Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

In the name of the most merciful God: Verily we sent down the Koran in the night of Al Kad’r. And what shall make thee understand how excellent the night of Al Kad’r is? The night of Al Kad’r is better than a thousand months. Therein do the angels descend, and the spirit of Gabriel also, by the permission of their Lord, with his decrees concerning every matter. It is peace until the rising of the morn.—Sale’s Koran.

While Ramazan is the sole month of the Mohammedan calendar generally known to the infidel world, the infidel world has never been very sure whether to spell its last syllable with a d or with a z. Let the infidel world accordingly know that either is right in its own domain. The Arabs say Ramadan, the Persians and the Turks say Ramazan. And they all observe throughout the month a species of fast that has no precise counterpart in the West. So long as the sun is in the sky, food or drink of any kind may not pass the true believer’s lips. He is not even allowed the sweet solace of a cigarette. But from the firing of the sunset gun until it is light enough to distinguish a white hair from a black he may feast to surfeiting.

Nothing is more characteristic of late afternoons in Ramazan than the preparations for the evening meal which preoccupy all Moslems, particularly those who work with their hands. As the sun nears the horizon, fires are lighted, tables are spread, bread is broken, water is poured out, cigarettes are rolled, and hands are lifted half-way to the mouth, in expectation of the signal that gives liberty to eat. This breaking of the daytime fast is called iftar, which means feast or rejoicing, and is an institution in itself. The true iftar begins with hors-d’œuvres of various sorts—olives, cheese, and preserves, with sweet simits, which are rings of hard pastry, and round flaps of hot unleavened bread, called pideh. Then should come a vegetable soup, and eggs cooked with cheese or pastîrma—the sausage of the country—and I know not how many other dainties peculiar to the season, served in bewildering variety and washed down, it may be, with water from the sacred well Zemzem in Mecca. Any Turkish dinner is colossal, but iftar in a great house is well nigh fatal to a foreigner. Foreigners have the better opportunity to become acquainted with them because Ramazan is the proverbial time for dinner-parties. The rich keep open house throughout the month, while the poorest make it a point to entertain their particular friends at iftar. The last meal of the night also has a name of its own, sohour, which is derived from the word for dawn. Watchmen patrol the streets with drums to wake people up in time for it, while another cannon announces when the fast begins again.

In a primitive community like that of the Prophet’s Arabia and in a climate where people anyway sleep during much of the day, Ramazan might be comparatively easy to keep. Under modern conditions, and especially in a town containing so large an alien population as Constantinople, it is not surprising that the fast is somewhat intermittently observed. The more Europeanised Turks make no pretence of fasting, to the no small scandal of their servants. Others strengthen their resolution by an occasional bite in private or a secret cigarette. Every now and then some such person is arrested and fined, for church and state are still officially one in Turkey, and the Sheriat is a system of Blue Laws that would leave very little room for individual judgment if it succeeded in altogether having its way. Those who are most conscientious are those upon whom the fast falls most heavily—peasants and workmen who cannot turn day and night about. So complete a derangement of all the habits of life naturally has its effect. No one who employs Turks or does business with them can get anything done, and tempers habitually mild grow strained as the month proceeds. Thus in one way or another does Ramazan continue to colour the whole life of the cosmopolitan city.

Stamboul, always solemn under her centuries and proud even in decay, is never prouder or more solemn than when illuminated for the holy month of Islam. It is one of the sights of the world to see the dark city under the moon of Ramazan, constellated with circlets of light that bead the galleries of numberless minarets. The imperial mosques that cut out so superb a silhouette above the climbing roofs have two, four, or six minarets to illuminate, some of them with three galleries apiece. And they use a yet more magical device. Lines are slung between minaret and minaret, and from them are suspended small glass mosque lamps in some decorative order. During the first half of the month they spell, as if in sparks of gold, a simple phrase like “O Allah!” or “O Mohammed!” After the fifteenth they often trace in the dark sky the outline of a flower or a ship. There is something starlike about these graceful illuminations, but they are called mahieh—moonlight.

Théophile Gautier called Ramazan a Lent lined with a Carnival. The phrase is a happy one if it does not lead the reader into attributing a Latin vivacity to Turkish merrymakings. The streets of Stamboul, ordinarily so deserted at night, are full of life during the nights of Ramazan. But their gaiety is little enough like the uproar of a European Carnival. Even in the busiest centres of amusement, where a carriage or even a man often finds difficulty in passing, there is none of the wild hilarity whereby an Occidental must express his sense of the joy of life. The people stroll quietly up and down or sit quietly in the coffee-houses, making their kef in a way that reveals Turkish character on its most sympathetic side. They are practically all men. Early in the evening veiled women in their loose street costume may sometimes be seen, accompanied by a servant with a lantern. But as the hours wear on they disappear, leaving only fezzes and turbans in the streets. Even the Christian women, who also inhabit their quarters of Stamboul, observe the custom. It is the rarest thing in the world for an Armenian or a Greek of the poorer classes to take his wife out with him at night.

The coffee-houses are, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of Stamboul streets during the nights of Ramazan. In the daytime they are closed, or the purely Turkish ones are, as there is then no scope for their activities. They are open all night long, however. And few be they that do not attempt to add in some way to their customary attractions. This is often accomplished in a simple manner with the aid of an instrument that we do not associate with the East—I mean the gramophone, which enjoys an enormous popularity in Constantinople. There, however, it has been taught to utter sounds which might prevent many from recognising an old friend. I confess that I prefer myself the living executant to his mechanical echo. One never has to go far during Ramazan to find him. Itinerant gipsies, masters of pipe and tom-tom, are then much in evidence in the humbler coffee-houses. There they go, two and two, a man and a boy, in the wide black trousers, the dark-red girdle, and the almost black fez which they affect. In larger coffee-houses there will be a whole orchestra, so called, of the fine lute, if one may so translate its Turkish title—a company of singers who also play on instruments of strange names and curves that suit the music they make. One such instrument, the out, is ancestor to the European lute. There are those, indeed, who find no music in the broken rhythms, the mounting minor, of a harmony which the Russian composers have only recently begun to make comprehensible to Western ears. For myself, I know too little of music to tell what relation it may bear to the antique modes. But I can listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions, that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to hear in them a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires glimmering on great plains. There are flashes, too, of light, of song, the playing of shepherds’ pipes, the swoop of horsemen, and sudden outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And more than all, it is the mood of Asia, elsewhere so rarely understood, which is neither lightness nor despair.

Dancing is not uncommon in the coffee-houses of the people during Ramazan. Sometimes it is performed by the gipsy girls, dressed in vivid cotton prints and jingling with sequins, who alone of their sex are immodest enough to enter a coffee-house. Dancing boys are oftener the performers—gipsies, Greeks, or Turks—who perpetuate a custom older than the satyr dances of India or the Phrygian dances of Cybele. Alimeh, whence the French almée, and köchek are the technical names of these not too respectable entertainers. Sometimes the habitués of the coffee-house indulge in the dancing themselves, if they are not pure Turks, forming a ring and keeping time to the sound of pipe and drum. Of recent years, however, all this sort of thing has grown rare. What has become rarer still is a form of amusement provided by the itinerant story-teller, the mettagh, who still carries on in the East the tradition of the troubadours. The stories he tells are more or less on the order of the Arabian Nights, and not very suitable for mixed companies—which for the rest are never found in coffee-shops. These men are often wonderfully clever at character monologue or dialogue. They collect their pay at a crucial moment of the action, refusing to continue until the audience has testified to the sincerity of its interest by some substantial token.

A Kara-gyöz poster