Chapter XI: Part 11

This system is probably the one the Turks found in use when they entered the city. Water still runs in the aqueducts of Valens and Justinian, and until the present generation Stamboul had no other water-supply than that first collected by Hadrian and Constantine. The Sultans restored and improved it, but I have no doubt that the conduits of many a Turkish fountain were laid by a Roman emperor. Of Byzantine fountains remaining to this day, I am not sure that any can positively be identified as such. Many of the fountains of Stamboul, however, must occupy the place of Byzantine fountains, whose materials may have been used in their construction. And it would not have been strange if the new masters of the city adapted to their own use models which they saw about them. The great quadruple fountain of Kîrk Cheshmeh—Forty Fountains—is a case in point. The Turks connect with it the name of Sultan Süleïman I, who is said to have left forty fountains in the city. But its original level was considerably below the existing street, and one of the four niches is ornamented with a Byzantine relief of peacocks, while other Byzantine fragments are built into the structure. The arches of two of the niches, moreover, are round, which was not characteristic of Süleïman’s period. So we are not without reasons for thinking that the fountain may have been a Byzantine one restored by Süleïman—who also restored the aqueduct that feeds it. The same is likely of others of his forty fountains. No others of them bear Byzantine sculptures. In fact, the only other street fountain on which I have seen any such decoration—unless the goose of Kazlî be Byzantine—is that of the small Koumrülü Mesjid, between Fatih and the Adrianople Gate. But the large Horhor Cheshmeh near Ak Seraï, and another farther up the hill toward the old Forum Amastrianon, have a distinct Byzantine air. At the same time, their general form is that of the Turkish wall fountain—an arched niche, containing a faucet above a stone or marble trough.

This form, in its simplest state, without any ornament or even a “mirror stone,” is found in what may be the oldest Turkish fountain in Constantinople. It lies within the enclosure of the castle of Roumeli Hissar. The niche is deeper than in later fountains, and the bricks used in its construction are the large flat ones which the Turks borrowed from their predecessors. If truth compels me further to record that the arch is not the pointed one preferred by the Turks until the eighteenth century, I am able to add that neither are the arches of the castle itself.

I suppose it is natural that few fountains of that early period remain to us. The newcomers probably found the city well enough supplied already, and five hundred years is a long time for such small structures to last in the open. The oldest inscribed wall fountain I know is that of Daoud Pasha, outside the mosque of the same personage, who was Grand Vizier to the Conqueror’s son Baïezid II (A. H. 890/A. D. 1485). There is little about the pointed arch or fairly deep niche to attract attention, save the bold inscription above a small mirror stone of palpably later date: “The author of charity deceased, the Grand Vizier Daoud Pasha.” This is the earliest form of ornament that appears on Turkish fountains—though I fancy the broad eaves that protect many of them did not wait long to be invented. I have already dwelt on the importance of writing in all Turkish decoration. I therefore need not add that the simplest inscription on a fountain has for the Turks an importance of a kind we do not appreciate. Some fountains are famous merely for the lettering on them—as in its day was that of Feïzoullah Effendi, outside his _medresseh_, whose inscription was designed by the celebrated calligraph Dourmoush-zadeh Ahmed Effendi.

It must not be inferred that the matter of the inscription is comparatively of less importance—though here again the Western critic is not quite competent to judge. The commonest of all inscriptions is a verse from the Koran: “By water all things have life.” Other verses, mentioning the four fountains of Paradise and the pool Kevser into which they flow, are also frequent, together with references to the sacred well Zemzem, which Gabriel opened for Hagar in Mecca, to Hîzîr and the Spring of Life, and to the battle of Kerbela, in which Hüsseïn and his companions were cut off from water. Or the central tenet of Islam, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of God,” may be carved above the niche—sometimes without any indication of the name or epoch of the founder. The majority, however, are not so modest. They are more likely to give ampler information than he who runs may read. And after the time of Süleïman the Magnificent it became increasingly the fashion for celebrated poets to compose the verses which celebrated calligraphs designed. Thus the historian Chelibi-zadeh records the end of the inscription on a reservoir of Ahmed III: “Seïd Vehbi Effendi, the most distinguished among the word-wizards of the time, strung these pearls on the thread of his verse and joined together the two lines of the following chronographic distich, like two sweet almonds breast to breast: ‘With what a wall has Ahmed dammed the waters! For of astonishment stops the flood in the midst of its course.’”

