Chapter X: Part 10

No rite, I suppose, surpasses that of the Greek Church in splendour. 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. At a point of the service the Gospels were read by different voices in a number of different languages. I recognised Latin and Slavic among them. Finally, the Patriarch withdrew in the same state as he entered. On his way to his own apartments he paused on an open gallery and made an address to the crowd in the court that had been unable to get into the church. Then he held in the great saloon of his palace a levee of those who had been in the church, and each of them was presented with gaily decorated Easter eggs and with a cake called, curiously enough, by the Persian name of _chörek_—except that the Greeks mispronounce it _tsouréki_. These dainties are the universal evidence of the Greek Easter—these and the salutation “Christ is risen,” to which answer is made by lips the least sanctimonious: “In truth he is risen.” Holy Thursday is the traditional day for dyeing eggs. On Holy Saturday the Patriarch sends an ornamental basket of eggs and _chörek_ to the Sultan. _Chörek_ is like the Easter cake of northern Italy. It is a sort of big brioche made in three strands braided together.

Easter Monday is in some ways a greater feast than Easter itself. In Constantinople the Christian population is so large that when the Greeks and Armenians stop work their fellow citizens find it easy to follow suit. The Phanar is a favourite place of resort throughout the Easter holidays, an open space between the patriarchate and the Golden Horn being turned into a large and lively fair. The traditional place for the celebration of the day, however, is in the open spaces of the Taxim, on the heights of Pera. The old travellers all have a chapter about the festivities which used to take place there, and remnants of them may still be seen. The Armenians gather chiefly in a disused cemetery of their cult, where the tomb of a certain St. Kevork is honoured at this season and where peasants from Asia Minor may sometimes be seen dancing among the graves. A larger and noisier congregation assembles at the upper edge of the parade-ground across the street. Not a little colour is given to it by Greeks from the region of Trebizond, who sometimes are not Greeks at all, but Laz, and who often wear the hood of that mysterious people knotted around their heads. They have a strange dance which they continue hour after hour to the tune of a little violin hanging from the player’s hand. They hold each other’s fingers in the air, and as they dance they keep up a quivering in their thighs, which they vary by crouching to their heels and throwing out first one leg and then the other with a shout. An even more positive touch of colour is given to the scene by the Kürds. They set up a tent in front of which a space is partially enclosed by screens of the same material. I remember seeing one such canvas that was lined with a vivid yellow pattern on a red ground. There swarthy Kürds in gaily embroidered jackets or waistcoats gather to smoke, to drink tea, and to dance in their own more sedate way, while gipsies pipe unto them and pound a big drum. I once asked one of the dancers how it was that he, being no Christian, made merry at Easter time. “Eh,” he answered, “there is no work. Also, since the constitution we are all one, and if one nation rejoices, the others rejoice with it. Now all that remains,” he went on, “is that there should be no rich and no poor, and that we should all have money together.” Interesting as I found this socialistic opinion in the mouth of a Kürdish _hamal_, I could not help remembering how it had been put into execution in 1896, when the Kürds massacred the Armenian _hamals_ and wrested from the survivors the profitable guild of the street porters. It was then that the Easter glory departed from the Taxim. But the place had already been overtaken by the growing city, while increasing facilities of communication now daily lengthen the radius of the holiday maker.

One assembly of Easter week which still is to be seen in something of its pristine glory is the fair of Balîklî. This takes place on the Friday and lasts through Sunday. The scene of it is the monastery of Balîklî, outside the land walls of Stamboul. It is rather curious that the Turkish name of so ancient a place should have superseded even among the Greeks its original appellation. The Byzantine emperors had a villa there and several of them built churches in the vicinity. The name Balîklî, however, which might be translated as the Fishy Place, comes from the legend every one knows of the Greek monk who was frying fish when news was brought him that the Turks had taken the city. He refused to believe it, saying he would do so if his fish jumped out of the frying-pan—not into the fire, but into the spring beside him. Which they promptly did. Since when the life-giving spring, as it is called, has been populated by fish that look as if they were half fried. The thing on Balîklî day is to make a pilgrimage to the pool of these miraculous fish, to drink of the water in which they swim, to wash one’s hands and face and hair in it, and to take some of it away in a bottle. The spring is at one end of a dark chapel, half underground, into which the crowd squeezes in batches. After receiving the benefits of the holy water you kiss the icons in the chapel. A priest in an embroidered stole, who holds a small cross in his hand, will then make the holy sign with it upon your person and offer you the cross and his hand as well to kiss, in return for which you drop a coin into the slot of a big box beside him. Candles are also to be had for burning at the various icons. The greater number of these, however, are in the monastery church hard by. And so many candles burn before them that attendants go about every few minutes, blow out the candles, and throw them into a box, to make room for new candles. There are also priests to whom you tell your name, which they add to a long list, and in return for the coin you leave behind you they pray for blessing upon the name. All this is interesting to watch, by reason of the great variety of the pilgrims and the unconscious lingering of paganism in their faith. And, while there is a hard commercial side to it all, you must remember that a hospital and other charitable institutions largely profit thereby.

