Facts and Fictions—Female Execution at Constantinople—Crime of the Condemned—Tale of the Merchant’s Wife—The Call to Prayer—The Discovery—The Mother and Son—The Hiding-Place—The Capture—The Trial—A Night Scene in the Harem—The Morrow—Mercifulness of the Turks towards their Women.
A vast deal of very romantic and affecting sentiment has been from time to time committed to paper, on the subject of the Turkish females drowned in the Bosphorus; and some tale-writers have even gone so far as to describe, in the character of witnesses, the extreme beauty and the heart-rending tears of the victims.
The subject is assuredly one which lends itself to florid phrases and highly wrought periods; but it is unfortunate that in this case, as in many others, the imagination far outruns the fact. I say unfortunate, because those readers who love to “sup full of horrors,” when they have wept over the affecting image of beauty struggling against the grasp of the executioner, and dark eyes looking reproach upon their murderer from amid the deep waters which are so soon to quench their light for ever, do not like to descend to the sober assurance that none of these things can be; and that the veracious chroniclers who have excited their sensibilities, and misled their reason, have only built up a pathetic sketch upon inference, and in reality know nothing at all about the matter.
There is no romance in one of these frightful executions—all is harsh unmitigated horror! The victim may, or may not, be young and beautiful; her executioners have no opportunity of judging. She may be the impersonation of grace, and they must remain equally ignorant of the fact; for she has neither power nor opportunity to excite sympathy, were she the loveliest houri who ever escaped from the paradise of Mahomet.
I have a friend, a man in place and power, who, during the time of the Janissaries, and but a few months previous to the annihilation of their body, had been detained in the Palace of one of the Ministers until three hours past midnight; and who, on passing across the deep bay near the Castle of Europe, was startled by perceiving two caïques bearing lights, lying upon their oars in the centre of the stream. His curiosity being excited, he desired his boatmen to pull towards them, when at the instant that he came alongside, he discovered that they were filled by police officers; and at the same moment, a female closely shrouded in a yashmac, and with the mouth of a sack, into which her whole body had been thrust, tied about her throat, was lifted in the arms of two men from the bottom of the furthest caïque, and flung into the deep waters of the bay. As no weight had been appended to the sack, the miserable woman almost instantly re-appeared upon the surface, when she was beaten down by the oars of the boatmen; and this ruthless and revolting ceremony was repeated several times ere the body finally sank.
My friend, heart-sick at the spectacle to which he had so unexpectedly become a witness, demanded of the principal officer, by whom he had been instantly recognized, the crime of the wretched victim who had just perished; and learnt that she was the wife of a Janissary whom the Sultan had caused to be strangled some weeks previously; and who, in her anguish at the fate of her husband, had since rashly permitted herself to speak in terms of hatred and disgust of the government by whose agency she had been widowed.
On that fatal morning she had paid the price of her indiscretion.
The ministers of death lingered yet awhile to convince themselves that the body would not reappear; and my friend lingered also from a feeling which he could not explain even to himself. The dawn was just breaking in the sky, and streaks of faint yellow were traced above the crests of the dark mountains of the Asian coast. One long ray of light touched the summits of the tall cypresses above the grave-yard of Isari, and revealed the castellated outline of the topmost tower of the Janissaries’ prison: there was not a breath of wind to scatter the ripple; and all around looked so calm and peaceful, that he could scarcely persuade himself that he had just looked on death, when the deep voices of the men in the caïques beside him, as they once more plunged their oars into the stream, and prepared to depart, aroused him from his reverie; and, motioning to his boatmen to proceed, he found himself ere long on the terrace of his own palace.
While I am on the subject of executions, I may as well relate “an o’er true tale,” communicated to me by the same individual. Nearly four years have elapsed since the occurrence took place, but it is so characteristic of Turkish manners, that it will not be misplaced here.
An eminent merchant of Stamboul, extremely wealthy, and considerably past the middle age, became the husband of a very young and lovely woman. As Turkish females never see the individuals whom they marry previously to the ceremony, but are chosen by some matronly relation of the person who finds it expedient to bestow himself on a wife, and who, having seen and approved the lady, arranges all preliminaries with her parents; so it may well be imagined that the bride is frequently far from congratulating herself on her change of position; and such, as it would appear from the result, was the case with the young wife to whom I have just referred, and who was destined to become the heroine of a frightful tragedy.