Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

A long row of half-ruined buildings, of a single story, with porticoes in front, and the broad, raised platform beneath, on which the Turks sit cross-legged at public places, is the scene of what was once a peculiarly oriental spectacle. The mufti has of late years denounced the use of opium, and the devotees to its sublime intoxication have either conquered the habit, or what is more probable, indulge it in more secret places. The shops are partly ruinous, and those that remain in order are used as cafés, in which, however, it is said that the dangerous drug may still be procured. My companion inquired of a good-humoured-looking caféjee whether there was any place at which a confirmed opium-eater could be seen under its influence. He said there was an old Turk, who was in the habit of frequenting his shop, and, if we could wait an hour or two, we might see him in the highest state of intoxication. We had no time to spare, if the object had been worth our while.

And here, thought I, as we sat down and took a cup of coffee in the half-ruined café, have descended upon the delirious brains of these noble drunkards, the visions of Paradise so glowingly described in books—visions, it is said, as far exceeding the poor invention of the poet, as the houris of the prophet exceed the fair damsels of this world. Here men, otherwise in their senses, have believed themselves emperors, warriors, poets; these wretched walls and bending roof, the fair proportions of a palace; this gray old caféjee, a Hylas or a Ganymede. Here men have come to cast off, for an hour, the dull thraldom of the body; to soar into the glorious world of fancy at a penalty of a thousand times the proportion of real misery; to sacrifice the invaluable energies of health, and deliberately poison the very fountain of life, for a few brief moments of magnificent and phrensied blessedness. It is powerfully described in the “Opium Eater” of De Quincy.

At the extremity of this line of buildings, by a natural proximity, stands the Timar-hané. We passed the porter at the gate without question, and entered a large quadrangle, surrounded with the grated windows of cells on the ground-floor. In every window was chained a maniac. The doors of the cells were all open, and, descending by a step upon the low stone floor of the first, we found ourselves in the presence of four men chained to rings in the four corners by massy iron collars. The man in the window sat crouched together, like a person benumbed (the day was raw and cold as December), the heavy chain of his collar hanging on his naked breast, and his shoulders imperfectly covered with a narrow blanket. His eyes were large and fierce, and his mouth was fixed in an expression of indignant sullenness. My companion asked him if he were ill. He said he should be well, if he were out—that he was brought there in a fit of intoxication, two years ago, and was no more crazy than his keeper. Poor fellow! It might easily be true! He lifted his heavy collar from his neck as he spoke, and it was not difficult to believe that misery like his for two long years would, of itself, destroy reason. There was a better dressed man in the opposite corner, who informed us, in a gentlemanly voice, that he had been a captain in the sultan’s army, and was brought there in the delirium of a fever. He was at a loss to know, he said, why he was imprisoned still.

We passed on to a poor, half-naked wretch in the last stage of illness and idiocy, who sat chattering to himself, and, though trembling with the cold, interrupted his monologue continually with fits of the wildest laughter. Farther on sat a young man of a face so full of intellectual beauty, an eye so large and mild, a mouth of such mingled sadness and sweetness, and a forehead so broad, and marked so nobly, that we stood, all of us, struck with a simultaneous feeling of pity and surprise. A countenance more beaming with all that is admirable in human nature, I have never seen, even in painting. He might have sat to Da Vinci for the “beloved apostle.” He had tied the heavy chain by a shred to a round of the grating, to keep its weight from his neck, and seemed calm and resigned, with all his sadness. My friend spoke to him, but he answered obscurely, and seeing that our gaze disturbed him, we passed unwillingly on. Oh what room there is in the world for pity! If that poor prisoner be not a maniac (as he may not be), and if nature has not falsified in the structure of his mind the superior impress on his features, what Prometheus-like agony has he suffered! The guiltiest felon is better cared for. And, allowing his mind to be a wreck, and allowing the hundred human minds, in the same cheerless prison, to be certainly in ruins, oh what have they done to be weighed down with iron on their necks, and exposed, like caged beasts, shivering and naked, to the eye of pitiless curiosity? I have visited lunatic asylums in France, Italy, Sicily, and Germany, but, culpably neglected as most of them are, I have seen nothing comparable to this in horror.