Chronograms are as common on fountains as they are on other monuments. The earliest I have happened to come across is an Arabic one on a fountain near the Studion, which points the reader’s attention as follows—“The date fell: We gave thee the fountain of Paradise.” The latter phrase is from the Koran. Its numerical value is 970, or 1563 of our era, which is twenty years later than the chronogram on the tomb of the Prince. The ideal chronogram should contain the name of the builder of the fountain and that of the writer of the verse—though I must confess I never found one that attained that height of ingenuity. Most of them mention the founder’s name alone, as “Sultan Mourad’s fountain is a gift” (994/1586), or “O God, grant Paradise to Moustafa Pasha!” (1095/1684). But the exigencies of arithmetic may relegate the names to the earlier part of the inscription—as on one of two neighbouring fountains in the quarter of Ak Bîyîk (_anglice_, White Whisker): “When the mother of Ali Pasha, Vizier in the reign of Sultan Mahmoud, quenched the thirst of the people with the clear and pure water of her charity, Riza of Beshiktash, the _Nakshibendi_”—an order of dervishes—“uttered the following epigraph: Come and drink water of eternal life from this joyful fountain.” The value of the last phrase is 1148, or 1735. Even in so general a sentiment, however, it is not always easy to get the required figure. Various ingenious devices are resorted to, of which a handsome Renaissance fountain in Kassîm Pasha is an excellent example: “The famous Vizier, the victorious warrior Hassan Pasha, made this fountain as a trophy for Mohammedans. His aims were always philanthropic and he provided this fountain with water like Zemzem. This fountain is so well situated and built in so pleasant a place that one would take it as the site where flows the water of eternal life. Those who look upon it drive away all sorrow from their hearts.” The numerical value of the last sentence is 2080, a date even farther from the Mohammedan calendar than from ours. But the value of the single word “sorrow” is 1040. Drive it away, or in other words subtract 1040 from 2080, and you get 1040 again, which is evidently the date of the construction (1631). The light values of this inscription are as enigmatic as its numerical values, so that I have never been able to photograph it properly. It also states that the water rights are free, meaning that no one _saka_ may sell the water. The builder of this interesting fountain was in his day a saddler, a cook, and a sergeant, which did not prevent him from eventually becoming high admiral of the fleet, inflicting a memorable defeat upon the Russians in the Black Sea, and marrying the sister of Sultan Mourad IV.

The taste for chronograms has continued to this day, but in time the arithmetic of the reader was helped out by an incidental date. The earliest numerals I have found are of the time of Süleïman the Magnificent, on a fountain built by a Jew in the suburb of Hass-kyöi (931, 1525). The same fountain is also decorated with the earliest reliefs I have noted, consisting merely of a little tracery on the mirror stone. Altogether this period was an important one for fountains as it was for all Turkish architecture. But while a few of them are admirably proportioned, like the little fountain in Avret Bazaar at the gate of the soup-kitchen of the _Hasseki_—she was Hourrem, the Joyous One, who bore to Süleïman his ill-fated son Moustafa—many of them are disappointingly heavy. It may be that the great Sinan did not consider such small monuments worth his while, or that they have suffered by restoration. At all events, the lesser sultans who followed Süleïman left fountains generally more graceful. Ahmed I is said to have built not less than a hundred of them. In the meantime they gradually developed in detail. The tracery, less floral than geometrical, covered more and more of the marble. Conventionalised cypresses, with tops mysteriously bent, sprang up on either side of the taps. Conventionalised roses, often having a mystic symbolism, became a favourite ornament for the apex of the arch. The occult pentagram or hexagram, symbolic of microcosm and macrocosm and talismanic against evil, were sometimes carved at the corners. And the top, when it was not shaded by broad eaves, was finished in various decorative ways.

The golden age of street fountains was in the first half of the eighteenth century, during the reigns of those notable builders Ahmed III and his nephew Mahmoud I. The change which they introduced into the architecture of their country was in many ways an unhappy one. It led the Turks out of their own order of tradition, which is rarely a safe or useful thing to do, into strange byways of bad taste where they lost themselves for two hundred years. Still, an architecture that tries experiments is an architecture that lives, and at its beginning the Turkish rococo has an inimitable grace and spirit. The fountains of the period are decorated, as no fountains had been decorated before, with floral reliefs a little like those of the Renaissance tombs and with fruits and flowers in various quaint receptacles. The earlier of the garden _selsebils_ I have already mentioned is an example, and a more typical one is the wall fountain of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari. The sculptures also began to be touched up with colour and gilding, as in the larger of the two fountains of Ak Bîyîk. So must have been the charming fountain, now most lamentably neglected, on the street that drops from Galata Tower to Pershembeh Bazaar.

Until this time the old pointed arch had been preferred, though, as we have seen, the rounded shell of the Renaissance had already made its appearance. But now round or broken arches began to be the order of the day; and so great richness of detail could only degenerate into the baroque. Yet I have bad taste enough to like, sometimes, even the out-and-out baroque. There is a little fountain, for instance, in the Asiatic suburb of Kanlîja, with a florid arch and rather heavy traceries and four very Dutch-looking tiles set into the wall above them, which I think is delightful. Long after photographing it I came across some more of those tiles in the imperial tribune of the mosque built in Scutari by Moustafa III, which gave me a clew to the date of the fountain. And after that I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of the gentleman whose summer _valî_ lies across the road from the fountain, and he told me that the fountain was built by the Sheï’h ül Islam of Moustafa III. There is, too, a fountain at Emirgyan, in front of the Khedival garden, which, for all its baroque lines, seems to me to terminate a vista very happily. But I do not hesitate to add that few wall fountains built since the middle of the eighteenth century are worth any attention.

