Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

A few doors away dwell the Albanians. You may know them by the gay stockings, red embroidered with gold, which they wear outside the tight white trousers of their country. Theirs is the dispensary of ice-cream in summer and of mahalibi in winter—the latter being a kind of corn-starch pudding sprinkled with sugar and rose-water. These comestibles, of which their people have a practical monopoly, they also peddle about the streets. But it is better to partake of them in their shop, surrounded by lithographic royalties and battle scenes of 1870; and best of all in front of it, sitting comfortably in a rush-bottomed chair while the never-ending diorama of the Bosphorus rolls by.

In suggestive proximity to this establishment is a Greek drug store. It might be Venetian, so impregnate is it with the sound and light of water. For situation, however, I never saw its equal in Venice. It has, indeed—especially when late sunlight warms the opposite shore—so perfect a view, the platform in front of it is so favourite a resort, the legend “La Science est Longue, mais la Vie Courte” curls with such levity about a painted Hippocrates within, that the place rather gives you the impression of an operatic drug store. The polyglot youth in charge of it stands at the door exactly as if he were waiting for the chorus on the stage outside to give him his cue; and you cannot help asking yourself whether there be anything in the porcelain jars about him.

In the market-place

I have spoken with unbridled admiration of our market-place and its two main branches. How shall I now speak admiringly enough of the square with which they both communicate and which unites in itself the richness of their charms? It is not a square in any geometric sense. It is a broad stone quay of irregular width, tree-shaded, awning-hung, festooned with vines and fish-nets, adorned of a flat-topped fountain whose benches are a superior place of contemplation, bordered by a quaintly broken architecture of shops, cafés, and dwellings, and watched upon by a high white minaret. It is not subject to the intermittent bustle of the Company for the Promotion of Happiness, but it carries on its own more deliberate and more picturesque activities. Here commerce goes forward, both settled and itinerant, with loud and leisurely bargaining. Here the kantarji exercises his function of weighing the freights unloaded by the picture-book boats at the quay. The headquarters of one of them is here, in a deep arch over the water. This is the bazaar caïque, that goes early in the morning to the Golden Horn for the transport of such freight and passengers as do not care to patronise the more expensive Company for the Promotion of Happiness—a huge row-boat with an incurving beak and a high stern, to pull whose oars the rowers drop from their feet to their backs. And here is also the headquarters of the hamals, most indispensable of men. These are Asiatic peasants who combine with many others the offices of carts and carters in flatter towns. They carry our furniture and fuel from the water on their backs. They chop our wood, to saw it being what they refuse. They keep guard of our houses when we go away. They patrol our streets at night, knocking the hour with their clubs on the pavement and rousing us with blood-curdling yells if so much as a hen-coop burn down at the Islands twenty miles away. They likewise act as town criers; and during the holy month of Ramazan they beat us up with drums early enough in the morning to be through breakfast by the time you can tell a black hair from a white. They are a strong, a faithful, even—if you choose to expend a little sentiment upon them—a pathetic race, living in exile without wife or child, sending money home as they earn it, going to their “countries” only at long intervals, and settling there when they are too old to work for their guild.

Altogether a man might spend his days in that square and be the better for it. As a matter of fact, a surprising number of us find it possible to do so, sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes or water-pipes, and watching life slip by on the strong blue current of the Bosphorus. And as I sit there too, treated always with a charming courtliness yet somehow made to feel the vanity of thanking God that I am not as other gyaours are, I often ask myself how these things may be. In other parts of the world people enjoy no such leisure unless they have rents or an indifference as to going to destruction. In Roumeli Hissar we neither go to destruction nor have rents. The case may be connected with the theory that all inhabitants of Constantinople are guests of its ruler. We are not subject to military duty, we are exempt from certain burdens of taxation, and other inducements are offered those of the true faith to settle in the City of the Sultans. I have no means of knowing how persuasive these may be, but it is astonishing how overwhelming a proportion of the less skilled labour of the place is performed by outsiders—witness the Greek shopkeepers of our village, the Albanian sweet vendors, and the hamals. The case at all events is not without its charm. We may not accomplish great things in the world. We may not perform memorable services for state or humanity. We may not create works that shall carry our names down the generations. But we live. We enjoy the sun, we taste each other’s society, and we are little troubled for the morrow. Could life be more?

XIV
REVOLUTION
1908

Constantinople is finished! So a reactionary impressionist groaned to himself on a certain summer day—to be precise, on the 24th of July, 1908—when the amazing truth became known that the constitution, suppressed thirty-two years before, had been re-established. Constitutions were well enough in their place, but their place was not Constantinople. A Constantinople at whose gate your Shakespeare was not taken from you as being a perilous and subversive book, a Constantinople through whose custom-house you could not bribe your way, a Constantinople which you might explore ungreeted by a derisive “Gyaour!” or a casual stone, a Constantinople of mosques open to the infidel without money and without price, a Constantinople wherein you were free to walk at night without a lantern, a Constantinople indifferent to passports or to ladies’ veils, a Constantinople where it was possible to paint in the streets, to meet and see off steamers, to post a local letter—and, what is more, receive one—a Constantinople without a censor, a spy, or a dog, might be a Constantinople of a kind; but it would not be the true Constantinople. It could never be the impenetrable old Constantinople that lent a certain verisimilitude to stories like “Paul Patoff” and made it possible for a romantic Gladstone to be taken seriously at his most romantic moments. Violated of its mystery, laid open to the deadly levelling of Western civilisation, what could save it from becoming a Constantinople of straight streets, of pseudo-classic architecture, of glaring lights, of impatient tram and telephone bells, of the death-dealing motors that Abd ül Hamid would never allow, of the terrible tourists—the German Liebespaar, the British old maid, the American mother and daughter—who insist on making one place exactly like another?

Well, the Constantinople of a reactionary impressionist is finished. A good deal of it vanished by magic on the night of the revolution. Of the outward and visible remainder more has disappeared already than an outsider might suppose. The dogs and the beggars went very soon, followed by the worst of the cobblestones and the bumpy old bridge that every traveller wrote a chapter about; and when I took a little journey in the world after this process was well started it struck me that the streets of Paris and New York were less clean than those of Stamboul. As for the censor and the spies, if they still exist it is in a tempered form. In the meantime the telephones, the motors, the dynamos so redoubted by Abd ül Hamid, have made their appearance. And with them has come a terrifying appetite for civic improvement. The mosaics of Justinian are about to be lighted by electricity. Boulevards have been cut through Stamboul. Old Turkish houses have been torn down by the hundred in the interests of street widening. Only a miracle saved the city walls from being sold as building material. I could wish that the edifices encumbering the sphendone of the Hippodrome might be sold as building material, in order to give back to the city its supreme ornament of a sea view. Imagine what such a wide blue vision might be, seen from the heart of the town—perhaps through a dark-green semicircle of cypresses! In the meantime the Hippodrome has been made to blossom, not quite as the rose, depriving Stamboul of its one good square and threatening to hide the beauty of Sultan Ahmed’s marble mosque. If the new gardens also do something to hide the Byzantino-Germanico-Turkish fountain which William II, in remembrance of a memorable visit, had the courage to erect in line with the obelisk of Theodosius and the twisted serpents of Platæa, they will not have been planted altogether in vain. But direr changes still have the people of Constantinople witnessed since their revolution night—fire, pestilence, earthquake, mutiny, war. They have even lived to hear, from streets of something less than sweet security, the nearing thunder of cannon, and to ask themselves if the supreme change were at hand, and Constantinople itself was to go.