There are also interesting things to watch outside the monastery gate. Temporary coffee-houses and eating places are established there in abundance, and the hum of festivity that arises from them may be heard afar among the cypresses of the surrounding Turkish cemetery. I must add that spirituous liquors are dispensed with some freedom; for the Greek does not share the hesitation of his Turkish brother in such matters, and he considers it well-nigh a Christian duty to imbibe at Easter. To imbibe too much at that season, as at New Year’s and one or two other great feasts, is by no means held to impair a man’s reputation for sobriety. It is surprising, however, how soberly the pleasures of the day are in general taken. 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. Gipsy women go about telling fortunes. “You are going to have great calamities,” utters one darkly when you refuse to hear your fate. “Is that the way to get a piastre out of me?” you ask. “But afterward you will become very rich,” she condescends to add. Other gipsies carry miniature marionette shows on their backs in glass cases. Wandering musicians tempt you to employ their arts. Vendors of unimaginable sweets pick their way among the tables. Beggars exhibit horrible deformities and make artful speeches. “May you enjoy your youth!” is one. “May you know no bitternesses!” exclaims another with meaning emphasis. “May God forgive your dead,” utters a third. “The world I hear, but the world I do not see,” cries a blind man melodramatically: “Little eyes I have none.” Diminutives are much in favour among this gentry. And every two minutes some one comes with a platter or with a brass casket sealed with a big red seal and says, “Your assistance,” adding, “for the church,” or “for the school,” or “for the hospital,” if you seem to fail to take in what is expected of you. Your assistance need not be very heavy, however, and you feel that you owe something in return for the pleasures of the occasion.

Beyond the circle of eating places stretches an open field which is the scene of the more active enjoyment of the day. There the boat-swings beloved of Constantinople children are installed, together with merry-go-rounds, weights which one sends to the top of a pole by means of a hammer blow, and many another world-old device for parting the holiday maker and his money. One novel variant is an inclined wire, down which boys slide hanging from a pulley. Dancing is the favourite recreation of the men. When they happen to be Bulgars of Macedonia they join hands and circle about one of their number who plays the bagpipe. Every few steps the leader stops and, steadied by the man who holds the other end of his handkerchief, indulges in posturings expressive of supreme enjoyment. The _pas’haliático_ of the Greeks is less curious but more graceful. After watching the other dances, picturesque as they are, one seems to come back with it to the old Greek sense of measure. And it is danced with a lightsomeness which is less evident with other races. The men put their hands on each other’s shoulders and circle in a sort of barn-dance step to the strains of a _lanterna_. Of which more anon.

The feast of Our Lady of the Fishes is one of the greatest popular festivals in Constantinople. By no means, however, is it the only one of its kind. The cult of holy wells forms a chapter by itself in the observances of the Greek Church. This cult has an exceptional interest for those who have been touched by the classic influence, as offering one of the most visible points at which Christianity turned to its own use the customs of paganism. An ἁγίασμα, an _áyazma_ as the Greeks colloquially call it, is nothing more or less than the sacred fount of antiquity. Did not Horace celebrate such a one in his ode to the _Fons Bandusiæ_? As a matter of fact, a belief in naiads still persists among Greek peasants. And you can pay a lady no greater compliment than to tell her that she looks, or even that she cooks, like a nereid. For under that comprehensive style the nymphs are now known. But as guardians of sacred founts they, like some of the greater divinities, have been baptised with Christian names. There is an infinity of such springs in and about Constantinople. Comparatively few of them are so well housed as the _áyazma_ of Balîklî. Some of them are scarcely to be recognised from any profane rill in the open country, while others are in Turkish hands and accessible only on the day of the saint to which they are dedicated. On that day, and in the case of an _áyazma_ of some repute on the days before and after—unless the nearest Sunday determine otherwise—is celebrated the _paniyíri_ of the patron of the spring. _Paniyíri_, or _panayíri_ as perhaps it is more commonly known, has the same origin as our word panegyric. For the reading of the saint’s panegyric is one of the religious exercises of the day. Which, like the early Christian agape and the contemporary Italian _festa_, is another survival of an older faith. During the Byzantine period the annual pilgrimage in state of an emperor to one of the shrines of the city was a πανήγυρις. But religious exercises are not the essential part of a _panayíri_ to most of those who take part in one. Nor need a _panayíri_ necessarily take place at a holy well. The number of them that do take place is quite fabulous. Still, as the joy of life was discovered in Greece, who shall blame the Greeks of to-day for finding so many occasions to manifest it? And it is natural that these occasions should oftenest arise during the clement half of the year, when the greater feasts of the church are done.

