Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The Bosphorus from the heights of Scutari

I never heard, however, of guides recommending so simple an excursion. What they will sometimes grudgingly recommend is to climb the hill of Chamlîja. Chamlîja—the Place of Pines—is a hill of two peaks, one a little higher than the other, on the descending terraces of which amphitheatrically sprawls the City of Gold. Chamlîja is the highest hill on the Bosphorus, and therefore is it dear to the Turks, who are like the Canaanites of old in that they love groves and high places. The groves, it is true, are now rather thinly represented by the stone-pines that give the height its name; but Turkish princes, like their Byzantine predecessors, have villas among them, while the hill is a favourite resort of their subjects. The widest prospect, of course, is to be had from the top of Big Chamlîja. But a more picturesque one is visible from the south side of Little Chamlîja, taking in a vivid geography of cypress forest and broken Marmora coast, and Princes’ Isles seen for once swimming each in its own blue, and far-away Bithynian mountains; while to the explorer of a certain northern spur, running straight to Beïlerbeï Palace, is vouchsafed one of the most romantic of all visions of the Bosphorus. Chamlîja has an especial charm for the people of the country because of its water. No European can quite understand what that means to a Turk. Being forbidden to indulge in fermented liquors, he is a connoisseur of water—not mineral water, but plain H₂O—as other men are of wine. He calls for the product of his favourite spring as might a Westerner for a special vintage, and he can tell when an inferior brand is palmed off on him. A dervish named Hafid Effendi once published a monograph on the waters of Constantinople in which he described the sixteen best springs, which he himself had tested. I will not enumerate all the conditions which he laid down for perfect water. One of them is that it must be “light”; another is that it should flow from south to north or from west to east. A certain spring of Chamlîja meets these requirements better than any other in Constantinople. A sultan, therefore, did not think it beneath him to house this famous water of my native town, and gourmets pay a price to put it on their tables.

A second pretext do guides and guide-books, out of the capriciousness of their hearts, allow outsiders for visiting Scutari, and that is to see the great cemetery. For that matter, few people with eyes of their own and a whim to follow them could look up from the water at that wood of cypresses, curving so wide and sombre above the town, without desiring to know more of it. I have wondered if Arnold Böcklin ever saw it, for in certain lights, and from the right point of the Bosphorus, Scutari looks strangely like a greater Island of Death. In spite of its vast population of old grey stones, however, there is to me nothing so melancholy there as in our trim Western places of burial, shut away from the world and visited only with whispers. There is, of course, a gravity, the inseparable Turkish gravity, but withal a quiet colour of the human. For the Turks have a different attitude toward death from ours. I do not mean that they lack feeling, but they seem to take more literally than we their religious teaching on the subject. They have no conventional mourning, and the living and the dead seem much nearer to each other. Nor is it merely that tombs and patches of cemetery ornament the busiest street. “Visit graves,” says a tradition of the Prophet: “Of a truth they shall make you think of futurity.” And “Whoso visiteth every Friday the graves of his two parents, or one of the two, he shall be written a pious son, even though he had been disobedient to them in the world.” And people do visit graves. The cult of the türbeh is a thing by itself, while every cemetery is a place of resort. The cypresses of Scutari are, therefore, the less funereal because the highways of common life run between them. I speak literally, for the main thoroughfares between Scutari and Kadi Kyöi pass through the cemetery. Under the trees the stone-cutters fashion the quaint marble of the graves. Fountains are scattered here and there for the convenience of passers-by. People sit familiarly among the stones or in the coffee-houses that do not fail to keep them company. I remember an old man who used to keep one of the coffee-houses, and how he said to me, like a Book of Proverbs: “Death in youth and poverty in age are hard, but both are of God.” He was born in Bulgaria, he told me, when it was still a part of Turkey, but he wished to die in Asia, and so he had already taken up his abode among the cypresses of Scutari. A more tragic anticipation of that last journey has been made by a colony of lepers. I went to visit them once, when I thought less of my skin than I do now. They live in a stone quadrangle set back from the Haïdar Pasha road, with windows opening only into their own court. In front of the gate is a stone post where people leave them food. When they offered me some of it, out of the hospitality of their hearts, I must confess I drew the line. They kept house in families, each in its own little apartment, and the rooms were clean and comfortable in the simple Turkish way. But the faces and hands of some of the inmates were not good to see. It made one’s heart sick for the children who are born and innocently grow up in that place of death.

Gravestones

The stones of Scutari are a study which I have often wished I had the knowledge to take up. Every grave has a headstone and a footstone, taller and narrower than our old-fashioned tombstones. You can tell at a glance whether a man or a woman is buried beneath the marble slab that generally joins the two stones. In old times every man wore a special turban, according to his rank and profession, and when he died that turban was carved at the top of his headstone. The custom is still continued, although the fez has now so largely taken the place of the turban. Women’s stones are finished with a carving of flowers. Floral reliefs are common on all monuments, which may also be painted and gilded. And in the flat slab will be a little hollow to catch the rain—for thirsty spirits and the birds. The epitaphs that are the chief decoration are not very different from epitaphs all over the world, though perhaps a little more flowery than is now the fashion in the West. The simpler ones give only the name and estate of the deceased, with a request for a prayer or a fatiha—the opening invocation of the Koran—and some such verse as “He is the Everlasting,” “Every soul shall taste death,” or “We are God’s and we return to God.” This sentiment is also characteristic: “Think of the dead. Lift up your hands in prayer, that men may some time visit your grave and pray.” The epitaph is often rhymed, though it may be of a touching simplicity—like “O my daughter! O! She flew to Paradise and left to her mother only the sorrow of parting,” or “To the memory of the spirit of the blessed Fatma, mother of Ömer Agha, whose children find no way out of their grief.” Others are more complicated and Oriental, ending, like the inscriptions on public buildings, in a chronogram. Von Hammer quotes one, not in this cemetery, which is peculiarly effective in Turkish:

The joy of the life of Feïsi, inspector of markets,

Has vanished into the other world. O how to help it!

For he has lost his rosebud of a daughter,