The whole place is an old fort. We pass under a gateway through a thick wall of crumbling rich red brick, and come across similar walls and arches again and again as soon as we wander away from the central bazaar, which consists of four narrow streets, a few Turkish shops for the sale of all sorts of things—largely such “souvenirs” as tourists are expected to buy, which may be taken as indicating that if English visitors are not numerous on this part of the Danube other visitors must come in fair numbers, for they are evidently looked to to play their part in supporting the small population of the island. In the streets, or alleys, we see only men and boys, all wearing the deep-red fez. When we pass by the gardens of some of the houses they are to be seen boarded up with fences of six or seven feet high—as we pass one a tiny Turkish maiden, red-fezed like her brother, emerges and offers a few flowers in a way that suggests that a “tip” is expected—another indication that, though we are the only visitors on the island at the moment, Ada Kaleh has taken on the ways of a “show place” and is on the look-out for strangers.
A CAFÉ IN ADA KALEH
The bazaar, with its little café tables under the acacias, its red-bricked paths, its low houses washed with brilliant blues and greens, its group of men and boys, its shop-keepers standing in their doorways fingering their “Tespis,” or strings of beads, is a true and interesting glimpse of the Orient. The plain mosque, above one of the battered walls, has little to show beyond a magnificent carpet covering its floor space, though outside is a picturesque roofed-in well, grown closely round with a wealth of vari-coloured convolvuluses, admiring which, in company with a Japanese visitor, I learned that in Japan as in England the flower is known as “the morning glory.” A series of embayed arches under the walls, all of the same crumbling red brick, known as the catacombs, suggest something of the security of the place in the old days when it was a powerful fort. Its military importance is still acknowledged by a small Austrian garrison being kept on it. Despite this evidence of changed authority it remains essentially Turkish.
On one of the gateways of the fortress is a memorial inscription in Turkish, along which have been placed, within recent years, other tablets rendering the inscription in Magyar and German. It is to the following effect:—
“Open is the way of glory
To him who was glorious in deeds
Similar to those of the old times of heroes.