Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

A house at Aya Kapou

The inside of the house is almost as simple as the outside—or it used to be before Europe infected it. A great entrance hall, paved with marble, runs through the house from street to garden, for almost no house in Stamboul lacks its patch of green; and branching or double stairways lead to the upper regions. Other big halls are there, with niches and fountains set in the wall. The rooms opening out on either hand contain almost no furniture. The so-called Turkish corner which I fear is still the pride of some Western interiors never originated anywhere but in the diseased imagination of an upholsterer. The beauty of an old Turkish room does not depend on what may have been brought into it by chance, but on its own proportion and colour. On one side, covering the entire wall, should be a series of cupboards and niches, which may be charmingly decorated with painted flowers and gilt or coloured moulding. The ceiling is treated in the same way, the strips of moulding being applied in some simple design. Of real wood-carving there is practically none, though the doors are panelled in great variety and the principle of the lattice is much used. There may also be a fireplace, not set off by a mantel, but by a tall pointed hood. And if there is a second tier of windows they may contain stained glass or some interesting scheme of mullioning. But do not look for chairs, tables, draperies, pictures, or any of the thousand gimcracks of the West that only fill a room without beautifying it. A long low divan runs under the windows, the whole length of the wall, or perhaps of two, furnished with rugs and embroidered cushions. Other rugs, as fine as you please, cover the floor. Of wall space there is mercifully very little, for the windows crowd so closely together that there is no room to put anything between them, and the view is consciously made the chief ornament of the room. Still, on the inner walls may hang a text or two, written by or copied from some great calligraphist. The art of forming beautiful letters has been carried to great perfection by the Turks, who do not admit—or who until recently did not admit—any representation of living forms. Inscriptions, therefore, take with them the place of pictures, and they collect the work of famous calligraphs as Westerners collect other works of art. While a real appreciation of this art requires a knowledge which few foreigners possess, any foreigner should be able to take in the decorative value of the Arabic letters. There are various systems of forming them, and there is no limit to the number of ways in which they may be grouped. By adding to an inscription its reverse, it is possible to make a symmetrical figure which sometimes resembles a mosque, or the letters may be fancifully made to suggest a bird or a ship. Texts from the Koran, invocations of the Almighty, the names of the caliphs and of the companions of the Prophet, and verses of Persian poetry are all favourite subjects for the calligrapher. I have also seen what might very literally be called a word-picture of the Prophet. To paint a portrait of him would contravene all the traditions of the cult; but there exists a famous description of him which is sometimes written in a circle, as it were the outline of a head, on an illuminated panel.

The house of the pipe

However, I did not start out to describe the interior of Stamboul, of which I know as little as any man. That, indeed, is one element of the charm of Stamboul—the sense of reserve, of impenetrability, that pervades its Turkish quarters. The lattices of the windows, the veils of the women, the high garden walls, the gravity and perfect quiet of the streets at night, all contribute to that sense. From the noisy European quarter on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, where life is a thing of shreds and patches, without coherent associations and without roots, one looks over to Stamboul and gets the sense of another, an unknown life, reaching out secret filaments to the uttermost parts of the earth. Strange faces, strange costumes, strange dialects come and go, on errands not necessarily too mysterious, yet mysterious enough for one who knows nothing of the literature of the East, its habits, its real thought and hope and belief. We speak glibly of knowing Turkey and the Turks—we who have lived five or ten or fifty years among them; but very few of us, I notice, have ever known them well enough to learn their language or read their books. And so into Stamboul we all go as outsiders. Yet there are aspects of Stamboul which are not so inaccessible. Stamboul at work, Stamboul as a market-place, is a Stamboul which welcomes the intruder—albeit with her customary gravity: if a man buttonholes you in the street and insists that you look at his wares you may be sure that he is no Turk. This is also a Stamboul which has never been, which never can be, sufficiently celebrated. The Bazaars, to be sure, figure in all the books of travel, and are visited by every one; but they are rather sighed over nowadays, as having lost a former glory. I do not sigh over them, myself. I consider that by its very arrangement the Grand Bazaar possesses an interest which can never disappear. It is a sort of vast department store, on one floor though not on one level, whose cobbled aisles wander up hill and down dale, and are vaulted solidly over with stone. And in old times, before the shops or costumes of Pera were, and when the beau monde came here to buy, a wonderful department store it must have been. In our economic days there may be less splendour, but there can hardly be less life; and if Manchester prints now largely take the place of Broussa silk and Scutari velvet, they have just as much colour for the modern impressionist. They also contribute to the essential colour of Constantinople, which is neither Asiatic nor European, but a mingling of both.

A last fragment of old Stamboul is walled in the heart of this maze, a square enclosure of deeper twilight which is called the Bezesten. Tradition has it that the shopkeepers of the Bezesten originally served God as well as mammon, and were required to give a certain amount of time to their mosques. Be that as it may, they still dress in robe and turban, and they keep shorter hours than their brethren of the outer bazaar. They sit at the receipt of custom, not in shops but on continuous platforms, grave old men to whom it is apparently one whether you come or go, each before his own shelf and cupboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl; and they deal only in old things. I do not call them antiques, though such things may still be picked up—for their price—in the Bezesten and out of it, and though the word is often on the lips of the old men. I will say for them, however, that on their lips it merely means something exceptional of its kind. They could recommend you an egg or a spring lamb no more highly than by calling it antika. At any rate, the Bezesten is almost a little too good to be true. It might have been arranged by some Gérôme who studied the exact effect of dusty shafts of light striking down from high windows on the most picturesque confusion of old things—stuffs, arms, rugs, brasses, porcelain, jewelry, silver, odds and ends of bric-à-brac. In that romantic twilight an antique made in Germany becomes precious, and the most abominable modern rug takes on the tone of time.

