The wealth stored here is something incredible. The loot of the place would make many and many a fortune, and enable the robbers to live comfortably and honestly for the rest of their days.
One of the most interesting places is the Arms Bazaar. It is not exactly what its name indicates, as it contains a great many things besides weapons of war or the chase. In the other bazaars you find an attempt now and then to conform to Occidental taste, but here everything is Oriental. You can find here every sort of weapon which the Orient has known in the past ten or twenty centuries. There are swords of Damascus, of a fineness unknown to the best steel of the present day, and which may have flashed in the hands of Saladin or Haroun-al-Raschid. There are knives and lances that are said to have pierced through coats of mail, and whose handles are crusted and covered with pearls and precious stones. There are spears, hatchets, lances, sabres, curious old match-locks, with barrels of immense length—all the weapons of the Islam of the past and going back to the time when Mohammed, at Mecca, believed himself commissioned from heaven to reform the world.
Saddles and housings, sparkling with precious stones, are placed where the light falling from the vaulted roof will show them to the best advantage; and as you look around you see thousands of objects covered with jewels and with barbaric pearl and gold. There are garments lined with costly furs, or embroidered in the most elaborate manner, and there are articles of furniture of fabulous value.
So great is the wealth contained in the Arms Bazaar that no fire is allowed there under any circumstances. Smoking is prohibited; the place where a Turk forbids himself to smoke must be sacred in the highest degree.
There are bazaars where they sell pipes of all kinds, and where you buy all kinds of tin-ware. There are book bazaars, seed bazaars, glass bazaars, and so on through a long list. And there is a second-hand bazaar, where you can buy anything from a set of false teeth to a suit of clothes. It is a wonderful mass of stuff, not altogether inviting; as you walk around, you have suspicions of plague, cholera, and other diseases of the Orient, and are not altogether sorry to get away. To most visitors to this place, the request “please not handle” would be quite superfluous, as they have no wish to form a very intimate acquaintance with the articles exposed for sale. But the Turk never puts up a notice of this sort, and seems quite indifferent on the subject.
We inquired for the slave bazaar, and were told it no longer existed.
A few years ago there was such a bazaar near the mosque of Mohammed II, where negro children were sold, and occasionally one could find an adult, man or woman, to be disposed of. The bazaar for white slaves is also gone, but the commerce is still carried on clandestinely. The business is conducted by Circassians established in the Pera quarter; they claim that the girls sold by them, come voluntarily to Constantinople, and the prices they demand is simply to cover the expense of importation. It was the month of Ramadan, or Ramazan, when I arrived at Constantinople. There may be some ignorant wretch who doesn’t know what Ramadan is.
Well, the Mohammedan year is divided into twelve months, composed alternately of twenty-nine and thirty days, or three hundred and fifty-four days in all. Consequently the year begins sometimes in the spring, sometimes in the summer, and so on, with a constant variation. This may seem absurd to our notions, but on second thought we see that it gives every month a fair show, and is really a very just system.
Suppose we had the same kind of year, we could have January begin, once in a while, in August, and March could have a chance to set up for September. May could not put on airs over November, because they would change places from time to time, and December could be in haying time, just as often as it is the period for skating. Think of planting potatoes in November and cutting ice in August, of eating your Christmas dinner and going a Maying in October! Mohammed had a level head after all.
Ramadan is the most sacred month in the year, and every Moslem is directed to fast every day during that month. From sunrise to sunset he must abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and smelling perfumes, and from all indulgence of a worldly character.