Marmara

“ But we were allowed to go into the harem garden, overlooked by the Sultan’s lattices. An artificial canal wound through the middle of it. Row-boats, a motor-boat, even a small sailboat, were moored there. Under the trees stood a miniature replica of the fountain at Gyök Sou. Pigeons fluttered everywhere and water-fowl were playing in the canal, while against the wall cutting off the immense prospect the garden might have enjoyed stood cages of gaudy birds. At one spot only did a small kiosk, execrably furnished, give access to the view. ”

“ It was my first experience of a Turkish town, and perhaps I was more struck with the dilapidation and evident decay than I ought to have been. The sea-wall of the massive Venetian fortification seemed crumbling and carious; the earth-work above it was half washed away; the semicircle of houses on the Marina looked seedy and tottering; the Marina itself was in places under-cut and falling into the water ”

“ Imagine if you can a limitless horizon extending far into the transparent azure of a limpid Eastern sky, deep into the snow-covered mountains of Anatolia, which are, however, so far away that they almost seem at this distance to be below your level. All around in the country are little bouquets of trees which, with each slender minaret, represent the location of a small village. Nearer, but still on the Asiatic shores, are the green hills of the Bosphorus with their summer residences and their uninterrupted line of homes by the water, while below are the green hills of the European shore. ”

“ On a fine day the view over the walls away to the Sea of Marmora is wonderfully beautiful—but this is winter, and grey clouds keep out the sunshine needed to draw out the many beauties of the scene. The road, at no time really entitled to be called so, is now a quagmire with rocks in it, yet traffic of a kind is passing—lumbering carts drawn by water-buffaloes pitch and roll in the sea of mud, and clinging to them are refugees from Thrace and Macedonia who have fled from their homes before the invader. ”

“ How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past? ”

“ Humanity can indeed be separated from humanity by gulfs impassable, or gulfs which may alone be bridged over by a violation of [329] nature, on the part of the man upon the east bank or upon the west bank.
The palm-trees wave above Marrakesh, turtle-backed mosques and tall towers rise among the gardens and gleam in the sun, but above and beyond every other feature of the far-away fantastic southern capital one watch-tower rises over everything and rears itself into the sky—the Kutobea, built, according to tradition, by Fabir for the Sultan El Mansur. ”

“ It is a city worthy to be the scene of the initiation of one of the world’s great movements. The splendid seaport, on the acquisition of which Austria had set her heart, impresses every visitor with a sense of a peculiar nobility with which it is invested by its aspect, situation, and history. Stately and beautiful is the approach to it from the sea as one sails up the fifty-mile broad Gulf of Salonica ”

“ There is a Turkish saying that the Almighty assigned the sovereignty of the land to the Moslem, but that of the sea to the Giaours, or Infidels.
But among the subject races of Turkey there is one which has distinguished itself for its intrepidity on the water and the fearlessness with which it navigates the Black Sea—a sea well deserving its sinister epithet. The Lazes occupy the eastern and south-eastern shores of the Black Sea, and their sailing-boats and ships do the coasting trade between these regions and Constantinople. ”

“ Steamboats, telegraphs, railways, have invaded Turkey already. The great tide of modern material civilisation is flooding in upon the East, with its restless, unmanageable eddies and waves, which have sapped, and are sapping, the foundations, and overwhelming the roof trees, of stronger political edifices than that of the Sublime Porte. If you Turks cannot control and manage the tide, it will very soon drown you. Now where are your men to do this? You have just now Fuad Pasha, and three or four other able men, and reasonably honest, who understand their time, and are guiding your affairs well. ”

“ Turkey in Asia is still more mountainous. The two almost parallel ranges, Taurus and Anti-Taurus, which are the basis of its mountain system, cover almost the whole of the peninsula of Asia Minor or Anatolia with their ramifications and offshoots, forming the surface into elevated plateaus, deep valleys, and enclosed plains. From the Taurus chain the Lebanon range proceeds southwards parallel to the coast of Syria, and, diminishing in elevation in Palestine, terminates on the Red Sea coast at Sinai. ”

“ Everything was now calm and quiet, and the world pursued its ordinary course; but far away among the Blue Mountains dwells a woman who knows nothing of all that is going on around her, and who every evening ascends the highest summit of the hills surrounding her little hut and gazes eagerly, longingly, in the direction of Stambul, following with her eyes the long zig-zag path which vanishes in the dim distance—will he come to-day whom she has so long awaited in vain? ”

“ If nothing remains of the glories of the city of the Caliphs, it is certainly for Turkey a busy, growing, and passably wealthy nineteenth-century capital. It is said to have a hundred mosques, twenty-six minarets, and fifteen domes, but I have not counted them!
Its bazars, which many people regard as the finest in the East outside of Stamboul, are of enormous extent and 29 very great variety. Many are of brick, with well-built domed roofs, and sides arcaded both above and below, and are wide and airy. Some are of wood, all are covered, and admit light scantily, only from the roof. ”

“ It fell into the hands of the Turks in 1458, and has since been their metropolis. The harbor is one of the finest in the world, and is capable of holding 1200 ships. On account of its curving shape and the rich cargoes in the ships there, this harbor is called the Golden Horn.
As you approach Constantinople, it is extremely beautiful, but when you enter it, you find the streets dark, narrow and gloomy. Every Turkish house is a kind of prison, so arranged as to keep the women in a state of jealous confinement. 101 The men generally live in the front part, they being the jailers of the houses. ”