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We can hardly call it a discovery that the architects made when they first detached a street fountain from the wall and made something more monumental out of it. The thing had already been done indoors and in the courts of mosques. The earliest specimens, however, show their evolution very clearly. They are nothing but wall fountains applied to a cube of masonry. I suppose the religious associations of the _shadrîvan_ kept its tradition from being followed, but with experience freedom was gained in the treatment of the detached fountain. Typical of its kind is a fountain in the waterside grove of plane-trees at Chibouklou, to which Ibrahim Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Ahmed III, gave the name of Feïzabad—Place of the Abundant Blessing of God. A great oblong pool reflects the trees, and nearer the Bosphorus is a raised space of the kind the Turks call a turf sofa. On one side of it a concave tablet, carved with a lamp swinging from a chain, indicates the direction of prayer. On the other stands a simple marble fountain, bearing three chronograms of 1133 or 1721. Twenty-eight Mehmed was then in Paris, and the new fashion was not yet launched in fountains. An early and a very happy experiment in that fashion adorns Ahmed’s park at Kiat Haneh. But the model and masterpiece of this little golden age is the great fountain at Top Haneh, beside the mosque of Don Quixote. It lacks, alas, the domed roof and broad eaves that Melling represents in one of his pictures. Moreover a trolley post has been planted squarely at its most conspicuous corner, while ugly iron fences attack two of its sides; and the War Department thinks nothing of making a dumping-ground of the enclosed angle. Yet none of these indignities affect the distinction of the floral reliefs that cover its white marble, or of its frieze of gold inscriptions spaced in a double row of blue cartouches.

A less ornamental but a deservedly famous fountain of the same period is to be seen on the upper Bosphorus, at Beïkos. I suspect, however, that it was once more ornamental than it is. A tall marble pavilion hospitably opens its arches on three sides to the streets of the village. At the bottom of the wall on the fourth side water pours noisily out of fifteen bronze spouts—or I believe they are thirteen now—into three marble troughs sunk below the level of the street, and runs away through a marble channel in the middle of the pavilion. From this T-shaped lower level steps rise to two marble platforms at the outer corners, where you may sip a coffee while drinking in the freshness and music of the water. This delightful fountain was also built by Mahmoud I. I know not whether the inhabitants of Roumeli Hissar got from Beïkos the idea of a fountain of their own, much smaller, which is flat on top and furnished with benches that are very popular on summer evenings. Another, at Beïlerbeï, has a place of prayer on the top, which you reach by a steep little stair of stone. Yet another might be pointed out at Top Haneh, in front of the big mosque, as at least one good deed of the late Sultan Abd ül Hamid II. It would not be fair to compare this structure with its greater neighbour at the other end of the parade-ground. Nevertheless, in spite of its ugly sculpture, it is one of the most successful modern fountains in Constantinople. Suggested, perhaps, by a fountain behind the Arsenal, built by the Admiral Süleïman Pasha in 1750, it is much happier in its lines. And the architect had something like a stroke of genius when he opened a space above the taps and filled it with twisted metal work. The little dome was originally surmounted by an intricately wrought _alem_. But the winter after the donor retired to Salonica this ornament disappeared as well.

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No one can explore much of Stamboul without noticing certain large grilled windows with metal cups chained to their sills. These are the windows of _sebils_, which I have referred to as one type of street fountain. If I have not yet mentioned them more fully it is because their chronological place is after the wall fountain. They are also much less numerous, though architecturally rather more important. The word _sebil_ means way or path: to build a _sebil_ is a step on the way to God. The water comes into a small room or pavilion, and an attendant is supposed to keep cups filled where they will be easily accessible from the street. A simpler form of foundation provides for a man to go about the streets giving water to those who ask for it. Or sometimes dervishes seek this “way” of acquiring merit. They usually wear green turbans, and the inside of the small brass bowl into which they pour water from a skin slung over their shoulders is inscribed with verses from the Koran.

The Seljukian Turks of Asia Minor, I have been told, were the inventors of this graceful philanthropy, remembering the thirst of the martyr Hüsseïn at Kerbela and the women who brought water to the companions of the Prophet at the battle of Bed’r. The earliest _sebil_ I know of in Constantinople, however, is the one at the corner of the triangular enclosure where the architect Sinan lies buried, near the great mosque he built for Sultan Süleïman. Small and simple though it is, the lines have the elegance that distinguishes the work of this master. And it proved full of suggestion for succeeding architects. It showed them, for one thing, how to treat a corner in a new and interesting way. And while the metal work of the windows is the simplest, the designers in iron and bronze found a new field for their craft. One or two architects took a hint from the openwork that lightens the wall beyond the _sebil_ and filled their windows with pierced marble, as in the fountain adjoining the tomb of Sultan Mehmed III at St. Sophia. But most architects preferred the lightness and the contrast of metal. Some of their experiments may be rather too complicated and spidery. Nevertheless, the grille work of _sebil_ windows would make an interesting study by itself.

