In the harem of the Seraglio
Photograph by Abdullah Frères, Constantinople
The entrance to the harem is under the pointed tower which catches the eye from afar. You go first into the court of the black eunuchs, narrow, high-walled on one side, overlooked on the other by a tiled porch and by a series of cells which never can have been light enough for the tiles that line them to be visible. A great hooded fireplace terminates the dark passage into which they open. Up-stairs are roomier and lighter quarters, also tiled, for the superior dignitaries of this African colony. A few vestiges of their power remain in the vestibule at the farther end of the court, in the shape of various instruments of torture. In a dark angle of this place, which communicates with the Court of the Pages and the Sultan’s quarters, a lantern hanging behind a rail marks where the old valideh Kyössem was strangled with a curtain cord. Tiles of the same period as her mosque face one of the side walls with an elegant row of cypress-trees. Beyond them opens another court. More tiles are there, and a lane of turf, where only the Sultan might ride, leads between the flagstones to a marble block. The interior of the harem is a labyrinth so complicated that I would have to visit it many more times to bring away any clear idea of its arrangement. There is very little of what we would call splendour in those endless rooms that sultan after sultan added to without order or plan. They contain, as true Turkish rooms should, almost no furniture. What furniture they do contain is late Empire, rather the worse for wear. Ugly European carpets cover a few floors. Stuffy European hangings drape a few windows. Gilded canopies cover a dais or two where a valideh soultan held her court—and almost the whole of a dark cupboard where a sultana did not disdain to sleep. There are ceilings more or less elaborately carved and gilded. There are big niches for braziers. There are doors inlaid with tortoise-shell and ivory and mother-of-pearl. There are wall fountains, some of them lovely with sculptured reliefs and painting. There are baths, also containing fountains, and screens of filigree marble, and marble tanks. There are, above all, tiles and tiles and tiles. They line almost all the rooms, and many of them are very bad. The new fashion in taste which Ahmed III imported from France became more and more popular until it nearly swallowed up the whole palace. Who knows what priceless walls were rifled in order to make room for cheap Dutch tiles and frescoes of imaginary perspectives! Porcelain and marble have been visibly painted over in some places, and panels that end up-stairs or in another room prove how ruthlessly partitions were put up. Yet there is a seducing quaintness about the Turkish rococo at its best. And there are enough good tiles left in the palace to make up for all the rest. I remember some simple ones in a passage, representing nothing but the tents of a camp, and several showing the holy places of Mecca. These, I believe, were of the time of Mehmed III. Others are absolutely the most superb things of their kind in Constantinople. A room of Mourad III, the gallery so called of Sultan Selim, and a magnificent hall which Süleïman himself might have built, if he did not, give an idea of what a magic place that old labyrinth may originally have been. Two rooms of Ahmed I are also charming, one a small dining-room delicately painted with fruit and flowers, the other a library, with inlaid cupboards for books and a quantity of cool green tiles. Interesting in another way is the Kafess, the Cage, where the young princes lived until it was time for them to ascend the throne—or to be strangled. Sultan Ibrahim was there when courtiers came to do homage to him, with the news that his terrible brother Mourad IV was dead; but he would not believe it until his mother, the great Kyössem, ordered Mourad’s body to be shown him. The broad eaves and exterior tiles of the Cage overhang a court of two levels, through the middle of whose stone pavement a fantastic little river is cut for running water. The one open side, guarded by a balustrade of perforated marble, overlooks a sunken garden and a bit of the Golden Horn. And I remember another court, higher in the air, where an upper story leaned out on brackets, as if for a better view of the Bosphorus, and where cherry-trees stood in blossom around a central pool.
The “Cage” of the Seraglio
Photograph by Abdullah Frères, Constantinople
