Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

A more elaborate form of entertainment is provided by coffee-houses fortunate enough to possess a garden or some large back room. This is the marionette theatre, and it is to be seen at no other time of the year. The Turkish marionettes, known by the name of their star performer, Kara-gyöz, are a national institution. In fact, their repertory includes almost all there is of a national theatre. In common with other Asiatic marionettes, they do not appear in person. The proscenium arch of their miniature stage is filled with a sheet of lighted paper. The tiny actors, cleverly jointed together of transparent materials, move between the light and the paper, so that their coloured shadows are all that the public sees. It is enough, however, to offer an amusement worth seeing. The theatre of Kara-gyöz would make an interesting study in itself, reflecting as it does the manners of the country. Sometimes, indeed, it has reflected them so faithfully as to require the intervention of the censor. But Kara-gyöz himself, otherwise Black-eye, is always amusing, whatever may be his lapses from propriety. This truculent individual must be a relative of Punch, although he is said to be a caricature of a veritable person, one of Saladin’s viziers. He is a humpback with a black beard and a raucous voice, to whom no enterprise is too difficult or too absurd. He is accompanied by a right-hand man who points his repartee and is alternately his dupe and his deceiver. The adventures of this amorous pair and those of the crack-voiced ladies, the brilliantly costumed gentlemen, the wonderful dogs, cats, mice, and other creatures that go to make up the company, create a scene that a spectator of simple tastes willingly revisits. Among the elements of his pleasure must be counted the ill-lighted barrack or tent in which the representation takes place, the gaily dressed children composing the better part of the audience—here, for once, ladies are allowed!—the loquacious venders of sweets and drinks, and the music of pipe and drum to the accompaniment of which the little coloured shadows play on their lighted paper.

The shadow shows are by no means the only species of the dramatic art to tempt the audiences of Ramazan. There are full-grown theatres that take themselves, the drama—everything except the lives of their patrons—more seriously. They are perfect fire-traps wherein the play’s the thing, innocent as they in great part are of those devices of upholstery which are the chief pride of the modern stage. The pit is aligned with rush-bottomed stools and chairs, above which rise, in the European fashion, tiers of not too Sybaritic boxes. A particularity of them is that, like the cafés and the streets, they contain no ladies. While there are Turkish theatres which ladies attend in the daytime, it is contrary to custom for ladies to take part in public entertainments at night. Consequently the European ladies who sometimes penetrate Stamboul during the nights of Ramazan make themselves more conspicuous than is likely to be pleasant and the objects of comment which it is well that they do not understand. Women do appear on the stage, but they are never Turks. They are usually Armenians, occasionally Syrians or Greeks, whose murder of the language is condoned by the exigencies of the case.

The performances last the better part of the night. They begin at three o’clock Turkish, or three hours after sunset at any season of the year, and close in time for the last meal of the night. There is a curtain-raiser, which is not seldom drawn from the manners of the people. The piece of resistance, however, is a comedy or melodrama adapted from the European stage. The first is more likely to be interesting to an outsider, for the Turks are capital comedians. But the more serious pieces are characteristic, too, in their mixture of East and West. Madam Contess, as she is flatly pronounced, will be attended by servants in fez and shalvars, and two gentlemen in top hats will salute each other with earth-sweeping salaams.

Between the two plays intervene a couple of hours or so of singing and dancing that are to many the meat in the sandwich. These entertainments are also highly characteristic of the city that straddles two continents. The costume of the performers is supposably European, although no Western almée would consent to be encumbered with the skirts and sleeves of her Armenian sister, or let her locks hang so ingenuously down her back. She would also be more scrupulous with regard to her colour schemes. Whatever the tint of their costume, the ballerine of Stamboul cherish an ineradicable partiality for pink stockings. As feminine charm increases, to the eye of an Oriental admirer, in direct proportion to the avoirdupois of the charmer, the effect is sometimes startling.

