Were I a little more didactically inclined, this speech should inspire the severest reflections on the man who made it and on the ironical truth of his lightly uttered prophecy. As it is, I am more inclined to reflect on the irony of the fact that ill-gotten gains may do more good or create something nearer the immortal than the savings of honest toil. At any rate, the medresseh of Shemsi Pasha is such a place as only a poet or a great architect could imagine; and many homeless people found refuge there during the late Balkan War. The cloister is very small and irregular. There are cells and a covered arcade on two sides. The third, I think, from three or four quaint little windows of perforated marble that remain in a corner of the wall, must once have been more open to the Bosphorus than it is now. On the fourth side, and taking up a good deal of the court, are the mosque and the tomb of the founder. The mosque must have been a little jewel in its day. It is half a ruin now. The minaret is gone and so is all but the pillars of the portico that looked into the court. Within, however, are intricately panelled shutters, and a little gallery painted on the under-side, and a carved mimber of woodwork like that in the tombs of Roxelana and her sons. The refugees of 1912, poor wretches, saw no reason why they should not drive as many nails as they needed into that precious wood. The greatest ornament of the mosque is a magnificent bronze grille in the archway that opens into the adjoining tomb. This grille is rather like one they show you at Ravenna, in a crypt window of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, except that it has an arrow in each of the arched openings; and the surmounting lunette is a more complicated design. Did Shemsi Pasha, who seems to have had rather a genius for picking things up, get hold of a real Byzantine grille and make this perfect use of it? The tomb itself is in a piteous state of neglect. Nothing is left to show which of the three bare and broken wooden catafalques marked the grave of the dead poet. Windows in the outer wall look through a little marble portico upon a ruined quay. And, tempered so, the splash and flicker of the Bosphorus come into the mosque.
The bassma haneh
Hand wood-block printing
One of the sights of Scutari which always interests me is to be seen behind Shemsi Pasha, where a bluff first begins to lift itself above the sea. Here on any summer day you will notice what you may think to be lines of clothes drying in the wind. The clothes are really those soft figured handkerchiefs which are so greatly used in the East. Bare-legged men dip them in the sea to set the colours; and from them you may follow a gory trail of dye till you come to a house with thick wooden bars tilted strangely out under the eaves like gigantic clothes-horses. This is the bassma haneh—the printing-house. It has belonged to the same family for two hundred years, and during that time it can hardly have changed its methods of wood-block printing. Every bit of the work is done by hand. Every stitch of it is lugged down to the salt water for the colours to be made fast, and lugged back. And the factory, like other old-fashioned institutions in Constantinople, is open only from the day of Hîd’r Eless, in May, to that of Kassîm, in November. Once, as I rather intrusively poked my way about it, I came upon a man, whether old or young I could not say, who sat on the floor blocking out the first pattern on long white strips of cloth that were ultimately, as he told me, to make turbans for the people of Kürdistan. The room was almost dark, and it contained hardly anything beside the mattress where the man slept at night and a sizzling caldron beside him. The mixture in the caldron, into which he kept dipping his block, was a dye of death: so he told me, literally in those words, adding that it had already cut ten years off his life. But his employers never could afford to put some sort of a chimney over the caldron—and they assured him that employment like his was to be found in no other country. Was it true? he asked me. I thought to myself that the idyllic old days of hand labour, after which so many of us sigh, may not always have been so idyllic after all.
If you go to the bassma haneh by following the shore from the Great Harbour, it is very likely that you will never get there, by reason of the bluff to which I have just alluded. No road runs along the edge of that bluff to Haïdar Pasha and Moda, as perhaps in some far distant day of civic improvement may be the case; but here and there the houses are set a little back, and so many streets come vertically down toward the water that there are plenty of places to take in what the bluff has to offer. And then you will see why so many sultans and emperors built palaces there of old. I may, however, draw your attention for a moment to the island lighthouse falsely known as Leander’s Tower. In an old Italian map it is put down as Torre della Bella Leandra, and I have wondered if there, haply, was a clew to the name or whether it is simply a sailor’s jumble of the legend of the Dardanelles. In Turkish it is called Kîz Koulesi—the Maiden’s Tower—and it has a legend of its own. This relates to a Greek emperor who, being told that his daughter would one day be stung by a serpent, built a little castle for her on that sea-protected rock. But it happened to her to be seen by an Arab gallant, who expressed his admiration by bringing her flowers in disguise. Among them a viper chanced to creep one day, before the gallant left the mainland, and the princess’s prophecy was fulfilled. The gallant immediately sucked the poison out of her wound, however, and ran away with the princess. He was the celebrated hero Sid el Battal, forerunner of the Spanish Cid, who commanded the fifth Arab siege of Constantinople in 739 and who now lies buried in a town named after him in Asia Minor. The existing Maiden’s Tower was built in 1763 by Sultan Moustafa III. But a Byzantine one existed before it, of the emperor Manuel Comnenus, from which a chain used to be stretched in time of war across to Seraglio Point. And many centuries earlier the rock bore the statue of a heifer in memory of Damalis, wife of that Athenian Chares who drove away Philip of Macedon. After her the bluff itself used to be called Damalis—which again may be connected with the intricate myth of Io and the Bosphorus.
Every one knows the old story of the Delphian Oracle, who told the colonists of Byzantium to settle opposite the City of the Blind. The City of the Blind turned out to be the place whose inhabitants had passed by the site of Seraglio Point. The reproach cannot be fastened on the City of Gold, because Chalcedon really incurred it. But I have already associated the two towns, and I am willing to do so again. For to live in Scutari is to prove either that the oracle was blind or that Byzas made a mistake. No other conclusion is possible for him who loiters on the bluffs opposite Seraglio Point. One of the best places to see Stamboul is there, where you look at it against the light. And it is something to see in the early morning, with mists melting out of the Golden Horn and making a fairyland of all those domes and pinnacles. As for the sunsets of Scutari, with Stamboul pricking up black against them, they are so notable among exhibitions of their kind that I cannot imagine why they were not long ago put down among sunsets of San Marco and moonlights of the Parthenon and I know not how many other favourite wonders of the world.
