Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Nothing could be more abrupt than the contrast between the slopes facing each other across the busy waterway, with all their picturesque detail of garden, roof, and minaret, and the plateau of which the Bosphorus is nothing but a crooked blue crack. From the Place of Martyrs it rolls desolately away to the west, almost without a house or a tree to break its monotony. Gullies cut it here and there. Patches of scrub-oak darken its surface. Sheep move slowly across it, looking in the distance like maggots in a texture of homespun. Otherwise you would never suppose that life existed there. As you watch the sun set across those great empty fields it is incredible that somewhere beyond them tilled lands and swarming cities are. Your impression is not of mere wildness, however. Two abandoned stone windmills on a far-off hill give the note of the impression. Such silence is the silence that follows upon the beating of many drums. You may sit upon that hilltop in evening light and drink melancholy like an intoxication, musing upon all the change and indifference of the world. Yet life lingers there still—life that neither indifference nor change, nor time nor ruin nor death can ever quite stamp out. Threads of water creep through some of the dry gullies, swelling after rain into noisy brooks. Above them hang patches of cultivation, dominated by the general brownness and bareness, but productive of excellent strawberries in the spring. That, too, is one of the times when the brown brightens for a little to green, while June colours whole tracts of hillside with butcher’s-broom and the wild rose. And then I have said nothing of heather, of crocuses, of violets, of I know not how many flowers scattered along certain lonely lanes. On the edge of the village these are paved like streets and pleasantly arched with bay-trees. In the bottoms of the ravines, also, they have in their season quite a sylvan air. They lead to stony trails in the open where you may meet a soldier, an Albanian shepherd, or a peasant in gay jacket and baggy blue trousers, wandering from nowhere to nowhere.

But I wander too far from our village, from that larger part of it which the exigencies of space must long ago have pushed northward out of the castle close into the underlying valley. There are those who deprecate our streets, their many steps, the manner of their paving, the irresoluteness with which they proceed to their destined ends, and the desultoriness of their illumination at night. I, however, am partial to a Gothic irregularity, and I applaud the law which admonishes us not to go abroad two hours after sunset without a lantern. We do not take the admonition too seriously, but there are chances enough of breaking our necks on moonless nights to maintain a market among us for paper lanterns. These, with the candles flaring in front of sacred tombs and the casual window lamplight so pleasingly criss-crossed by lattices, make Whistler nocturnes for us that they may never know who dwell in the glare of electricity.

If I find anything to deprecate it is the tendency gaining ground among us to depart from the ways of our fathers in the matter of domestic architecture. The jig-saw and the paint pot begin to exercise their fatal fascination upon us who were so long content with simple lines and the colour of weathered wood. But the pert gables of the day are still outnumbered by square old many-windowed houses with low-pitched roofs of red tiles and corbelled upper stories inherited from the Byzantines. Under the eaves you will often see a decorative text from the Koran, framed like a picture, which insures the protection of heaven better than premium or policy. No house is too small to have a garden, walled as a garden should be, and doing more for the outsider by its green suggestions of withdrawal than by any complete revelation of its charms. Few of these pleasances do not enjoy some view of the Bosphorus. I know one such, containing a Byzantine capital that makes the cedar of Lebanon above it throw as secular a shade as you please, so cunningly laid out at length on the hillside that the Bosphorus is a mere ornamental water of a lower terrace. This Grand Canal of Constantinople enters bodily into certain thrice enviable yalîs on the water’s edge. Their windows overhang the sea, or are separated from it merely by a narrow causeway. And each contains its own marble basin for boats, communicating with the open by a water-gate or by a canal or tunnel through the quay.

Distinctively Turkish as the flavour of our village is, we yet resemble the city and the empire to which we are tributary in the variety of our population. Of Greeks there are few. It was perhaps natural for them to flee the first stronghold of their conquerors on this side of the Bosphorus—if they ever inhabited it in any number. An Armenian quarter, however, scrambles up the north side of the valley. You can recognise the houses by their lack of lattices, and the priest by the high conical crown of his hat. There are also Albanians, Croats, Jews, Macedonians, and Montenegrins among us, in addition to nothing less exotic than a small Anglo-American colony. It dwells on the upper fringe of habitation, the American part of it being connected, principally, with the college founded by a Mr. Robert of New York.