One of the earliest “panegyrics” of the season is that of _Aï Saránda_, which is held on the 9th/22d of March. _Aï Saránda_ means St. Forty to many good people, although others designate thereby the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste—now the Turkish city of Sîvas. There is a spring dedicated to these worthies on the outskirts of Pera, between the place called The Stones and the Palace of Dolma Ba’hcheh. I find it difficult to share the popular belief that the forty martyrs of Sîvas ever had anything to do with this site. It is true that the pious Empress Pulcheria dug them up in the fifth century and transported them with great pomp to the church she built for them on the farther side of the Golden Horn. It is also true that their church was demolished shortly before the Turkish conquest, and its marbles used in fortifying the Golden Gate. But why should a Turkish tomb on the hillside above the _áyazma_ be venerated by the Greeks as the last resting-place of “St. Forty”? Has it anything to do with the fact that the forty martyrs are commemorated at the vernal equinox, which happens to be the New Year of the Persians and which the Turks also observe?

Being ignorant of all these matters, my attention was drawn quite by accident to the tomb in question by some women who were tying rags to the grille of a window. The act is common enough in the Levant, among Christians and Mohammedans alike. It signifies a wish on the part of the person who ties the rag, which should be torn from his own clothing. More specifically, it is sometimes supposed to bind to the bar any malady with which he may happen to be afflicted. Near this grille was a doorway through which I saw people coming and going. I therefore decided to investigate. Having paid ten _paras_ for that privilege to a little old Turk with a long white beard, I found myself in a typical Turkish _türbeh_. In the centre stood a ridged and turbaned catafalque, while Arabic inscriptions adorned the walls. I asked the _hoja_ in attendance who might be buried there. He told me that the Greeks consider the tomb to be that of St. Forty, while the Turks honour there the memory of a certain holy Ahmed. I would willingly have known more about this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of a saint; but others pressed behind me, and the _hoja_ asked if I were not going to “circulate.” He also indicated the left side of the catafalque as the place for me to begin. I accordingly walked somewhat leisurely around the room. When I came back to the _hoja_ he surprised me not a little by throwing a huge string of wooden beads over my head, obliging me to step clear of them. He then directed me to circulate twice more, which I did with more intelligence, he muttering some manner of invocation the while. The third time I was considerably delayed by a Greek lady with two little boys who carried toy balloons. The little boys and their balloon strings got tangled in the string of the big wooden beads, and one of the balloons broke away to the ceiling, occasioning fearful sounds of lamentation in the holy place. The _hoja_ kept his temper admirably, however. He was not too put out to inform me that I owed him a piastre for the service he had rendered me. I begged his pardon for troubling him to remind me, saying that I was a stranger. He politely answered that one must always learn a first time, adding that a piastre would not make me poor nor him rich. I reserved my opinion on the latter point when I saw how many of them he took in. At the foot of the catafalque a Turkish boy was selling tapers. I bought one, as it were an Athenian sacrificing to the unknown god, lighted it, and stuck it into the basin of sand set for the purpose. That done, I considered myself free to admire the more profane part of the _panaïr_—as the Turks say.

Part of it covered the adjoining slopes, where peaceably inclined spectators, including Turkish women not a few, might also contemplate the blossoming peach-trees that added their colour to the occasion, and the farther panorama of Bosphorus and Marmora. But the crux of the proceedings was in a small hollow below the tomb. I must confess that I shrank from joining the press of the faithful about the grotto of the sacred fount. I contented myself with hovering on their outskirts. A black group of priestly cylinders marked the densest part of the crowd, and near them a sheaf of candles burned strangely in the clear spring sunlight. A big refreshment tent was pitched not too far away to receive the overflow of devotion, reaching out canvas arms to make further space for tables and chairs. The faded green common to Turkish tents was lined with dark red, appliquéd to which were panels of white flower-pots and flowers. I wondered if the tent-man wittingly repeated this note of the day. For flowers were everywhere in evidence. Lilacs, tulips, hyacinths, jonquils, violets, and narcissi were on sale under big green canvas umbrellas at the edge of the hollow, while every other pilgrim who came away from the _áyazma_ carried a bottle of holy water in one hand and a spring flower in the other.

Interesting as is the _panayíri_ of the forty martyrs, it does not rank with the later and greater spring festival of St. George. This also has Turkish affiliations—at least in Constantinople and Macedonia. Both races count St. George’s Day, April 23d/May 6th, the official beginning of summer—of the good time, as modern Greek pleasantly puts it. The Turks, however, dedicate the day to Hîd’r Eless. But it is not too difficult to relate this somewhat vague personage to our more familiar friend Elijah, who in his character of St. Elias shares with St. George the mantle of Apollo. Nor is the heavenly charioteer the only one of the Olympians whose cult survives to-day among their faithful people. The Hebrew prophet would doubtless have been much astonished to learn that he was to be the heir of a Greek god. He owes it partly to the similarity of his name to the Greek word for sun and partly to the chariot of fire that carried him out of the world. As for “the infamous George of Cappadocia,” as Gibbon denominates the patron saint of our ancestral island, his part in the heritage of Apollo is due to his dragon, cousin german to the python of the Far Darter. The sanctuaries of these two Christian legatees of Olympus have replaced those of Apollo on all hilltops, while their name-days are those when men feasted of old the return and the midsummer splendour of the sun.

