LETTER XLIII.
Punishment of Conjugal Infidelity—Drowning in the Bosphorus—Frequency of its occurrence accounted for—A Band of Wild Roumeliotes—Their Picturesque Appearance—Ali Pacha, of Yanina—A Turkish Funeral—Fat Widow of Sultan Selim—A Visit to the Sultan’s Summer Palace—A Travelling Moslem—Unexpected Token of Home.
A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the Bosphorus this morning. I was idling away the day in the bazaar and did not see her. The ward-room steward of the “United States,” a very intelligent man, who was at the pier when she was brought down to the caique, describes her as a young woman of twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful; and with the exception of a short quick sob in her throat, as if she had wearied herself out with weeping, she was quite calm and submitted composedly to her fate. She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress, her yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was drawn over her without resistance. The plash of her body in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had followed her to the water.
It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions, knowing as we do, that the poor victim is taken before the judge, upon the least jealous whim of her husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspicion, and hurried instantly from the tribunal to this violent and revolting death. Any suspicion of commerce with a Christian particularly, is, with or without evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants of Arnaout-keni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus, were shocked with the spectacle of a Turkish woman and a young Greek, hanging dead from the shutters of a window on the water’s side. He had been detected in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less than an hour the unfortunate lovers had met their fate. They are said to have died most heroically, embracing and declaring their attachment to the last.
Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople, and it is not wonderful, considering the superiority of the educated and picturesque Greek to his brutal neighbour, or the daring and romance of Europeans in the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The liberty of going and coming, which the Turkish women enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by their secrecy, is temptingly favourable to intrigue, and the self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the demand for it.
An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of the sultan’s sister, consisting of a great number of women, tells me that their time is principally occupied in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers, with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These platonic passions for persons whom they have only seen from their gilded lattices, are their only amusement, and they are permitted by the sultana, who has herself the reputation of being partial to Franks, and, old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to obtain their society. My intelligent informant thinks the Turkish women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat remarkable for their sentiment of character.
With two English travellers, whom I had known in Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran down under the wall of the city, on the side of the sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath the wall of the seraglio, whose small water-gates, whence so many victims have found
“Their way to Marmora without a boat,”
are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with the dramatis personæ of a thousand tragedies. One smiles to detect himself gazing on an old postern, with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end, in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of September!