Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Shadrîvan of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha

Most mosques, as well as medressehs and other pious institutions, also have a larger and more decorative fountain which usually stands in the middle of the court. The technical name of such a fountain is shadrîvan, or shadîravan, really meaning “for the peace of souls.” The fountain, that is, not only aids the faithful in their religious exercises, but adds so much to the celestial credit of the builder or of the person whom he commemorates. For many shadrîvans were built, after the mosque to which they are attached, by another person. Those in the courts of Baïezid and Selim, for instance, are the work of Mourad IV, whose soul needed what peace it could find, while so late a sultan as Mahmoud I built the fanciful shadrîvan in the somewhat stern court of the Conqueror as well as that in the court of St. Sophia. The last two are charming examples of the Turkish rococo. The commonest form of shadrîvan is a basin or reservoir, encircled about the bottom by taps and protected by a roof from sun and rain. The simplest type is to be seen in the medresseh yard of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, with a perfectly plain reservoir and a pointed roof held up by wooden pillars. A similar one which lies more on the track of sightseers is in front of the mosque known as Little St. Sophia, anciently the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. Here the reservoir is an octagon terminating in a cone, while the roof is tiled and ornamented at the apex with a bronze alem—a lyre or crescent containing a cobweb of Arabic letters. There are also seats between the posts for the greater convenience of those who use the fountain. Some shadrîvans are partially enclosed and made into pavilions, where it is very pleasant to rest. An excellent example exists in the yard of the mosque of Ramazan Effendi, in Issa Kapou. The perforated marble enclosing the upper part of the reservoir of this shadrîvan is a thing that is seen in many such fountains. Sometimes a handsome grille work protects the water, as at St. Sophia and Sokollî Mehmed Pasha. The latter fountain is uncommon in that the large round reservoir is the whole shadrîvan, with projecting eaves to shelter the people at the taps. But not all shadrîvans are for purposes of ablution. At the Süleïmanieh and at Yeni Jami they are merely covered tanks without taps. The shadrîvan of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari is of the same kind, except that the water falls invisibly from the roof of the tank, filling the court with a mysterious sense of sound and coolness.

Shadrîvan of Ramazan Effendi

Shadrîvan of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha

I do not suppose that street fountains are actually more numerous than private ones, but they naturally seem so to a foreigner wandering through Stamboul. It is not easy to classify them clearly, so many are the forms they take. They affect, however, two principal types, known in Turkish as cheshmeh and sebil, either of which may be attached to a wall or may exist as an independent structure. The original form is the applied cheshmeh, which is merely a wall fountain put outside the house, and enlarged in scale accordingly. These fountains are a very characteristic feature of Constantinople streets. There are literally thousands of them, and they offer so great a variety of interest that it is a wonder no one has taken the trouble to give them the study they deserve. They are a wide-spread example, for one thing, of Turkish philanthropy—and incidentally of a passing conception of public utilities. Every one of those fountains was originally a public benefaction, often made by a Sultan, it is true, and on an imperial scale, but oftener by a private citizen who wished to commemorate some member of his family, to ornament the street in which he lived, or to confer a benefit upon his neighbours. He therefore endowed his fountain, in many instances. Such endowments form an appreciable fraction of the property administered by the Department of Pious Foundations. Sometimes the benefactor stipulated that water-carriers or other persons were or were not to have the right of selling the water of his fountain. The water-carrier, the saka, belongs to a race by no means yet extinct in Constantinople, though I doubt if his guilds are quite what they were. There used to be two such guilds, of the horse sakas and of the hand sakas. The patron of both was the hero who attempted to carry water to Hüsseïn in the battle of Kerbela. The members of both may be recognised by the dripping goatskins in which they carry water from house to house. In these degenerate days, however, a hand saka is more likely to carry a couple of kerosene tins, slung over his shoulder from either end of a pole. But if he has the right to be paid for carrying water, every man has the right to go himself to the fountain and draw water without money and without price.

Until a few years ago Constantinople possessed no other water-system. Now modern water companies operate in their more invisible ways. But the Ministry of Pious Foundations is still the greatest water company of them all. That it was a fairly adequate one our American traveller of a hundred years ago is witness. Only recently, however, has the department attempted to make some sort of order out of the chaos of systems which it administers—some larger, like the water-supplies of the Sultans, some limited to the capacity of one small spring, and all based on the idea of a charity rather than that of a self-paying utility. Even now I doubt if any exact and complete map exists of the water-supply of Constantinople. The knowledge necessary to make such a map is distributed between an infinity of individuals known as souyoljîs, waterway men, who alone can tell, often, just where the pipes lie and how they are fed. And very useful, if occasionally very trying, gentlemen are these to know. This is sometimes amusingly illustrated on the outskirts of the city, where a house or a group of houses may be supplied from some small independent source of water. As time has passed and property has changed hands, the tradition of the waterway has been preserved only in some humble family that has profited by its knowledge, perhaps, to cultivate a tidy vegetable garden. And every now and then the water runs low or stops altogether in the quarter for whose benefit it was originally made to flow, until on payment of a tip to the souyoljî it miraculously begins to flow again.