The real rug market of Constantinople is not in the Bazaars nor yet in the hans of Mahmoud Pasha, but in the Stamboul custom-house. There the bales that come down from Persia and the Caucasus, as well as from Asia Minor and even from India and China, are opened and stored in great piles of colour, and there the wholesale dealers of Europe and America do most of their buying. The rugs are sold by the square metre in the bale, so that you may buy a hundred pieces in order to get one or two you particularly want. Burly Turkish porters or black-capped Persians are there to turn over the rugs for you, shaking out the dust of Asia into the European air. Bargaining is no less long and fierce than in the smaller affairs of the Bazaars, though both sides know better what they are up to. Perhaps it is for this reason that the sale is often made by a third party. The referee, having first obtained the consent of the principals to abide by his decision—“Have you content?” is what he asks them—makes each sign his name in a note-book, in which he then writes the compromise price, saying, “Sh-sh!” if they protest. Or else he takes a hand of each between both of his own and names the price as he shakes the hands up and down, the others crying out: “Aman! Do not scorch me!” Then coffees are served all around and everybody departs happy. As communications become easier the buyers go more and more to the headquarters of rug-making, so that Constantinople will not remain indefinitely what it is now, the greatest rug market in the world. But it will long be the chief assembling and distributing point for this ancient trade.

There are two other covered markets, both in the vicinity of the Bridge, which I recommend to all hunters after local colour. The more important, from an architectural point of view, is called Mîssîr Charshî, Corn or Egyptian Market, though Europeans know it as the Spice Bazaar. It consists of two vaulted stone streets that cross each other at right angles. It was so badly damaged in the earthquake of 1894 that many of its original tenants moved away, giving place to stuffy quilt and upholstery men. Enough of the former are left, however, to make a museum of strange powders and electuaries, and to fill the air with the aroma of the East. And the quaint woodwork of the shops, the dusty little ships and mosques that hang as signs above them, the decorative black frescoing of the walls, are quite as good in their way as the Bezesten. The Dried Fruit Bazaar, I am afraid, is a less permanent piece of old Stamboul. It is sure to burn up or to be torn down one of these days, because it is a section of the long street—almost the only level one in the city—that skirts the Golden Horn. I hope it will not disappear, however, before some etcher has caught the duskiness of its branching curve, with squares of sky irregularly spaced among the wooden rafters, and corresponding squares of light on the cobblestones below, and a dark side corridor or two running down to a bright perspective of water and ships. All sorts of nuts and dried fruits are sold there, in odd company with candles and the white ribbons and artificial flowers without which no Greek or Armenian can be properly married.

This whole quarter is one of markets, and some of them were old in Byzantine times. The fish market, one of the richest in the world, is here. The vegetable market is here, too, at the head of the outer bridge, where it can be fed by the boats of the Marmora. And all night long horse bells jingle through the city, bringing produce which is sold in the public square in the small hours of the morning. Provisions of other kinds, some of them strange to behold and stranger to smell, are to be had in the same region. In the purlieus of Yeni Jami, too, may be admired at its season a kind of market which is a specialty of Constantinople. The better part of it is installed in the mosque yard, where cloth and girdles and shoes and other commodities meet for the raiment of man and woman are sold under awnings or big canvas umbrellas. But other sections of it, as the copper market and the flower market, overflow beyond the Spice Bazaar. The particularity of this Monday market is that it is gone on Tuesday, being held in a different place on every day of the week. Then this is a district of hans, which harbour a commerce of their own. Some of these are hotels, where comers from afar camp out in tiers of stone galleries about an open court. Others are places of business or of storage and, as the latter, are more properly known by the name kapan. The old Fontego or Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice, and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, are built on the same plan and originally served the same purpose. The Italian word fondaco comes from the Arabic fîndîk, which in turn was derived from the πανδοχεῖον of Constantinople. But whether any of these old stone buildings might trace a Byzantine or Venetian ancestry I cannot say. The habit of Stamboul to burn up once in so often made them very necessary, and in spite of the changes that have taken place in business methods they are still largely used. And all about them are the headquarters of crafts—wood-turning, basket-making, amber-cutting, brass-beating—in alleys which are highly profitable to explore.

One of the things that make those alleys not least profitable is the grape-vine that somehow manages to grow in them. It is no rarity, I am happy to report. That grape-vine is one of the most decorative elements of Stamboul streets; and to me, at least, it has a whole philosophy to tell. It was never planted for the profit of its fruit. Vines allowed to grow as those vines grow cannot bear very heavily, and they are too accessible for their grapes to be guarded. They were planted, like the traghetto vines in Venice, because they give shade and because they are good to look upon. Some of them are trained on wires across the street, making of the public way an arbour that seduces the passer-by to stop and taste the taste of life.