“ After glancing in through several doorways, and seeing nothing but flying troops of rats, I mounted a grass-grown stair leading to one of the curtains on the western side, whence a view can be had of the entire building—a vast extent of ruined towers and battlements, stairways and ramparts, dark red or blackened with age, surrounding a mass of vivid green, and beyond them more towers and battlements, stretching on, on, on, belonging to the eastern walls of Stambul ”

“ And each contains its own marble basin for boats, communicating with the open by a water-gate or by a canal or tunnel through the quay.
Distinctively Turkish as the flavour of our village is, we yet resemble the city and the empire to which we are tributary in the variety of our population. Of Greeks there are few. It was perhaps natural for them to flee the first stronghold of their conquerors on this side of the Bosphorus—if they ever inhabited it in any number. An Armenian quarter, however, scrambles up the north side of the valley. ”

“ If you will look on your map you will notice that Asia Minor is that part of Turkey which projects into the Mediterranean on the Asiatic side, an almost square peninsula about three hundred miles each way. It is bounded on the north by the Black Sea, on the east by Armenia and Kurdistan, on the south by Syria and the Mediterranean and on the west by the Ægean Sea. The western portion of Asia Minor is called Anatolia. It is densely settled by Turkish farmers who cultivate the ground in a primitive, awkward way, but do not realize more than half the value of their labour ”

“ Right over us hung a mountain whose eight thousand feet rise from the sea-line to the snow. Takhtaly is the proudest peak on the exquisite Anatolian coast, perhaps on any coast at all of the Mediterranean sea, and, seen from south, east, or north, will be remembered when many a loftier mountain has been forgotten. It is the great glory of Phaselis; but even were it away, the site of the city would be one of the most beautiful in the Greek lands, whether for its prospect over the purple gulf to the Tauric Alps, or for its nearer setting. ”

“ One sees exactly the same sort of thing in Italy, except that the style of ornament is different in the two countries. The purely Turkish garden marbles are of the same general order, having to do with water. And, although there was less need of them when nature had already been so generous, they are what the Turk brought most of himself to the gardens of the Bosphorus. The Turkish well-heads are not particularly interesting, being at their best not much more than a marble barrel. ”

“ There are plenty of saloons in Constantinople, but they are all found in the foreign quarter. In Stamboul, which is almost exclusively Mohammedan, there are none, and the natives dissipate at coffee-houses, which are as numerous in the Mohammedan districts as saloons in Chicago. The highest joy that a Turk can realize is to sit outside a café, sip a cup of coffee, smoke a nargileh—one of those long-stemmed water pipes—and contemplate the infinite. ”

“ There is a hill near Gemlik, on the Gulf of Moudania, about fifty miles from here, whence the Turks believe the new moon can be first seen. The families who live on this hill are exempted from taxation, in consideration of their keeping a watch for the moon, at the close of Ramazan. A series of signals, from hill to hill, is in readiness, and the news is transmitted to Constantinople in a very short time Then, when the muezzin proclaims the asser, or prayer two hours before sunset, he proclaims also the close of Ramazan. ”

“ Within its walled area the traffic of the central plateaus of Asia joined with Mesopotamian or Black Sea and Mediterranean freight, after having followed the easterly approach to Turkey through Tabriz and the southern affluents of the Aras, north of Urmiah Lake. Through this eastern avenue of penetration Asiatic peoples and products have been dumped century after century into Turkish territory.
The valley of the Euphrates, rather than that of the Tigris, is therefore the main artery of communication between north and south in eastern Turkey. ”

“ It is to be hoped that the advent of the railroad and the introduction of irrigation and the promised establishment of an efficient forestry will ere long materially improve the present sad economic condition of the country, and that fair Anatolia will once more be covered, as of yore, with flourishing marts of commerce and magnificent cities where there are now crumbling columns of Greek temples and scattered fragments of Roman palaces and amphitheaters—a veritable “sepulchre of the past.” ”

“ The bazaars are amongst the most curious places in the city, not so much because of the rich merchandise which is displayed in them, but because they are frequented by a variety of nations such as cannot be met with in any other city of the world. The capital of the Ottoman empire is a centre of attraction not only to the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, but also to those of Anatolia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Tunis, and even of the oases. There are “Franks” from every country of Europe, drawn thither by a desire to share in the profits of the ever-increasing commerce of the Bosphorus. ”

“ As all the older harbours on the W. coast of Asia Minor have been choked by alluvial deposits, Smyrna has developed into the chief seaport of Anatolia and the largest city in Turkish Asia after Damascus. Population, excl. suburbs, about 200,000, incl. over 100,000 Greeks, 60,000 Turks, 20,000 Jews (p. 542) , 12,000 Armenians, and 15,000 Europeans and Levantines. The chief languages are Greek, French, and Italian. ”

“ In Turkey it is grey desolation; the untilled land, the wretched Christian peasantry, the squalid huts, sodden and soaked, seem all rotting together in a land whereon the sun will never shine again. We splashed on. No one took any notice of us, for we were going to market. The Turkish blockhouses, "half an hour apart" along the frontier, were left behind us. We slopped past a yellow guard-house and more gaunt Nizams and rode into Berani, a small town of, for the most part, crooked houses of timber and mud, a wide main street, a large market-place, two wooden mosques, and a fortress. ”

“ Almost every Turkish garden contains visible water of some sort, which at its simplest is nothing but a shallow [235] marble pool. In the centre of the pool is sometimes a fountain which I always think of with regret when there is pointed out for my admiration a too fat marble infant struggling with a too large marble fish, or a dwarf holding an umbrella over its head. This fountain consists of nothing but a series of jets, generally on varying levels, set in a circle of those marble stalactites—here should one call them stalagmites?—which are so familiar in Oriental architecture. ”