The place among places to celebrate St. George’s Day is Prinkipo. That delicious island deserves a book to itself. Indeed, I believe several have been written about it. One of them is by a political luminary of our own firmament who flamed for a moment across the Byzantine horizon and whose counterfeit presentment, in a bronze happily less enduring than might be, hails the motor men of Astor Place, New York. Sunset Cox’s work bears the ingratiating title of “The Pleasures of Prinkipo; or, The Diversions of a Diplomat”—if that be the order of the alternatives. The pleasures of Prinkipo are many as its red and white sage roses, but none of them is more characteristic than to climb the Sacred Way through olive and cypress and pine to the little monastery crowning the higher hill of the island, and to take part in the ceremonies of rejoicing over the return of the sun. This is a _panayíri_ much frequented by the people of the Marmora, who come in their fishing-boats from distant villages of the Marble Sea. Their costumes become annually more corrupt, I am pained to state; but there are still visible among them ladies in print, sometimes even in rich velvet, trousers of a fulness, wearing no hat but a painted muslin handkerchief over the hair, and adorned with dowries in the form of strung gold coins. They do not all come to make merry. Among them are not a few ill or deformed, who hope a miracle from good St. George. You may see them lying pale and full of faith on the strewn bay of the little church. They are allowed to pass the night there, in order to absorb the virtue of the holy place. I have even known of a sick child’s clothes being left in the church a year in hope of saving its life.

But these are only incidents in the general tide of merrymaking. Eating and drinking, music and dance, go on without interruption for three days and three nights. The music is made in many ways, of which the least popular is certainly not the way of the _lanterna_. The _lanterna_ is a kind of hand-organ, a hand-piano rather, of Italian origin but with an accent and an interspersing of bells peculiar to Constantinople. It should attract the eye as well as the ear, usually by means of the portrait of some beauteous being set about with a garland of artificial flowers. And it is engineered by two young gentlemen in fezzes of an extremely dark red, in short black jackets or in bouffant shirt-sleeves of some magnificent print, with a waistcoat more double-breasted than you ever saw and preferably worn unbuttoned; also in red or white girdles, in trousers that flare toward the bottom like a sailor’s, and in shoes or slippers that should have no counter. Otherwise the rules demand that the counter be turned under the wearer’s heel. Thus accoutred he bears his _lanterna_ on his back from patron to patron and from one _panayíri_ to another. His companion carries a camp-stool, whereon to rest his instrument while turning the handle hour in and hour out. I happen, myself, to be not a little subject to the spell of music. I have trembled before Fitzner, Kneisel, and Sevčik quartettes and I have touched infinity under the subtlest bows and batons of my time. Yet I must confess that I am able to listen to a _lanterna_ without displeasure. On one occasion I listened to many of them, accompanied by pipes, drums, gramophones, and wandering violins, for the whole of a May night on St. George’s hilltop in Prinkipo. What is more, I understood in myself how the Dionysiac frenzy was fed by the cymbals of the mænads, and I resented all the inhibitions of a New England origin that kept me from joining the dancers. Some of them were the Laz porters of the island, whose exhausting measure was more appropriate to such an orgy than to Easter Monday. Others were women, for once; but they kept demurely to themselves, apparently untouched by any corybantic fury. The same could not be said of their men, whose dancing was not always decent. They were bareheaded, or wore a handkerchief twisted about their hair like a fillet, and among them were faces that might have looked out of an Attic frieze. It gave one the strangest sense of the continuity of things. In the lower darkness a few faint lights were scattered. One wondered how, to them, must seem the glare and clangour of this island hilltop, ordinarily so silent and deserted. The music went up to the quiet stars, the revellers danced unwearying, a half-eaten moon slowly lighted the dark sea, a spring air moved among the pines, and then a greyness came into the east, near the Bithynian Olympus, and at last the god of hilltops rode into a cloud-barred sky.

The second feast of Apollo takes place at midsummer, namely on St. Elias’s Day (July 20/August 2). Arnaout-kyöi is where it may be most profitably admired. Arnaout-kyöi—Albanian Village—is the Turkish name of a thriving suburb which the Greeks call Great Current, from the race of the Bosphorus past its long point. It perhaps requires a fanatical eye to discover anything Apollonic in that lively settlement. No one will gainsay, however, that the joy of life is visible and audible enough in Arnaout-kyöi during the first three days of August. 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. The perfection of festivity is to attach one of these inspiriting instruments to your person for the night. The thing may be done for a dollar or two. You then take a table at a café and order with your refreshments a candle, which you light and cause to stand with a little of its own grease. In the meantime perhaps you buy as many numbers as your means will allow out of a bag offered you by a young gentleman with a watermelon under his arm, hoping to find among them the mystic number that will make the melon your own. But you never do. When your candle has burned out—or even before, if you be so prodigal—you move on with your _lanterna_ to another café. And so wears the short summer night away.

