Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven Towers, and dismissed our boat to walk across to the Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the triple walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers look as if they were toppling after an earthquake, and are overgrown superbly with ivy. Large trees, rooted in the crevices, and gradually bursting the thick walls, overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for the whole length of the five or six miles across, it is one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no country such beautiful ruins.

At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of horsemen, armed in the wild manner of the East, who had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the mountains. They were not allowed to enter the city, and, with their horses picketed upon the plain, were lying about in groups, waiting till their leader should conclude his audience with the seraskier. They were as cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see. The extreme richness of eastern arms, mounted showily in silver, and of shapes so cumbersome, yet picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged capotes, and torn leggings, and their way-worn and weary countenances. Yet they were almost without exception fine-featured, and with a resolute expression of face, and they had flung themselves, as savages will, into attitudes that art would find it difficult to improve.

Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs, indicating the spots in which are buried the heads of Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three sons and grandson. The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head for having dared to aspire to independence. He was a brave old barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief of the most warlike people of modern times, one stands over his grave with regret. It would have been a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event in his travels made more impression on his mind than the pacha’s detecting his rank by the beauty of his hands. His fine description of the wild court of Yanina, in “Childe Harold,” has already made the poet’s return of immortality, but had he survived the revolution in Greece, with his increased knowledge of the Albanian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen whether the age or the language will produce another Byron to take up the broken thread.

As we were poring over the Turkish inscription, four men, apparently quite intoxicated, came running and hallooing from the city gate, bearing upon their shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the cemetery, they went stumbling on over the foot-stones, tossing the corpse about so violently, that the helpless limbs frequently fell beyond the limits of the rude barrow, while the grave-digger, the only sober person, save the dead man, in the company, followed at his best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These extraordinary bearers set down their burden not far from the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like men who had merely engaged in a moment’s frolic by the way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed a little the posture of the disordered body, and sat down to get breath for his task.

My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces on its way to the grave. The poor are thus carried out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after they have completed their prescribed paces, change with the first individual whose reckoning with heaven may be in arrears.

The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last journey, was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He had neither shroud nor coffin, but

“Lay like a gentleman taking a snooze,”

in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his bosom the only token that he was dressed for any particular occasion. We had not time to stay and see his grave dug, and “his face laid toward the tomb of the prophet.”

We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the triangle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line approaching its hypothenuse. Though in a city so thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a street; and the perfect silence, and the cheerless look of the Turkish houses, with their jealously closed windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by the plague. The population of Constantinople is only seen in the bazaars or in the streets bordering on the Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy apartments opening on their secluded gardens, or are hidden from the gaze of the street by their fine dull-coloured lattices. It strikes one with melancholy after the gay balconies and open doors of France and Italy!

We passed the Eskai Serai, the palace in which the imperial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude; and, weary with our long walk, emerged from the silent streets at the bazaar of wax-candles, and took caique for the Argentopolis of the ancients, the Silver City of Galatia.