Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Part of it covered the adjoining slopes, where peaceably inclined spectators, including Turkish women not a few, might also contemplate the blossoming peach-trees that added their colour to the occasion, and the farther panorama of Bosphorus and Marmora. But the crux of the proceedings was in a small hollow below the tomb. I must confess that I shrank from joining the press of the faithful about the grotto of the sacred fount. I contented myself with hovering on their outskirts. A black group of priestly cylinders marked the densest part of the crowd, and near them a sheaf of candles burned strangely in the clear spring sunlight. A big refreshment tent was pitched not too far away to receive the overflow of devotion, reaching out canvas arms to make further space for tables and chairs. The faded green common to Turkish tents was lined with dark red, appliquéd to which were panels of white flower-pots and flowers. I wondered if the tent-man wittingly repeated this note of the day. For flowers were everywhere in evidence. Lilacs, tulips, hyacinths, jonquils, violets, and narcissi were on sale under big green canvas umbrellas at the edge of the hollow, while every other pilgrim who came away from the áyazma carried a bottle of holy water in one hand and a spring flower in the other.

Interesting as is the panayíri of the forty martyrs, it does not rank with the later and greater spring festival of St. George. This also has Turkish affiliations—at least in Constantinople and Macedonia. Both races count St. George’s Day, April 23d/May 6th, the official beginning of summer—of the good time, as modern Greek pleasantly puts it. The Turks, however, dedicate the day to Hîd’r Eless. But it is not too difficult to relate this somewhat vague personage to our more familiar friend Elijah, who in his character of St. Elias shares with St. George the mantle of Apollo. Nor is the heavenly charioteer the only one of the Olympians whose cult survives to-day among their faithful people. The Hebrew prophet would doubtless have been much astonished to learn that he was to be the heir of a Greek god. He owes it partly to the similarity of his name to the Greek word for sun and partly to the chariot of fire that carried him out of the world. As for “the infamous George of Cappadocia,” as Gibbon denominates the patron saint of our ancestral island, his part in the heritage of Apollo is due to his dragon, cousin german to the python of the Far Darter. The sanctuaries of these two Christian legatees of Olympus have replaced those of Apollo on all hilltops, while their name-days are those when men feasted of old the return and the midsummer splendour of the sun.

The place among places to celebrate St. George’s Day is Prinkipo. That delicious island deserves a book to itself. Indeed, I believe several have been written about it. One of them is by a political luminary of our own firmament who flamed for a moment across the Byzantine horizon and whose counterfeit presentment, in a bronze happily less enduring than might be, hails the motor men of Astor Place, New York. Sunset Cox’s work bears the ingratiating title of “The Pleasures of Prinkipo; or, The Diversions of a Diplomat”—if that be the order of the alternatives. The pleasures of Prinkipo are many as its red and white sage roses, but none of them is more characteristic than to climb the Sacred Way through olive and cypress and pine to the little monastery crowning the higher hill of the island, and to take part in the ceremonies of rejoicing over the return of the sun. This is a panayíri much frequented by the people of the Marmora, who come in their fishing-boats from distant villages of the Marble Sea. Their costumes become annually more corrupt, I am pained to state; but there are still visible among them ladies in print, sometimes even in rich velvet, trousers of a fulness, wearing no hat but a painted muslin handkerchief over the hair, and adorned with dowries in the form of strung gold coins. They do not all come to make merry. Among them are not a few ill or deformed, who hope a miracle from good St. George. You may see them lying pale and full of faith on the strewn bay of the little church. They are allowed to pass the night there, in order to absorb the virtue of the holy place. I have even known of a sick child’s clothes being left in the church a year in hope of saving its life.

But these are only incidents in the general tide of merrymaking. Eating and drinking, music and dance, go on without interruption for three days and three nights. The music is made in many ways, of which the least popular is certainly not the way of the lanterna. The lanterna is a kind of hand-organ, a hand-piano rather, of Italian origin but with an accent and an interspersing of bells peculiar to Constantinople. It should attract the eye as well as the ear, usually by means of the portrait of some beauteous being set about with a garland of artificial flowers. And it is engineered by two young gentlemen in fezzes of an extremely dark red, in short black jackets or in bouffant shirt-sleeves of some magnificent print, with a waistcoat more double-breasted than you ever saw and preferably worn unbuttoned; also in red or white girdles, in trousers that flare toward the bottom like a sailor’s, and in shoes or slippers that should have no counter. Otherwise the rules demand that the counter be turned under the wearer’s heel. Thus accoutred he bears his lanterna on his back from patron to patron and from one panayíri to another. His companion carries a camp-stool, whereon to rest his instrument while turning the handle hour in and hour out. I happen, myself, to be not a little subject to the spell of music. I have trembled before Fitzner, Kneisel, and Sevčik quartettes and I have touched infinity under the subtlest bows and batons of my time. Yet I must confess that I am able to listen to a lanterna without displeasure. On one occasion I listened to many of them, accompanied by pipes, drums, gramophones, and wandering violins, for the whole of a May night on St. George’s hilltop in Prinkipo. What is more, I understood in myself how the Dionysiac frenzy was fed by the cymbals of the mænads, and I resented all the inhibitions of a New England origin that kept me from joining the dancers. Some of them were the Laz porters of the island, whose exhausting measure was more appropriate to such an orgy than to Easter Monday. Others were women, for once; but they kept demurely to themselves, apparently untouched by any corybantic fury. The same could not be said of their men, whose dancing was not always decent. They were bareheaded, or wore a handkerchief twisted about their hair like a fillet, and among them were faces that might have looked out of an Attic frieze. It gave one the strangest sense of the continuity of things. In the lower darkness a few faint lights were scattered. One wondered how, to them, must seem the glare and clangour of this island hilltop, ordinarily so silent and deserted. The music went up to the quiet stars, the revellers danced unwearying, a half-eaten moon slowly lighted the dark sea, a spring air moved among the pines, and then a greyness came into the east, near the Bithynian Olympus, and at last the god of hilltops rode into a cloud-barred sky.

