The middle and lower classes of Constantinople live between these shops and the cafés. A dish of kibaubs serves them for dinner, and they drink coffee, which they get for about half a cent a cup, from morning till night. We paid for our mess (which was more than any two men could eat at once, unless very hungry), twelve cents.
We started again with fresh courage, in search of the cistern. We soon found the old one, which is an immense excavation, with a roof, supported by five hundred granite columns, employed now as a place for twisting silk, and escaping from its clamorous denizens, who rushed up after us to the daylight, begging paras, we took one of the boys for a guide, and soon found the object of our search.
Knocking at the door of a half-ruined house, in one of the loneliest streets of the city, an old, sore-eyed Armenian, with shabby calpack, and every mark of extreme poverty, admitted us, pettishly demanding our entrance money, before he let us pass the threshold. Flights of steps, dangerously ruinous, led us down, first into a garden, far below the level of the street, and thence into a dark and damp cavern, the bottom of which was covered with water. As the eye became accustomed to the darkness, we could distinguish tall and beautiful columns of marble and granite, with superb Corinthian capitals, perhaps thirty feet in height, receding as far as the limits of our obscured sight. The old man said there were a thousand of them. The number was doubtless exaggerated, but we saw enough to convince us, that here was covered up, almost unknown, one of the most costly and magnificent works of the Christian emperors of Constantinople.
LETTER XXXVIII.
Belgrade—The Cottage of Lady Montagu—Turkish Cemeteries—Natural Taste of the Moslems for the Picturesque—A Turkish Carriage—Washerwomen Surprised—Gigantic Forest Trees—The Reservoir—Return to Constantinople.
I left Constantinople on horseback with a party of officers, and two American travellers in the East, early on one of nature’s holiday mornings, for Belgrade. We loitered a moment in the small Armenian cemetery, the only suburb that separates the thickly crowded street from the barren heath that stretches away from the city on every side to the edge of the horizon. It is singular to gallop thus from the crowded pavement, at once into an uncultivated and unfenced desert. We are so accustomed to suburban gardens that the traveller wonders how the markets of this overgrown and immense capital are supplied. A glance back upon the Bosphorus, and toward the Asian shore, and the islands of the sea of Marmora, explains the secret. The waters in every direction around this sea-girdled city are alive with boats, from the larger kachambas and sandals to the egg-shell caique, swarming into the Golden Horn in countless numbers, laden with every vegetable of the productive East. It is said, however, that it is dangerous to thrive too near the eye of the sultan. The summary mode for rewarding favourites and providing for the residence of ambassadors, by the simple confiscation of the prettiest estate desirably situated, is thought to have something to do with the barrenness of the immediate neighbourhood.
The Turks carry their contempt of the Christian even beyond the grave. The funereal cypress, so singularly beautiful in its native East, is permitted to throw its dark shadows only upon turbaned tombstones. The Armenian rayah, the oppressed Greek, and the more hated Jew, slumber in their unprotected graves on the open heath. It almost reconciles one to the haughtiness and cruelty of the Turkish character, however, to stand on one of the “seven hills” of Stamboul, and look around upon their own beautiful cemeteries. On every sloping hill-side, in every rural nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a dark necropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so thickly by the close growing cypresses, that the light of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape. And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in more civilised countries; the humblest headstone lettered with gold, and the more costly sculptured into forms the most sumptuous, and fenced and planted with flowers never neglected.
In the East, the grave-yard is not, as with us, a place abandoned to its dead. Occupying a spot of chosen loveliness, it is resorted to by women and children, and on holidays by men, whose indolent natures find happiness enough in sitting on the green bank around the resting-place of their relatives and friends. Here, while their children are playing around them, they smoke in motionless silence, watching the gay Bosphorus or the busier curve of the Golden Horn, one of which is visible from every cemetery in the Stamboul. Occasionally you see large parties of twenty or thirty, sitting together, their slight feast of sweetmeats and sherbet spread in some grassy nook, and the surrounding head-stones serving as leaning-places for the women, or bounds for the infant gambols of the gaily-dressed little Mussulmans.