To the sorrow of those who employ Greek labour, but to the joy of him who dabbles in Greek folklore, _panayíria_ increase in frequency as summer draws to a close. The picturesque village of Kandilli, opposite Arnaout-kyöi—and any church dedicated to the _Metamorphosis_—is the scene of an interesting one on Transfiguration Day (August 6/19). No good Greek eats grapes till after the Transfiguration. At the mass of that morning baskets of grapes are blessed by the priests and afterward passed around the church. I know not whether some remnant of a bacchic rite be in this solemnity. It so happens that the delicious _chaoush_ grapes of Constantinople, which have spoiled me for all others that I know, ripen about that time. But as the blessing of the waters drives away the _kallikántzari_, so the blessing of the grapes puts an end to the evil influence of the _thrímes_. The _thrímes_ are probably descended from the dryads of old. Only they now haunt the water, instead of the trees, and their influence is baleful during the first days of August. Clothes washed then are sure to rot, while the fate of him so bold as to bathe during those days is to break out into sores.

The next great feast is that of the Assumption, which is preceded by a fortnight’s fast. Those who would see its panegyric celebrated with due circumstance should row on the 28th of August to Yeni-kyöi and admire the plane-shaded avenue of that fashionable village, decorated in honour of the occasion and musical with mastic glasses and other instruments of sound. A greater _panayíri_, however, takes place a month later in the pleasant meadows of Gyök Sou, known to Europe as the Sweet Waters of Asia. Two feasts indeed, the Nativity of the Virgin and the Exaltation of the Cross (September 8/21 and 14/27), then combine to make a week of rejoicing. There is nothing to be seen at Gyök Sou that may not be seen at other fêtes of the same kind. I do recollect, though, a dance of Anatolian peasants in a ring, who held each other first by the little finger, then by the hand, then by the elbow, and lastly by the shoulder. And the amphoræ of the local pottery works in which people carry away their holy water give the rites of the _áyazma_ a classic air. But this _panayíri_ has an ampler setting than the others, in its green river valley dotted with great trees, and it enjoys an added importance because it is to all practical purposes the last of the season. No one can count on being able to make merry out-of-doors on St. Demetrius’s Day (October 26 / November 8). St. Demetrius is as interesting a personality as St. George. He also is an heir of divinity, for on him, curiously enough, have devolved the responsibilities of the goddess Demeter. He is the patron of husbandmen, who discharge labourers and lease fields on his day. Among working people his is a favourite season for matrimony. I know not how it is that some sailors will not go to sea after _Aï Thimítri_, until the waters have been blessed at Epiphany. Perhaps it is that he marks for Greeks and Turks alike the beginning of winter, being known to the latter as Kassîm. This division of the seasons is clearly connected with the Pelasgian myth of Demeter.

The feast of her successor I have never found particularly interesting, though I must say I have seen it only at Kourou Cheshmeh. Kourou Cheshmeh, or Dry Fountain, as the Turks call it, is where Medea, during her somewhat stormy honeymoon in the Argo, planted a laurel, and where a very different notability of a later day, St. Daniel the Stylite, stood for many years on a pillar. No sign of laurel or pillar are there to-day, or of the famous Byzantine church of the Archangel Michael, which existed somewhere in the vicinity and which Sultan Mehmed II pulled down to build into Cut-Throat Castle. But there is a remnant of antiquity in Kourou Cheshmeh which goes very well with feasts of Demeter. This is an old altar, half buried in the earth near the mosque of the village, festooned about with garlands between battered rams’ heads—a curiously vivid symbol of the contrasts and survivals that are so much of the interest of Constantinople.

