Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

We entered the gloomy shadow of the vast cemetery, and found its cool and damp air a grateful exchange for the sunshine. The author of “Anastasius” gives a very graphic description of this place, throwing in some horrors, however, for which he is indebted to his admirable imagination. I never was in a more agreeable place for a summer-morning’s lounge, and, as I sat down on a turbaned headstone, near the tomb of Mohammed the Second’s horse, and indulged in a train of reflections arising from the superior distinction of the brute’s ashes over those of his master, I could remember no place, except Plato’s Academy at Athens, where I had mused so absolutely at my ease.

We strolled on. A slender and elegantly-carved slab, capped with a small turban, fretted and gilt, arrested my attention. “It is the tomb,” said my companion, “of one of the ichoglans or sultan’s pages. The peculiar turban is distinctive of his rank, and the inscription says, he died at eighteen, after having seen enough of the world! Similar sentiments are to be found on almost every stone. Close by stood the ambitious cenotaph of a former pacha of Widin, with a swollen turban, crossed with folds of gold, and a footstone painted and carved, only less gorgeously than the other; and under his name and titles was written, “I enjoyed not the world.” Farther on, we stopped at the black-banded turban of a cadi, and read again, underneath, “I took no pleasure in this evil world.” You would think the Turks a philosophising people, judging by these posthumous declarations; but one need not travel to learn that tombstones are sad liars.

The cemetery of Scutari covers as much ground as a city. Its black cypress pall spreads away over hill and dale, and terminates, at last, on a long point projecting into Marmora, as if it would pour into the sea the dead it could no longer cover. From the Armenian village, immediately above, it forms a dark, and not unpicturesque foreground to a brilliant picture of the gulf of Nicomedia and the clustering Princes’ Islands. With the economy of room which the Turks practise in their burying-grounds, laying the dead, literally, side by side, and the immense extent of this forest of cypresses, it is probable that on no one spot on the earth are so many of the human race gathered together.

We wandered about among the tombs till we began to desire to see the cheerful light of day, and crossing toward the height of Bulgurlu, commenced its ascent, with the design of descending by the other side to the Bosphorus, and returning, by caique, to the city. Walking leisurely on between fields of the brightest cultivation, we passed, half way up, a small and rural serai, the summer residence of Esmeh Sultana, the younger sister of the sultan, and soon after stood, well breathed, on the lofty summit of Bulgurlu. The constantly-occurring sairgahs, or small grass platforms, for spreading the carpet and “taking kaif,” show how well the Turks appreciate the advantages of a position commanding, perhaps, views unparalleled in the world for their extraordinary beauty. But let us take breath and look around us.

We stood some three miles back from the Bosphorus, perhaps a thousand feet above its level. There lay Constantinople! The “temptation of Satan” could not have been more sublime. It seemed as if all the “kingdoms of the earth” were swept confusedly to the borders of the two continents. From Seraglio Point, seven miles down the coast of Roumelia, the eye followed a continued wall; and from the same point, twenty miles up the Bosphorus, on either shore, stretched one crowded and unbroken city! The star-shaped bay in the midst, crowded with flying boats; the Golden Horn sweeping out from behind the hills, and pouring through the city like a broad river, studded with ships; and, in the palace-lined and hill-sheltered Bosphorus, the sultan’s fleet at anchor, the lofty men-of-war flaunting their blood-red flags, and thrusting their tapering spars almost into the balconies of the fairy dwellings, and among the bright foliage of the terraced gardens above them. Could a scene be more strangely and beautifully mingled?

But sit down upon this silky grass, and let us listen to my polyglot friend, while he explains the details of the panorama.

First, clear over the sea of Marmora, you observe a snow-white cloud resting on the edge of the horizon. That is Olympus. Within sight of his snowy summit, and along toward the extremity of this long line of eastern hills, lie Bithynia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, and the whole scene of the apostles’ travels in Asia Minor; and just at his feet, if you will condescend to be modern, lies Brusa, famous for its silks, and one of the most populous and thriving of the sultan’s cities. Returning over Marmora by the Princes’ Islands, at the western extremity of Constantinople, stands the Fortress of the Seven Towers, where fell the Emperor Constantine Palæologus, where Othman the Second was strangled, where refractory ambassadors are left to come to their senses and the sultan’s terms, and where, in short, that “zealous public butcher,” the seraskier, cuts any Gordian knot that may tangle his political meshes; and here was the famous “Golden Gate,” attended no more by its “fifty porters with white wands,” and its crowds of “ichoglans and mutes, turban-keepers, nail-cutters, and slipper-bearers,” as in the days of the Selims.

Between the Seven Towers and the Golden Horn you may count the “seven hills” of ancient Stamboul, the towering arches of the aqueduct of Valens, crossing from one to the other, and the swelling dome and gold-tipped minarets of a hundred imperial mosques crowning and surrounding their summits. What an Orient look do those gallery-bound and sky-piercing shafts give to the varied picture!

There is but one “Seraglio Point” in the world. Look at that tapering cape, shaped like a lady’s foot, projecting from Stamboul toward the shore of Asia, and dividing the bay from the sea of Marmora. It is cut off from the rest of the city, you observe, by a high wall, flanked with towers, and the circumference of the whole seraglio may be three miles. But what a gem of beauty it is! In what varied foliage its unapproachable palaces are buried, and how exquisitely gleam from the midst of the bright leaves its gilded cupolas, its gay balconies, its airy belvideres, and its glittering domes! And mark the height of those dark and arrowy cypresses, shooting from every corner of its imperial gardens, and throwing their deep shadows on every bright cluster of foliage, and every gilded lattice of the sacred enclosure. They seem to remind one, that amid all its splendour, and with all its secluded retirement, this gorgeous sanctuary of royalty, has been stained, from its first appropriation by the monarchs of the East till now, with the blood of victims to the ambition of its changing masters. The cypresses are still young over the graves of an uncle and a brother, whose cold murder within those lovely precincts prepared the throne for the present sultan. The seraglio, no longer the residence of Mahmoud himself, is at present occupied by his children, two noble boys, of whom one, by the usual system, must fall a sacrifice to the security of the other.

Keeping on toward the Black Sea, we cross the Golden Horn to Pera, the European and diplomatic quarter of the city. The high hill on which it stands overlooks all Constantinople; and along its ridge toward the beautiful cemetery on the brow, runs the principal street of the Franks, the promenade of the dragoman exquisites, and the Broadway of shops and belles. Here meet, on the narrow pavé, the veiled Armenian, who would die with shame to show her chin to a stranger, and the wife of the European merchant, in a Paris hat and short petticoats, mutually each other’s sincere horror. Here the street is somewhat cleaner, the dogs somewhat less anti-Christian, and hat and trowsers somewhat less objects of contempt. It is a poor abortion of a place, withal, neither Turkish nor Christian; and nobody who could claim a shelter for his head elsewhere, would take the whole of its slate-coloured and shingled palaces as a gift.