Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

V
THE MAGNIFICENT COMMUNITY

Galata, que mes yeux désiraient dès longtemps...

—André Chénier.

In Pera sono tre malanni:

Peste, fuoco, dragomanni.

—Local Proverb.

It is not the fashion to speak well of Pera and Galata. A good Turk will sigh of another that he has gone to Pera, by way of saying that he has gone to the dogs. A foreign resident will scarcely admit that so much as the view is good. Even a Perote born pretends not to love his Grande Rue if he happens to have read Loti or Claude Farrère. And tourists are supposed to have done the left bank of the Golden Horn when they have watched the Sultan drive to mosque and have giggled at the whirling dervishes. A few of the more thorough-going will, perhaps, take the trouble to climb Galata Tower or to row up the Sweet Waters of Europe. For my part, however, who belong to none of these categories, I am perverse enough to find Pera and Galata a highly superior place of habitation. I consider that their greatest fault is to lie under the shadow of Stamboul—though that gives them one inestimable advantage which Stamboul herself lacks, namely the view of the dark old city crowned by her imperial mosques. Pera—and I now mean the whole promontory between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus—Pera occupies a really magnificent site, it has a history of its own, it contains monuments that would make the fortune of any other town, and it fairly drips with that modern pigment known as local colour. Who knows, it may even be destined to inherit the renown of the older city. Stamboul tends to diminish, whereas Pera grows and has unlimited room for growing. The left bank is already the seat of the Sultan and of the bulk of the commerce and finance of the capital. Moreover, the battles of the revolution fought there in 1909 give the place a peculiar interest in the eyes of the Young Turks. On that soil, less encumbered than Stamboul with the débris of history, they may find conditions more favourable for the city of their future.

If the story of Pera cannot compare with that of the grey mother city, it nevertheless can boast associations of which communities more self-important might be proud. Jason stopped there on his way to get the Golden Fleece, and after him Beshiktash was known in antiquity as Iasonion. In the valley behind that picturesque suburb there later existed a famous laurel grove, sacred of course to Apollo, who, with Poseidon, was patron of Byzantium. The sun-god was also worshipped at a sacred fount which still exists in Galata, within the enclosure of the Latin church of St. George. Legend makes this spring the scene of the martyrdom of St. Irene, daughter of a Roman ruler, who was put to death for refusing to sacrifice to Apollo and who became herself the patron saint of the new Christian city of Constantinople. Christianity is said to have been brought there by no less a person than the apostle Andrew. He is also reputed to have died in Galata, though another tradition makes Patras the scene of his death; but in any case he was buried in Constantine’s Church of the Holy Apostles. The church of St. Irene where he preached, somewhere in the vicinity of Top Haneh, was restored with magnificence by Justinian. An earlier emperor, Leo the Great, had already built in the neighbourhood of Beshiktash the celebrated church of St. Mamas, together with a palace that was long a favourite resort of the imperial family. In the light of recent history it is interesting to recall that Krum, King of Bulgaria, sacked and burned the suburb of St. Mamas, with the rest of Thrace, in 811.

Among the antiquities of the town, its names have been the subject of much research and confusion. Pera is a Romaic word meaning opposite or beyond, and first applied indiscriminately with Galata to the rural suburb on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This hill was also called Sykai, from the fig-trees that abounded there; and when the mortar-loving Justinian beautified and walled the suburb, he renamed it after himself. With regard to the word Galata there has been infinite dispute. I myself thought I had solved the question when I went to Genoa and saw steep little alleys, for all the world like those I knew in Genoese Galata, which were named Calata—a descent to the sea—and of which the local dialect made the c a g. But the accent was different, and I lived to learn that the name, as that of a castle on the water’s edge, has been found in Byzantine MSS. dating from two hundred years earlier than the time Genoa founded her colony there. Villehardouin also speaks of the tower of “Galathas,” which the crusaders stormed as a preliminary to their capture of Constantinople. It apparently stood in the vicinity of the custom-house, and to it was attached the chain that padlocked the Golden Horn. I would like to believe that the name came from Brennus and his Gauls, or Galatians, who passed this way with fire and sword in the third century B. C. There is more certainty, however, with regard to its own derivatives. The Italian word galetta is one of them, more or less familiar in English and very common in its French form of galette. Another French word, galetas, is also derived from Galata, meaning a high garret and hence a poor tenement. Belonging at first to the castle alone, the name seems to have spread to the whole surrounding settlement. It now applies to the lower part of the hill, formerly enclosed by the Genoese wall, while Pera is the newer town on top of the hill, “beyond” the old.

The history of the town we know began in the Latin colonies that originally fringed the opposite shore of the Golden Horn. Constantinople has always been a cosmopolitan city. The emperors themselves were of many races and the empire they governed was as full of unassimilated elements as it is to-day. Then even from so far away as England and Denmark men came to trade in the great city that was named from a citizen of York. It was natural that Italians should come in the greatest number, though they felt less and less at home as the emperors became more and more Greek. The people of Amalfi and Ancona, the Florentines, the Genoese, the Lombards, the Pisans, and the Venetians, all had important colonies in Constantinople. And by the twelfth century four of them at least had their own settlements between Seraglio Point and the Azap Kapou Bridge. The easternmost were the Genoese, whose quarter was near the present railway station; next came the Pisans, then the men of Amalfi—not far from Yeni Jami—and last the Venetians.