Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The outer court of Eyoub

Of a very different character is the hollow of converging valleys outside the city wall where lies, at the end of the Golden Horn proper, the suburb of Eyoub Soultan. Eyoub Soultan, anglice Prince Job, takes its name from a friend and standard-bearer of the Prophet who took part in the third Arab siege of Constantinople in 668 and fell outside the walls. Of this good man and his last resting-place so many legendary things are related that I don’t know where my chapter would end if I repeated only the few of them I have heard. I can only say that when Sultan Mehmed II was making his own siege, eight hundred years later, he opportunely discovered the burial-place of the saintly warrior. This discovery having stimulated the flagging ardour of the besiegers, with what results we know, the Conqueror built a splendid mausoleum above the grave of the Prophet’s friend and beside it the first of the imperial mosques. To this, the holiest shrine of Islam in Constantinople, the sultans come for that ceremony which takes for them the place of a coronation—to be girded with the sword of Osman. So holy a shrine is it that until the re-establishment of the constitution in 1908 no Christian had ever entered that mosque except in disguise, or so much as its outer court. Even now it is not easy for a Christian to see the inside of the türbeh. I have not, at all events. But I count myself happy to have seen its outer wall of blue and green tiles, shaded by broad eaves and pierced in the centre by an intricate grille of brass which shines where the fingers of the faithful pass over the letters of the creed. And I must confess that I lay up no grudge against the imams for keeping me out. I cannot say it is for the same reason that another man of God, with whom I sometimes sit in front of another tomb in Stamboul, once gave me for never having been himself in the tomb of Eyoub: that he did not feel himself worthy. It is, rather, an inconsistent feeling that I am not sorry if some things and some places still be held sacred in the world. On one side of the tomb, opening out of the same tiled wall, is a sebil where an attendant waits to give cups of cold water to the thirsty. On the other side a window opens through a grille of small green bronze hexagons into a patch of garden where a few rose-bushes stand among graves. And in the centre of the quadrangle stand two enormous plane-trees, or what is left of them, planted there by the Conqueror five hundred years ago. The mosque itself is not very interesting, having been restored too many times. It contains one much-prized relic, however, consisting of a print of the Prophet’s foot in stone. Beside the mosque and the forecourt is a second court, larger and irregular in shape, also shaded by plane-trees, where, furthermore, are a fountain of ablution and painted gravestones in railings and a colony of pigeons that are pampered like those of St. Mark’s.

Eyoub

The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but they all have the grave dignity which the Turks contrive to put into everything they do, and the streets take a tone from the great number of pious institutions that line them, interspersed with cypresses and tombs. The quarter is indeed, more than any other, the Pantheon of Stamboul, so many important personages have chosen to be buried near the friend of the Prophet. The pious Mehmed V, however, is the first sultan who has chosen to lie to the last day in the company of all those good and famous men. Several of the most notable mausoleums, though the most neglected, are of the period of Süleïman I, and built by Sinan. In one of them, separated from a little library by a porch of precious tiles, lies the Bosnian slave, nicknamed from his birthplace Sokollî Mehmed, whose destiny it was to become the Treasurer of Süleïman, successor to the terrible admiral Barbarossa, and Grand Vizier of the empire. When his imperial master died on the battle-field of Szigeth, in Hungary, Mehmed Pasha succeeded in hiding the fact until Selim II could reach Constantinople. The young sultan was the worst who had yet ascended the throne, but he stood in such awe of his father’s great minister that Sokollî ruled the empire throughout Selim’s reign and part of that of Mourad III. Three hundred years before De Lesseps he conceived the idea of the Suez Canal, and might have carried it out had he lived. He was murdered in 1579—at the instigation, it was whispered, of the jealous and cruel Lala Moustafa Pasha. The latter also has a place in this Turkish Pantheon. He was the barbarian who flayed alive Marcantonio Bragadin, the heroic defender of Famagusta, and stuffed his skin with straw. Having been paraded before the troops in Cyprus and hung up in the Arsenal at Kassîm Pasha for the edification of the galley-slaves, this bloody trophy was at last presented to the Venetians, who gave it honourable burial in their own Pantheon of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Lala Moustafa was himself of Christian origin, being of the same Serb race as Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the admiral Pialeh Pasha, and still another son-in-law of the imperial house who lies in Eyoub, Ferhad Pasha, a vizier of Mourad III and Mehmed IV. Although not born in the faith, Ferhad Pasha was renowned for the beauty of his calligraphy. Among this group of mausoleums is that of one real Turk, the celebrated Sheï’h ül Islam Ebou Sououd Effendi, who drew up and interpreted the laws of Süleïman.

The türbehs cluster so thickly between the mosque and the water that one avenue is lined by nothing else, and from it little paved alleys wander away between crowded gravestones and arching trees. Few of the trees are cypresses here. The cypresses inhabit a hill beyond this silent quarter, and through them climbs the most picturesque street in Eyoub. Toward the top it forks. Whichever way you take, you will do well, particularly in the spring, when the left-hand lane brings you into sight of a blossoming valley of fruit-trees. But you will do better after all to take the right-hand turn and climb a little farther, the cypresses and gravestones thinning as you climb, till you come to a coffee-house that did not need Pierre Loti to make it famous. Any man who gazes from a height upon leagues of space and many habitations of his fellow men is forced into philosophy. Here, however, you sip in with your coffee strange things indeed as you look down from your high cemetery edge, past cypresses and turbaned stones and the minarets of the mosque and the procession of siege-battered towers scaling the slope beyond, upon the whole picture of the Golden Horn framed between its two beetling cities. The outer bridge, to be sure, is cut off by the curve of Galata; but the heights of Scutari, or sometimes those of the Bithynian Olympus, are visible to remind you what a meeting-place of nations is here.