H. G. Dwight

“ The streets of Stamboul, ordinarily so deserted at night, are full of life during the nights of Ramazan. But their gaiety is little enough like the uproar of a European Carnival. Even in the busiest centres of amusement, where a carriage or even a man often finds difficulty in passing, there is none of the wild hilarity whereby an Occidental must express his sense of the joy of life. The people stroll quietly up and down or sit quietly in the coffee-houses, making their kef in a way that reveals Turkish character on its most sympathetic side. They are practically all men. ”

“ As you sit at a table, absorbing your own modest refreshment, you are even struck by a certain stolidity in those about you. Perhaps it is partly due to the fact that the crowd is not purely Greek. Armenians are there, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks too. Then many of the pilgrims are peasants, come in ox-carts from outlying villages and dazzled a little by this urban press. They listen in pure delight to the music that pours from a hundred instruments. The crowning glory of such an occasion is to have a musician sit at the table with you, preferably a hand-organ man or a gipsy with his pipe. ”

“ The structure in which these are preserved, its broad eaves and crusting of flowered tiles reflected in a pool bordered by lanterns to be lit on holy nights, is one of the things that make that garden incomparable. Then there are quaint turrets and doorways; there are kiosks; there are terraces; there are white cloisters a little grassy and neglected; there are black cypresses and monstrous plane-trees into which the sun looks with such an air of antique familiarity.
Of all this every one has written who has ever been to Constantinople. ”

“ Last to come in, taking their stand at the right of the throne, were the imperial princes. They had been waiting with the Sultan in an adjoining room, where they had paid homage to him in private. Then, preceded by the grand master of ceremonies, the Sultan himself entered. Every one made a temenna to the ground, that graceful triple sweep of the hand which is the Turkish form of salutation, while a choir hidden under one of the galleries chanted: “Thou wilt live long with thy glory, O Sultan, if God wills. Great art thou, but forget not that One is greater.” ”

“ To many people the colour of Stamboul looks purely Turkish—at first sight. The simplest peasant of Asia Minor could not look at it often, however, without noticing things of an order strange to him—a sculptured capital lying in the street, bits of flowered marble set into a wall, a column as high as a minaret standing by itself, a dome of unfamiliar shape, and mosque walls mysterious with unreadable letters and the sacrilegious picturing of human forms, and ruined masonry or dark subterranean vaultings leading off into myth. ”

“ The mosque must have been a little jewel in its day. It is half a ruin now. The minaret is gone and so is all but the pillars of the portico that looked into the court. Within, however, are intricately panelled shutters, and a little gallery painted on the under-side, and a carved mimber of woodwork like that in the tombs of Roxelana and her sons. The refugees of 1912, poor wretches, saw no reason why they should not drive as many nails as they needed into that precious wood. The greatest ornament of the mosque is a magnificent bronze grille in the archway that opens into the adjoining tomb. ”

“ I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. ”

“ There is hardly a street of Stamboul in which some such window does not give a glimpse into the peace and gravity of the East. The windows do not all look into mosque yards. Many of them open into the cloister of a medresseh, a theological school, or some other pious [8] foundation. Many more look into a patch of ground where tall turbaned and lichened stones lean among cypresses or where a more or less stately mausoleum, a türbeh, lifts its dome. Life and death seem never very far apart in Constantinople. In other cities the fact that life has an end is put out of sight as much as possible. ”

“ The most abiding one was that of the Constantinople campagna. It undulated to the horizon so desolate [483] in its autumn colour, so bare save for a few tawny clumps of wood, so empty and wild, that no one would suspect the vicinity of a great capital. We met almost no one. A few Greek peasants came or went to market, apparently oblivious to wars or rumours of them. Not so a convoy of Turkish refugees, toiling up a hill with all they had in the world piled under matting on ox-carts with huge ungainly wheels. ”

“ I can no more than sketch out an impression of a big green tent in some vacant lot, of the high lights of brass that go with tea and coffee drinking in its shadow, and of fiercely moustachioed persons in tall felt caps, in hooded or haply goatskin jackets, and in wide trousers, if they be Kürds, or of slighter Laz with tight black legs that bulge out at the top and hoods picturesquely knotted about their heads, who join hands and begin very slowly a swaying step that grows wilder and wilder with the throbbing of a demon drum. ”

“ It used to be a detached kiosk in Hüsseïn Pasha’s garden. In modern times a house has been added to it, and a retired provincial governor has inherited the fallen splendour of the Kyöprülüs. Some day, I suppose, it will all go up in smoke or tumble into the Bosphorus. In the meantime the fountain is still, the precious marquetry has been picked out of the doors, the woodwork cracks and sags, the blue jars and the flowers become more and more ghostly, the gold of the ceiling grows dimmer every day. ”