In time _sebils_ were treated in the same variety of ways as other street fountains. Perhaps the first example of an applied _sebil_ is that of the eunuch Hafîz Ahmed Pasha. The fountain forms an angle of his mosque, not far from that of the Conqueror. Ahmed Pasha was twice Grand Vizier under Sultan Mourad IV. Shortly before his death the Conqueror appeared to him in a dream, angrily reproaching him for building a mosque so near his own and threatening to kill him. The old man was greatly troubled by this vision of evil omen; and, sure enough, he was murdered about two months afterward. There is something very attractive in his unpretentious _sebil_, with its tall pointed windows, its little arched door, and its lichened cupola. Another applied corner _sebil_, built by Sultan Ahmed I behind his mosque, is unusual in that it is lined with tiles. Similar tiles are to be seen in the window embrasures of that Sultan’s tomb. Their conventionalised peacock eyes, a green-rimmed oval of blue on a white ground, would be too coarse in the open; but seen in shadow through the small hexagons of the grille, they are wonderfully decorative. By an odd chance they were not destroyed by the fire that raged through this quarter in 1912. Among other fountains which came off less happily was one uniting a _sebil_ and a _cheshmeh_. This experiment, if I am not mistaken, was first tried in the time of Ahmed III. A beautiful example is to be seen on the busy street of Shah-zadeh, where Ahmed’s Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, is buried within his own _medresseh_. Four windows round the corner with a curve of handsome grille work, while the tall arch of the _cheshmeh_ decorates the side street with its gilding and delicate reliefs.

The most beautiful example of all, the king, in fact, of Constantinople street fountains, is the one which Ahmed III built outside the great gate of the Seraglio. It stands four-square on a circular marble base, having a curved _sebil_ window at each corner and the pointed arch of a _cheshmeh_ in the middle of each side. The overhanging roof is crowned by live fantastic little domes and gilded _alems_. The traceries are not quite so delicate, perhaps, as those of Top Haneh, nor does the whiteness of marble make up any of the effect of this fountain. The brightness of its original polychrome decoration has acquired a soft patina of time. The main effect is given here by the great gold inscriptions on a blue-green ground, framed in plain terra-cotta, and by a frieze of blue and white tiles enclosed between two bands of a delicious dark velvety green. The principal chronogram of the fountain, facing St. Sophia, was written by the Sultan himself. It is said that his first version added up to four less than the required sum, which should have been 1141 (1729). It read: “The date of Sultan Ahmed flows from the tongue of the faucet. Praising God, drink of the fountain and pray for Ahmed Khan.” A witty ecclesiastic to whom his majesty confided his dilemma solved the difficulty by suggesting that it was necessary to turn on the water before it would flow. The imperial poet thereupon added the word “open” to his second hemistich and completed the chronogram. The other inscriptions were chosen by competition from among the chief poets of the day. This fountain is unsurpassed for the richness of its detail. Even the under-side of the eaves is decorated with wavy gilt mouldings and painted reliefs of fruit and flowers. But the details take nothing away from the general effect. It is the balance of them, after all, the admirable silhouette, the perfect proportion, that give this monument its singular beauty and dignity.

There is another large detached _sebil_ in Galata, near the bridge of Azap Kapou. It was built soon after the fountain of Ahmed III by the mother of Sultan Mahmoud I. Crowded between the surrounding houses, it enjoys no such advantages of perspective as its more famous rivals of St. Sophia and Top Haneh. The greater part of the edifice, indeed, is no more than a blank stone reservoir. But the side facing the main street is treated with a masterly sense of its position. Projecting out from the centre is the circular _sebil_ window, filled with a rich bronze grille, while set a little back on either side, and slightly inclined toward either perspective of the street, are two tall _cheshmehs_. The niche of each and the whole face of the structure is incrusted with intricate floral reliefs more delicate even than those of Top Haneh, though not executed in so white a stone. There are also pots and vases of flowers and sheaves of wheat, and above the tap of each niche is a pointed openwork boss of bronze. Here, too, the richness of the ornament combines with the composition and height of the façade and the sweep of the eaves to reach something not far from a grand air.

No other _sebil_ of the left bank is executed in so refined a style as this. But many other fountains, in all parts of the city, have a happy knack of filling a space or turning a corner or screening a dark interior with twisted metal work. The difficulty is to choose instances. I might mention the _sebil_ of Baïram Pasha at Avret Bazaar; of Mehmed Emin Effendi, half fountain and half tomb, which lends its elegance to the neighbourhood of Dolma Ba’hcheh Palace; of Abd ül Hamid I at Fîndîklî; of Laleli Jami, the Tulip Mosque, which Moustafa III built at Ak Seraï. For the Western architect they are full of unexpected suggestions, if he have the eye to see, while to the mere irresponsible impressionist they make up a great part in the strangeness and charm of the Turkish capital.

