Sooner or later Athens is sure to become a winter resort not less favoured than any on the Mediterranean, and the permanent home of many foreigners. The opinion thus confidently expressed is strengthened by the fact that few who have lived for some length of time within its gates pass out of them without regret, or fail to re-enter them with pleasure. At any rate, so writes a learned American.
A gentleman has written explaining that Greece is bankrupt because she is so small. He says that out of 5,000,000 Greeks who rose in 1821 against the Turk, less than 1,000,000 were allowed to form part of the Hellenic kingdom. The obvious reply to this is, Why don’t they go and live in Greece if they really want to? Nobody forces them to live elsewhere, and they can hardly be waiting till Constantinople, Asia Minor and Cyprus are added to King George’s kingdom. The truth is that in business Greek would rather not meet Greek; there is more money in meeting somebody else. The rich Greeks will always be found outside Greece.
CHAPTER VII.
CONSTANTINOPLE.
I am in Constantinople, founded 658 b.c. by Byza, King of Megara, after whom it was called Byzantium. After some hundreds of years it fell into the hands of the Romans, who, like the Scotch, kept everything they could lay their hands on; and then came Constantine the Great, whose mother, some people say, lived in East Anglia, who enlarged and beautified the city, built the Hippodrome (one of the wonders of the place), and would have made it the capital of his enormous empire. No one can blame the Emperor for preferring Constantinople to Rome.
The city soon became worthy to be the seat of empire. It commanded from its seven hills the opposite shores of Asia and Europe. The climate was healthy, the soil fertile, and the harbour capacious and secure. The Bosphorus and the Hellespont were its two gates, which could always be shut against a hostile fleet. A hundred years after its foundation, a writer, quoted by Gibbon, describes it as possessing a school of learning, a circus, two theatres, eight public and a hundred and fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticos, five granaries, eight aqueducts, four spacious halls for the meetings of the senate and courts of justice, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and four thousand three hundred private houses, which from their size and beauty deserved to be distinguished from the multitude of plebeian buildings. Successive wars and invasions impaired the wealth and the magnificence of the city. Of the time of Constantine little remains but the ruins of the Hippodrome. The Christian Church of St. Sophia, which he erected to the Eternal Wisdom, and from the pulpit of which Gregory of Nazianzen and Chrysostom the golden-mouthed thundered, was burnt in the reign of Justinian, and his Church of St. Sophia is now a Turkish mosque. The city was the seat and centre of the controversies originated in Alexandria as to the nature of the Trinity, and its rival factions, the Greens and the Blues, were ever ready to engage in bloody and disastrous conflict. As a rule, a man’s zeal is according to his ignorance, and at Constantinople the meanest mechanics spent most of their time in discussing mysteries of which the acutest intellects can never even form an adequate idea, and which no human creed can properly define and express. The Crusaders, who knew little of these matters, seem to have been quite awestruck when they made their way to Constantinople. ‘That such a city could be in the world,’ writes one of the old chroniclers, ‘they had never conceived, and they were never weary of staring at the high walls and towers with which it was entirely compassed; the rich palaces and lofty churches, of which there were so many that no one could have believed it if he had not seen with his own eyes that city—the queen of all cities.’
There are few places naturally so picturesque—no city where the suburbs are so charming. One never wearies of Scutari, Gallipoli, washed by the splendid waters of the Sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus, or those of that magnificent harbour, the Golden Horn, which extends eight miles, and affords an anchorage for a fleet of twelve hundred vessels. Indeed, whether viewed from sea or land, or from such a wonderful standpoint as the marble tower of the Seraskierat, Constantinople on its seven hills, divided as it were between Europe and Asia, presents a marvellous display of scenic beauty. You gaze on stately white palaces, surrounded by domes, towers, cupolas, standing amidst tier above tier of many-coloured dwellings, surrounded on all sides by graceful masses of dark cypresses and sombre pines. High above all rises the grand marble mosque of St. Sophia, resplendent with mosaics, and sending up heavenwards its lofty minarets, whence five times a day the cry of the muezzin calls the world to prayer. As you look and admire, you feel, with the poet,
‘That every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile’—
that is, ever since the Turk has been there. And thus it appears that Constantinople has been, socially and politically, a centre of abominations. It was in 1453 that Mahomet II. took it as his own, and it is there that the unspeakable Turk has ever since remained, and mainly in consequence of English diplomacy and the prodigal expenditure of English treasure and blood. The climax was reached in the days of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe—the Great Elchi, as he was termed. He insisted on reforms, and the Sultan granted them. He insisted that all religions should be equal in the eye of the law, and the precious boon was at once declared.