The second feast of Apollo takes place at midsummer, namely on St. Elias’s Day (July 20/August 2). Arnaout-kyöi is where it may be most profitably admired. Arnaout-kyöi—Albanian Village—is the Turkish name of a thriving suburb which the Greeks call Great Current, from the race of the Bosphorus past its long point. It perhaps requires a fanatical eye to discover anything Apollonic in that lively settlement. No one will gainsay, however, that the joy of life is visible and audible enough in Arnaout-kyöi during the first three days of August. There also is a sacred way, leading out of an odoriferous ravine to a high place and a grove, whither all men gather in the heat of the day to partake of the water of a holy well. But waters less sanctified begin to flow more freely as night draws on, along the cool quay and in the purlieus thereof. Fringes of coloured paper are strung from house to house, flags hang out of windows or across the street, wine-shops are splendid with banners, rugs, and garlands of bay, and you may be sure that the sound of the lanterna is not unheard in the land. The perfection of festivity is to attach one of these inspiriting instruments to your person for the night. The thing may be done for a dollar or two. You then take a table at a café and order with your refreshments a candle, which you light and cause to stand with a little of its own grease. In the meantime perhaps you buy as many numbers as your means will allow out of a bag offered you by a young gentleman with a watermelon under his arm, hoping to find among them the mystic number that will make the melon your own. But you never do. When your candle has burned out—or even before, if you be so prodigal—you move on with your lanterna to another café. And so wears the short summer night away.

To the sorrow of those who employ Greek labour, but to the joy of him who dabbles in Greek folklore, panayíria increase in frequency as summer draws to a close. The picturesque village of Kandilli, opposite Arnaout-kyöi—and any church dedicated to the Metamorphosis—is the scene of an interesting one on Transfiguration Day (August 6/19). No good Greek eats grapes till after the Transfiguration. At the mass of that morning baskets of grapes are blessed by the priests and afterward passed around the church. I know not whether some remnant of a bacchic rite be in this solemnity. It so happens that the delicious chaoush grapes of Constantinople, which have spoiled me for all others that I know, ripen about that time. But as the blessing of the waters drives away the kallikántzari, so the blessing of the grapes puts an end to the evil influence of the thrímes. The thrímes are probably descended from the dryads of old. Only they now haunt the water, instead of the trees, and their influence is baleful during the first days of August. Clothes washed then are sure to rot, while the fate of him so bold as to bathe during those days is to break out into sores.

The next great feast is that of the Assumption, which is preceded by a fortnight’s fast. Those who would see its panegyric celebrated with due circumstance should row on the 28th of August to Yeni-kyöi and admire the plane-shaded avenue of that fashionable village, decorated in honour of the occasion and musical with mastic glasses and other instruments of sound. A greater panayíri, however, takes place a month later in the pleasant meadows of Gyök Sou, known to Europe as the Sweet Waters of Asia. Two feasts indeed, the Nativity of the Virgin and the Exaltation of the Cross (September 8/21 and 14/27), then combine to make a week of rejoicing. There is nothing to be seen at Gyök Sou that may not be seen at other fêtes of the same kind. I do recollect, though, a dance of Anatolian peasants in a ring, who held each other first by the little finger, then by the hand, then by the elbow, and lastly by the shoulder. And the amphoræ of the local pottery works in which people carry away their holy water give the rites of the áyazma a classic air. But this panayíri has an ampler setting than the others, in its green river valley dotted with great trees, and it enjoys an added importance because it is to all practical purposes the last of the season. No one can count on being able to make merry out-of-doors on St. Demetrius’s Day (October 26 / November 8). St. Demetrius is as interesting a personality as St. George. He also is an heir of divinity, for on him, curiously enough, have devolved the responsibilities of the goddess Demeter. He is the patron of husbandmen, who discharge labourers and lease fields on his day. Among working people his is a favourite season for matrimony. I know not how it is that some sailors will not go to sea after Aï Thimítri, until the waters have been blessed at Epiphany. Perhaps it is that he marks for Greeks and Turks alike the beginning of winter, being known to the latter as Kassîm. This division of the seasons is clearly connected with the Pelasgian myth of Demeter.

The feast of her successor I have never found particularly interesting, though I must say I have seen it only at Kourou Cheshmeh. Kourou Cheshmeh, or Dry Fountain, as the Turks call it, is where Medea, during her somewhat stormy honeymoon in the Argo, planted a laurel, and where a very different notability of a later day, St. Daniel the Stylite, stood for many years on a pillar. No sign of laurel or pillar are there to-day, or of the famous Byzantine church of the Archangel Michael, which existed somewhere in the vicinity and which Sultan Mehmed II pulled down to build into Cut-Throat Castle. But there is a remnant of antiquity in Kourou Cheshmeh which goes very well with feasts of Demeter. This is an old altar, half buried in the earth near the mosque of the village, festooned about with garlands between battered rams’ heads—a curiously vivid symbol of the contrasts and survivals that are so much of the interest of Constantinople.

The mosque and the Greek altar of Kourou Cheshmeh