“Is he never unchained?” we asked. “Never!” And yet from the ring to the iron collar there was just chain enough to permit him to stand upright! There were no vessels near them, not even a pitcher of water. Their dens were cleansed and the poor sufferers fed at appointed hours, and, come wind or rain, there was neither shutter nor glass to defend them from the inclemency of the weather.

We entered most of the rooms, and found in all the same dampness, filth, and misery. One poor wretch had been chained to the same spot for twenty years. The keeper said he never slept. He talked all the night long. Sometimes at mid-day his voice would cease, and his head nod for an instant, and then with a start as if he feared to be silent, he raved on with the same incoherent rapidity. He had been a dervish. His collar and chain were bound with rags, and a tattered coat was fastened up on the inside of the window, forming a small recess in which he sat, between the room and the grating. He was emaciated to the last degree. His beard was tangled and filthy, his nails curled over the ends of his fingers, and his appearance, save only an eye of the keenest lustre, that of a wild beast.

In the last room we entered, we found a good-looking young man, well-dressed, healthy, composed, and having every appearance of a person in the soundest state of mind and body. He saluted us courteously, and told my friend that he was a renegade Greek. He had turned Mussulman a year or two ago, had lost his reason, and so was brought here. He talked of it quite as a thing of course, and seemed to be entirely satisfied that the best had been done for him. One of the party took hold of his chain. He winced as the collar stirred on his neck, and said the lock was on the outside of the window (which was true), and that the boys came in and tormented him by pulling it sometimes, “There they are,” he said, pointing to two or three children who had just entered the court, and were running round from one prisoner to another. We bade him good morning, and he laid his hand to his breast, and bowed with a smile. As we passed toward the gate, the chattering lunatic on the opposite side screamed after us, the old dervish laid his skinny hands on the bars of his window, and talked louder and faster, and the children, approaching close to the poor creatures, laughed with delight at their excitement.

It was a relief to escape the common sights and sounds of the city. We walked on to the Hippodrome. The only remaining beauty of this famous square is the unrivalled mosque of Sultan Achmet, which, though inferior in size to the renowned Santa Sophia, is superior in elegance both within and without. Its six slender and towering minarets are the handsomest in Constantinople. The wondrous obelisk in the centre of the square, remains perfect as in the time of the Christian emperors, but the brazen tripod is gone from the twisted column, and the serpent-like pillar itself is leaning over with its brazen folds to its fall.

Here stood the barracks of the powerful Janisaries, and from the side of Sultan Achmet the cannon were levelled upon them, as they rushed from the conflagration within. And here, when Constantinople was “the second Rome,” were witnessed the triumphal processions of Christian conquest, the march of the crusaders, bound for Palestine, and the civil tumults which Justinian, walking among the people with the Gospel in his hand, tried in vain to allay ere they burnt the great edifice built of the ruins of the temple of Solomon. And around this now neglected area, the captive Gelimer followed in chains the chariot of the conquering Belisarius, repeating the words of Solomon, “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!” while the conqueror himself, throwing aside his crown, prostrated himself at the feet of the beautiful Theodora, raised from a Roman actress to be the Christian empress of the East. From any elevated point of the city, you may still see the ruins of the palace of the renowned warrior, and read yourself a lesson on human vicissitudes, remembering the school-book story of “an obolon for Belisarius!”

The Hippodome was, until late years, the constant scene of the games of the jereed. With the destruction of the Janisaries, and the introduction of European tactics, this graceful exercise has gone out of fashion. The East is fast losing its picturesqueness. Dress, habits, character, everything seems to be undergoing a gradual change, and when, as the Turks themselves predict, the Moslem is driven into Asia, this splendid capital will become another Paris, and with the improvements in travel, a summer in Constantinople will be as little thought of as a tour in Italy. Politicians in this part of the world predict such a change as about to arrive.