I never saw any one lay a sacrifice to the Goddess of Plenty on that ancient marble. A real rite of sacrifice may be seen, however, at the last _panayíri_ of the year, in the village of San Stefano. The _panayíri_, as you might suppose, is that of St. Stephen. In the Greek calendar St. Stephen’s Day falls on the 27th of December (January 9th), instead of the 26th. The most characteristic part of the _panayíri_ is a church procession which takes place on the afternoon before the feast, when priests and choir-boys march through the village with banners and incense and a small flock of sheep. The sheep are gaily decorated, like those of _Kourban Baïram_, and they come to the same end. In fact, the Greeks apply to their own sacrifice the Turkish name of _kourban_. The main difference is that each animal represents some special votive offering. And the offering may take different forms, according to the means of the giver. One rainy winter afternoon I was watching the sheep, daubed with paint and decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers, gather in the yard of the church, when an old crone came into the porch. She had pulled two or three of her many skirts over her head to protect herself from the rain, and when she dropped them into place there appeared in her arms a big rooster. “My _kourban_,” she said, showing him to a neighbour who greeted her, and she made no bones about taking him with her into the church. Holding him tightly under one arm she proceeded to buy, at the stall inside the door, three big candles, one of which she lighted at the shrine of St. Stephen, another at that of the Virgin, and a third in front of an icon which I did not recognise. That done, she made the round of all the icons in the church, twice over, kissing each one and piously crossing herself before it. Then she sat down in a stall at the back of the church, her rooster blinking around as if determined to pass his last hour with credit. The old woman encouraged him with pats and with remarks which I was sorry not to catch. In the meantime candles multiplied before the icons, a sharp sweet odour added itself to that of the strewn bay on the floor, a brisk business was done by a choir-boy who sold, wrapped up in gay tissue-paper, dried leaves supposed to be of the plant which sprang from St. Stephen’s crown of martyrdom, and a big frosted cake was brought in with ceremony and put between two candles on a table opposite the bishop’s throne. At last the Bishop himself arrived, rather wet and out of breath, and was inducted into his vestments beside the stove at the back of the church, not far from where the old woman was sitting with her cock. At that point the latter, unable to contain his emotions any longer, suddenly filled the holy place with a loud and pagan crow.

These _panayíria_ are only a few of an inexhaustible list, for every church and spring has its own. I have not even mentioned certain famous ones that are not easily visited. Of this category, though less famous than the fairs of Darîja, Pyrgos, or Silivri, is the feast of the _Panayía Mavromolítissa_. This madonna in the church of Arnaout-kyöi is a black icon reputed to have been found in the fields at the mouth of the Black Sea. Every year on the 5th of September she is carried back in a cortège of fishing-boats—weeping, it is said—by priests and well-wishers who hold a picnic _panayíri_ in the vicinity of the Cyanean Rocks. I have not spoken, either, of Ascension Day, which it is proper to celebrate by taking your first sea bath. Or of St. John’s Day, known by its bonfires and divinations. The Greeks often burn in the fires of St. John one or two effigies which are said to represent Judas, though Herod and Salome should rather perish on that occasion. Then there is May Day, when young men and maidens get up early in the morning, as they do in Italy, and go out into the fields to sing, to dance, to drink milk, to pick flowers, and to make wreaths which the swain hangs up on the door-post of the lady of his heart. And equally characteristic, in a different way, are the days when men eat and drink in honour of their dead.

No one, I suppose, tries any longer to prove that the modern Greek is one with his classic ancestor. Yet he remains curiously faithful to the customs of ancient Greece. Whereby he affords us an interesting glimpse into the processes of evolution. In him the antique and the modern world come together, and we see for ourselves, more clearly than on the alien soil of the West, how strangely habit is rooted in the heart of man, and how the forms of Christianity are those of the paganism that preceded it.

XII

FOUNTAINS

An anonymous American traveller who visited Turkey something less than a hundred years ago wrote, in comparing the water facilities of New York and Constantinople, that “the emporium of the United States is some centuries behind the metropolis of Turkey.” I doubt whether the comparison would still hold, since the building of Croton and other dams. Nevertheless, the fact remains that water—fresh water, at all events—is an element less native to the Anglo-Saxon than to the Turk. We have our proverb about cleanliness and godliness, and we have our morning tubs, and we have our unrivalled systems of plumbing; but we also have our Great Unwashed. In Turkey, however, there is no Great Unwashed—save among those who are not Turks. The reason is that for a follower of the Prophet godliness is next to cleanliness. His religion obliges him to wash his face, hands, and feet before each of his five daily prayers, while innumerable public baths exist for the completer ablutions required of him. Add to that the temperance enjoined upon him, whence is derived his appreciation of good drinking water, and you will begin to understand why there are so many fountains in Stamboul.

The fountains of Constantinople are very little like those of Rome and Paris. There are no figures about them, and not many of them spout or splash. In fact, I recently saw the most famous of them referred to in an architectural handbook as a kiosk, so little resemblance does it bear to the customary fountain. Fountains are, none the less, one of the chief ornaments of Constantinople. If they are intended more strictly for use than Western fountains, they also take the place—and often most happily—of commemorative sculpture in Western countries. And so faithfully have they followed all the vicissitudes of the art of building in Turkey, have they reflected changes of taste and successive foreign influences, that a study of them would yield valuable material toward a history of Ottoman architecture.

