Under this designation, gentle reader or severe, you probably never would recognise the straggling settlement of wooden houses, set off by a few minarets and shut in from the southeast by a great black curtain of cypresses, that comes down to the Asiatic shore opposite the mouth of the Golden Horn. That is because you have forgotten its old Greek name, and mix it up in your mind with a certain notorious town in Albania. Moreover, your guide-book assures you that a day, or even half a day, will suffice to absorb its interest. Believe no such nonsense, however. I have reason to know what I am talking about, for I have spent ten of the best years of my life in Scutari, if not eleven, and have not yet seen all its sights. By what series of accidents a New English infant, whose fathers dwelt somewhere about the Five Towns long before Mr. Arnold Bennett or even Mr. Josiah Wedgwood thought of making them famous, came to see the light in this Ultima Thule of Asia, I hesitate to explain. I tried to do so once before an election board in that sympathetic district of New York known as Hell’s Kitchen, and was very nearly disfranchised for my pains. Only the notorious example of the mayor, who also happened to be born on the wrong side of the Atlantic and who nevertheless had reached his high office without any intermediate naturalisation, preserved to me the sacred right of the ballot. But the fact gives me the right to speak of guide-books as cavalierly as I please.
Yet it also singularly complicates, I find, my intention of doing something to draw my native town from the obscurity into which it has too long relapsed. In considering its various claims to interest, for instance, my first impulse is to count among them a certain lordly member of the race of stone-pines. I used to look up at it with a kind of awe, so high did its head tower above my own and so strangely did it parley with the moving air. Our heads are not much nearer together now; but unaccountable changes have taken place in the thatch of mine, while the pine has lost none of the thickness and colour that delighted me long ago. I suppose, however, that other pines are equally miraculous, and that the pre-eminence of this one in my eyes is derived from the simple fact that I happened to be born in sight of it. I will therefore struggle as valiantly as I may against the enormous temptation to do a little Kenneth Grahame over again, with Oriental variations. For the rest, there must have been less difference between a Minor Asiatic infancy and a New English one than might be imagined. It was conducted, for the most part, in the same tongue. It was enlivened by the same games and playthings. It was embittered by the same books and pianos. Its society was much more limited, however, and it was passed, for the most part, behind high garden walls, to adventure beyond which, without governess or guardian of some sort, was anathema.
Fresco in an old house in Scutari
I could easily lose myself in reminiscences of one or two Scutari gardens. In fact, I can only save myself—and the reader—from such a fate by making up my mind to write a separate chapter about gardens in general. As for the houses that went with the gardens, they were very much like the old houses of Stamboul. They were all halls and windows, and they had enormously high ceilings, so that in winter they were about as cosy as the street. I remember one of them with pleasure by reason of the frescoes that adorned it, with beautiful deer in them and birds as big as the deer stalking horizontally up the trunks of trees. Another was a vast tumble-down wooden palace of which we humbly camped out in one corner. It had originally belonged to an Armenian grandee who rejoiced in the name of the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked. The Son of the Man Who Was Cooked had the honour to be a friend of the Sultan of his day, who not seldom visited him. His majesty used to come at all hours, it is said, and sometimes in disguise. This was partly because the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked loved to go loaded with jewels, as the legend went, and the Sultan hoped by finding him in that case to have the better ground for raising loans. But it is also whispered that other reasons entered into the matter, and that on the men’s side of the house a secret stair was built, enabling majesty to circulate in the house without attracting too much attention. Certain it is that such a stair, black and breakneck, existed, for my room was at the top of it—and as I lay in bed in winter I could look out through the cracks in the wall and see the snow in the garden. But I never wondered then, as I have wondered since, whether the legend that Abd ül Hamid was half an Armenian had any connection with our house. Another of its attractions was that it boasted in the cellar a bottomless pit—or so the servants used to assure us.
These were they who lent, perhaps, the most local colour to that Minor Asiatic youth. They were daughters of Armenia, for the most part. And I sometimes think that if William Watson had enjoyed my opportunities he never would have written “The Purple East.” Surely he never squirmed under an Armenian kiss, which in my day partook both of sniffing and of biting and which left the victim’s cheek offensively red and moist. Yet how can I remember with anything but gratitude the kindly neighbours to whom foreign children, coming and going between the houses that in those distant days made a small Anglo-American colony in upper Scutari, were always a source of interest? For some mysterious reason that is buried in the heart of exiled Anglo-Saxondom, we really knew wonderfully little about our neighbours. We never played with their children or entered other than strangers the world outside our garden wall. Nor was it because our neighbours were unwilling to meet us half-way. They paid us the compliment of naming a certain place of amusement which existed in our vicinity the American Theatre, hoping thereby to gain our patronage. But I fear this hope met with no response. At any rate, I never came nearer the unknown delights of the American Theatre than the top of our garden wall, from which I remember once listening entranced to such strains of music as never issued from our serious piano. I recognised them years afterward, with a jump, in an opera of Suppé. I have also lived to learn that Scutari, or the part of it where we lived, is a sort of Armenian Parnassus, perhaps even an Armenian Montmartre, given over entirely to the muses. Emancipated Armenian ladies, they tell me, do such unheard-of things as to walk, on their own two feet, vast distances over the hills of Asia with emancipated Armenian gentlemen in long locks and flowing neckties; and imperishable Armenian odes have celebrated the beauties of Baghlar Bashi and Selamsîz.
