Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

There may be question as to whether any real generous impulse, any true glimmer of repentance, visited that old lion at bay. But there can be none as to the temper of the crowds that marched about the streets for days with flags and music, cheering the army that had freed them, cheering the Sultan who, they said, had been kept from them by traitors, cheering the orators who told them again and again of their happiness and assured them that thenceforward in the Ottoman Empire there was no distinction between Armenian, Greek, Jew, and Turk: all were Ottomans, all were brothers, all were free. It was, of course, too good to be true. Yet, even in the light of subsequent history, I persist in remembering those days as a little golden age which no one was the worse for having known. A carriage wheel was crushed in the press. The hat—or should one say the fez?—was instantly passed around, and the happy jehu was given the wherewithal to buy fifty new wheels. A shop-window, again, was accidentally broken. The shopkeeper presently had reason to wish that the crowd would break a window every day. Ladies who never before would have dared go alone through certain streets, or through any street at certain hours, went unmolested when and where they chose. Races that had lived under an armed truce, and not always that, suddenly fell on each other’s necks. A cold-hearted impressionist more than once found it in him to smile at respectable old gentlemen who insisted on kissing fervent young orators on both cheeks. And when priests of different religions exchanged such salutes it was even more a case of the lion lying down with the lamb.

Cartoon representing the exodus of the Palace camarilla

The scattering of the Palace camarilla was one of the most picturesque of the many picturesque events of the day. The true story of those precious rascals is a piece of the Middle Ages—or of the flourishing days of New York. Some of them were ministers, some chamberlains and secretaries, one of them no more than an Arab astrologer, who gained immense credit during the Greek war of 1897 by holding over telegrams and prophesying their contents to the Sultan. Without this star-chamber nothing was done in the empire. The council of ministers sat at the Sublime Porte, but the true cabinet sat secretly in Yîldîz Palace. If the Grand Vizier did not happen to belong to it, so much the worse for him. He must be prepared to see his orders countermanded and his promises rendered void. It was always possible to obtain such a result. Those who knew the ropes knew the department of each member of the kitchen cabinet, and his price. For that matter they were willing to be accommodating. They took from each according to his means. And they were not too proud to be known as the kehayas of the industrial guilds. One accepted two hundred pounds a month from the butchers of Constantinople, in return for leniency in the matter of inspection. Another received a handsome allowance from the corporation of bakers, who were also obliged to subsidise the police in order to prevent the seizure of undersized loaves from being too serious. A third drew a dollar for every bag of flour that came into the city. I even heard of a pasha who allowed his kitchens to be supplied with butter by a Kürdish chief. There was no possible source of revenue which these men had not tapped—public funds, private enterprises, the distribution of places, the granting of concessions. It mattered nothing to them that the country was going to ruin, the development of its incalculable resources stopped, so long as they built great palaces on the Bosphorus and fared sumptuously every day.

The constitution took them more completely than any by surprise. Accustomed to the variable climate of the court, they were prepared to fall from favour, to be exiled, or even to lose their lives. But they were not prepared for this. Not many of them were quick enough to grasp the situation. The first to do so was Selim Pasha Melhameh, a Syrian. As Minister of Agriculture, Mines, and Forests he was in the way of getting good things from people who wanted concessions. His already comfortable fortune was agreeably increased during his last winter in office by a scarcity of fuel that caused great misery among the poor of the capital. An imperial order was issued to bring down wood from the forests of the interior and sell it at a fixed price. The wood was brought down and the price fixed—by Selim Pasha. He is said to have been absent from the all-night council at which the constitution was granted. At first he would not believe the news, but when proof was given him he called for his wife and told her to pack at once. She did so with such expedition that three days later, borrowing the Italian embassy launch on the pretext of seeing off their son, who was going to his post in the Turkish embassy at Rome, they sailed on the steamer with him.

The next to leave was the notorious Izzet Pasha, the Sultan’s first chamberlain. There was a mediæval character for you—that perfect gentleman and connoisseur, descended from robber Bedouins beyond Damascus, who became the greatest robber in the empire. He robbed so shamelessly, he robbed so amusingly, that an irresponsible impressionist cannot help investing him with a romantic interest. When the coup d’état took place, his Syrian wit told him that a country he had plundered for years was no longer the country for him. He accordingly bought for eight thousand pounds, in the name of a French lady, a small Greek passenger steamer worth some fifteen hundred, and prepared to decamp. When the captain learned the identity of his new owner he refused to serve him. Rather than excite suspicion by drumming up another crew, Izzet proceeded to buy another steamer, this time under the British flag. Having been bitten once, he stipulated that the owners should be paid in three instalments—two thousand pounds down, fifteen hundred when he should get away, by cash deposited with a third party, and fifteen hundred more from his first port of call. When the owners presented their cheque for two thousand pounds at Izzet Pasha’s bank they were informed that the latter had withdrawn his account. Izzet Pasha expressed infinite regret at the mistake, and courteously wrote out a second cheque on a bank from which he had withdrawn his account. Before the owners had time to present that Izzet Pasha, boarding his steamer from the German embassy launch and a series of tugs, had got away with three of his four wives, in spite of the crowd that shook their fists after him from Galata quay. At the Dardanelles he was stopped. And perhaps the most novel of all his experiences was to see a handful of gold he gave to the officer keeping him under guard thrown scornfully overboard. But the English register of his boat and a commission he displayed, sending him abroad on imperial business, saved his skin. He was not heard from again till he turned up at Genoa. There, telling his captain he was going to take his family ashore for a walk, he took ticket for England. The captain waited patiently till there was nothing left on board to eat or to burn, and then he wired to his former owners. They had not received their third payment, but as the second was duly made and as they got their boat back they did not come off so badly.

