The greatest of the Princes of the Sea lies farther up the Bosphorus, at Beshiktash. The name is a corruption of besh tash, five stones, from the row of pillars on the shore to which he used to moor his galleys. Known to Europe by the nickname Barbarossa, from his great red beard, his true name was Haïreddin. Beginning life as a Greek pirate of Mitylene, he entered the service of the Sultan of Tunis, captured Algiers on his own account, and had the diplomacy to offer his prize to Selim I. Under Süleïman the Magnificent he became the terror of the Mediterranean and his master’s chief instrument in a lifelong rivalry with Charles V. He died in 1546, full of years and honours, leaving a fortune of sixty thousand ducats and three thousand slaves. He wished to be buried by the sea, at the spot where he moored so often in his lifetime; but shanties and boat yards now shut him off from the water. Nothing could be quainter or quieter than the little railed garden near the steamer landing, where a vine-covered pergola leads to the türbeh of that turbulent man of blood. His green admiral’s flag hangs over his catafalque, marked in white with inscriptions, with an open hand, and with the double-bladed sword that was the emblem of his dignity, while his admiral’s lanterns hang in niches on either side of the simple mausoleum.
The harbour of Jason and Barbarossa—and very likely the one that gave access to the Byzantine suburb of St. Mamas—is also the place where Sultan Mehmed II started his ships on their overland voyage. At least I can never see the valley of Dolma Ba’hcheh—the Filled-in Garden—into which the sea formerly entered, without convincing myself that it must have been the channel of that celebrated cruise and not the steeper hill of Top Haneh. However that may be, the descendants of Mehmed II have long shown a partiality for the neighbourhood. Ahmed I built a summer palace there as long ago as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Mehmed IV, Ahmed III, and Mahmoud I constructed others, while for the last hundred years the sultans have lived there altogether. The existing palace of Dolma Ba’hcheh, which occupies most of the old harbour, dates only from 1853. The villas of Yîldîz are more recent still. The neighbourhood of majesty has done less for the imperial suburb than might elsewhere be the case. No one seems to find anything incongruous in the fact that one of the Sultan’s nearest neighbours is a gas house. The ceremony of selamlîk, salutation, when the Sultan drives in state to mosque on Friday noon, is the weekly spectacle of Beshiktash—though less dazzling than it used to be. After his prayer the Sultan gives audience to ambassadors and visitors of mark. I know not whether this custom goes back to the time of Albert de Wyss, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, who used to turn out his embassy when Selim II rode by to mosque, or to that of the later Byzantine emperors, who received every Sunday the heads of the Latin communities.
The waterside settlements outside the walls of Galata were and are prevailingly Turkish. The Christian expansion followed the crest of the hill, founding the modern Pera. But there is a leaven of Islam even in Pera. Baïezid II built a mosque in the quarter of Asmalî Mesjid—Vine Chapel—and a palace at Galata Seraï. This palace finally became a school for the imperial pages, recruited from among the Christian boys captured by the Janissaries, and existed intermittently as such until it was turned into the Imperial Lyceum. Galata Seraï means Galata Palace, which is interesting as showing the old application of the name. The word Pera the Turks have never adopted. They call the place Bey O’lou—the Son of the Bey. There is dispute as to the identity of this Bey. Some say he was David Comnenus, last emperor of Trebizond, or Demetrius Palæologus, despot of Epirus—the youngest son of the latter of whom, at any rate, turned Turk and was given lands in the vicinity of the Russian embassy. Others identify the Son of the Bey with Alvise Gritti, natural son of a Doge of Venice, who became Dragoman of the Porte during the reign of Süleïman the Magnificent, and exercised much influence in the foreign relations of that monarch. Süleïman himself built in Pera, or on that steep eastward slope of it which is called Fîndîklî—the Place of Filberts. The view from the terrace of the mosque he erected there in memory of his son Jihangir is one of the finest in Constantinople. It was his father Selim I who established the Mevlevi, popularly called the Whirling Dervishes, in Pera. There they remain to this day, though they have sold the greater part of the vast estates they once owned, a little island of peace and mysticism in the unbelieving town that has engulfed them. It is the classic amusement of tourists on Friday afternoons to visit their tekkeh; and a classic contrast do the noise and smiles of the superior children of the West make with the plaintive piping, the silent turning, the symbolism and ecstasy of that ritual octagon. Among the roses and ivy of the courtyard is buried a child of the West who also makes a contrast of a kind. He was a Frenchman, the Comte de Bonneval, who, after serving in the French and Austrian armies and quarrelling with the redoubtable Prince Eugene, came to Constantinople, became general of bombardiers, governor of Karamania, and pasha of three tails. He negotiated the first treaty of alliance made by Turkey with a Western country, namely, with Sweden, in 1740.
