Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

giardini, cimiteri senza avelli,

ove erra forse qualche spirto amante

dietro l’ombre de’ suoi beni perduti!

—Gabriele D’Annunzio: “Poema Paradisiaco.”

In the matter of gardens the Turk has never acquired the reputation of his Moorish and Persian cousins. Perhaps it is that he belongs to a younger race and has had more conflicting traditions out of which to evolve a style. For no man likes a garden better than he. He never could put up with a thing like the city back yard or the suburban lawn of the New World. He is given to sitting much out-of-doors, he does not like to be stared at while he is doing it, and he has a great love of flowers. This is one of his most sympathetic traits, and one which was illustrated for me in an unexpected quarter during the late Balkan War when I saw soldiers in a temporary camp laying out patches of turf and pansies around their tents. The fashion of the buttonhole is not yet perfectly acclimated in Constantinople, but nothing is commoner than to observe a grave personage marching along with one rose or one pink in his hand—of which flowers the Turks are inordinately fond. Less grave personages do not scorn to wear a flower over one ear, with its stem stuck under their fez. And I always remember a fireman I once beheld who was not too busy squirting water at a burning house to stop every now and then and smell the rose he held between his teeth.

I cannot claim to know very much about the gardens of Stamboul, though no one can walk there without continually noticing evidences of them—through gateways, over the tops of walls, wherever there is a patch of earth big enough for something green to take root. Any one, however, may know something about the gardens of the Bosphorus. The nature of the ground on which they are laid out, sloping sharply back from the water to an average height of four or five hundred feet and broken by valleys penetrating more gradually into the rolling table-lands of Thrace and Asia Minor, makes it possible to visit many of them without going into them. And the fact has had much to do with their character. Gardens already existed on the banks of the Bosphorus, of course, when the Turk arrived there, and he must have taken them very much as he found them. Plane-trees still grow which, without any doubt, were planted by Byzantine gardeners; and so, perhaps, were certain great stone-pines. I have also wondered if the Turks did not find, when they came, the black and white pebbles, generally arranged in un-Oriental-looking designs, that pave so many garden paths. I am more inclined to believe that these originated in the same order of things as the finer mosaic of church walls than that they were imported from Italy. Perhaps the Italians imported them from Constantinople.

It would be interesting to know whether the Byzantine influence played any part in the gardens of the Renaissance, as it did in so many other arts. However, there is no doubt that the Italian influence came back to Constantinople after the Turkish period. It began to come most definitely, if by a roundabout road, when Sultan Ahmed III imitated the gardens of Versailles. It came again from the same quarter when the successor of Ahmed III sent the son of Twenty-eight Mehmed on another mission to Paris. And it came more definitely still, by a still more roundabout road, when a Russian ambassador brought to Constantinople, at the end of the eighteenth century, a painter named Melling. Like Van Mour, Melling has left most interesting records of the Bosphorus of his day. In the course of time it befell him to be recommended as landscape-gardener to a member of the imperial family, the celebrated Hadijeh Soultan. Through the good graces of this enlightened princess he later became architect to her brother, Sultan Selim III, the Reformer. I do not know whether it was the painter, in turn, who obtained for the Sultan the brother of the gardener of Schönbrunn. But altogether Melling must have done a good deal more for the gardens of the Bosphorus than to paint them.

At the same time, no one has done more for them than the Bosphorus itself. A terrace ten feet long may be as enviable as an estate reaching from the water’s edge to the top of the hill, since it is the blue panorama of the strait, with its busy boats and its background of climbing green, that is the chief ornament of the garden. The Turks lean, accordingly, to the landscape school. Their gardens have, really, very little of an Italian air. The smallest patch of ground in Italy is more architectural than the largest Turkish estate. However much stone and mortar the Turks put together in retaining and enclosing walls, the result has little architectural effect. They do not trim terraces with marble balustrades, while the lack of garden sculpture is with them a matter into which religion enters. Nor do they often plant trees like the Italians—to balance each other, to frame a perspective, to make a background. Still less, I imagine, do they consciously make colour schemes of flowers. And Lady Mary Montagu noted a long time ago the absence of the trim parterres to which she was accustomed. It is perfectly in keeping with Oriental ideas of design, of course, for a Turkish garden not to have too much symmetry. Yet it does have more symmetry than an out-and-out landscaper would countenance, and definitely artificial features. I always wonder whether the natural look of so many paths and stone stairs and terraces is merely a result of time or whether it is an accidental effect of the kind striven for by a school of our own gardeners.

In a Turkish garden