This ceiling, and the whole room to which it belongs, is the most precious thing of its kind in all Constantinople, if not in all the world. The design of the room is that of the earlier Broussa mosques, a T-shaped arrangement with the top of the T in the garden and three square bays, slightly raised above a central square, leaning out on piles above the water. At the intersection of the two axes stands a fountain, with a cluster of marble stalactites rising from a filigree marble pedestal, in the centre of a shallow square tank of marble. On the garden side, where the door is, there are no windows, but a series of cupboards and niches of some light wood once delicately inlaid with wavy stems and pointed leaves. On the water side an unbroken succession of windows, not very tall and set at the level of the divan, look north and west and south, and bring the Bosphorus like a great sparkling frieze into the pavilion. They also make the water light, by reflection, the upper part of the room. At the height of the window tops a shelf, slightly carved and gilded, runs entirely around the walls. Above that rises a frieze of painted panels in which tall sprays of lilies and other flowers stand in blue and white jars, each in a pointed arch and each framed by garlands of tiny conventionalised flowers. And above all hangs a golden ceiling, domed over the fountain, over each bay hollowed into an oblong recess, lovely with latticework and stalactites and carved bosses and Moorish traceries of interlaced stars, and strange border loops of a blue that echoes the jars below or the sea outside, and touches of a deep green, and exquisite little flowers, all shimmering in a light of restless water.
The golden room of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha
The creator of this masterpiece was that great friend of the arts Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, to whose medresseh in Stamboul I have already referred. His yalî has disappeared and his legendary pleasure-grounds are now a wilderness, albeit superlatively pleasant still either to look into or to look out of. In them is one of the sixteen famous springs of Hafid Effendi. Historic garden-parties were given in this garden, and ambassadors whom sultans delighted to honour were taken to sit in the golden room. It used to be a detached kiosk in Hüsseïn Pasha’s garden. In modern times a house has been added to it, and a retired provincial governor has inherited the fallen splendour of the Kyöprülüs. Some day, I suppose, it will all go up in smoke or tumble into the Bosphorus. In the meantime the fountain is still, the precious marquetry has been picked out of the doors, the woodwork cracks and sags, the blue jars and the flowers become more and more ghostly, the gold of the ceiling grows dimmer every day. But even so, the golden room has a charm that it can never have had when the afternoon sun first shimmered into it.
The gardens of the lower Bosphorus are in many ways less picturesque than those nearer the Black Sea. The hills on which they lie are in general lower, farther apart, and more thickly covered with houses. With their milder air, however, their more Mediterranean light, and their glimpse into the Sea of Marmora, they enjoy another, a supreme, advantage. The upper Bosphorus—well, in other places you may see sharply rising slopes terraced or wooded. Beside the Nordfjord, the coast of Dalmatia, or Lake Como, where would the Bosphorus be? But nowhere else may you behold the silhouette of Stamboul. And that, pricking the sky above its busy harbour, just not closing the wide perspective that shines away to the south, is the unparalleled ornament of the gardens of the lower Bosphorus. The garden that Melling laid out for the princess Hadijeh was in this part of the strait, at the point of Defterdar Bournou, above Orta-kyöi. Abd ül Hamid, who to his other crimes added a culpable crudity of taste, pulled down the princess’s charming old house in order to build two hideous new ones for two daughters of his own. Most of the finest sites in the neighbourhood, or on the opposite shore, belong or have belonged to different members of the imperial family. Abd ül Hamid himself was brought back from Salonica at the outbreak of the Balkan War and shut up in the Asiatic garden of Beïlerbeï. In this old pleasance of the sultans Abd ül Aziz built a palace for the empress Eugénie when she went to the East to open the Suez Canal. It must have been strange to Abd ül Hamid to look out from its windows at the opposite park where he reigned for thirty-three years. The city of palaces which grew up around him there was never known otherwise than as Yîldîz Kiosk—the Pavilion of the Star—from a kyöshk his father built. Another pavilion in that park, also visible from Beïlerbeï, is the Malta Kiosk, where Abd ül Hamid’s older brother Mourad passed the first months of his long captivity, and where Midhat Pasha, father of the Turkish constitution, was iniquitously tried for the murder of Abd ül Aziz. In the pleasant lower hall of this little palace, almost filled by a marble basin of goldfish, it is not easy to reconstitute that drama so fateful for Turkey—which did not end when Abd ül Hamid received from Arabia, in a box labelled “Old Japanese Ivory,” the head of the murdered patriot.
