LETTER XLI.
Unerring Detection of Foreigners—A Cargo of Odalisques—The Fanar, or Quarter of the Greeks—Street of the Booksellers—Aspect of Antiquity—Purchases—Charity for Dogs and Pigeons—Punishment of Canicide—A Bridal Procession—Turkish Female Physiognomy.
Pulling up the Golden Horn to-day in a caique without any definite errand (a sort of excursion particularly after my own heart), I was amused at the caikjee’s asking my companion, who shaves clean like a Christian, and has his clothes from Regent-street, and looks for aught I can see, as much like a foreigner in Constantinople as myself, “in what vessel I had arrived.” We asked him if he had ever seen either of us before. “No!” How then did he know that my friend, who had not hitherto spoken a word of Turkish, was not as lately arrived as myself? What is it that so infallibly, in every part of the world, distinguishes the stranger?
We passed under the stern of an outlandish-looking vessel just dropping her anchor. Her deck was crowded with men and women in singular costumes, and near the helm, apparently under the protection of a dark-visaged fellow in a voluminous turban, stood three young, and, as well as we could see, uncommonly pretty girls. The captain answered to our hail that he was from Trebizond, and his passengers were slaves for the bazaar. How redolent of the East! Were one but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of surprise and innocence!
We landed at the Fanar. Bow-windows crowded with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked shoulders (which I am already so orientalised as to think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists, reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and miserable suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece, the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, intriguing, but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes. One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root of Palæologus or some equally boasted blood of the Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G—— at the baths of Lucca last year, whom I except from every disparaging remark), that he is a little disappointed with the dirty alleys and the stuffed windows shown him as hereditary homes of these very sounding names. There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar, that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter that would pass in our country for a respectable barn. In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior to any other race of their own nation. The Albanians and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were (except the North American Indians) the finest people, physically, I have ever been among; while it would be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate-looking body of men and women, than swarm in this nest of Grecian princes.
We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and caïques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward the bazaar. Always discovering new passages in that labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves, after an hour’s rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rather the oldest and narrowest part of the bazaar, and the light of heaven meets with the additional interruption of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in the middle of the street. On entering the literary twilight of the passage in the rear of these columns, the classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odour of manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding; and the trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries, wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complexion of a shelf at the Harpers’, or the Hendees’, or the Careys’—no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem, no political pamphlet or gay souvenir! And the priceless treasures of learning are not here doled out by a talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in sombre and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspondence of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumbed tomes of Arabic or Persian; while the venerable bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his grey beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind, and murmur a low “pekke!” of approbation.
We had stepped back into the last century. Here was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed, not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less than the purchase of a whole scrivener’s furniture, from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed, by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbours: for in Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar. A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the old man’s knees, while from a wooden bowl he was eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evidently an interruption. He had not even laid aside his book.
There was something in his handling the volume, as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an affection for the author. He turned it over with a slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I took it from him open at the place, and marked the passage with my nail, to look for it in the translation.