Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

The castle of Baïezid the Thunderbolt

Powerful as the fortress was in its day, and interesting as it remains as a monument to the energy and resource of its builder, it never played a great part in the martial history of the Turks. The Bosphorus was not then the important highway it is now. After the capture of Constantinople the castle degenerated into a garrison of Janissaries and a state prison of less importance than the Seven Towers. Not a few passages of romance, however, attach to that diminished period. More than one European diplomat spent a season of repose within the walls of Cut-Throat Castle, in days when international law was less finical on such points than it since has grown. And it formed a residence less agreeable than the present country embassies, if we may judge from the account that has come down to us of one such villeggiatura. This was written by a young Bohemian attaché who spent two years of the sixteenth century in enforced retirement at Roumeli Hissar. His name, Wenceslas Wratislaw, with those of other prisoners, may still be seen in the stone of a little chamber high in the north tower. In the same tower, commanding a magnificent view, the Conqueror lived while preparing his great siege. Whether this, or the angular tower by the water, or some other donjon of the Bosphorus was the Black Tower which has so unsavoury a name in Turkish annals I have never quite made up my mind.

To-day the castle has outlived even that period of usefulness. The true cut-throats skulk in the bare hills at the mouth of the Black Sea, while the ambassadors—with the single exception, it is true, of our own—pass their summers in pleasant villas presented to them by different Sultans. As for the towers, they survive only to add their picturesqueness to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, to flaunt ivy and even sizable trees from their battlements, and to afford a habitation to bats and carrion-crows. The last vestige of military uses clinging to them is the pseudo-classic guard-house that crouches under the waterside keep. The walls at least subserve the purpose, however, of sheltering a quarter of our village. One of our thoroughfares enters the double gate by the north tower, descends a breakneck alley of steps lattice-bordered and hung with vine, pauses between a fountain, a ruined mosque, and a monstrous mulberry-tree, and finally emerges upon the quay by a low arch that was once the boat entrance to the sea tower. There is to a prying foreigner some inheritance of other days in the inhabitants of this hanging suburb. They are all of the ruling race and there is about them something intrenched and aloof. The very dogs seem to belong to an older, a less tolerant, dispensation. The Constantinople street dog, notwithstanding the reputation that literature has attempted to fasten upon him, is in general the mildest of God’s creatures. But the dog of Cut-Throat Castle is quite another character. He is a distinct reactionary, lifting up his voice against the first sign of innovation. It may be that generations of surrounding walls have engendered in him the responsibilities of a private dog. At all events he resents intrusion by day, and by night is capable of the most obstinate resistance thereto.

The north tower of the castle

Another memento of that older time is to be seen in the cemetery lying under the castle wall to the south. It is, perhaps, the oldest Mohammedan burying-ground in Constantinople, or at least on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It certainly is the most romantic, with its jutting rocks, its ragged black cypresses, its round tower and crenelated wall, overhanging a blue so fancifully cut by Asiatic hills. It has, too, a spicy odour quite its own, an odour compounded of thyme, of resinous woods, of sea-salt, and I know not what aroma of antiquity. But its most precious characteristic is the grave informality it shares with other Mohammedan cemeteries. There is nothing about it to remind one of conventional mourning—no alignment of tombs, no rectilinear laying out of walks, no trim landscape gardening. It lies unwalled to the world, the gravestones scattered as irregularly on the steep hillside as the cyclamens that blossom there in February. Many of them have the same brightness of colour. The tall narrow slabs are often painted, with the decorative Arabic lettering, or some quaint floral design, picked out in gold. It is another expression of the philosophy of the guard-house soldiers who so often lounge along the water, of the boy who plays his pipe under a cypress while the village goats nibble among the graves, of the veiled women who preen their silks among the rocks on summer afternoons. The whole place is interfused with that intimacy of life and death, the sense of which makes the Asiatic so much more mature than the European. The one takes the world as he finds it, while the other must childishly beat his head against stone walls. It is the source of the strength and of the weakness of the two stocks.

We also love to congregate, or in Empedoclean moods to muse alone, about another old cemetery. There, on top of the steep slope behind the castle, you will often see a row of women, like love-birds contemplating the universe, or a grave family picnic. There too, especially on moonlight nights, you will not seldom hear voices uplifted in the passionate minor which has so compelling a charm for those who know it of old, accompanied perhaps by an oboe and the strangely broken rhythm of two little drums. It is the true music for a hilltop that is called the Place of Martyrs. The victims of the first skirmish that took place during the building of the castle lie there, under a file of oaks and cypresses. At the north end of the ridge a few broken grey stones are scattered among tufts of scrub-oak that soon give way to the rounded bareness of the hillside. At the other end newer and more honourable graves, protected by railings, attend a tekkeh of Bektash dervishes. This establishment was founded by a companion of the Conqueror. Mohammed gave him, as the story goes, all the land he could see from the top of the hill. The present sheikh is a descendant of the founder, but I do not believe he inherited all the land he can see. The view from the Place of Martyrs is one of the finest on the Bosphorus. I am not of the company of certain travellers in the matter of that famous strait. I have seen hills with greater nobility of outline and waters of a more satisfying blue. But when one has made all due reservations in the interest of one’s private allegiances the fact remains that the Bosphorus is a charming piece of water enclosed between charmingly moulded hills. It bends below you like a narrow lake as you see it from the Place of Martyrs. The northern sea is invisible; but southward the tops of islands look over the heights of Scutari, and the Marmora glimmers to the feet of a ghostly range that sometimes pretends not to be there.