The grey stone buildings stand on a splendid terrace above the south tower of the castle, visible from afar. And they always make me sorry that such a chance was lost for some rare person equal to the opportunity, who should have combined a knowledge of modern educational requirements with a feeling for the simple broad-eaved houses of the country and their picturesque corbels. However, there the grey stone buildings stand, ugly and foreign, but solid and sufficient, an object of suspicion to some, to others an example of the strange vicissitudes of the world, whereby above a promontory sacred once to Hermes, later to Byzantine saints, and again to Mohammed, there should fly to-day the flag of a country so distant as our own. The condition on which the flag flies is not the least picturesque of these incongruities. The proprietors from whom the first land was obtained were the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and in conformity with the law governing such property the college bound itself to pay them, in addition to the price of purchase, a yearly tribute of some fourteen dollars.

I might speak of other public institutions flourishing in our midst: of the primary school by the water where you hear the children studying aloud while they rock back and forth over the Koran; of the Sünbüllü dervishes farther down the quay, to whom laden wood boats throw out a few sticks as they tow up the five-mile current; of the howling dervishes, and the clever ruse by which they obtained their building; of our three mosques—to say nothing of the imam’s mother of the smallest of them, an active yet beneficent public institution in herself, who, when the American college dug foundations for a wall round a slope long beloved by the Turkish ladies, threw her ample person most literally into the breach and could only be persuaded to retire therefrom by the Ministry of Public Works. Nor should I pass over our village green, which was once a cemetery, but which is now a common meeting-place for those of us who are happy enough to live about it. Some of us spend most of our time there, in the company of our wives, our children, our horses, our donkeys, and our hens. Most notable among the habitués—at least to an alien eye—is a lady of African descent, espoused to a meek Caucasian water-carrier and the mother of an infinite chocolate-and-cream progeny. Her ardent disposition is reported to have led her through many vicissitudes, matrimonial and otherwise. On one occasion it led her to scratch out the eyes of another habituée of the green, over some matter of mulberries. It is a proof of the reasonableness of justice among us that when condemned to a brief term of imprisonment she first succeeded in postponing the execution of the sentence, I believe through some expectation of presenting the happy water-carrier with a new chocolate-cream, and then in causing her term to be subdivided, alternately languishing in dungeons and enjoying the society of her family until she had paid the full penalty of the law.

A larger, the true centre of our municipal life, is the charshî, or market-place. Very notable, to the mind of one admirer, is ours among market-places. My admiration is always divided between that crooked street of it, darkened by jutting upper stories that sometimes actually jump across it, wherein are situate the principal shops, the minor cafés, a fountain or two, and the public bath, and that adjoining portion of it which lies open to the sea. The latter certainly offers the most facilities for the enjoyment of life. Indeed, one end of it is chiefly given up to a Company for the Promotion of Happiness—if one may so translate its Turkish name—whose English steamers carry us to town, seven miles away, or to the upper Bosphorus, as quickly, as regularly, and as comfortably as any company I know. It also does much to promote the happiness of those who do not travel, through the sociable employees of its wharf and by affording a picturesque va et vient at almost any hour of the day. I fear, however, that it does less to promote the happiness of the boatmen who await custom at the adjacent wooden quay. They wait in those trim little skiffs, so much neater than anything of the sort we see for hire at home, which have almost superseded caïques because they hold more passengers with greater comfort. And to one who observes how much of the time they do wait, and how modestly they are remunerated for their occasional excursions, it is a miracle how they contrive to live. There is no fixed tariff. If you know the ropes you pay two and a half piastres, some twelve cents, to be rowed across the Bosphorus or to the next village. For ten they will take you almost anywhere. But they eke out their incomes by fishing. We are famous for our lobsters at Roumeli Hissar.

The boatmen, and others with them, often prefer to wait in certain agreeable resorts along that same wooden platform. The first of these is the café of the Armenian, whose corner rakes the Company for the Promotion of Happiness. He profits thereby not a little, for when we wish to take a steamer we do not always trouble ourselves to look up the time-table beforehand. The Armenian is also a barber, and in his low-ceiled room of many windows you may hear, to the accompaniment of banging backgammon boards, the choicest of conversation. The only thing I have against him is that I have to pay twice as much for my coffee as a customer who wears a girdle and a fez.

The village boatmen and their skiffs