XIII

A TURKISH VILLAGE

There are larger villages. There are more prosperous villages. There are villages more fashionable. Great ladies lift their eyebrows when we pronounce its name, even ladies not so great, and decide that we will hardly do for their visiting lists. But few villages are so picturesque as ours. And in one respect at least we are surpassed by no village. For we sit on that cleft promontory of the Bosphorus where, during the league-long coquetry of the two continents before their final union, Europe most closely approaches Asia. The mother of nations, as we see her some eight hundred yards away, is a slope sunburnt or green according to the time of year but always discreetly overlooked by farther heights of blue, a slope sharp enough, not too high, admirably broken by valleys and points and one perfect little bay for which I sometimes think I would give all the rest of the Bosphorus, a slope beaded irregularly along the bottom with red-roofed summer _valîs_, variegated with gardens and hamlets and nestling patches of wood, and feathered along the top with cypresses and stone-pines in quite an Italian manner. For my part, I fail to see why any one should ever have desired to leave so delectable a continent, particularly at a period when the hospitality of our village must have been more scant than it is now. But history has recorded many a migration to our side of the strait. Here Xenophon crossed with the remnant of his ten thousand. Here Darius sat upon a throne of rock and watched Persia swarm after him against the Scythians. Here, too, the great emperor Heraclius, returning to Constantinople after his triumphs in the East, caused a pontoon bridge to be railed high with woven branches in order to screen from his eyes the water he dreaded more than blood. And here Sultan Mehmed II opened the campaign which ended in the fall of the Roman Empire.

The castle he built in 1452, the summer before he took Constantinople, is what gives our village its character and its name. Roumeli Hissar means Roman, Greek, European, or western castle, distinguishing us from the opposite village of Andolou Hissar, where stand the ruins of the earlier fortress of Baïezid the Thunderbolt. To see the two round towers of Roumeli Hissar facing each other across a ravine, the polygonal keep at the water’s edge, the crenelated walls and turrets irregularly enclosing the steep triangle between them, you would never guess that they sprang up in about the time of a New York apartment-house. Yet that they did so is better attested than the legend that their arrangement reproduces the Arabic letters of their builder’s name. Having demanded permission of the Greek emperor to put up a hunting-lodge on the Bosphorus, the Conqueror proceeded to employ an army of masons, in addition to his own troops, with orders to destroy any buildings they found convenient to use for material. So it is that the shafts and capitals of columns, the pieces of statues, the fragments of decorative brick and marble, that give so interesting a variety of detail to the structure are a last dim suggestion of the ancient aspects of the village. One of its Byzantine names was that of the _Asomaton_, the Bodiless Angels, to whom a monastery in the place was dedicated, while earlier still a temple of Hermes had existed there. In three months the hunting-lodge was ready for occupancy, and the Sultan called it Cut-Throat Castle, a play on the Turkish word which means both throat and strait. It put the Bosphorus at his mercy, as a Venetian galley that went to the bottom under a big stone cannon-ball was the first to testify—though the Genoese commanded the mouth of the Black Sea from another pair of castles. But in spite of their hasty construction the walls have withstood the decay and the earthquakes of nearly five hundred years. Will as much be said of existing New York apartment-houses in the twenty-fifth century?

Powerful as the fortress was in its day, and interesting as it remains as a monument to the energy and resource of its builder, it never played a great part in the martial history of the Turks. The Bosphorus was not then the important highway it is now. After the capture of Constantinople the castle degenerated into a garrison of Janissaries and a state prison of less importance than the Seven Towers. Not a few passages of romance, however, attach to that diminished period. More than one European diplomat spent a season of repose within the walls of Cut-Throat Castle, in days when international law was less finical on such points than it since has grown. And it formed a residence less agreeable than the present country embassies, if we may judge from the account that has come down to us of one such _villeggiatura_. This was written by a young Bohemian attaché who spent two years of the sixteenth century in enforced retirement at Roumeli Hissar. His name, Wenceslas Wratislaw, with those of other prisoners, may still be seen in the stone of a little chamber high in the north tower. In the same tower, commanding a magnificent view, the Conqueror lived while preparing his great siege. Whether this, or the angular tower by the water, or some other donjon of the Bosphorus was the Black Tower which has so unsavoury a name in Turkish annals I have never quite made up my mind.

To-day the castle has outlived even that period of usefulness. The true cut-throats skulk in the bare hills at the mouth of the Black Sea, while the ambassadors—with the single exception, it is true, of our own—pass their summers in pleasant villas presented to them by different Sultans. As for the towers, they survive only to add their picturesqueness to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, to flaunt ivy and even sizable trees from their battlements, and to afford a habitation to bats and carrion-crows. The last vestige of military uses clinging to them is the pseudo-classic guard-house that crouches under the waterside keep. The walls at least subserve the purpose, however, of sheltering a quarter of our village. One of our thoroughfares enters the double gate by the north tower, descends a breakneck alley of steps lattice-bordered and hung with vine, pauses between a fountain, a ruined mosque, and a monstrous mulberry-tree, and finally emerges upon the quay by a low arch that was once the boat entrance to the sea tower. There is to a prying foreigner some inheritance of other days in the inhabitants of this hanging suburb. They are all of the ruling race and there is about them something intrenched and aloof. The very dogs seem to belong to an older, a less tolerant, dispensation. The Constantinople street dog, notwithstanding the reputation that literature has attempted to fasten upon him, is in general the mildest of God’s creatures. But the dog of Cut-Throat Castle is quite another character. He is a distinct reactionary, lifting up his voice against the first sign of innovation. It may be that generations of surrounding walls have engendered in him the responsibilities of a private dog. At all events he resents intrusion by day, and by night is capable of the most obstinate resistance thereto.