The entertainment offered by these ladies is more of the East than of the West. It is a combination of song and dance, accompanied by strings and the clapping of the castanet. The music is even more monotonous, in the literal sense of the word, than that of the fine lute. To the tyro one song sounds exactly like another, each beginning on the same high note and each glissando to the same low one. And you are inclined to protest that a lady suffering from so cruel a cold should never be permitted to leave her room, much less appear in pink stockings at midnight on a ramshackle wooden stage. But there is a melancholy passion in those endless love-songs that haunts the memory—at least of most of those present, who listen in the silence of perfect appreciation. The dancing into which each song dies away has been a little more tampered with by the West. While the basis of it is the Arab danse du ventre, it is a danse du ventre chastened by the cult of the toe. What there may be of grossness about it is pleasantly tempered for an occasional spectator by the personal equation. I remember watching, once, an almée who must have been in her prime before many of her public were in their cradles. But they had grown up in her tradition, and cries of “One more!” greeted each effort of her poor old cracked voice. There was nothing pitiable about it. The audience had a frank affection for her, independent of her overripe enchantments, and she danced terrible dances for them, eyes half shut, with a grandmotherly indulgence that entirely took away from the nature of what she was doing.

So popular is this form of entertainment that it is thrown in as a sop to sweeten most of the variety performances with which Ramazan abounds. The street of Stamboul where the theatres cluster is a perfect Bowery of cinematographs, music-halls, shooting-galleries, acrobatic exhibitions, and side-shows of a country circus. But it is a Bowery with the reputation of Broadway, and a picturesqueness that neither can boast. Part of the picturesqueness it had when I first knew it has gone—in the shape of the quaint arcades that lined one stretch of it. But the succession of bright little coffee-houses remains, and the white mosque, ethereal at night among its dark trees, that Süleïman the Magnificent built in memory of his dead son. Crowds and carriages abound in Shah-zadeh-Bashi until two o’clock in the morning, itinerant peddlers of good things to eat and drink call their wares, tom-toms beat, and pipes cry their wild invitation to various smoky interiors.

Wrestlers

One interior to which they invite is the open space, enclosed by green tent-cloth and not too brilliantly lighted, where may be seen the great Turkish sport of wrestling. Spectators of distinction are accommodated with chairs under an awning; the others squat on their heels around the ring. The wrestlers, sometimes several pairs at a time, appear barefooted, in leather breeches reaching just below the knee. Their first act, if you please, is to anoint themselves from head to foot with oil. That done, each couple stand side by side, join right hands, and bend with the right foot forward, while an old man recites over them some incomprehensible rubric, giving their names and recommending them to the suffrage of the public. They then prance forward to the tent of honour, alternately clapping their hands and their leather legs. There they kneel on one knee and salaam three times. Finally, after more prancing and slapping, during the course of which they hastily shake hands once as they run past each other, they are ready to begin. They do so by facing each other at arm’s length, putting their hands on each other’s shoulders and bending forward till their heads touch. They make no attempt at clinching. That is apparently the one hold forbidden. The game is to throw their opponent by pushing his head down till they can get him around the body or by catching at his legs. Slippery as the wrestlers are with oil, it is no easy matter. Time after time one will seem to have his man, only to let him wriggle away. Then they go at each other again with a defiant “Ho-ho!” The trick is generally done in the end by getting hold of the breeches. When, at last, one of the two is thrown, the oily opponents tenderly embrace and then make a round of the ring collecting tips. Celebrated wrestlers, however, collect their money first. The scene is picturesque enough under the moon of Ramazan, with the nude figures glistening in the lamplight, the dimmer ring of faces encircling them, and the troubled music of pipe and drum mounting into the night.

I must beware of giving the impression that Ramazan is merely a holiday season. It is a holy month, and during its term religious zeal rises higher than at any other time. It is enjoined upon the faithful to read the Koran through during Ramazan, and to perform other meritorious deeds. The last prayer of the day, which occurs two hours after sunset, takes on a special significance. Ordinarily known as yassî, it is then called teravi—repose—and in place of the usual five prostrations twenty-two are performed. The ungodly say that this is to aid the digestion of those who have just eaten a heavy iftar. Preaching also takes place every night in the mosques, and many of the services are attended by women. This custom was utilised during the Ramazan of 1326, otherwise 1908, for enlightening the provinces on the subject of the constitution, as it was in the capital for various attempts to subvert the same.