Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Sebil of Sultan Ahmed III

The most beautiful example of all, the king, in fact, of Constantinople street fountains, is the one which Ahmed III built outside the great gate of the Seraglio. It stands four-square on a circular marble base, having a curved sebil window at each corner and the pointed arch of a cheshmeh in the middle of each side. The overhanging roof is crowned by live fantastic little domes and gilded alems. The traceries are not quite so delicate, perhaps, as those of Top Haneh, nor does the whiteness of marble make up any of the effect of this fountain. The brightness of its original polychrome decoration has acquired a soft patina of time. The main effect is given here by the great gold inscriptions on a blue-green ground, framed in plain terra-cotta, and by a frieze of blue and white tiles enclosed between two bands of a delicious dark velvety green. The principal chronogram of the fountain, facing St. Sophia, was written by the Sultan himself. It is said that his first version added up to four less than the required sum, which should have been 1141 (1729). It read: “The date of Sultan Ahmed flows from the tongue of the faucet. Praising God, drink of the fountain and pray for Ahmed Khan.” A witty ecclesiastic to whom his majesty confided his dilemma solved the difficulty by suggesting that it was necessary to turn on the water before it would flow. The imperial poet thereupon added the word “open” to his second hemistich and completed the chronogram. The other inscriptions were chosen by competition from among the chief poets of the day. This fountain is unsurpassed for the richness of its detail. Even the under-side of the eaves is decorated with wavy gilt mouldings and painted reliefs of fruit and flowers. But the details take nothing away from the general effect. It is the balance of them, after all, the admirable silhouette, the perfect proportion, that give this monument its singular beauty and dignity.

There is another large detached sebil in Galata, near the bridge of Azap Kapou. It was built soon after the fountain of Ahmed III by the mother of Sultan Mahmoud I. Crowded between the surrounding houses, it enjoys no such advantages of perspective as its more famous rivals of St. Sophia and Top Haneh. The greater part of the edifice, indeed, is no more than a blank stone reservoir. But the side facing the main street is treated with a masterly sense of its position. Projecting out from the centre is the circular sebil window, filled with a rich bronze grille, while set a little back on either side, and slightly inclined toward either perspective of the street, are two tall cheshmehs. The niche of each and the whole face of the structure is incrusted with intricate floral reliefs more delicate even than those of Top Haneh, though not executed in so white a stone. There are also pots and vases of flowers and sheaves of wheat, and above the tap of each niche is a pointed openwork boss of bronze. Here, too, the richness of the ornament combines with the composition and height of the façade and the sweep of the eaves to reach something not far from a grand air.

No other sebil of the left bank is executed in so refined a style as this. But many other fountains, in all parts of the city, have a happy knack of filling a space or turning a corner or screening a dark interior with twisted metal work. The difficulty is to choose instances. I might mention the sebil of Baïram Pasha at Avret Bazaar; of Mehmed Emin Effendi, half fountain and half tomb, which lends its elegance to the neighbourhood of Dolma Ba’hcheh Palace; of Abd ül Hamid I at Fîndîklî; of Laleli Jami, the Tulip Mosque, which Moustafa III built at Ak Seraï. For the Western architect they are full of unexpected suggestions, if he have the eye to see, while to the mere irresponsible impressionist they make up a great part in the strangeness and charm of the Turkish capital.

XIII
A TURKISH VILLAGE

There are larger villages. There are more prosperous villages. There are villages more fashionable. Great ladies lift their eyebrows when we pronounce its name, even ladies not so great, and decide that we will hardly do for their visiting lists. But few villages are so picturesque as ours. And in one respect at least we are surpassed by no village. For we sit on that cleft promontory of the Bosphorus where, during the league-long coquetry of the two continents before their final union, Europe most closely approaches Asia. The mother of nations, as we see her some eight hundred yards away, is a slope sunburnt or green according to the time of year but always discreetly overlooked by farther heights of blue, a slope sharp enough, not too high, admirably broken by valleys and points and one perfect little bay for which I sometimes think I would give all the rest of the Bosphorus, a slope beaded irregularly along the bottom with red-roofed summer valîs, variegated with gardens and hamlets and nestling patches of wood, and feathered along the top with cypresses and stone-pines in quite an Italian manner. For my part, I fail to see why any one should ever have desired to leave so delectable a continent, particularly at a period when the hospitality of our village must have been more scant than it is now. But history has recorded many a migration to our side of the strait. Here Xenophon crossed with the remnant of his ten thousand. Here Darius sat upon a throne of rock and watched Persia swarm after him against the Scythians. Here, too, the great emperor Heraclius, returning to Constantinople after his triumphs in the East, caused a pontoon bridge to be railed high with woven branches in order to screen from his eyes the water he dreaded more than blood. And here Sultan Mehmed II opened the campaign which ended in the fall of the Roman Empire.

The castle he built in 1452, the summer before he took Constantinople, is what gives our village its character and its name. Roumeli Hissar means Roman, Greek, European, or western castle, distinguishing us from the opposite village of Andolou Hissar, where stand the ruins of the earlier fortress of Baïezid the Thunderbolt. To see the two round towers of Roumeli Hissar facing each other across a ravine, the polygonal keep at the water’s edge, the crenelated walls and turrets irregularly enclosing the steep triangle between them, you would never guess that they sprang up in about the time of a New York apartment-house. Yet that they did so is better attested than the legend that their arrangement reproduces the Arabic letters of their builder’s name. Having demanded permission of the Greek emperor to put up a hunting-lodge on the Bosphorus, the Conqueror proceeded to employ an army of masons, in addition to his own troops, with orders to destroy any buildings they found convenient to use for material. So it is that the shafts and capitals of columns, the pieces of statues, the fragments of decorative brick and marble, that give so interesting a variety of detail to the structure are a last dim suggestion of the ancient aspects of the village. One of its Byzantine names was that of the Asomaton, the Bodiless Angels, to whom a monastery in the place was dedicated, while earlier still a temple of Hermes had existed there. In three months the hunting-lodge was ready for occupancy, and the Sultan called it Cut-Throat Castle, a play on the Turkish word which means both throat and strait. It put the Bosphorus at his mercy, as a Venetian galley that went to the bottom under a big stone cannon-ball was the first to testify—though the Genoese commanded the mouth of the Black Sea from another pair of castles. But in spite of their hasty construction the walls have withstood the decay and the earthquakes of nearly five hundred years. Will as much be said of existing New York apartment-houses in the twenty-fifth century?

Cut-Throat Castle from the water