Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The upper terrace of the French embassy garden at Therapia

The garden of the Russian embassy at Büyük Dereh

There are Turks, of course, in the upper Bosphorus, as there are Christians in the middle Bosphorus. One of the most conspicuous of all the Bosphorus gardens is at Beïkos, on the Asiatic shore—which, for the rest, is much more Turkish than the European. Beïkos is also connected with the Argonauts, being the place where they met with so unkind a welcome from Amycus, king of the Bebryces. He or some other mythic personage is supposed to have been buried on the hilltop behind Beïkos. This height, popularly known as Giant’s Mountain, is the only one on the Bosphorus from which you can see both the Black Sea and the Marmora—as Byron recorded in a notorious stanza. A giant grave is still to be seen there, some twenty feet long, which the Turks honour as that of rather an unexpected personage. A little mosque adjoins the grave—built, I believe, by the ambassador Twenty-eight Mehmed—and in the mosque is this interesting inscription: “Here lies his excellency Joshua, the son of Nun, who although not numbered among the apostles may well be called a true prophet sent of God. He was despatched by Moses (on whom be peace) to fight the people of Rome. While the battle was yet unfinished the sun set. Joshua caused the sun to rise again and the Romans could not escape. This miracle convinced them; and when Joshua invited them, after the battle, to accept the true faith, they believed and accepted it. If any man doubts, let him look into the sacred writings at the Holy Places of the Christians and he will be satisfied.” The garden I have wandered so far away from rises on a pyramid of terraces at the mouth of a smiling valley which bears the grim name of Hounkyar Iskelesi—the Landing-Place of the Manslayer. A white palace crowns the pyramid, facing the long river-like vista of the Bosphorus. The palace was built by the great Mehmed Ali, of Egypt, to whom the sultan of the day paid the honour of coming to see his new pleasure-house and of expressing his admiration of it. The viceroy accordingly assured his majesty, as Oriental etiquette demands, that the palace and everything in it was his. Whereupon his majesty, to the no small chagrin of the viceroy, graciously signified his acceptance of the gift.

Beïkos and the shores of its great bay were a favourite resort of sultans long before the day of Mehmed Ali. In general, however, the Turks have always preferred the narrow middle stretch of the Bosphorus; and for most reasons I am with them. The summer meltem—which some derive from the Italian maltempo—often intensely irritating near the mouth of the Black Sea, is here somewhat tempered by the windings of the strait. Then here the coasts of the two continents approach each other most closely, are most gracefully modelled and greenly wooded. The Asiatic shore in particular, which opposite Therapia is forbidding enough, is here a land of enchantment, with its gardens, its groves, its happy valleys, its tempting points and bays, its sky-line of cypresses and stone-pines, its weathered wooden villages, its ruined waterside castle of Anadolou Hissar, its far-famed Sweet Waters—and most so if seen from Europe in a light of sunset or early morning. If Mehmed Ali lost his palace at Beïkos—and on Arnaout-kyöi Point there are the ruins of another one which he was stopped from building—several of the most enviable estates along this part of the Bosphorus belong to his descendants. The beautiful wooded cape of Chibouklou, on the Asiatic side, is crowned by the mauresque château of the present Khedive. Directly opposite, on the southern point of Stenia Bay, is the immense old tumble-down wooden palace of his grandfather Ismaïl, the spendthrift Khedive of the Suez Canal, who died there in exile. The garden behind it is the largest and, historically, one of the most interesting on the Bosphorus. The name of the bay is derived, according to one story, from that of the Temple of Sosthenia, or Safety, built by the Argonauts after their escape from King Amycus. A temple of Hecate was also known there in more authentic times, and a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael by Constantine the Great. On a stormy night of 1352, the admirals Nicolò Pisani of Venice and Paganino Doria of Genoa unwittingly took shelter in the bay within bow-shot of each other, during an interval of a long sea-fight which raged between them the whole length of the Bosphorus. Emirgyan, the name of the village in which the khedivial estate is situated, was that of a Persian general who surrendered Erivan to Sultan Mourad IV in 1635, and who ended his days in pleasant captivity on this wooded shore. His beautiful Persian palace of Feridoun was the wonder of its day. His conqueror used often to visit him there, for Emirgyan was a man of wit and an accomplished musician. Not only did he first introduce into Turkey a sort of Persian bassoon and the four-stringed Persian chartar from which we get our guitar, but he marked a new epoch in Turkish music. There were also other reasons why Mourad used to visit the palace of Feridoun, where, “in the design of refreshing his vital spirits and of summoning the warmth which awakens joy, it pleased” the Sultan “to give rein to the light courser of the beverage of the sunrise”—as a discreet historian put that violent young man’s propensity to strong waters. It was after a debauch here that he died, at the age of twenty-eight, having beheaded a hundred thousand of his people and having entertained a strange ambition to be the last of his line. He gave orders on his death-bed that the head of his brother Ibrahim, the last surviving male of his blood, be brought to him. But his courtiers took advantage of his condition to dissemble their disobedience, and the imperial family to-day springs from that brother. As for the luckless Emirgyan, he saved his head from the elder brother, only to be deprived of it by the younger.

At Roumeli Hissar, still farther to the south, is a neglected garden which belonged to Halim Pasha, brother of the prodigal Ismaïl. In it are two unpretentious houses which look as if they were built of brown stucco. There is sentiment in that stucco, however, for it is really mud brought from the banks of the Nile. According to the law of Islam Halim would have been Khedive in turn if Ismaïl had not bound the Turkish government, by a substantial quid pro quo, to make the viceroyalty hereditary to the eldest son in his own family. And Halim Pasha’s family later suffered the misfortune to be nearly ruined by an English speculator.