, and depend much more upon the colour of their banks. This colour must have been vivider before steam lengthened the radius of the dweller in Stamboul and when the Golden Horn was still a favourite resort of the court. Nevertheless there is a great deal of character in the quiet, in the not too prosperous and evidently superseded settlements that follow the outer bustle of the harbour. One of the most characteristic of them is the Greek quarter of Phanar—or Fener, as the Turks call it. In both languages the name means lantern or lighthouse. It originally pertained to a gate of the city wall, being derived from a beacon anciently marking a spit of land in front of the gate. There stood more anciently an inner fortified enclosure in this vicinity called the Petrion. A convent of that name once existed, I know not whether founded by a certain Petrus, a noble of the time of Justinian, who lived or owned property in this neighbourhood. It was here that the Venetians were able to effect their entrance into the city in 1203 and 1204, by throwing bridges from their galleys to the battlements of the wall. No galley would be able to come so close to the wall to-day. But the wall is still there, or large parts of it. And behind it, occupying perhaps the site of the old Petrion, the Greek Patriarchs of Constantinople have had their headquarters for the past three hundred years.

Old houses of Phanar

You would never guess, to look at the rambling wooden konak or the simple church beside it, that you were looking at the Vatican of the Greek world. Neither would you suspect that the long alley skirting the water, hemmed in between dark old stone houses with heavily barred windows and upper stories jutting out toward each other on massive stone brackets, was once the Corso of Constantinople. That was when the great Greek families that furnished princes to Moldavia and Wallachia and dragomans to the European embassies and to the Porte maintained the splendour of a court around the Patriarchate. The ambassadors of the tributary principalities lived there, too, and a house is still pointed out as the Venetian embassy. A very different air blows in the Phanar to-day. Many of the Phanariotes emigrated to Greece or otherwise disappeared at the time of the Greek revolution, while those of their descendants who still remain in Constantinople prefer the heights of Pera. None but the poorest, together with Armenians and Jews not a few, now live in those old stone houses. They are worth looking at, however—and I hope prefectures bursting with modernity and the zeal of street-widening will remember it. None of them, I believe, dates from before the fifteenth century, but after the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus they are all that is left to give an idea what a Byzantine house may have looked like. They also suggest how the old wooden house of Stamboul may have come by its curving bracket. If none of them are very decorative on the outside, we must remember that the house of a mediæval Greek in Stamboul was very literally his castle. Some of the houses originally contained no stairs at all, unless secret ones. Beside the stone house stood a wooden one which contained the stairs, and each floor of the two houses communicated by a narrow passage and two or three heavy iron doors. In case of fire or massacre the inmates betook themselves to the top floor of their stone house and barricaded their iron doors until the coast was clear. Occasionally it was so clear that no wooden house and no stairs were left them. But you would never suspect from outside what pillars and arches, what monumental fireplaces, what plaster mouldings, what marquetry of mother-of-pearl, what details of painting and gilding and carving those top floors hide. And under many of them gardens still run green to the water’s edge.