Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Stuck in the mud

Our first plan was to strike northwest in the hope of coming out somewhere between Hadem-kyöi, the headquarters of Nazîm Pasha, and the forest region of Derkos, which local rumour had lately peopled with Bulgarians. I may as well say first as last that this plan did not succeed. Before we were half-way to the lines our road petered out into a succession of quagmires and parallel ruts with heather growing so high between them that it threatened to scrape off the under works of the car. Into one of the quagmires we sank so deeply that only a pair of hairy black buffalo could haul us out. For an irresponsible amateur, however, the attempt had its impressions. The most abiding one was that of the Constantinople campagna. It undulated to the horizon so desolate in its autumn colour, so bare save for a few tawny clumps of wood, so empty and wild, that no one would suspect the vicinity of a great capital. We met almost no one. A few Greek peasants came or went to market, apparently oblivious to wars or rumours of them. Not so a convoy of Turkish refugees, toiling up a hill with all they had in the world piled under matting on ox-carts with huge ungainly wheels. We ran through one village inhabited by Greeks—Pyrgos is its name, and a famous panayíri is held there in August—who gave us anew a sense of the strange persistence of their type through so many vicissitudes. Among them were girls or women with big double-armed amphoræ on their shoulders that might have come out of a museum. As we rammed the furze a mile or two beyond we saw the minaret of a Turkish village, and heard a müezin call to noonday prayer. We heard a shot, too, crack suddenly out of the stillness. It had to do duty with us for an adventure—unless I mention a couple of deserters we met, one of whom drew his bayonet as we bore down upon him. But I must not forget the fine Byzantine aqueduct under which we stopped to lunch. As we stood admiring the two tiers of arches marching magnificently across the ravine we heard a sound of bells afar. The sound came nearer and nearer, until a string of camels wound into sight. They took the car as unconcernedly as the car took them, disappearing one by one through the tall gateway that Andronicus Comnenus built across that wild valley.

The aqueduct of Andronicus I

Our second attempt was more successful. It led us through Stamboul and the cemetery cypresses outside the walls, into a campagna flatter and more treeless than the one we had seen in the morning, but not so void of humanity. In the neighbourhood of the city the refugees made the dominant note, with their clumsy carts and their obstinate cattle and their veiled women and their own coats of many colours. Other refugees were camped on the bare downs. The children would run toward us when they caught sight of the car, laughing and shouting. For them war was a picnic. Farther out the soldiers were more numerous than the refugees. Every time we met one, at first, we expected to be stopped. Some of them were driving cattle and horses into the city. Others were going out with carts of supplies. Once we overtook a dark mass of redifs making in loose order for the isolated barracks of Daoud Pasha—where the Janissaries used to muster for a European campaign. We knew them by their blue uniforms, piped with red, of Abd ül Hamid’s time. They looked mildly at us as we charged them, and mildly made room. So did the officer who rode at their head. On the ascent beyond him we saw two men in khaki waiting for us. We concluded that our reconnaissance was at an end. But we presently perceived that the men in khaki wore red crescents on their sleeves and carried no rifles. They merely wanted to see us pass. It was the same at a gendarmerie station a little farther on, and at the aerodrome behind San Stefano.

Fleeing from the enemy

Photographed by Frederick Moore

We found the road unexpectedly good, after the heather and quagmires of the morning. There were bad bits in it, but they only gave us occasion to bless the French syndicate that had had time to make the good ones before the war broke out. After dipping through one wide hollow we came in sight of the Marmora. A battle-ship making for the city drew a long smudge of smoke across the vaporous blue—the German Goeben, we afterward learned she was. On the low shore the Russian war monument of 1878 lifted its syringe dome. Through all the region behind it a faint odour of carbolic hung in the air, a reminder of the place of horror that San Stefano had become since cholera broke out. We passed a few dead cattle. A huge dog was tearing at one carcass, a creature that twilight would have made a hyena. Some new-made graves, too, had their own story to tell.

Suddenly, on the brow of a hill, we came upon the sunset picture of Küchük Chekmejeh. Below us, at the left, was a bay into which the sun was dropping. To the right stretched a shining lake. And between them ran a long bridge with one fantastically high and rounded arch that looked at its own image in the painted water. I would like to believe that that arch is the one mentioned in the epitaph of the architect Sinan and romantically likened to the Milky Way; but I believe the true arch of the Milky Way is at Büyük Chekmejeh. The village of Küchük Chekmejeh—the Little Drawbridge—made a huddle of red-brown roofs at the right end of the bridge. As we ran down to it we encountered more soldiers guarding a railway line. In front of us a cart crossed the track with an empty stretcher. Near it two men were digging or filling a grave. The village itself was full of soldiers, who also guarded the bridge. We skimmed across it, no one saying a word to us, and up into another high bare rolling country bordered by the sea.