“ One is silenced, too, in the face of so many human associations. A thousand years before St. Peter’s that great dome swung in the Byzantine air, and under it one is bewildered by a cloud of ghosts. Yet impressions detach themselves—of space, of light, of an immense distinction. All the little Turkish rearrangements are swallowed up in it, as must have been the glitter of the Greek ritual. ”

“ How is it that these who burst once out of the East with so much noise and terror, who battered their way through the walls of this city and carried the green standard of the Prophet to the gates of Vienna, sit here now rolling cigarettes and sipping little cups of coffee? Some conclude that their course is run, while others upbraid them for wasting so their time. For my part, I like to think that such extremes may argue a complexity of character for whose unfolding it would be wise to wait. I also like to think that there may be some people in the world for whom time is more than money. ”

“ And a perfect mosque yard it is, grove-like with trees and looked upon by a great portico of the time of the Conqueror. There is something both grave and human about mosque yards and coffee-houses both that excellently suits them to each other. The combination is one that I, at any rate, am incapable of resisting. I dare not guess how many days of my life I have I cannot say wasted in the coffee-houses of Mahmoud Pasha, and Yeni Jami, and Baïezid, and Shah-zadeh, and Fatih. ”

“ There also is a sacred way, leading out of an odoriferous ravine to a high place and a grove, whither all men gather in the heat of the day to partake of the water of a holy well. But waters less sanctified begin to flow more freely as night draws on, along the cool quay and in the purlieus thereof. Fringes of coloured paper are strung from house to house, flags hang out of windows or across the street, wine-shops are splendid with banners, rugs, and garlands of bay, and you may be sure that the sound of the lanterna is not unheard in the land. ”

“ Decoration has no part in the nobility of that effect. There is nothing to hide. Each of those leaping arches and soaring domes does something—and in a way! But there is also a perfection of detail, rich, coloured, as if suffused by a glamour of dusky gold that is between the white morning clarity of paganism and the Gothic twilight.
The churches of Constantinople neither begin nor end with St. Sophia, however. The oldest of them is St. John the Baptist of the Studion, so called from the Roman senator Studius who about 463 founded a monastery near the Golden Gate. ”

“ No house is too small to have a garden, walled as a garden should be, and doing more for the outsider by its green suggestions of withdrawal than by any complete revelation of its charms. Few of these pleasances do not enjoy some view of the Bosphorus. I know one such, containing a Byzantine capital that makes the cedar of Lebanon above it throw as secular a shade as you please, so cunningly laid out at length on the hillside that the Bosphorus is a mere ornamental water of a lower terrace. This Grand Canal of Constantinople enters bodily into certain thrice enviable yalîs on the water’s edge. ”

“ The carved and gilded iconostasis, the icons set about with gold, the multitude of candles, precious lamps, and chandeliers, the rich vestments, the clouds of incense, make an overpowering appeal to the senses. To the Western eye, however, there is too much gilt and blaze for perfect taste, there are too many objects in proportion to the space they fill. And certainly to the Western ear the Byzantine chant, however interesting on account of its descent from the antique Greek modes, lacks the charm of the Gregorian or of the beautiful Russian choral. ”

“ The lattices of the windows, the veils of the women, the high garden walls, the gravity and perfect quiet of the streets at night, all contribute to that sense. From the noisy European quarter on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, where life is a thing of shreds and patches, without coherent associations and without roots, one looks over to Stamboul and gets the sense of another, an unknown life, reaching out secret filaments to the uttermost parts of the earth. ”

“ To give any comprehensive account of the mosques of Stamboul would be to write a history of Ottoman architecture, and for that I lack both space and competence. I may, however, as an irresponsible lounger in mosque yards, touch on one or two characteristic aspects of mosques and their decoration which strike a foreigner’s eye. The frescoing or stencilling of domes and other curved interior surfaces, for instance, is an art that has very little been noticed—even by the Turks, judging from the sad estate to which the art has fallen. Some people might object to calling it an art at all. ”

“ On this southward-looking slope the cypresses attain a symmetry, a slenderness, a height, a thickness of texture and richness of colour unmatched in Stamboul. They grow in squares, many of them, or in magic circles. The stones under them are older than the others, and more like things of nature in the flowered grass. On certain happy afternoons, when the sun brings a fairy depth and softness of green out of the cypresses, when their shadows fall lance-like across bare or mossy aisles, and the note of a solitary bird echoes between them, it is hard not to imagine oneself in an enchanted wood. ”

