The Lion of Janina; Or, The Last Days of the Janissaries: A Turkish Novel

by Mór Jókai

From the summit of the mighty Lithanizza you can look down upon the fairy-like city which dominates Albania. It is Janina, the historically renowned Janina.

Beside it stands the lake of Acheruz, in whose green mirror the city can regard itself; there it is in duplicate. It is as deep as it is high. The golden half-moons of the minarets sparkle in the lake and in the sky at the same time. The roofless white houses, rising one above another, seem melted into a compact mass, and they are encircled by red bastions, with exits out of eight gates.

But what have we to do with the minarets, the bazaars, the kiosks of the city? Beyond the city, where Cocytus, rippling down from the wooded mountain, forms, with the lake into which it flows, a peninsula, there, on an isthmus, stands the strong fortress of Ali Pasha, with vast, massive bastions, a heavy, iron-plated drawbridge, and a ditch in front of the walls full of solid sharp-pointed stakes in two fathoms of water. From the summits of the ramparts the throats of a hundred cannons gape down upon the town—iron dogs, whose barking can be heard four miles off. On the walls an innumerable multitude of armed men keep watch, and in front of the gate the guns look out upon each other from the port-holes of the steep bastions on both sides of it. Woe to those who should attempt to make their way into the citadel by force! The gate, fastened with a huge chain, is defended by three heavy iron gratings, and from close beneath the lofty projecting roof circular pieces of artillery shine forth, in front of which are pyramidal stacks of bombs.

The court-yard forms a huge crescent, in which nothing is visible but instruments of warfare, engines of destruction. In the lower part of the semicircular barracks stand the sentry-boxes, while in the opposite semicircle a long pavilion cuts the fortress in two, extending from the end of one semicircle to the end of the other, and here are three gates, which lead into the heart of the fortress.

In all this long building there are no windows above the court-yard, only two rows of narrow embrasures are visible therein. All the windows are on the other side overlooking the garden, and there dwell the odalisks of Ali Pasha's three sons. The three sons, Omar, Almuhán, and Zaid, inhabit the building with the three gates. The back of this building looks out upon the garden, in which the harems of the pasha's sons are wont to disport themselves.

Here again a long bastion barricades the garden, a bastion also protected by trenches full of water, across whose iron bridge you gain admission into the pasha's inmost fortress.

And what is that like? Nobody can tell. The brass gates, covered with silver arabesques, seem to be eternally closed, and none ever comes in or goes out save Ali and his dumb eunuchs, and those captives whose heads alone are sent back again. The bastion surrounding this central fortress is so high that you cannot look into it from the top of the citadel outside; but if any one could peep down upon it from the summit of the lofty Lithanizza he would perceive inside it a fairy palace, with walls of colored marble protected by silver trellis-work, with blue-painted, brazen cupolas, with golden half-moons on their pointed spires. One tower there, the largest of all, has a roof of red cast-iron, and this one roof stands out prominently from among all the other buildings of the inner fortress. The colored kiosks are everywhere wreathed with garlands of flowers, and the spectator perched aloft would plainly discern cradles for growing vines on the top of the bastion. He might also, in the dusk of the summer evenings, distinguish seductive shapes bathing in the basins of the fountains, and lose his reason while he gazed; or it might chance (which is much more likely) that Ali Pasha's patrols might come upon him unawares and cast him down from the mountain-top.

This wondrous retreat was Ali's paradise. Here he grouped together the most beautiful flowers of the round world—flowers sprung from the earth or from a human mother. For maidens also are flowers, and may be plucked and enjoyed like other flowers. But the most beautiful among so many beautiful flowers was Eminah, Tepelenti's favorite damsel, the sixteen-years-old daughter of the Pasha of Delvino, who gave her to Ali just as so many eminent Turks are wont to give their daughters. On the day of their birth they promise to give them to some powerful magnate, and by the time the fiancée is marriageable the fiancé has already one foot in his grave.

A pale, blue-eyed flower was she, looking as if she had grown up beneath the light of the moon instead of the light of the sun; her shape, her figure, was so delicate that it reminded one of those sylphs of the fairy world that fly without wings. Her voice was sweeter, more tender, than the voices of the other damsels; and, wiser than they, she could speak so that you felt rather than heard what she said. Ali loved to toy with her light hair, unwind the long folds of her tresses, cover his face with their silken richness, and fancy he was reposing in the shades of paradise.

And the child loved the man. Ali was a handsome old fellow. His beard was as glossy and as purely white as the wing of a swan; the roses of his cheeks had not yet faded; when he smiled he was no longer a tiger, but revealed a row of teeth even handsomer than her own. And, in addition to that, he was valiant—a hero. Even in old men love is no mere impotent desire when accompanied with all the vigorous passion of youth.