I do not propose to make any such study of them now. The variety of these small monuments is so great, however, that I must be academic enough to divide them into four or five categories. Of which the first would include the private fountains alluded to in earlier chapters. Numerous and interesting as private fountains are, a foreigner naturally has little opportunity to become acquainted with them. Their commonest form is that seen in all Turkish houses—of a niche in the wall containing a tap set over a marble basin. This arrangement, of course, amounts to nothing more or less than a wash-stand. But mark that the hole in the bottom of the basin contains no stopper. A Mohammedan would consider that we wash our hands in dirty water, preferring, himself, to use only the stream running from the faucet. Turkish houses—real Turkish houses—are like Japanese ones in that they contain very little furniture or bric-à-brac. The old architects, therefore, made the most of the opportunity afforded by the ritual use of water, and found nothing incongruous in treating a sanitary fixture architecturally, or even in making it an important feature of decoration. This they oftenest accomplished by setting the tap in the lower part of a tall marble tablet, called the _aïna tashi_, or mirror stone, which they shaped to suit the niche in which it stood and ornamented more or less elaborately with carving and sometimes with painting too.

Photograph by Abdullah Frères]

Not many early examples can remain, on account of the unfortunate propensity of Turkish houses to burn up. A number, however, are to be seen in the old palace of Top Kapou. Perfectly simple but characteristic and charming of their kind are the tiny wall fountains of a room in the “Cage,” at each end of the window-seat in front of each of the four windows. The same principle is used for more ornamental purposes by putting one basin below another in such a way that the second will catch the overflow of the first. There is a big wall fountain of this sort in the splendid hall of Süleïman the Magnificent. In a private house of much later date I have seen three graduated basins projecting from their niche, rounded and scalloped like shells. There is also a pretty _selsebil_ of a new kind in one of the baths of the Seraglio, where the surface of the mirror stone is notched into a series of overlapping scales so as to multiply the ripple of the water. But the prettiest dripping fountain I know is in an old house in Bebek, on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It stands in the entrance hall, at an odd little angle where it will best catch the light, and it combines the miniature basins of an ordinary _selsebil_ with a lower surface of marble scales. What is least ordinary about it, however, are the spaces of marble lace work bordering the shallow arched niche where the water trickles. There is a free space behind them in order to give the proper relief to the design. And there is an irregularity about the intertwined whorls which a Western artist would have thought beneath him, but which only adds interest to the work.

This original _selsebil_ partakes also of the nature of a _fîskieh_, as the Turks onomatopoetically call a spurting fountain. In the stalactites bordering the two shallow basins at the bottom are jets which used to add to the complicated tinkle of the fountain. Spurting fountains seem to be rarer indoors than out, though I have already mentioned the beautiful one in the Kyöprülü kiosk. They are not uncommon in the outer hall of public baths. One that contravenes the canons of orthodox Mohammedan art is to be admired in the handsome bath of St. Sophia—a work of Sinan—where three dolphins, their tails in the air, spout water into a fluted basin. I have wondered if these unorthodox creatures, like the lions of so many gardens, may not perpetuate a Byzantine tradition if not actual Byzantine workmanship. I have already referred to the pigeons on a _selsebil_ in Candilli. I have not yet referred to, though I have been considerably intrigued by, a fat goose that is the pride of a street fountain outside the Golden Gate. But on another fountain in Stamboul there is to be seen another unorthodox creature, that is of unimpeachable Mohammedan descent. The fountain is of the bubbling kind which sometimes very pleasantly adorns the centre of a room. In this case it was put into a niche in the Tile Pavilion which the Conqueror built in the Seraglio grounds. The fountain, however, would seem to date from Sultan Mourad III, who restored the kiosk in 1590. On either side of the deep rectangular recess are poetical inscriptions of that Sultan, gold on green, with a quaint little climbing border picked out of the marble in gold, and a surmounting shell. That shell, dear to the Renaissance designers and how many before them, is supposed to have made its entrance into Mohammedan architecture from this very niche. At the back of the niche is another shell, and under it the unorthodox creature, a peacock, spreads his fan. It was perhaps to diminish the importance of this unorthodox, of this probably heretical Shiïte peacock, that the artist coloured him more soberly than the flowers that bloom on either side of him, and made him combine with the shell to form the outline of a symbolic egg.

A few interesting interior fountains are to be seen in mosques, though Constantinople cannot equal Broussa in this respect. St. Sophia contains two such fountains, put there by Sultan Mourad III, which are big alabaster jars fitted with taps. Two more typical ones are in Sultan Ahmed, their graceful mirror stones set against two of the enormous piers that hold up the dome. The real mosque fountains, however, are those which exist for purposes of ritual ablution outside of the smallest _mesjid_. There you will always see a row of small taps, set near the ground against the wall of the mosque or its yard, with stepping-stones in front of them. They are rarely treated with much elaboration except in later mosques like Nouri Osmanieh, but they agreeably break up a flat wall surface. And at Eyoub they really form one element of the picturesqueness of the outer court, with the bracketed roof that protects them from the weather and their clambering vine.