There are many other Turkish buildings in Pera, but the suburb is essentially Christian and was built up by the Galatiotes. It began to exist as a distinct community during the seventeenth century—about the time, that is, when the Dutch were starting the city of New York. The French and Venetian embassies and the Franciscan missions clustered around them were the nucleus of the settlement on a hillside then known as The Vineyards. We have already seen how the Conventuals moved to Pera after the loss of San Francesco. Their grounds for two hundred years adjoined those of the French embassy, but have gradually been absorbed by the latter until the fathers lately built on another site. The first Latin church in Pera, however, was S. Louis, of the Capuchins, who have been chaplains for the French embassy since 1628. Ste. Marie Draperis is also older in Pera than Sant’ Antonio. The church is so called from a philanthropic lady who gave land in Galata to the Observants in 1584. It passed to the Riformati because of the scandal which arose through two of the brothers turning Turk, and in 1678 moved to The Vineyards for the same reason as the Conventuals. It is now under Austrian protection and serves as chapel for the embassy of that Power, though the fathers are still Italians. The Observants, also known as Padri di Terra Santa, preceded them by a few years in Pera, where they acted as chaplains for the Venetian Balio. Their hospice, marked by the cross of Jerusalem is between Ste. Marie and the Austrian embassy.
The first European ambassadors were not many in number nor did they regularly follow each other, and they were usually quartered in a han detailed for that use in Stamboul, facing the Burnt Column. The Venetian Balio, I believe, always had a residence of his own. The French, however, set up a country-seat at The Vineyards as early as the time of Henri IV. And during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim, who in his rage at the Venetians over the Cretan War threatened to kill every Christian in the empire, beginning with the Balio, the ambassadors moved to the other side for good. The Venetians occupied the site since pre-empted by the Austrians. The Austrian embassy was originally on the other side of the Grande Rue, beside the now disused church of the Trinitarians, while the Russian embassy was the present Russian consulate. The existing Russian embassy was the Polish embassy. The Dutch and the Swedes acquired pleasant properties on the same slope. All these big gateways and gardens opening off the Grande Rue give colour to another theory for the Turkish name of Pera—that it was originally Bey Yolou, or the Street of Grandees.
The British embassy is by no means so young a member of this venerable diplomatic colony as our own, but its early traditions are of a special order. They are bound up with the history of the Levant Company. This was one of those great foreign trading associations of which the East India Company and the South Sea Company are, perhaps, more familiar examples. Hakluyt tells us that at least as early as 1511 British vessels were trading in the Levant, and that this trade became more active about 1575. In 1579 it was in some sort regularised by letters which were exchanged between Sultan Mourad III and Queen Elizabeth—“most wise governor of the causes and affairs of the people and family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue,” as her imperial correspondent addressed her. At a later date high-sounding epistles also passed between the Virgin Queen and her majesty Safieh—otherwise the Pure—favourite wife of the Grand Turk, who wrote: “I send your majesty so honourable and sweet a salutation of peace that all the flock of nightingales with their melody cannot attain to the like, much less this simple letter of mine.” The latter lady adds a touch of her own to her time, having been in reality a Venetian, of the house of Baffo. While on her way from Venice to Corfu, where her father was governor, she was kidnapped by Turkish corsairs and sent as a present to the young prince Mourad. So great became her influence over him that when he succeeded to the throne she had to be reckoned with in the politics of the Porte. Another royal correspondent of the Baffa, as the Balio called his countrywoman in his reports to the Council of Ten, was Catherine de’ Medici. In the meantime Queen Elizabeth had already issued, in 1581, letters patent to certain London merchants to trade in the Levant. In 1582 the first ambassador, Master William Harbone, or Hareborne, who was also chief factor of the Levant Company, betook himself and his credentials from London to Constantinople in the good ship Susan. The charter of “the Right Worshipful the Levant Company” was revised from time to time, but it was not definitely surrendered until 1825. And until 1821 the ambassador to the “Grand Signior,” as well as the consuls in the Levant, were nominated and paid by the company. It was under these not always satisfactory conditions that Mr. Wortley Montagu brought his lively Lady Mary to the court of Ahmed III in 1717. Lord Elgin, of the marbles, was the first ambassador appointed by the government. I have not succeeded in gaining very much light as to the quarters provided by the Levant Company for its distinguished employees. In the Rue de Pologne there is a funny little stone house, now fallen, I believe, to the light uses of a dancing-school, which was once the British consulate. The present embassy is a Victorian structure and known to be in a different place from the one where Lady Mary wrote her letters.
