Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Photograph by Abdullah Frères

Not many early examples can remain, on account of the unfortunate propensity of Turkish houses to burn up. A number, however, are to be seen in the old palace of Top Kapou. Perfectly simple but characteristic and charming of their kind are the tiny wall fountains of a room in the “Cage,” at each end of the window-seat in front of each of the four windows. The same principle is used for more ornamental purposes by putting one basin below another in such a way that the second will catch the overflow of the first. There is a big wall fountain of this sort in the splendid hall of Süleïman the Magnificent. In a private house of much later date I have seen three graduated basins projecting from their niche, rounded and scalloped like shells. There is also a pretty selsebil of a new kind in one of the baths of the Seraglio, where the surface of the mirror stone is notched into a series of overlapping scales so as to multiply the ripple of the water. But the prettiest dripping fountain I know is in an old house in Bebek, on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It stands in the entrance hall, at an odd little angle where it will best catch the light, and it combines the miniature basins of an ordinary selsebil with a lower surface of marble scales. What is least ordinary about it, however, are the spaces of marble lace work bordering the shallow arched niche where the water trickles. There is a free space behind them in order to give the proper relief to the design. And there is an irregularity about the intertwined whorls which a Western artist would have thought beneath him, but which only adds interest to the work.

Selsebil in Bebek

The goose fountain at Kazlî

This original selsebil partakes also of the nature of a fîskieh, as the Turks onomatopoetically call a spurting fountain. In the stalactites bordering the two shallow basins at the bottom are jets which used to add to the complicated tinkle of the fountain. Spurting fountains seem to be rarer indoors than out, though I have already mentioned the beautiful one in the Kyöprülü kiosk. They are not uncommon in the outer hall of public baths. One that contravenes the canons of orthodox Mohammedan art is to be admired in the handsome bath of St. Sophia—a work of Sinan—where three dolphins, their tails in the air, spout water into a fluted basin. I have wondered if these unorthodox creatures, like the lions of so many gardens, may not perpetuate a Byzantine tradition if not actual Byzantine workmanship. I have already referred to the pigeons on a selsebil in Candilli. I have not yet referred to, though I have been considerably intrigued by, a fat goose that is the pride of a street fountain outside the Golden Gate. But on another fountain in Stamboul there is to be seen another unorthodox creature, that is of unimpeachable Mohammedan descent. The fountain is of the bubbling kind which sometimes very pleasantly adorns the centre of a room. In this case it was put into a niche in the Tile Pavilion which the Conqueror built in the Seraglio grounds. The fountain, however, would seem to date from Sultan Mourad III, who restored the kiosk in 1590. On either side of the deep rectangular recess are poetical inscriptions of that Sultan, gold on green, with a quaint little climbing border picked out of the marble in gold, and a surmounting shell. That shell, dear to the Renaissance designers and how many before them, is supposed to have made its entrance into Mohammedan architecture from this very niche. At the back of the niche is another shell, and under it the unorthodox creature, a peacock, spreads his fan. It was perhaps to diminish the importance of this unorthodox, of this probably heretical Shiïte peacock, that the artist coloured him more soberly than the flowers that bloom on either side of him, and made him combine with the shell to form the outline of a symbolic egg.

The wall fountain of Chinili-Kyöshk

A few interesting interior fountains are to be seen in mosques, though Constantinople cannot equal Broussa in this respect. St. Sophia contains two such fountains, put there by Sultan Mourad III, which are big alabaster jars fitted with taps. Two more typical ones are in Sultan Ahmed, their graceful mirror stones set against two of the enormous piers that hold up the dome. The real mosque fountains, however, are those which exist for purposes of ritual ablution outside of the smallest mesjid. There you will always see a row of small taps, set near the ground against the wall of the mosque or its yard, with stepping-stones in front of them. They are rarely treated with much elaboration except in later mosques like Nouri Osmanieh, but they agreeably break up a flat wall surface. And at Eyoub they really form one element of the picturesqueness of the outer court, with the bracketed roof that protects them from the weather and their clambering vine.