Galata has always been famous for its fires, to say nothing of its earthquakes. These, and changes of population, with the street-widening and rebuilding of our day, have left us very little idea of the architecture of the Genoese colony. In the steep alleys on either side of the Rue Voïvoda are a number of stone buildings, with corbelled upper stories and heavily grated windows, which are popularly called Genoese. They bear too close a resemblance to Turkish structures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to the old houses of the Phanar, to be so named without more study than any one has taken the trouble to give them. But they are certainly mediæval and they suggest how Galata may once have looked. The façade of one of them, in the Rue Perchembé Bazaar, is decorated with a Byzantine marble panel. This was the fashionable quarter of Genoese Galata. The palace of the Podestà was there, at the northeast corner of the place where Perchembé Bazaar crosses Voïvoda. Indeed, this Ducal Palace, much transformed, still survives as an office building and rejoices in the name of Bereket Han—the House of Plenty.
Such slender honours of antiquity as Galata may boast cluster chiefly about certain churches and missions. The story of these is a picturesque chapter in the history of the mediæval orders. The Franciscans were the first to come to Constantinople, opening a mission on Seraglio Point in 1219, during the lifetime of St. Francis, and establishing themselves in Galata as early as 1227. No trace of them now remains in either place, each of the various branches into which the order divided having eventually removed to Pera. The church of San Francesco d’Assisi, belonging to the Conventuals, was the cathedral of the colony, and one worthy of Genoa the Superb. Partially destroyed by fire in 1696, it was seized by the mother of Sultans Moustafa II and Ahmed III, who built on its site—below the Imperial Ottoman Bank—the existing Yeni Valideh mosque. The church of Sant’ Antonio, on the Grande Rue de Pera, is the direct descendant of the cathedral of San Francesco and the missionaries of 1219.
The Dominicans were also settled at an early date on both sides of the Golden Horn. Arab Jami, the mosque whose campanile-like minaret is so conspicuous from the water, was formerly their church of San Paolo. Tradition ascribes its foundation to St. Hyacinth, the great Dominican missionary of the Levant. The fathers were dispossessed about 1535 in favour of the Moorish refugees from Spain, who also invaded the surrounding quarter. The quarter is still Mohammedan, though the Albanian costume now gives it most colour. Refugees of a less turbulent character had come from Spain a few years earlier and found hospitality at different points along the Golden Horn. These were the Jews driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. There was already a considerable colony of Jews in Constantinople. Many of them had been Venetian subjects and lived on the edge of the Venetian settlement, at the point where the mosque of Yeni Jami now stands. When the great sultana Kyössem acquired that property she exempted forty of the residents from taxation for life and engaged herself to pay the Karaïte community an annual ground rent of thirty-two piastres. This was a considerable sum in 1640, but it now amounts to little more than a dollar a year! The sultana furthermore granted the Jews new lands at the place called Hass-kyöi—which might roughly be translated as Village of the Privy Purse—and a large Jewish colony still lives there, most of whose members speak a corrupt Spanish.
As for the Dominican fathers, they took refuge in what is now the Mission of S. Pierre. The building had originally been a convent of nuns of St. Catherine and gardens were added to it by a generous Venetian, in whose memory a mass is still performed once a year. This monastery has been burned and remodelled so many times that little can be left of its original appearance. Among its other claims to interest, however, is a Byzantine icon kept in the church, said to be none other than that celebrated icon of the Shower of the Way which I have already mentioned. The latter end of this venerable work of art is involved in as great mystery as its origin. According to the Greeks it was found in Kahrieh Jami by the Turks in 1453 and cut to pieces. Whether they admit the icon of Kahrieh Jami to have been the identical icon which the emperor Baldwin presented to St. Sophia in 1204, and which the Venetian Balio took away by force and put into the church of Pantocrator, now Zeïrek Kilisseh Jami, I cannot say. The Latins, however, claim that the Venetians never lost it, and that consequently it was never cut to pieces by the Turks, but that it ultimately came into possession of the Dominican fathers. Where doctors of divinity disagree so radically, let me not presume to utter an opinion!
In the court of the church and on the façade of the monastery toward the Rue Tchinar—the Street of the Plane-Tree—are stone escutcheons bearing the lilies of France and the arms of a Comte de St. Priest. He was a French ambassador at the time of our Revolutionary War. The building being under French protection and on the central street of old, of oldest Galata—the one which climbs past the palace of the Podestà from the water’s edge to the Tower—was occupied at different times by the notables of the French colony. Among these, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was a merchant named Louis Chénier. Settling as a young man in Galata, he had become deputy of the nation—an office peculiar to the colony from the time of Colbert—right-hand-man to the ambassador, and husband, like many a European before and after him, of a Levantine lady. Her family, that is, were of European—in this case of Spanish—origin, but by long residence in the Levant and by intermarriage with Greeks had lost their own language. The seventh child of this couple was André Chénier, the poet of the French Revolution. His birthplace is marked by a marble tablet. The poet never saw the Street of the Plane-Tree, however, after he was three years old. He grew up in Paris, where, as every one knows, he was almost the last victim of the Terror.
