The Turk and his lost provinces

by William Eleroy Curtis

St. Sophia for fifteen hundred years has been the theater of some of the greatest and most solemn ceremonies in history, and was particularly associated with the Crusades. On one of the piers in the nave is the mark resembling the imprint of a bloody hand, said to have been made by Mohammed II. as his war charger stood upon the bodies of Christian corpses on the day of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.

All around the mosques are tombs, schools, baths, fountains, shops for the sale of chaplets and other religious articles, hospices for pilgrims, kitchens for the poor and a theological seminary with several thousand students.

The Sultan has many palaces, all of them constructed by his predecessors. He has built none himself, although he altered the Yildiz Kiosk, in which he lives in seclusion, and modernized it a good deal. Most of his palaces are occupied by his seven brothers and sisters, his three married children, and other relatives. Only two of the palaces are ever seen by strangers, and those can be entered only with a permit from the Sultan himself, to whom application must be made with the endorsement of your ambassador. Dolma-Baghtcheh Palace, an enormous mass of glittering marble, with gorgeous gates and a pretty garden around it, stands not far from the city on the European side, and Beyler-Bey, on the Asiatic shore. If exquisitely carved marble, carved wood and gilding, mosaics and mirrors, crystal chandeliers and gorgeous frescoes, priceless rugs, tapestries, gilded furniture and divans upholstered in costly damask, all in a prodigality from which taste is excluded, constitute an ideal palace, Beyler-Bey excels.

BEYLER-BEY PALACE, CONSTANTINOPLE

At a distance the exterior, shown against the woodlands and the grassy plateaus of the Asiatic shore, makes an exceedingly pretty picture, and Dolma-Baghtcheh as a mass is imposing. When you come to examine the details you wonder without admiration at the lace-work doors, the massive gilt columns, the barbaric domes and the Saracenic arches and a crystal staircase, which must have cost an enormous sum of money. Everything about the place is of the most costly material. The bath and toilet-room connected with the Sultan’s apartments, which is shown with great pride, is lined with slabs of alabaster—floor, walls and ceiling—and the tub is of the same material. There are wash-basins in nearly all the reception-rooms made of onyx and alabaster, which we were told were necessary to take the place of finger-bowls after the people of the court ate sweets. Both the Dolma-Baghtcheh and the Beyler-Bey palaces are mixtures of Moorish, Arabic, Turkish and French architecture and decoration, but the big ballroom, where the Sultans formerly held receptions, is pure French.

We asked the handsome young aide-de-camp, who was detailed by His Imperial Majesty to conduct us through the palaces, how a ball-room was used in a country where gentlemen were not permitted to meet ladies. He explained that in the harems the ladies often danced among themselves for the entertainment of their husbands, although the latter never danced with them, but a ball-room was considered a necessary feature of a palace, and this one had been used on several occasions years ago. The young colonel showed us through the picture gallery also, where there is a collection of paintings made by the late Sultan Abdul Aziz, who evidently knew very little about art. His taste seemed to run to nude women, horses, and battle pictures in which Turkish legions were trampling down their enemies. There were several portraits of Sultans also, notwithstanding the popular impression that the Mohammedan religion forbids the reproduction of the human face and figure.

People who have read fanciful descriptions of Constantinople, penned by poets, artists and other sentimentalists like D’Amicis, for example, who are apt to see more than appears to ordinary eyes, have an impression that the Seraglio of the Sultan is a palace of mysterious seclusion; that it has something to do with the harem and other private affairs of His Imperial Majesty. I supposed so until I came to Constantinople, but it is nothing of the sort. Literally, a seraglio means a portico or vestibule surrounding any habitation, palace, kiosk or mosque, but the term is commonly used as a collective noun, and refers to a collection of buildings used for different purposes, such as the residence of a pasha, his harem, his offices, his stables and the mosque that is attached to all of the large establishments in Turkey. The Seraglio of the Sultan is a large collection of buildings inclosed by a mighty wall, covering the extreme point of the peninsula upon which Stamboul stands, and dividing the Sea of Marmora from the Golden Horn. In its geographical association it corresponds to Battery Park, New York, and is the most conspicuous object one sees upon approaching the city and the last upon which the eye rests when departing. It is also the most interesting spot in all Turkey from a historical standpoint. There is no place in the East except the Holy Land which has so many associations. It is to Constantinople what the Kremlin is to Moscow, the Escurial to Madrid, Potsdam to Berlin, Versailles to Paris, and perhaps we may compare it to Hampton Court near London.

The garden of the Seraglio was the Acropolis of the original city, the site of the Palatium sacrum of Constantine, the citadel of his successors, the palace of Justinian and Placidia, queen of the Goths. Few spots on earth have had a longer or more tragic history. From the gardens of the Seraglio sailed the fleets of the Phoenicians, the war barges of the Romans, the triremes from Asia, the galleys of Darius the Persian, of Xerxes, of Alexander the Great, Philip of Macedon, and I would not be surprised if Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles and those bold old warriors had landed there many a time. The gilded barges of Venice and Genoa brought their soldiers there and from that landing-place carried away millions of plunder. The feet of the Crusaders trod the gravel walks—Richard the Lion-Hearted, Godfrey de Bouillon, and the Frank emperors made it their headquarters in the time of the Crusades. Since the occupation of Constantinople by the Turks, the resplendent caiques of the Sultans have come and gone, some of them bearing candidates for uneasy thrones, and others, desperate creatures, seeking refuge from a miserable death.

From the time of Mohammed II., who took Constantinople by storm in 1453, to Abdul Medjid, in 1864, who deserted it for the more cheerful palace of the Dolma-Baghtcheh on the banks of the Bosphorus, twenty-two Sultans have been imprisoned or murdered, or died by violence within the palaces of the Seraglio. For four hundred years the fate of the sovereigns of Turkey was subject to the caprice of the all-powerful Janizaries, who made it their headquarters. Up to the beginning of the last century it was the fashion for the Janizaries to decapitate unpopular Sultans and ministers and expose their heads upon the pillars of the gate in order that the public might know what had happened. Two niches on either side of the Sublime Porte, which is the main gateway to the Seraglio, were made for that purpose. Sometimes, however, as a special mark of vengeance or honor, the heads were placed, like that of John the Baptist, upon a silver charger and left outside where the public could examine them closely.