Nevertheless, we did not suffer the consequences of our aloofness. Between our garden and another one, to which we were in time allowed to go alone, there existed, unbeknownst to our elders, certain post stations, as it were, where a wayfarer might stop for rest and refreshment. Out of one barred window a lady always passed me a glass of water. She rather reminded me of some docile overgrown animal in a cage. Indeed I am not sure she could have got out if she tried—which apparently she never did—for she was of immeasurable proportions. I thought of her when I later came to read of a certain Palace lady pet-named Little Elephant, who built a mosque in Scutari. I know not whether this was the same whom a Sultan, having sent messengers to the four quarters of the empire in search of the fattest beauty imaginable, found in my native town, almost under his palace windows, and led away in triumph. As George Ade has told us, slim princesses used not to be the fashion in Turkey. From another window, higher above the street, attentions of another sort used to be showered on us by an old gentleman who never seemed to dress. He was always sitting there in a loose white gown, as if he had just got up or were just going to bed, and he would toss us down pinks or chrysanthemums, according to the season. But the person most popular with us was a little old woman who lived in a house so old and so little that I blush when I remember how greedy I used to be at her expense. She used to reach out between the bars of her window spoonfuls of the most heavenly preserve I have ever tasted, thick and white and faintly flavoured with lemon. So distinguished a sweetmeat could only possess so distinguished a name as bergamot.
Returning to Scutari long afterward, it came upon me with a certain surprise that no one offered me sweets or flowers, or even a glass of water. My case was oddly put to me by a man like one of Shakespeare’s fools, who perhaps should not have been at large but who asked himself aloud when he met me at a mosque gate: “I wonder what he is looking for—his country?” If Scutari tempts me to do Kenneth Grahame over again, it also tempts me to do Dr. Hale over again, to whose famous hero I could give other points than that of the election board in Hell’s Kitchen. The enduring taunt of my school-days was that I never could be President, and it was a bitter blow to me when I learned that my name could never be carved in the Hall of Fame above the Hudson. Yet when I went back to Scutari, as a man will go back to the home of his youth, the inhabitants were so far from recognising me as one of themselves that the thought occurred to me how amusingly like life it would be if I, who am not notable for the orthodoxy of my opinions, were massacred for a Christian in the town where I was born! Nevertheless I have discovered with a good deal of surprise, in the room of the vanished Scutari I used to know, a Scutari that I never saw or heard of when I was young—I speak, of course, to the race of men that likes Stamboul—a place of boundless resources, of priceless possibilities—a true City of Gold.
The favourite story is that Chrysopolis was so called because of the Persian satraps who once lived there and heaped up the gold of tribute. Others have it, and I like their theory better, that the city took its name from Chryses, son of Chryseis and Agamemnon, who, fleeing after the fall of Troy from Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, met there his end. A few poetic-minded individuals have found an origin for the word in the appearance the town presents from Constantinople at sunset with all its panes on fire. I don’t know that the idea is more far-fetched than any other. An equal variety of opinion prevails with regard to the modern name. Certain authorities claim that it is a corruption of Üsküdar, used by the Turks, which is from a Persian word meaning a post messenger. For myself, I am feebly impressed by all these Persians, who seem to me dragged in by the ears. A Turkish savant told me once that he believed Üsküdar to be a corruption of an old Armenian name, Oskitar or Voskitar, which is merely a translation of Chrysopolis. When Mehmed II captured Constantinople he brought a great many Armenians into it, to repopulate the city and to offset the Greeks; and the richest of them, who came from Broussa, he settled in Scutari, which has always retained a certain Armenian tinge. I learn that in ancient Armenian some such word could have been made out of Chrysopolis. But the name Scutari is much older than the Turkish conquest. Villehardouin and at least one Byzantine historian speak of the palace of Scutari, on the promontory that juts out toward Seraglio Point. Also, I seem to remember reading in Gibbon of a corps of scutarii who had their barracks on that side of the strait. I have never been able to lay my hand on those scutarii again, and so cannot found very much of an argument upon them. Any Latin lexicon, however, will give you the word scutarius, a shield-bearer, and tell you that a corps of them existed under the later empire. Wherefore I formally reject and contemn Murray, Von Hammer and Company, with their Persian postboys, and take my stand on those Roman shields. In all probability the name spread, as in the case of Galata, from a barracks or a palace to the entire locality, and Üsküdar must be a Turkish attempt to pronounce the Greek Σκουτάριον.