The park of Yîldîz originally belonged to the palace whose name of Chira’an—The Torches—has been corrupted by Europeans into Cheragan. Only a ruin stands there now, on which Abd ül Aziz once squandered half the revenues of the empire. He stumbled on the threshold the first time he went into his new house, and never would live in it; but after his dethronement he either committed suicide or was murdered there. His successor, Mourad V, dethroned in turn after a reign of three months, lived in his unhappy uncle’s palace for nearly thirty years. Abd ül Hamid is said to have kept his brother so rigorously that the ladies of the family were at one time compelled to dress in the curtains of the palace. The so-called mad Sultan, deprived of books and even of writing materials, taught his children to read and write by means of charcoal on the parquet floor. The imperial prisoner occupied the central rooms of the palace, the doors leading from which were nailed up. When architects were called after his death to put the palace in order they found a foot of water standing on the marble floor of the state entrance, at the north end; and street dogs, jumping in and out of the broken windows, lived in the magnificent throne-room above. Upon his own dethronement, Abd ül Hamid begged to be allowed to retire to this splendid residence. It was presented, instead, to the nation by Sultan Mehmed V for a parliament house. But after two months of occupancy as such it was destroyed by fire. It was only the last of many palaces, one of which was built by Selim III and in which Melling, again, had a hand. The name Chira’an goes back, I believe, to the time of Ahmed III, whose Grand Vizier and son-in-law, Ibrahim Pasha, had a palace there. This minister, by some reports a renegade Armenian, is famous in Turkish annals for his liberal administration, for his many public buildings, and for his introduction of printing into the Ottoman Empire. Among his other talents was one for humouring the tastes of his splendour-loving master. Ibrahim Pasha gave the Sultan one night at Chira’an a garden-party, at which countless tortoises, with lights fastened to their shells, made a moving illumination among the trees. Whence the name of The Torches.
Ahmed III gave many similar entertainments in his own gardens on Seraglio Point, sometimes fêtes of lights, sometimes fêtes of flowers. Of the latter he had such an admiration that he created at his court a Master of Flowers, whose credentials, ornamented by gilt roses, ended thus: “We command that all gardeners recognise for their chief the bearer of this diploma; that they be in his presence all eye like the narcissus, all ear like the rose; that they have not ten tongues like the lily; that they transform not the pointed pistil of the tongue into the thorn of the pomegranate, dyeing it in the blood of inconvenient words. Let them be modest, and let them keep, like the rosebud, their lips closed. Let them not speak before their time, like the blue hyacinth, which scatters its perfume before men ask for it. Finally, let them humbly incline themselves before him like the violet, and let them not show themselves recalcitrant.” The tulip does not seem to be mentioned in this document, but the culture of tulips under Ahmed III and his congenial Grand Vizier became as extravagant a rage as ever it did in Holland. Indeed, tulips were first introduced into the Low Countries from Constantinople, by the Fleming Ogier de Busbecq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Süleïman the Magnificent. Under the Latinised form of his name he has left a quaint memoir of his two embassies. The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word dülbend—turban—which was a favourite nickname of the flower among the Turks. Ahmed III always celebrated tulip time, inviting the grandees of the empire to come and admire his tulip beds. He devised a way of illuminating them at night with the small glass cup lamps used in mosques. Mahmoud I was of a taste to continue this pretty custom. He also laid out special tulip and hyacinth gardens behind the summer palace he built at the water’s edge. Alleys of cypress-trees were there, and a great pool of marble, and about it the slaves of the harem would sing and dance in the fairy light of the illuminated flowers.