Most mosques, as well as _medressehs_ and other pious institutions, also have a larger and more decorative fountain which usually stands in the middle of the court. The technical name of such a fountain is _shadrîvan_, or _shadîravan_, really meaning “for the peace of souls.” The fountain, that is, not only aids the faithful in their religious exercises, but adds so much to the celestial credit of the builder or of the person whom he commemorates. For many _shadrîvans_ were built, after the mosque to which they are attached, by another person. Those in the courts of Baïezid and Selim, for instance, are the work of Mourad IV, whose soul needed what peace it could find, while so late a sultan as Mahmoud I built the fanciful _shadrîvan_ in the somewhat stern court of the Conqueror as well as that in the court of St. Sophia. The last two are charming examples of the Turkish rococo. The commonest form of _shadrîvan_ is a basin or reservoir, encircled about the bottom by taps and protected by a roof from sun and rain. The simplest type is to be seen in the _medresseh_ yard of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, with a perfectly plain reservoir and a pointed roof held up by wooden pillars. A similar one which lies more on the track of sightseers is in front of the mosque known as Little St. Sophia, anciently the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. Here the reservoir is an octagon terminating in a cone, while the roof is tiled and ornamented at the apex with a bronze _alem_—a lyre or crescent containing a cobweb of Arabic letters. There are also seats between the posts for the greater convenience of those who use the fountain. Some _shadrîvans_ are partially enclosed and made into pavilions, where it is very pleasant to rest. An excellent example exists in the yard of the mosque of Ramazan Effendi, in Issa Kapou. The perforated marble enclosing the upper part of the reservoir of this _shadrîvan_ is a thing that is seen in many such fountains. Sometimes a handsome grille work protects the water, as at St. Sophia and Sokollî Mehmed Pasha. The latter fountain is uncommon in that the large round reservoir is the whole _shadrîvan_, with projecting eaves to shelter the people at the taps. But not all _shadrîvans_ are for purposes of ablution. At the Süleïmanieh and at Yeni Jami they are merely covered tanks without taps. The _shadrîvan_ of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari is of the same kind, except that the water falls invisibly from the roof of the tank, filling the court with a mysterious sense of sound and coolness.

I do not suppose that street fountains are actually more numerous than private ones, but they naturally seem so to a foreigner wandering through Stamboul. It is not easy to classify them clearly, so many are the forms they take. They affect, however, two principal types, known in Turkish as _cheshmeh_ and _sebil_, either of which may be attached to a wall or may exist as an independent structure. The original form is the applied _cheshmeh_, which is merely a wall fountain put outside the house, and enlarged in scale accordingly. These fountains are a very characteristic feature of Constantinople streets. There are literally thousands of them, and they offer so great a variety of interest that it is a wonder no one has taken the trouble to give them the study they deserve. They are a wide-spread example, for one thing, of Turkish philanthropy—and incidentally of a passing conception of public utilities. Every one of those fountains was originally a public benefaction, often made by a Sultan, it is true, and on an imperial scale, but oftener by a private citizen who wished to commemorate some member of his family, to ornament the street in which he lived, or to confer a benefit upon his neighbours. He therefore endowed his fountain, in many instances. Such endowments form an appreciable fraction of the property administered by the Department of Pious Foundations. Sometimes the benefactor stipulated that water-carriers or other persons were or were not to have the right of selling the water of his fountain. The water-carrier, the _saka_, belongs to a race by no means yet extinct in Constantinople, though I doubt if his guilds are quite what they were. There used to be two such guilds, of the horse _sakas_ and of the hand _sakas_. The patron of both was the hero who attempted to carry water to Hüsseïn in the battle of Kerbela. The members of both may be recognised by the dripping goatskins in which they carry water from house to house. In these degenerate days, however, a hand _saka_ is more likely to carry a couple of kerosene tins, slung over his shoulder from either end of a pole. But if he has the right to be paid for carrying water, every man has the right to go himself to the fountain and draw water without money and without price.

Until a few years ago Constantinople possessed no other water-system. Now modern water companies operate in their more invisible ways. But the Ministry of Pious Foundations is still the greatest water company of them all. That it was a fairly adequate one our American traveller of a hundred years ago is witness. Only recently, however, has the department attempted to make some sort of order out of the chaos of systems which it administers—some larger, like the water-supplies of the Sultans, some limited to the capacity of one small spring, and all based on the idea of a charity rather than that of a self-paying utility. Even now I doubt if any exact and complete map exists of the water-supply of Constantinople. The knowledge necessary to make such a map is distributed between an infinity of individuals known as _souyoljîs_, waterway men, who alone can tell, often, just where the pipes lie and how they are fed. And very useful, if occasionally very trying, gentlemen are these to know. This is sometimes amusingly illustrated on the outskirts of the city, where a house or a group of houses may be supplied from some small independent source of water. As time has passed and property has changed hands, the tradition of the waterway has been preserved only in some humble family that has profited by its knowledge, perhaps, to cultivate a tidy vegetable garden. And every now and then the water runs low or stops altogether in the quarter for whose benefit it was originally made to flow, until on payment of a tip to the _souyoljî_ it miraculously begins to flow again.