Greatest wonders of the world, as seen and described by famous writers

by Unknown

(TURKEY)

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

The land breeze begins to rise, and we make use of it to approach nearer and nearer to the Dardanelles. Already several large ships, which like us are trying to make this difficult entrance, come near us; their large grey sails, like the wings of night-birds, glide silently between our brig and Tenedos; I go down below and fall asleep.

Break of day: I hear the rapid sailing of vessels and the little morning waves that sound around the sides of the brig like the song of birds; I open the port-hole, and I see on a chain of low and rounded hills the castles of the Dardanelles with their white walls, their towers, and their immense mouths for the cannon; the canal is scarcely more than a league in width at this place; it winds, like a beautiful river, between the exactly similar coasts of Asia and Europe. The castles shut in this sea just like the two wings of a door; but in the present condition of Turkey and Europe, it would be easy to force a passage by sea, or to make a landing and take the forts from the rear; the passage of the Dardanelles is not impregnable unless guarded by the Russians.

The rapid current carries us on like an arrow before Gallipoli and the villages bordering the canal; we see the isles in the Sea of Marmora frowning before us; we follow the coast of Europe for two days and two nights, thwarted by the north winds. In the morning we perceive perfectly the isles of the princes, in the Sea of Marmora, and the Gulf of Nicæa, and on our left the castle of the Seven Towers, and the aërial tops of the innumerable minarets of Stamboul, in front of the seven hills of Constantinople. At each tack, we discover something new. At the first view of Constantinople, I experienced a painful emotion of surprise and disillusion. “What! is this,” I asked myself, “the sea, the shore, and the marvellous city for which the masters of the world abandoned Rome and the coast of Naples? Is this that capital of the universe, seated upon Europe and Asia; for which all the conquering nations disputed by turns as the sign of the supremacy of the world? Is this the city that painters and poets imagine queen of cities seated upon her hills and her twin seas; enclosed by her gulfs, her towers, her mountains, and containing all the treasures of nature and the luxury of the Orient?” It is here that one makes comparison with the Bay of Naples bearing its white city upon its hollowed bosom like a vast amphitheatre; with Vesuvius losing its golden brow in the clouds of smoke and purple lights, the forest of Castellamare plunging its black foliage into the blue sea, and the islands of Procida and Ischia with their volcanic peaks yellow with vine-branches and white with villas, shutting in the immense bay like gigantic moles thrown up by God himself at the entrance of this port? I see nothing here to compare to that spectacle with which my eyes are always enchanted; I am sailing, it is true, upon a beautiful and lovely sea, but from the low coasts, rounded and monotonous hills rear themselves; it is true that the snows of Olympus of Thrace whiten the horizon, but they are only a white cloud in the sky and do not make the landscape solemn enough. At the back of the gulf I see nothing but the same rounded hills of the same height without rocks, without coves, without indentations, and Constantinople, which the pilot points out with his finger, is nothing but a white and circumscribed city upon a large knoll on the European coast. Is it worth while having come so far to be disenchanted? I did not wish to look at it any longer; however, the ceaseless tackings of the ship brought us sensibly nearer; we coasted along the castle of the Seven Towers, an immense mediæval grey block, severe in construction, which faces the sea at the angle of the Greek walls of the ancient Byzantium, and we came to anchor beneath the houses of Stamboul in the Sea of Marmora, in the midst of a host of ships and boats delayed like ourselves from port by the violence of the north winds. It was five o’clock, the sky was serene and the sun brilliant; I began to recover from my disdain of Constantinople; the walls that enclosed this portion of the city picturesquely built of the débris of ancient walls and surmounted by gardens, kiosks and little houses of wood painted red, formed the foreground of the picture; above, the terraces of numerous houses rose in pyramid-like tiers, story upon story, cut across with the tops of orange-trees and the sharp, black spires of cypress; higher still, seven or eight large mosques crowned the hill, and, flanked by their open-work minarets and their mauresque colonnades, lifted into the sky their gilded domes, flaming with the palpitating sunlight; the walls, painted with tender blue, the leaden covers of the cupolas that encircled them, gave them the appearance and the transparent glaze of monuments of porcelain. The immemorial cypresses lend to these domes their motionless and sombre peaks; and the various tints of the painted houses of the city make the vast hill gay with all the colours of a flower-garden. No noise issues from the streets; no lattice of the innumerable windows opens; no movement disturbs the habitation of such a great multitude of men: everything seems to be sleeping under the broiling sunlight; the gulf, furrowed in every direction with sails of all forms and sizes, alone gives signs of life. Every moment we see vessels in full sail clear the Golden Horn (the opening of the Bosphorus), the true harbour of Constantinople, passing by us flying towards the Dardanelles; but we can not perceive the entrance of the Bosphorus, nor even understand its position. We dine on the deck opposite this magical spectacle; Turkish caïques come to question us and to bring us provisions and food; the boatmen tell us that there is no longer any plague; I send my letters to the city; at seven o’clock, M. Truqui, the consul-general of Sardaigne, accompanied by officers of his legation, comes to pay us a visit and offer us the hospitality of his house in Pera; there is not the slightest hope of finding a lodging in the recently burned city; the obliging cordiality, and the attraction that M. Truqui inspires at the first moment, induces us to accept. The contrary wind still blows, and the brigs cannot raise anchor this evening: we sleep on board.

THE GOLDEN HORN.

At five o’clock I am standing on the deck; the captain lowers a boat; I descend with him, and we set sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, coasting along the walls of Constantinople, which the sea washes. After half an hour’s navigation through a multitude of ships at anchor, we reach the walls of the Seraglio, which stand next to those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill that bears Stamboul, the angle that separates the Sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, or the grand inner roadstead of Constantinople. It is here that God and man, nature and art, have placed, or created, in concert the most marvellous view that human eyes may contemplate upon the earth. I gave an involuntary cry, and I forgot for ever the Bay of Naples and all its enchantments; to compare anything to this magnificent and gracious combination would be to insult creation.

The walls supporting the circular terraces of the immense gardens of the great Seraglio were a few feet from us to our left, separated from the sea by a narrow sidewalk of stone flags washed by the ceaseless billows, where the perpetual current of the Bosphorus formed little murmuring waves, as blue as those of the Rhône at Geneva; these terraces that rise in gentle inclines up to the Sultan’s palace, where you perceive the gilded domes across the gigantic tops of the plantain-trees and the cypresses, are themselves planted with enormous cypresses and plantains whose trunks dominate the walls and whose boughs, spreading beyond the garden, hang over the sea in cascades of foliage shadowing the caïques; the rowers stop from time to time beneath their shade; every now and then these groups of trees are interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks, doors sculptured and gilded opening upon the sea, or batteries of cannon of copper and bronze in ancient and peculiar shapes.

Several pulls of the oar brought us to the precise point of the Golden Horn where you enjoy at once a view of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and, finally, of the entire harbour, or, rather, the inland sea of Constantinople; there we forgot Marmora, the coast of Asia, and the Bosphorus, taking in with one glance the basin of the Golden Horn and the seven cities seated upon the seven hills of Constantinople, all converging towards the arm of the sea that forms the unique and incomparable city, that is at the same time city, country, sea, harbour, bank of flowers, gardens, wooded mountains, deep valleys, an ocean of houses, a swarm of ships and streets, tranquil lakes, and enchanted solitudes,—a view that no brush can render except by details, and where each stroke of the oar gives the eye and soul contradictory aspects and impressions.