Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

The “Golden Horn” is a curved arm of the sea, the broadest extremity meeting the Bosphorus and forming the harbour of Constantinople, and the other tapering away till it is lost in the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” It curls through the midst of the “seven-hilled” city, and you cross it whenever you have an errand in old Stamboul. Its hundreds of shooting caïques, its forests of merchantmen and men-of-war, its noise and its confusion, are exchanged in scarce ten minutes of swift pulling for the breathless and Eden-like solitude of a valley that has not its parallel, I am inclined to think, between the Mississippi and the Caspian. It is called in Turkish khyat-khana. Opening with a gentle curve from the Golden Horn, it winds away into the hills toward Belgrade, its long and even hollow thridded by a lively stream, and carpeted by a broad belt of unbroken green sward swelling up to the enclosing hills, with a grass so verdant and silken that it seems the very floor of faëry. In the midst of its longest stretch to the eye (perhaps two miles of level meadow) stands a beautiful serai of the sultan’s, unfenced and open, as if it had sprung from the lap of the green meadow like a lily. The stream runs by its door, and over a mimic fall whose lip is of scalloped marble, is built an oriental kiosk, all carving and gold, that is only too delicate and fantastical for reality.

Here, with, the first grass of spring, the sultan sends his fine-footed Arabians to pasture; and here come the ladies of his harem (chosen, women and horses, for much the same class of qualities), and in the long summer afternoon, with mounted eunuchs on the hills around, forbidding on pain of death, all approach to the sacred retreat, they venture to drop their jealous veils and ramble about in their unsunned beauty.

After a gallop of three or four miles over the broad waste table plains, in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, we checked our horses suddenly on the brow of a precipitous descent, with this scene of beauty spread out before us. I had not yet approached it by water, and it seemed to me as if the earth had burst open at my feet, and revealed some realm of enchantment. Behind me, and away beyond the valley to the very horizon, I could see only a trackless heath, brown and treeless, while a hundred feet below lay a strip of very Paradise, blooming in all the verdure and heavenly freshness of spring. We descended slowly, and crossing a bridge half hidden by willows, rode in upon the elastic green sward (for myself) with half a feeling of profanation. There were no eunuchs upon the hills, however, and our spirited Turkish horses threw their wild heads into the air, and we flew over the verdant turf like a troop of Delhis, the sound of the hoofs on the yielding carpet scarcely audible. The fair palace in the centre of this domain of loveliness was closed, and it was only after we had walked around it that we observed a small tent of the prophet’s green couched in a small dell on the hill-side, and containing probably the guard of its imperial master.

We mounted again and rode up the valley for two or three miles, following the same level and verdant curve, the soft carpet broken only by the silver thread of the Barbyses, loitering through it on its way to the sea. A herd of buffaloes, tended by a Bulgarian boy, stretched on his back in the sunshine, and a small caravan of camels bringing wood from the hills, and keeping to the soft valley as a relief to their spongy feet, were the only animated portions of the landscape. I think I shall never form to my mind another picture of romantic rural beauty (an employment of the imagination I am much given to when out of humour with the world) that will not resemble the “Valley of Sweet Waters”—the khyat-khana of Constantinople. “Poor Slingsby” never was here.[^[15]]

The lofty mosque of Sulymanye, the bazaars of the opium-eaters, and the Timar-hané, or mad-house of Constantinople, are all upon one square in the highest part of the city. We entered the vast court of the mosque from a narrow and filthy street, and the impression of its towering plane-trees and noble area, and of the strange, but grand and costly pile in its centre, was almost devotional. An inner court, enclosed by a kind of romanesque wall, contained a sacred marble fountain of light and airy architecture, and the portico facing this was sustained by some of those splendid and gigantic columns of porphyry and jasper, the spoils of the churches of Asia Minor.[^[16]]

I think the most beautiful spire that rises into the sky is the Turkish minaret. If I may illustrate an object of such magnitude by so trifling a comparison, it is exactly the shape and proportions of an ever-pointed pencil-case—the silver bands answering to the encircling galleries, one above another, from which the muezzin calls out the hour of prayer. The minaret is painted white, the galleries are fantastically carved, and rising to the height of the highest steeples in our country (four and sometimes six to a single mosque), these slender and pointed fingers of devotion seem to enter the very sky. Remembering, dear reader, that there are two hundred and twenty mosques and three hundred chapels in Constantinople, raising, perhaps, in all, a thousand minarets to heaven, you may get some idea of the magnificence of this seven-hilled capital of the East.

It was near the hour of prayer, and the devout Mussulmans were thronging into the court of Sulymanye by every gate. Passing the noble doors, with their strangely-carved arches of arabesque, which invite all to enter but the profaning foot of the Christian, the turbaned crowd repaired first to the fountains. From the walls of every mosque, by small conduits pouring into a marble basin, flow streams of pure water for the religious ablutions of the faithful. The Mussulman approaches, throws off his flowing robe, steps out of his yellow slippers, and unwinds his voluminous turban with devout deliberateness. A small marble step, worn hollow with pious use, supports his foot while he washes from the knee downward. His hands and arms, with the flowing sleeve of his silk shirt rolled to the shoulder, receive the same lavation, and then, washing his face, he repeats a brief prayer, resumes all but his slippers, and enters the mosque, barefooted. The mihrab (or niche indicating the side toward the tomb of the prophet), fixes his eye. He folds his hands together, prays a moment standing, prostrates himself flat on his face toward the hallowed quarter, rises upon his knees, and continues praying and prostrating himself for perhaps half an hour. And all this process is required by the mufti, and performed by every good Mussulman five times a day! A rigid adherence to it is almost universal among the Turks. In what an odour of sanctity would a Christian live, who should make himself thus “familiar with heaven!”

As the muezzin from the minaret was shouting his last “mash-allah!” with a voice like a man calling out from the clouds, we left the court of the majestic mosque, with Byron’s reflection:—

“Alas! man makes that great, which makes him little!”

and, having delivered ourselves of this scrap of poetical philosophy, we crossed over the square to the opium-eaters.