“ It is a serious question whether they will succeed in saving certain of their provinces that remain—or whether their own good advises them to do so. There are influences of common blood and common tradition which no mere political influence can indefinitely withstand. In any case, I have come to look upon the Turkish revolution with other than the eye of a reactionary impressionist. It would be a reactionary impressionist indeed who put the picturesqueness of Stamboul before the good of a people—and a blind one who failed to see what there was of human colour in those dramatic events. ”

“ For Turkish princes have no title other than that of their humblest subject. A band was playing in the garden, which is on the very top of Bebek hill, and the Greeks of the village were dancing among the flower-beds, while a row of little princes and princesses in big gilt armchairs looked solemnly on. Beyond them a clump of huge umbrella-pines lifted themselves darkly against the fairy scene of the illuminated Bosphorus. ”

“ And many a Turkish monument has interest for them only because its marbles are anagrams that spell anew the glory of the ancient world.
Need I say that I am no such man? The essential colour of Constantinople is for me, who am neither Byzantinist nor Orientalist, a composite one, and the richer for being so. I confess I do not like the minarets of St. Sophia, but it is only because they are ugly. I am sorry that the palace of Constantine has so completely disappeared, but I am Philistine enough to suspect that the mosque built on its site may lift quite as imposing a mass against the sky. ”

“ No gateway in Europe can have seen so much of the pomp and glory of the world. Now the arches are blind, save for one small postern in the centre, and that was nearly choked by an earthquake in 1912. One Roman eagle still looks down from a high marble cornice upon the moat, empty of all but garden green, and upon a colony of Turkish gravestones that stand among cypresses where the Via Egnatia started away for the Adriatic. ”

“ For the imperial mosques are monuments of victory, built and endowed out of the spoils of war. After the martial period of the empire came to an end with Süleïman I only one mosque of importance, that of Ahmed I, was built by a reigning sultan in his own name. But the tiles of the imperial factories, after many fires and much thieving, still make up what is most brilliant and most durable in the colour of Stamboul. The best tiles are Nicene of the sixteenth century, that extraordinary cinque-cento, when so many of the best things of the world were produced. ”

“ And still streets and open spaces were turned into camping grounds, where small grey cattle were tethered to big carts and where people in veils and turbans shivered over camp-fires—when they had a camp-fire to shiver over. They could generally fall back on cypress wood. It always gave me a double pang to catch the aroma of such a fire, betraying as it did the extremity of some poor exile and the devastation at work among the trees that give Constantinople so much of its colour.
Exiles
I have done a good deal of visiting in my day, being somewhat given to seek the society of my kind. ”

“ The yards of the imperial mosques take the place, in Stamboul, of squares and parks. Even many a smaller mosque enjoys an amplitude of perspective that might be envied by cathedrals like Chartres, or Cologne, or Milan. These roomy enclosures are surrounded by the windowed walls which I have already celebrated. Within them cypresses are wont to cluster, and plane-trees willingly cast their giant shadow. Gravestones also congregate there. And there a centre of life is which can never lack interest for the race of men that likes Stamboul. ”

“ Sacked of her wealth, home of the arts no more, guarded by jealous keepers, and lacking most that is dear to the modern wanderer’s heart, how should she compete with Rome? Only in one respect can she hold her own unchallenged against that potent rival, for by no stretch of the imagination can Rome, crouching on her seven ant-hills beside her muddy river, be given the palm of place over Constantinople. ”

“ Every one carries a candle but none are lighted—not even before the icons. The service begins with antiphonal chanting. The ancient Byzantine music sounds stranger than ever in the dim light, sung by the black-robed priests with black veils over their tall black caps. Finally, the celebrant, in a purple cope of mourning, withdraws behind the iconostásion, the screen that in a Greek church divides the holy table from the chancel. As the chant proceeds candles are lighted in certain chandeliers. Then the door of the sanctuary is thrown open, revealing a blaze of light and colour within. ”

“ For thirty years this people had been kept in constantly closer restriction, had lived under the eyes of that vast army of informers from which they were not safe even within their own doors, had been robbed one by one of all the little liberties of life so common in other countries that we think nothing of them—to visit one’s friends, to gather for amusement or discussion, to read the book of one’s choice, to publish one’s sentiment or protest, to go out at night, to travel at will. Hundreds of thousands had grown up to man’s estate knowing no other manner of life. ”

“ The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but they all have the grave dignity which the Turks contrive to put into everything they do, and the streets take a tone from the great number of pious institutions that line them, interspersed with cypresses and tombs. The quarter is indeed, more than any other, the Pantheon of Stamboul, so many important personages have chosen to be buried near the friend of the Prophet. ”