Nothing is left now of this garden, or the palace to which it belonged, or the Gate of the Cannon, after which they were named. A disastrous fire and the building of the Bulgarian railway long made a waste of the tip of Seraglio Point, until in 1913 it was turned into a public park. Seraglio Point is an Italian misnomer for the Turkish Seraï Bournou—Palace Point. But a palace and gardens remain, not far away, and to them has been transferred the title of Top Kapou—Cannon Gate. Although this is now the oldest palace in Constantinople, the name of Eski Seraï—the Old Palace—belongs to the site of that older one which the Conqueror built on the hill of the War Department. He was the first, however, to set apart Seraglio Point as a pleasure-ground for his family, and he built the Chinili-Kyöshk, now of the Imperial Museum. His son and grandson built other pavilions of their own, but it was not until the reign of his great-grandson Süleïman I that the court was definitely transferred to the Seraglio. As in the Palace of Celestial Purity in the Forbidden City, no woman had up to that time been permitted to sleep there. And it is perhaps significant that the decadence of the empire began very soon after the transfer of the harem to the new palace. From that time on the Old Palace, whose grounds Süleïman greatly curtailed to make room for his two principal mosques, was reserved for the families of deceased sultans, while the new palace was continually enlarged and beautified. Something legendary attaches to it in the eyes of the common people, who are pleasantly inclined to confuse King Solomon, the friend of the Queen of Sheba, and a great personage in Mohammedan folklore, with their own Sultan Süleïman. A soldier from Asia Minor related to me once how Sultan Solomon sent out four birds to the four quarters of heaven to discover the most perfect site for a palace, and how they came back with the news that no place was to be found in the world so airy or so beautiful as Seraglio Point. He accordingly built the palace of Top Kapou. And beneath it he hollowed out a space reaching far under the sea in which he planted a forest of marble pillars. I cannot vouch for the last part of the story, but I am inclined to agree with the Sultan’s birds. Certainly the garden of the Seraglio has its superb situation between the Golden Horn and the Marmora, its crescent panorama of cities, seas, and islands, and its mementoes of the past, to put it alone among the gardens of the world. Acropolis of ancient Byzantium, pleasance of Roman, Greek, and Ottoman emperors for sixteen hundred years, it is more haunted by associations than any other garden in Europe. One could make a library alone of the precious things its triple walls enclose: the column of Claudius Gothicus, the oldest Roman monument in the city; the church of St. Irene, originally built by Constantine, whose mosaics look down as Justinian and Leo left them on the keys of conquered cities, the battle-flags of a hundred fields, the arms and trophies of the martial period of the Turks; the sarcophagus of Alexander, which is but one of the glories of the museum; the imperial library, where the MS. of Critobulus was discovered; the imperial treasury, with its jewels, coins, rare stuffs, gemmed furniture, the gifts and spoil of kings, in vaults too dim and crowded for their splendour to be seen; the sacred relics of the Prophet which Selim I captured with Egypt and which constitute the credentials of the sultans to the caliphate of Islam. The structure in which these are preserved, its broad eaves and crusting of flowered tiles reflected in a pool bordered by lanterns to be lit on holy nights, is one of the things that make that garden incomparable. Then there are quaint turrets and doorways; there are kiosks; there are terraces; there are white cloisters a little grassy and neglected; there are black cypresses and monstrous plane-trees into which the sun looks with such an air of antique familiarity.
Of all this every one has written who has ever been to Constantinople. But not many have written of a part of the garden which until the fall of Abd ül Hamid almost no outsider had visited. A few wrote then of the strange scene which took place there when the slaves of the deposed Sultan were set at liberty, and any Circassian who believed himself to have a relative in the imperial harem was invited to come and take her away. The dramatic contrasts and disappointments one could imagine made a true term to all the passionate associations of that place. No one lives there now. When a few more years have passed and no breathing person has any vital memory connected with it, the harem of the old Seraglio will be, like how many other places devised by a man to house his own life, a resort for sightseers at so much a head, a mere piece of the taste of a time. As it is, the Gate of Felicity does not open too easily, and one can still feel the irony of its name.