The rest of the gang were not allowed to escape. They were entertained at the War Department until they began to disgorge gold and lands. Zeki Pasha gave up no more than ten thousand pounds; but Hassan Rami Pasha, who had been Minister of Marine a year, handed over some two hundred thousand. This act of penance performed, they and their colleagues were sent to Prinkipo, where, under due surveillance, they were granted the liberties of an island six miles in circumference until such time as parliament should investigate their affairs.

In contrast to the scurrying to cover of the old régime was the return of the exiles. During Abd ül Hamid’s long reign, and most actively during the latter part of it, there had been a systematic clearing out of independent personalities. Men who would not hide their disapproval of the government, who could not be bought or silenced in any other way, or whom chance spies happened to report on adversely, were banished to remote parts of the empire. Others fled to countries where life was made less difficult for them. Sixty thousand exiles are said to have left Constantinople alone. And there remains the large number of those who were suppressed in unavowed ways. One of the first acts of the new government was to issue an amnesty for exiles and political prisoners. There consequently set in an immediate tide of return. It happened that the old French steamship line of the Messagéries Maritimes brought back most of the exiles, partly because many of them were settled in Paris, partly because of the sympathy of educated Turks and of all revolutionaries for France. So the arrival of the Messagéries boat became a weekly event of the city. Steamers would be chartered to go down the Marmora, crowds would blacken the Galata quay, the windows, balconies, and roofs overlooking it, the adjacent shipping, the old bridge, to welcome back with flags, music, cheers, and frantic whistles men like old Deli Fouad Pasha, mad Fouad Pasha, who prevented the massacre of Armenians in Scutari in 1896; like the Armenian Patriarch who proved too intractable at the same period; like young Prince Sabaëddin, the Sultan’s nephew, who came back from Paris with the coffin of his fugitive father. But not all of these returns were joyful. There were tragic meetings at the coming of men broken by imprisonment or deadly climates—as once when a pale figure was carried from the ship in a chair, amid a silence that was broken only by some one sobbing on the quay. And there were those who returned to the quay every week, scanning the decks of arriving steamers for faces they never found.

Altogether there was matter enough for the eye of an impressionist resentful of the demolishing of his city. Space would never suffice me to report the scenes characteristic or picturesque, the stories romantic and humorous, that could not fail to mark so great an event. The sudden outburst of literary and dramatic activity, the movement toward emancipation of the Turkish women, the honours paid by the Young Turks to the memory of the Armenians massacred in 1896, the visits of friendly deputations from Bulgaria, Greece, and Roumania, the events in the Balkans and the Austrian boycott, the manœuvres of the reactionaries, the removal of the Palace guard, the procedure of the elections, added each its note of colour. Nothing, perhaps, filled the public eye quite so obviously as the primary elections for parliament. Symbolic of what the revolution had striven to attain, this event was celebrated in each district with fitting ceremonies. One district in Stamboul solemnly brought its voting urn to the Sublime Porte on the back of a camel. Five villages on the Bosphorus, forming another district, made a water pageant that reminded one of state days in Venice. But the five great fishing caïques, with their splendid incurving beaks, their high poops gay with flags and trailing rugs, their fourteen to twenty costumed rowers, were no imitation of other days, like the Venetian Bissone. Most imposing of all was the procession that carried the urns of Pera through the city in decorated court carriages, attended by music, banners, soldiers, school children, and other representative bodies to the number of several thousand. Two of these were peculiarly striking. Near the head of the procession, led by an Arab on a camel, rode a detachment of men representing the different races of the empire, each in the costume of his “country.” And later came a long line of carriages in which imams and Armenian priests, imams and Greek priests, imams and Catholic priests, imams and Jewish rabbis, drove two and two in the robes of their various cults.

The opening of parliament itself, with all the circumstance that arms and majesty could lend it, marked a term for those effervescent days. The Young Turks made it a particular point that the ceremony of December 17 should be held, not in the throne-room of Dolma Ba’hcheh, as the Sultan wished, but in the place where the parliament of 1876 had been dissolved. This Palladian structure behind St. Sophia, originally built for the university and remodelled after the dissolution of the first parliament for the uses of the Ministry of Justice, contained no hall of suitable size. There was not even room in the chamber of deputies for the two hundred odd members—if they all had arrived in time for the opening. The invitations were consequently restricted to the smallest possible number: to the greater dignitaries of state, to the heads of foreign missions and their first dragomans—leaving out disappointed secretaries and wives—and to a few representatives of the press. There was perhaps more heartburning among these spoilt children of the century than among any other section of the public. Some of them had travelled great distances to attend this historic inauguration, only to be shut out of it. The press of the country naturally had the first claim. The thorny question of allotting tickets among the press of other countries was settled by giving each head of a foreign mission two tickets to dispose of as he chose. Those fortunate enough to get them were inclined to grumble at the quarters assigned them—a species of low, dark theatre box above that of the ambassadors, from which only the ten or fifteen first to arrive could see the floor. But all could see the imperial box, directly opposite. And I, for one, being no journalist, counted myself lucky to be there at all.