The largest mission left in Galata is S. Benoît, whose walls now overshadow the least monastic quarter of the town. Its history is even more varied than that of S. Pierre, having been occupied and reoccupied at different times by the Benedictines, the Observants, the Capuchins, and the Jesuits. The last were the longest tenants, carrying on a devoted work for nearly two hundred years. After the secularisation of their order in 1773 they were succeeded by the Lazarists, who have not fallen behind in the high traditions of the mission. The place has a distinctly mediæval air, with its high walls, its Gothic gateway, and its machicolated campanile. Nothing is left, alas, of the mosaics which used to decorate the church. After so many fires I fear there is no chance of their being discovered under modern plaster. But the pillars of the porch are doubtless those which a diplomatic father obtained by gift from the Sheï’h ül Islam in 1686. And there are a number of interesting tablets about the building. One of them records not too truthfully the rebuilding of the church by Louis XIV. The most notable, perhaps, is the tombstone of Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania and pretender to the throne of Hungary, who lived twenty years in exile at Rodosto, on the Sea of Marmora. When he died there in 1738 his friends asked permission to bury him in Galata, but were refused. They accordingly pretended to inter him at Rodosto. As a matter of fact, his coffin was sent in one of the many boxes containing his effects to S. Benoît. There the royal exile was secretly buried in the church, his grave long remaining unmarked. Another grave, all mark of which seems to have disappeared, is that of Jan Van Mour, a Fleming whom Louis XV made “peintre ordinaire du roy en Levant.” He had the good fortune to live in Constantinople during the brilliant reign of Ahmed III, and he was the painter who started in France the eighteenth-century fashion of turquerie. The Museum of Amsterdam contains a large collection of Turkish documents from his brush, while there are others in France and in the castle of Biby in Sweden.
The stones of Galata have more to tell than those who ungratefully tread them are wont to imagine. But they are by no means Christian stones alone. Although the Latins naturally diminished in number after the Turkish conquest, the city quickly outgrew its walls. While part of this growth was due to the influx of Venetians, and later of Greeks, from the opposite side of the Horn, a good deal of it came about through Turkish colonisation. This was chiefly without the walls. You can almost trace the line of them to-day by the boundary between populations. The Turkish settlements gathered around mosques, palaces, and military establishments built by different sultans in the country about Galata, mainly on the water-front. One of the oldest of these settlements grew up in the deep ravine just west of the Galata wall. It is now engaged in readjusting its relations to the rest of the world, but it still remains like a piece of Stamboul, and it is the home of many dervishes. It took its name from a vizier of Süleïman the Magnificent, the conqueror of Nauplia and twice governor of Egypt. He was known as Handsome Kassîm, but he ended his days in bad odour. His quarter is supposed to take after him in the latter rather than in the former particular by those who do not appreciate what Kassîm Pasha adds to the resources of Pera. No one, however, should be incapable of appreciating what the cypresses of Kassîm Pasha do for the windows of Pera. They are all that is left of the great grove of the Petits Champs des Morts, the old burial-ground of Galata. As the city grew, the cemeteries, both Christian and Mohammedan, were removed to the Grands Champs des Morts at the Taxim. They, too, have now been overtaken by the streets and turned in great part to other uses. But a field of the dead was there again when the Young Turks took Pera from Abd ül Hamid in 1909.
I have already mentioned the mosque of Pialeh Pasha and the naval station which are among the greater lions of the left bank. A detail of history connected with this famous shipyard is that we perhaps get our word arsenal from it, through the Italian darsena. The accepted derivation is from the Arabic dar es sanaat, house of construction, from an ancient shipyard in Egypt captured by the founder of this Arsenal. But as likely an origin is the Turkish word—from the Persian, I believe—terssaneh, the house of slaves. At all events, this is where the great bagnio of the galley-slaves used to be. These were Christians captured in war; and of course the Christian powers repaid the compliment by capturing all the Turks they could for their own galleys. At all times during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries there were from three to four thousand slaves in the Arsenal, while several thousand more were chained to the oars of the imperial galleys. No less than fifteen thousand were said to have been freed at the battle of Lepanto. As the Turks became less warlike the number naturally declined, and came to an end with the abolition of slavery in 1846. One of the principal activities of the Catholic missions was among the inmates of this and other bagnios. The fathers were allowed access to the Arsenal and even maintained chapels there, confessing the slaves, arranging when they could for their ransom, and heroically caring for them through epidemics. St. Joseph of Leonissa, one of the pioneer Capuchins, caught the plague himself from the slaves but recovered to labour again in the bagnio—so zealously that he even aspired to reach the ear of the Sultan. He was accordingly arrested and condemned to death. The sentence was already supposed to have been executed when he was miraculously rescued by an angel and borne away to his native Italy, living there to a ripe old age. If the angel might have been discovered to bear some resemblance to the Venetian Balio, his intervention doubtless seemed no less angelic to the good missionary.
Another Turkish settlement grew up on the east side of Galata wall at Top Haneh, Cannon House. The place has been the seat of artillery works from the beginning of the Turkish era, for it must be remembered that Mehmed II, in the siege of Constantinople, was the first general to prove the practicability of cannon, and that during the whole of their martial period the Turks had no superiors in this branch of warfare. The conqueror turned a church and its adjoining cloisters into a foundery, and his son Baïezid II built barracks there for the artillerymen, while Süleïman I and Ahmed III restored and added to these constructions. There was also another shipyard at Top Haneh, and another Prince of the Sea is buried there near the mosque he built.