The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which the Oriental delights as much as he does in making a noise. It is most curious to find a whole people without nerves, who cannot talk without shouting, and who cannot shout without giving you the idea that they are in great pain, and that unless relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will be your fault. Those of them who sell bread or fruits or fish or beads, or whatever it may be, in the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. They apparently never "move on." They always meet under your window or at the corners of a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the streetcars—which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these cars—and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs.

A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE

There are three or four intensely interesting ceremonies and many show-places in Constantinople which are unlike anything of the same sort in any other city. Apart from these and the bazars, which are very wonderful, there is nothing in the city itself which makes even the Oriental seek it in preference to his own mountains or plains or native village. Constantinople, so far as its population is to be considered, is standing still. It impresses you as stagnant before your statistical friend or the oldest member of the diplomatic corps or the oldest inhabitant tells the Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo possible, or in pretty little Athens, where the boulevards and the classics are so strangely jumbled, but one cannot understand a man's settling down in Constantinople. Where there are no women there can be no court, and the few rich Greek residents and still fewer of the pashas and the diplomats make the society of the city. Even these last find it far from gay, for it so happens that the ambassadors are all either bachelors, widowers, or the husbands of invalid wives, and the result is a society which depends largely on a very smart club for its amusement. In the wintertime, when the snow and rain sweep over the three hills, and the solitary street of Galata is a foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves radiate a candle-like heat in a room built to let in all the air possible, I can imagine few less desirable places than the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This is in the winter only; as I have said, it is a fair-weather city, and I did not see it at its best.

There are three things to which one is taken in Constantinople—the mosque of St. Sophia, the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's own mosque is situated conveniently near his palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant. Once every Friday he rides this distance, and once a year journeys as far as the mosque of St. Sophia. With these outings he is content, and on no other occasions does he show himself to his people or leave his palace. This is what it is to be a sovereign of many countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman religion; and the ruler of nations and lands conquered by your ancestors, of which you see less than a donkey-boy in Cairo or the owner of a caïque on the Bosporus. We used to sing in college,

"The Sultan better pleases me; His life is full of jollity."

The jollity of a life which the possessor believes to be threatened by assassination in every form and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly nature.

You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony of the Sultan's visit to his mosque is called, and you are requested, as you are supposed to be the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not to bring opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless strongly suggestive of a theatrical performance. The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience in a grand-stand, are on the other. One end of the street is blocked by a great square, and the other by the gateway of the palace from which the Sultan comes. The street is not more than a hundred yards in length. A band of music enters this square first and plays the overture to the ceremony. The musicians are mounted on horseback and followed by a double line of cavalrymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance at rest with a red pennant. There are thousands of these; they stretch out like telegraph poles on the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east wind like a forest of autumn leaves. You begin to suspect that they are going around the square and returning again many times, as the supers do in "Ours." Then the horses turn black and the overcoats of the men change from gray to blue, and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of bunting along the street leading to the palace, until they have all filed into the open square and halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of four thousand restless horses and four thousand scarlet flags. And then more bands and drums and bugle-calls come from every point of the city, and regiment after regiment swarms up the hill on which the palace rests, the tune of one band of music breaking in on the tune of the next, as do those of the political processions at home, until every approach to the gate of the palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed men, and you look out and down upon the points of five thousand bayonets crushed into a space not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There is no populace to see this spectacle, only those of the faithful who stop on their way to Mecca to catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, and a few women who have brought petitions to present to him and who are allowed within the lines of soldiers.