Another memento of that older time is to be seen in the cemetery lying under the castle wall to the south. It is, perhaps, the oldest Mohammedan burying-ground in Constantinople, or at least on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It certainly is the most romantic, with its jutting rocks, its ragged black cypresses, its round tower and crenelated wall, overhanging a blue so fancifully cut by Asiatic hills. It has, too, a spicy odour quite its own, an odour compounded of thyme, of resinous woods, of sea-salt, and I know not what aroma of antiquity. But its most precious characteristic is the grave informality it shares with other Mohammedan cemeteries. There is nothing about it to remind one of conventional mourning—no alignment of tombs, no rectilinear laying out of walks, no trim landscape gardening. It lies unwalled to the world, the gravestones scattered as irregularly on the steep hillside as the cyclamens that blossom there in February. Many of them have the same brightness of colour. The tall narrow slabs are often painted, with the decorative Arabic lettering, or some quaint floral design, picked out in gold. It is another expression of the philosophy of the guard-house soldiers who so often lounge along the water, of the boy who plays his pipe under a cypress while the village goats nibble among the graves, of the veiled women who preen their silks among the rocks on summer afternoons. The whole place is interfused with that intimacy of life and death, the sense of which makes the Asiatic so much more mature than the European. The one takes the world as he finds it, while the other must childishly beat his head against stone walls. It is the source of the strength and of the weakness of the two stocks.

We also love to congregate, or in Empedoclean moods to muse alone, about another old cemetery. There, on top of the steep slope behind the castle, you will often see a row of women, like love-birds contemplating the universe, or a grave family picnic. There too, especially on moonlight nights, you will not seldom hear voices uplifted in the passionate minor which has so compelling a charm for those who know it of old, accompanied perhaps by an oboe and the strangely broken rhythm of two little drums. It is the true music for a hilltop that is called the Place of Martyrs. The victims of the first skirmish that took place during the building of the castle lie there, under a file of oaks and cypresses. At the north end of the ridge a few broken grey stones are scattered among tufts of scrub-oak that soon give way to the rounded bareness of the hillside. At the other end newer and more honourable graves, protected by railings, attend a _tekkeh_ of Bektash dervishes. This establishment was founded by a companion of the Conqueror. Mohammed gave him, as the story goes, all the land he could see from the top of the hill. The present sheikh is a descendant of the founder, but I do not believe he inherited all the land he can see. The view from the Place of Martyrs is one of the finest on the Bosphorus. I am not of the company of certain travellers in the matter of that famous strait. I have seen hills with greater nobility of outline and waters of a more satisfying blue. But when one has made all due reservations in the interest of one’s private allegiances the fact remains that the Bosphorus is a charming piece of water enclosed between charmingly moulded hills. It bends below you like a narrow lake as you see it from the Place of Martyrs. The northern sea is invisible; but southward the tops of islands look over the heights of Scutari, and the Marmora glimmers to the feet of a ghostly range that sometimes pretends not to be there.

Nothing could be more abrupt than the contrast between the slopes facing each other across the busy waterway, with all their picturesque detail of garden, roof, and minaret, and the plateau of which the Bosphorus is nothing but a crooked blue crack. From the Place of Martyrs it rolls desolately away to the west, almost without a house or a tree to break its monotony. Gullies cut it here and there. Patches of scrub-oak darken its surface. Sheep move slowly across it, looking in the distance like maggots in a texture of homespun. Otherwise you would never suppose that life existed there. As you watch the sun set across those great empty fields it is incredible that somewhere beyond them tilled lands and swarming cities are. Your impression is not of mere wildness, however. Two abandoned stone windmills on a far-off hill give the note of the impression. Such silence is the silence that follows upon the beating of many drums. You may sit upon that hilltop in evening light and drink melancholy like an intoxication, musing upon all the change and indifference of the world. Yet life lingers there still—life that neither indifference nor change, nor time nor ruin nor death can ever quite stamp out. Threads of water creep through some of the dry gullies, swelling after rain into noisy brooks. Above them hang patches of cultivation, dominated by the general brownness and bareness, but productive of excellent strawberries in the spring. That, too, is one of the times when the brown brightens for a little to green, while June colours whole tracts of hillside with butcher’s-broom and the wild rose. And then I have said nothing of heather, of crocuses, of violets, of I know not how many flowers scattered along certain lonely lanes. On the edge of the village these are paved like streets and pleasantly arched with bay-trees. In the bottoms of the ravines, also, they have in their season quite a sylvan air. They lead to stony trails in the open where you may meet a soldier, an Albanian shepherd, or a peasant in gay jacket and baggy blue trousers, wandering from nowhere to nowhere.

