Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help.
Guide Thou us on the straight path,
The path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;—with
Whom Thou art not angry, and who go not astray.
As we wandered along the pathways of this last resting place of so many myriads of Mohammedans—from Constantinople[84] as well as from Scutari—I was impressed by the number of men and women who were here absorbed in prayer for their dear departed,[85] or in tending the flowers which adorned the graves. These quiet mourners, with the countless turtledoves, which make their home in the branches of the funereal cypress trees and which seem to keep up continuously their subdued moan, give to this gloomy necropolis a solemnity and an impressiveness that are almost lacking in such ostentatious cities of the dead as Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo of Genoa.
A short drive from the Great Cemetery brings us to the modern town of Kadi Keui which, like Scutari, is also a part of the municipality of Constantinople. It was formerly known as Chalcedon and was founded seventeen years before Byzantium. By the oracle of Delphi it was designated as “the city of the blind,” because its founders were blind to the superior position of the tongue of land on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, on which the City of Constantinople now stands.
Like most other cities in this part of the world it has witnessed many vicissitudes and has been repeatedly captured and sacked by invading armies from both Asia and Europe. Famed in antiquity for its temple of Apollo and for having been the birthplace of Xenocrates, the most distinguished of Plato’s disciples, its temples and palaces, after its capture by the Ottomans, served the sultans as a stone quarry when they required building material for their mosques in Constantinople.
But, although not a vestige of Chalcedon’s former grandeur now remains, it will always be remembered as the city in which was held in 451 the fourth œcumenical council of the Church, in which was condemned the teaching of Eutyches and the Monophysites respecting the human and the divine nature in Christ. When I recalled the fact that this council, including the representatives of the absent bishops, was attended by six hundred and thirty bishops; that more than six hundred of these belonged to the Eastern Church, and remembered the very small number of the episcopate that is now found in this part of the world, it was easy to understand the present backward condition of civilization and culture in Asia Minor and Syria. What a change, indeed, since the days of those great doctors of the Oriental Church—the Cyrils, the Gregories, the Basils, the Ephrems, the Chrysostoms—whose learning and eloquence have from their time been the admiration and edification of the whole of Christendom.
A short distance to the north of Kadi Keui is the Haidar Pasha military hospital which was the scene of Florence Nightingale’s heroic labors during the Crimean War. The rooms which she occupied while here are still preserved intact and as I passed through them, I recalled Longfellow’s beautiful tribute to her in the verses:
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand