Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

How many of them came I do not imagine any one knows. Thousands and tens of thousands of them were shipped over into Asia Minor. Other thousands remained, in the hope of going back to their ruined homes. The soldiers and the sick had already occupied most of the spare room that was to be found. The refugees had to take what was left. I knew one colony of them that spent the winter in the sailing caïques in which they fled from the coast villages of the Marmora. Being myself like a Turk in that I make little of numbers and computations, I have no means of knowing how many men, women, and children, from how many villages, swelled the population of Eyoub. I only know that their own people took in a good number, that they lived in cloisters and empty houses, that certain mosques were given up to them entirely, that sheds, storehouses, stables, were full of them. I even heard of four persons who had no other shelter than a water-closet. And still streets and open spaces were turned into camping grounds, where small grey cattle were tethered to big carts and where people in veils and turbans shivered over camp-fires—when they had a camp-fire to shiver over. They could generally fall back on cypress wood. It always gave me a double pang to catch the aroma of such a fire, betraying as it did the extremity of some poor exile and the devastation at work among the trees that give Constantinople so much of its colour.

Exiles

I have done a good deal of visiting in my day, being somewhat given to seek the society of my kind. But it has not often happened to me, in the usual course of visiting, to come so near the realities of life as when, with another member of our subcommittee, I visited the mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha, in Eyoub. The mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha is worth visiting. It was built by Sinan, and its founder, a Vizier of Selim II, was nicknamed Zal, after a famous Persian champion, because, with his own hands, he finally succeeded in strangling the strong young prince Moustafa, son of Süleïman the Magnificent. Like its greater neighbour, the mosque of Zal Mahmoud Pasha has two courts. They are on two levels, joined by a flight of steps, each opening into a thoroughfare of its own. And very cheerless they looked indeed on a winter day of snow, especially for the cattle stabled in their cloisters. The mosque itself was open to any who cared to go in. We did so, pushing aside the heavy flap that hangs at any public Turkish doorway in winter. We found ourselves in a narrow vestibule in which eight or ten families were living. One of them consisted of two children, a little boy flushed with fever and a pale and wasted little girl, who lay on the bricks near the door without mattress or matting under them. They were not quite alone in the world, we learned. Their mother had gone away to find them bread. The same was the case with a larger family of children who sat around a primitive brazier. The youngest was crying, and a girl of ten was telling him that their mother would soon be back with something to eat.

We lifted a second flap. A wave of warm smoky air met us, sweetened by cypress wood but sickeningly close. Through the haze of smoke we saw that the square of the nave, surrounded on three sides by a gallery, was packed as if by a congregation. The congregation consisted chiefly of women and children, which is not the thing in Turkey, sitting on the matted floor in groups, and all about them were chests and small piles of bedding and stray cooking utensils. Each of these groups constituted a house, as they put it. As we went from one to another, asking questions and taking notes, we counted seventy-eight of them. Some four hundred people, that is, were living huddled together under the dome of Zal Mahmoud Pasha. In the gallery and under it rude partitions had been made by stretching ropes between the pillars and hanging up a spare rug or quilt. In the open space of the centre there was nothing to mark off house from house save the bit of rug or matting that most of the families had had time to bring away with them, or such boundaries as could be drawn by the more solid of the family possessions and by the row of family shoes. Under such conditions had not a few of the congregation drawn their first or their last breath.

Nearly every “house” had a brazier of some kind, if only improvised out of a kerosene tin. That was where the blue haze came from and the scent of cypress wood. Some had a little charcoal, and were daily near asphyxiating themselves. Others had no fire at all. On a number of the braziers we noticed curious flat cakes baking, into whose composition went bran or even straw. We took them to be some Thracian dainty until we learned that they were a substitute for bread. The city was supposed to give each refugee a loaf a day, but many somehow did not succeed in getting their share. A few told us that they had had none, unless from their neighbours, for five days. It struck me, in this connection, that in no other country I knew would the mosque carpets still have been lying folded in one corner instead of making life a little more tolerable for that melancholy congregation. Of complaint, however, we heard as little as possible. The four hundred sat very silently in their smoky mosque. Many of them had not only their lost homes to think of. A father told us that when Chorlou was spoiled, as he put it, his little girl of nine had found a place in the “fire carriage” that went before his, and he had not seen her since. One old man had lost the rest of his family. He had been unable to keep up with them, he said: it had taken him twenty-two days to walk from Kîrk Kil’seh. A tall ragged young woman, who told us that her effendi made war in Adrianople, said she had three children. One of them she rocked beside her in a wooden washing trough. It came out only by accident that she had adopted the other two during the hegira from Thrace. We wondered how, if the effendi ever came out of Adrianople alive, he would find his wife and his baby; for hardly one in fifty of these peasants could read or write, and no exact register of them was kept. Many of them were ill and lay on the floor under a coloured quilt. If another member of the family wanted to take a nap he would crawl under the same quilt. Is it any wonder that diseases became epidemic in the mosques? Cholera did not break out in many of them except St. Sophia, which was used as a barracks. But in Zal Mahmoud Pasha there were at one time cases of consumption, pneumonia, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and smallpox. Five cases of the last were found under one quilt. Still, the refugees would not be vaccinated if they could help it. The only way to bring them to it was to cut off their bread. And not many of them were willing to go away or to let members of their families be taken away to hospitals. How did they know whether they would ever see each other again, they asked? A poor mother we knew, whose husband had been taken as a soldier and had not been heard of since, and whose home had burned to the ground before her eyes, lost her four children, one after the other. A neighbour afterward remarked of her in wonder that she seemed to have no mind in her head.

Lady Lowther’s refugees

In distributing Lady Lowther’s relief we did what we could to systematise. Having visited, quarter by quarter, to see for ourselves the condition of the people and what they most needed, we gave the head of each house a numbered ticket, enabling him or her to draw on us for certain supplies. Most of the supplies were dealt out on our own day at home. They say it is more blessed to give than to receive. I found, however, that it was most possible to appreciate the humorous and decorative side of Thrace when we received, in the coffee-shop of many windows which was our headquarters. It is astonishing how large a proportion of Thrace is god-daughter to Hadijeh or Aïsheh, Mothers of the Moslems, or to the Prophet’s daughter Fatma. Many, nevertheless, reminded one of Mme. Chrysanthème and Madam Butterfly. On our visiting list were Mrs. Hyacinth, Mrs. Tulip, Mrs. Appletree, and Mrs. Nightingale. I am also happy enough to possess the acquaintance of Mrs. Sweetmeat, Mrs. Diamond, Mrs. Pink (the colour), Mrs. Cotton (of African descent), Mrs. Air (though some know her as Mother Eve), Miss May She Laugh, and Master He Waited. This last appellation seemed to me so curious that I inquired into it, and learned that my young gentleman waited to be born. These are not surnames, you understand, for no Turk owns such a thing. Nor yet, I suppose, can one call them Christian names! To tell one Mistress Hyacinth from another you add the name of her man; and in his case all you can do is to call him the son of so and so.