But I wander too far from our village, from that larger part of it which the exigencies of space must long ago have pushed northward out of the castle close into the underlying valley. There are those who deprecate our streets, their many steps, the manner of their paving, the irresoluteness with which they proceed to their destined ends, and the desultoriness of their illumination at night. I, however, am partial to a Gothic irregularity, and I applaud the law which admonishes us not to go abroad two hours after sunset without a lantern. We do not take the admonition too seriously, but there are chances enough of breaking our necks on moonless nights to maintain a market among us for paper lanterns. These, with the candles flaring in front of sacred tombs and the casual window lamplight so pleasingly criss-crossed by lattices, make Whistler nocturnes for us that they may never know who dwell in the glare of electricity.

If I find anything to deprecate it is the tendency gaining ground among us to depart from the ways of our fathers in the matter of domestic architecture. The jig-saw and the paint pot begin to exercise their fatal fascination upon us who were so long content with simple lines and the colour of weathered wood. But the pert gables of the day are still outnumbered by square old many-windowed houses with low-pitched roofs of red tiles and corbelled upper stories inherited from the Byzantines. Under the eaves you will often see a decorative text from the Koran, framed like a picture, which insures the protection of heaven better than premium or policy. 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. Their windows overhang the sea, or are separated from it merely by a narrow causeway. 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. You can recognise the houses by their lack of lattices, and the priest by the high conical crown of his hat. There are also Albanians, Croats, Jews, Macedonians, and Montenegrins among us, in addition to nothing less exotic than a small Anglo-American colony. It dwells on the upper fringe of habitation, the American part of it being connected, principally, with the college founded by a Mr. Robert of New York.

The grey stone buildings stand on a splendid terrace above the south tower of the castle, visible from afar. And they always make me sorry that such a chance was lost for some rare person equal to the opportunity, who should have combined a knowledge of modern educational requirements with a feeling for the simple broad-eaved houses of the country and their picturesque corbels. However, there the grey stone buildings stand, ugly and foreign, but solid and sufficient, an object of suspicion to some, to others an example of the strange vicissitudes of the world, whereby above a promontory sacred once to Hermes, later to Byzantine saints, and again to Mohammed, there should fly to-day the flag of a country so distant as our own. The condition on which the flag flies is not the least picturesque of these incongruities. The proprietors from whom the first land was obtained were the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and in conformity with the law governing such property the college bound itself to pay them, in addition to the price of purchase, a yearly tribute of some fourteen dollars.

I might speak of other public institutions flourishing in our midst: of the primary school by the water where you hear the children studying aloud while they rock back and forth over the Koran; of the Sünbüllü dervishes farther down the quay, to whom laden wood boats throw out a few sticks as they tow up the five-mile current; of the howling dervishes, and the clever ruse by which they obtained their building; of our three mosques—to say nothing of the _imam’s_ mother of the smallest of them, an active yet beneficent public institution in herself, who, when the American college dug foundations for a wall round a slope long beloved by the Turkish ladies, threw her ample person most literally into the breach and could only be persuaded to retire therefrom by the Ministry of Public Works. Nor should I pass over our village green, which was once a cemetery, but which is now a common meeting-place for those of us who are happy enough to live about it. Some of us spend most of our time there, in the company of our wives, our children, our horses, our donkeys, and our hens. Most notable among the habitués—at least to an alien eye—is a lady of African descent, espoused to a meek Caucasian water-carrier and the mother of an infinite chocolate-and-cream progeny. Her ardent disposition is reported to have led her through many vicissitudes, matrimonial and otherwise. On one occasion it led her to scratch out the eyes of another _habituée_ of the green, over some matter of mulberries. It is a proof of the reasonableness of justice among us that when condemned to a brief term of imprisonment she first succeeded in postponing the execution of the sentence, I believe through some expectation of presenting the happy water-carrier with a new chocolate-cream, and then in causing her term to be subdivided, alternately languishing in dungeons and enjoying the society of her family until she had paid the full penalty of the law.

A larger, the true centre of our municipal life, is the _charshî_, or market-place. Very notable, to the mind of one admirer, is ours among market-places. My admiration is always divided between that crooked street of it, darkened by jutting upper stories that sometimes actually jump across it, wherein are situate the principal shops, the minor cafés, a fountain or two, and the public bath, and that adjoining portion of it which lies open to the sea. The latter certainly offers the most facilities for the enjoyment of life. Indeed, one end of it is chiefly given up to a Company for the Promotion of Happiness—if one may so translate its Turkish name—whose English steamers carry us to town, seven miles away, or to the upper Bosphorus, as quickly, as regularly, and as comfortably as any company I know. It also does much to promote the happiness of those who do not travel, through the sociable employees of its wharf and by affording a picturesque _va et vient_ at almost any hour of the day. I fear, however, that it does less to promote the happiness of the boatmen who await custom at the adjacent wooden quay. They wait in those trim little skiffs, so much neater than anything of the sort we see for hire at home, which have almost superseded caïques because they hold more passengers with greater comfort. And to one who observes how much of the time they do wait, and how modestly they are remunerated for their occasional excursions, it is a miracle how they contrive to live. There is no fixed tariff. If you know the ropes you pay two and a half piastres, some twelve cents, to be rowed across the Bosphorus or to the next village. For ten they will take you almost anywhere. But they eke out their incomes by fishing. We are famous for our lobsters at Roumeli Hissar.

The boatmen, and others with them, often prefer to wait in certain agreeable resorts along that same wooden platform. The first of these is the café of the Armenian, whose corner rakes the Company for the Promotion of Happiness. He profits thereby not a little, for when we wish to take a steamer we do not always trouble ourselves to look up the time-table beforehand. The Armenian is also a barber, and in his low-ceiled room of many windows you may hear, to the accompaniment of banging backgammon boards, the choicest of conversation. The only thing I have against him is that I have to pay twice as much for my coffee as a customer who wears a girdle and a fez.

A few doors away dwell the Albanians. You may know them by the gay stockings, red embroidered with gold, which they wear outside the tight white trousers of their country. Theirs is the dispensary of ice-cream in summer and of _mahalibi_ in winter—the latter being a kind of corn-starch pudding sprinkled with sugar and rose-water. These comestibles, of which their people have a practical monopoly, they also peddle about the streets. But it is better to partake of them in their shop, surrounded by lithographic royalties and battle scenes of 1870; and best of all in front of it, sitting comfortably in a rush-bottomed chair while the never-ending diorama of the Bosphorus rolls by.

In suggestive proximity to this establishment is a Greek drug store. It might be Venetian, so impregnate is it with the sound and light of water. For situation, however, I never saw its equal in Venice. It has, indeed—especially when late sunlight warms the opposite shore—so perfect a view, the platform in front of it is so favourite a resort, the legend “La Science est Longue, mais la Vie Courte” curls with such levity about a painted Hippocrates within, that the place rather gives you the impression of an operatic drug store. The polyglot youth in charge of it stands at the door exactly as if he were waiting for the chorus on the stage outside to give him his cue; and you cannot help asking yourself whether there be anything in the porcelain jars about him.

I have spoken with unbridled admiration of our market-place and its two main branches. How shall I now speak admiringly enough of the square with which they both communicate and which unites in itself the richness of their charms? It is not a square in any geometric sense. It is a broad stone quay of irregular width, tree-shaded, awning-hung, festooned with vines and fish-nets, adorned of a flat-topped fountain whose benches are a superior place of contemplation, bordered by a quaintly broken architecture of shops, cafés, and dwellings, and watched upon by a high white minaret. It is not subject to the intermittent bustle of the Company for the Promotion of Happiness, but it carries on its own more deliberate and more picturesque activities. Here commerce goes forward, both settled and itinerant, with loud and leisurely bargaining. Here the _kantarji_ exercises his function of weighing the freights unloaded by the picture-book boats at the quay. The headquarters of one of them is here, in a deep arch over the water. This is the bazaar caïque, that goes early in the morning to the Golden Horn for the transport of such freight and passengers as do not care to patronise the more expensive Company for the Promotion of Happiness—a huge row-boat with an incurving beak and a high stern, to pull whose oars the rowers drop from their feet to their backs. And here is also the headquarters of the _hamals_, most indispensable of men. These are Asiatic peasants who combine with many others the offices of carts and carters in flatter towns. They carry our furniture and fuel from the water on their backs. They chop our wood, to saw it being what they refuse. They keep guard of our houses when we go away. They patrol our streets at night, knocking the hour with their clubs on the pavement and rousing us with blood-curdling yells if so much as a hen-coop burn down at the Islands twenty miles away. They likewise act as town criers; and during the holy month of Ramazan they beat us up with drums early enough in the morning to be through breakfast by the time you can tell a black hair from a white. They are a strong, a faithful, even—if you choose to expend a little sentiment upon them—a pathetic race, living in exile without wife or child, sending money home as they earn it, going to their “countries” only at long intervals, and settling there when they are too old to work for their guild.

Altogether a man might spend his days in that square and be the better for it. As a matter of fact, a surprising number of us find it possible to do so, sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes or water-pipes, and watching life slip by on the strong blue current of the Bosphorus. And as I sit there too, treated always with a charming courtliness yet somehow made to feel the vanity of thanking God that I am not as other _gyaours_ are, I often ask myself how these things may be. In other parts of the world people enjoy no such leisure unless they have rents or an indifference as to going to destruction. In Roumeli Hissar we neither go to destruction nor have rents. The case may be connected with the theory that all inhabitants of Constantinople are guests of its ruler. We are not subject to military duty, we are exempt from certain burdens of taxation, and other inducements are offered those of the true faith to settle in the City of the Sultans. I have no means of knowing how persuasive these may be, but it is astonishing how overwhelming a proportion of the less skilled labour of the place is performed by outsiders—witness the Greek shopkeepers of our village, the Albanian sweet vendors, and the _hamals_. The case at all events is not without its charm. We may not accomplish great things in the world. We may not perform memorable services for state or humanity. We may not create works that shall carry our names down the generations. But we live. We enjoy the sun, we taste each other’s society, and we are little troubled for the morrow. Could life be more?

XIV

REVOLUTION

1908