The town that grew up around these embassies is one of the most extraordinary towns in creation. First composed of a few Galatiotes who followed their several protectors into the wilderness, it has continued ever since to receive accretions from the various nationalities of Europe and Asia until it has become a perfect babel, faintly Italian in appearance but actually no more Italian than Turkish, no more Turkish than Greek, no more Greek than anything else you please. Half a dozen larger worlds and nobody knows how many lesser ones live there, inextricably intermingled, yet somehow remaining miraculously distinct. There is, to be sure, a considerable body of Levantines—of those, namely, who have mixed—but even they are a peculiar people. The fact gives Pera society, so far as it exists, a bewildering hydra-headedness. The court is not the centre of things in the sense that European courts are. The Palace ladies do not receive, and it is an unheard-of thing for the Sultan to go to a private house, while in other ways there are profound causes of separation between the ruling race and the non-Moslem elements of the empire. By the very constitution of the country the Armenians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other fractions of the population form communities apart. Even the surprisingly large European colony has historic reasons for tending to divide into so many “nations.” These have little in common with the foreign colonies of Berlin, Paris, or Rome. Not students and people of leisure but merchants and missionaries make up the better part of the family that each embassy presides over in a sense unknown in Western cities. The days are gone by when the protection of the embassies had the literal meaning that once attached to many a garden wall. But the ambassadors cling to the privileges and exemptions granted them by early treaties, and through the quarter that grew up around their gates the Sultan himself passes almost as a stranger.
This diversity of traditions and interests has, of course, influenced the development of Pera. Not the least remarkable feature of this remarkable town is its lack of almost every modern convenience. I must admit, of course, that a generation before New York thought of a subway Pera had one—a mile long. And it is now installing those electric facilities which Abd ül Hamid always objected to, on the ground that a dynamo must have something to do with dynamite. But it will be long before Pera, which with its neighbours sprawls over as much ground as New York, will really take in the conception of rapid transit, or even the more primitive one of home comfort. I hardly need, therefore, go into the account of the more complicated paraphernalia of modern life. There are no public pleasure or sporting grounds other than two dusty little municipal gardens, laid out in old cemeteries, which you pay to enter. Pictures, libraries, collections ancient or modern, there are none. I had almost said there is neither music nor drama. There are, to be sure, a few modest places of assembly where excellent companies from Athens may be heard, where a visitor from the Comédie Française occasionally gives half a dozen performances, and where the failures of European music-halls oftenest air their doubtful charms. On these boards I have beheld a peripatetic Aïda welcome Rhadames and a conquering host of five Greek supers; but Brünnhilde and the Rhine maidens have yet to know the Bosphorus. Not so, however, a translated “Tante de Charles.” When the “Merry Widow” first tried to make her début, she met with an unexpected rebuff. Every inhabitant of Pera who respects himself has a big Croat or Montenegrin, who are the same rose under different names, to decorate his front door with a display of hanging sleeves and gold embroidery. It having been whispered among these magnificent creatures that the “Lustige Witwe” was a slander on the principality—as it was then—of Nicholas I, they assembled in force in the gallery of the theatre and proceeded to bombard the stage with chairs and other detachable objects until the company withdrew the piece.
Consisting of an accretion of villages, containing the conveniences of a village, Pera keeps, in strange contradiction to her urban dimensions, the air of a village, the separation of a village from the larger world, the love of a village for gossip and the credulity of a village in rumour. This is partly due, of course, to the ingrained belief of the Turks that it is not well for people to know exactly what is going on. The papers of Pera have always lived under a strict censorship, and consequently there is nothing too fantastic for Pera to repeat or believe. Hence it is that Pera is sniffed at by those who should know her best, while the tarriers for a night console themselves with imagining that there is nothing to see. I have never been able to understand why it should be thought necessary nowadays for one town to be exactly like another. I, therefore, applaud Pera for having the originality to be herself. And within her walls I have learned that one may be happy even without steam-heat and telephones. In despite, moreover, of the general contempt for her want of intellectual resources, I submit that merely to live in Pera is as good as a university. No one can hope to entertain relations with the good people of that municipality without speaking at least one language beside his own. It is by no means uncommon for a Perote to have five or six at his tongue’s end. Turkish and French are the official languages, but Greek is more common in Pera and Galata proper, while you must have acquaintance with two or three alphabets more if you wish to read the signs in the streets or the daily papers. And then there remain an indeterminate number of dialects used by large bodies of citizens.