A town so varied in its discourse is not less liberal in other particulars. Pera observes three holy days a week: Friday for the Turks, Saturday for the Jews, Sunday for the Christians. How many holidays she keeps I would be afraid to guess. She recognises four separate calendars. Two of them, the Julian and the Gregorian, followed by Eastern and Western Christians respectively, are practically identical save that they are thirteen days apart. There are, however, three Christmases in Pera, because the Armenians celebrate Epiphany (Old Style); and sometimes only one Easter. As for the Jews, they adhere to their ancient lunar calendar, which is supposed to start from the creation of the world. The Turks also follow a lunar calendar, not quite the same, which makes their anniversaries fall eleven days earlier every year. Their era begins with the Hegira. But in 1789 Selim III also adopted for financial purposes an adaptation of the Julian calendar, beginning on the first of March and not retroactive in calculating earlier dates. Thus the Christian year 1914 is 5674 for the Jews, and 1332 or 1330 for the Turks. There are also two ways of counting the hours of Pera, the most popular one considering twelve o’clock to fall at sunset. These independences cause less confusion than might be supposed. They interfere very little, unless with the happiness of employers. But where the liberty of Pera runs to licence is in the matter of post-offices. Of these there are no less than seven, for in addition to the Turks the six powers of Europe each maintain their own. They do not deliver letters, however, and to be certain of getting all your mail—there is not too much certainty even then—you must go or send every day to every one of those six post-offices.
Grande Rue de Pera
For those branches of learning of which Pera is so superior a mistress, an inimitable hall of learning is her much-scoffed Grande Rue—“narrow as the comprehension of its inhabitants and long as the tapeworm of their intrigues,” as the learned Von Hammer not too good-humouredly wrote. I am able to point out that it has broadened considerably since his day, though I must add that it is longer than ever! It begins under another name in Galata, in a long flight of steps from which you see a blue slice of the harbour neatly surmounted by the four minarets of St. Sophia. It mounts through a commerce of stalls and small shops, gaining in decorum as it rises in altitude, till it reaches the height which was the heart of old Pera. Here was the Stavrothromo of the Perotes, where the Rue Koumbaradji—Bombardier—climbs laboriously out of Top Haneh and tumbles down from the other side of the Grande Rue into Kassîm Pasha. The Grande Rue now attains its climax of importance much farther on, between Galata Seraï and Taxim, whence, keeping ever to the crest of the hill, it passes out into the country like another Broadway between apartment-houses and vacant lots. Other Grandes Rues may be statelier, or more bizarre and sketchable. This Grande Rue must have been more sketchable in the time of Von Hammer, who found nothing picturesque in the balconies almost meeting across the street, in the semi-oriental costumes of the Perotes and the high clogs in which they clattered about the town. But even now the Grande Rue is by no means barren of possibilities—where a motor-car will turn out for an ox-cart or a sedan-chair, and where pedestrians are stopped by an Anatolian peasant carrying a piano on his back, by a flock of sheep pattering between two gaunt Albanians, or by a troop of firemen hooting half-naked through the street with a gaudy little hand-pump on their shoulders. There are any number of other types that only need the seeing eye and the revealing pencil which Pera has too long lacked. And few Grandes Rues can be full of contrasts more profound than meet you here where East and West, the modern and the mediæval, come so strangely together.
The Little Field of the Dead
There are other streets in Pera, and streets that are visibly as well as philosophically picturesque. There is, for instance, that noisome shelf which ought to be the pride of the town, overhanging the Little Field of the Dead, where cypresses make a tragic foreground to the vista of the Golden Horn and far-away Stamboul, and where crows wheel in such gusty black clouds against red sunsets. There are also the heights of Fîndîklî, from which you catch glimpses, down streets as steep as Capri and Turkish as Eyoub, of the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. But for the sketchable, for the pre-eminently etchable, Galata is the place—humble, despised, dirty, abandoned Galata, with its outlying suburbs. If the Grande Rue de Pera is Broadway, the main street of Galata is the Bowery. It runs along the curve of the shore from Azap Kapou, at the Arsenal wall, to the outer bridge and the Bosphorus. And nobody knows it, but some very notable architecture adorns this neglected highway. Besides the old Genoese Arab Jami and the mosque of Don Quixote, there is at Azap Kapou another masterpiece of Sinan, a lovely little mosque founded by the great Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha. At Fîndîklî, too, there is an obscure waterside mosque whose aspect from the Bosphorus is admirable, set as it is among boats and trees, with a valley cleaving the hill behind it. And even the tall Nousretieh at Top Haneh, built by Sultan Mahmoud II, has its points. These points, particularly as exemplified in the twin minarets, are an inimitable slimness and elegance. And I don’t care if the great door opening on to the parade-ground, and the court at the north, are rococo; they are charming. There are also two or three of the handsomest fountains in all Constantinople on this long street—notably the big marble one at the corner of this very parade-ground, by Mahmoud I, and the one of his mother at Azap Kapou. The same princess left near Galata Tower, in that old Grande Rue of the Genoese where the Podestà lived and André Chénier was born, a wall fountain whose lamentable state of ruin is a reproach to the city that can boast such a treasure. The entire left bank, in fact, is particularly rich in these interesting monuments. This is the only part of the city for which the sultans installed an entirely new water-system.
The fountain of Azap Kapou
I could easily pass all bounds in enumerating the glories of Galata, which Murray’s guide-book dismisses with little more than a remark about the most depraved population in Europe. Of depravity I am not connoisseur enough to pass judgment on this dictum. I can only say that if the Galatiotes are the worst people in Europe, the world is not in so parlous a state as some persons have imagined. I presume it must be to the regions called Kemer Altî—Under the Arch—lying between Step Street and the pious walls of S. Benoît, that the critic refers. Here the primrose path of Galata winds among dark and dismal alleys, Neapolitan save for the fezzes, the odour of mastic, and the jingling lanterna, the beloved hand piano of Galata. Yet even here simplicity would be a truer word than depravity. Among primrose paths this is at once the least disguised and the least seductive which I have happened to tread. There is so little mystery about it, its fantastic inhabitants make so little attempt to conceal their numerous disadvantages, that no Ulysses should be compelled to stop his ears against such sirens.