Théophile Gautier
Constantinople (1852)
Part II: The Golden Horn, Ramadan, The City
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved
This work may be freely reproduced, stored and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Conditions and Exceptions apply.
Contents
- Chapter 6: ‘The Little Field of the Dead’, The Golden Horn.
- Chapter 7: A Ramadan Night.
- Chapter 8: The Cafés.
- Chapter 9: The Shops.
- Chapter 10: The Bazaars.
Chapter 6: ‘The Little Field of the Dead’, The Golden Horn
The lodgings that had been prepared for me occupied the first floor of a house situated at the end of a street in the Frankish quarter, the only quarter Europeans are allowed to inhabit. This street runs from the main street of Pera (Beyoğlu) to the ‘Little Field of the Dead’, (a cemetery in the western part of Beyoğlu, the Great Field being in the northern part), but I cannot designate it to you any more clearly, for the peremptory reason that in Constantinople the streets bear no name-plaques at their corners, neither in Turkish nor French. In addition, the houses themselves are un-numbered, which magnifies the difficulty. Each must traverse this anonymous maze, and find their path, using their own observation and judgement. Ariadne’s thread, or the white pebbles left by Tom Thumb, would prove most useful here; as for leaving breadcrumbs along the way, it is not to be thought of: the dogs or birds would soon eat them. