A house had been hastily prepared for Lady Hester, and Lord Sligo gave me a room in his lodgings at one Madam Onophrio’s, who kept an apothecary’s shop. Everything appeared to us inconvenient and dirty; and, what was most uncomfortable of all, the principal part of our luggage, from the frequent changes in our plans, had been sent to Smyrna.
CHAPTER IV.
Procession of the Sultan to the Mosque—A Dinner party—Therapia—Visiters there—Lady Hester seeks permission to reside in France—Turbulence of the Janissaries—Pera—Visit to Hafez Aly—Captain Pasha—Mahometan patients attended by the Author—Princess Morousi—Disagreeable climate of Constantinople—Return of Lord Sligo to Malta.
We were busied, during the first days, in making ourselves somewhat like the beings among whom we were come. Tailors, hatters, and such persons, are not wanting at Constantinople. We let our mustachios grow, bought ourselves horses, and went through the ceremony of paying and receiving visits. I was fortunate in procuring for myself a Persian horse, which, I was told, had brought Mr. Morier from Persia: it was very handsome, and proved capable of enduring great fatigue.
The first person generally resorted to, on arriving in a strange city, is the banker. I was commissioned to call on Lady Hester’s; and I found in Mr. Alexander a man of rare merit. He was dragoman of the Prussian mission, as well as a merchant, and to him I was subsequently indebted for whatever information I needed on any point. His conversation abounded in anecdotes, which were highly useful and instructive to a traveller.
The house in which Lady Hester lived was too small, and in a narrow street (as indeed are all the streets in Pera but the two main ones); she therefore hastened to get into the country, after having seen the sights that are usually shown to strangers. By means of a firmán, we entered four of the principal mosques. I forbear giving descriptions of them, as they are to be found at length in several works.
In Constantinople all that one sees is odd and strange, but it is difficult to make another person understand in what that strangeness consists. The mere act of walking in the streets has something in it incompatible with recreation. There are no carriages or vehicles of any kind, and consequently the streets are so silent that people’s voices are heard as in a room. All the shops are entirely open to the air; you are therefore subjected to the gaze of the shopkeepers; so that the effect is similar to what is felt in walking through a hall, with a row of servants on each side.
All persons of the same trade here have their shops in the same place. Thus, there will be a row of tailors, a row of furriers, and a row of shoemakers; and such a street is called the tailors’ bazar, the furriers’ bazar, the shoemakers’ bazar. But, if the commodities are of a precious nature, or susceptible of injury when exposed to the air or wet, as jewelry, drugs, and the like, then the street is covered in, the shops are fitted up in a somewhat more ornamented manner, and the place is called bezestan.
There was no audience of an English ambassador while we were at Constantinople, so that I had not an opportunity of seeing his highness, the Sultan, excepting on Fridays, when it was his custom to perform his public devotions at a mosque. The sight was magnificent and striking, but it is impossible to convey an adequate impression of it in a description: and I can only give the reader a general idea of it. The origin of it, as we were told, was this—that subsequent to some insurrection among the janissaries, in the reign of one of the early Sultans, a sort of charter of rights was obtained from their monarch; one of which was, that, instead of keeping himself shut up in his seraglio, as his predecessors had done, he should show himself once a week to his faithful subjects; since which time it has become a custom for him to go publicly to mosque every Friday, which is the Moslem’s sabbath.
On these occasions, when the Sultan issues from the harým, the janissary-aga holds his stirrup whilst he mounts his horse, and (as I was informed) draws on his legs a pair of new yellow boots, a ceremony always repeated. To secure a good view, I had taken a convenient situation in a street through which the Sultan was to pass; and, presently, the procession approached in the following order. First came some dozens of water-carriers, who bore skins of water across their backs, with which they laid the dust as they advanced. On the right and left of the street was a double file of janissaries. Bostangis, with knotted whips, kept the crowd from pressing on the procession. Next to the water-carriers came a group of nondescript persons; grooms to hold horses, servants to unrobe their effendis or masters, and other hangers-on or attendants of great men. After these, upon a finely caparisoned horse, surrounded by a dozen valets on foot, followed a fierce-looking Turk, with a black beard; and I and my companion exclaimed, “Here comes the Sultan:”—it was only his coffee-bearer. We made the like remark at a second, and a third; but they were his stool, sword, and pipe-bearers, who, with the emblems of office in their hands, passed in succession.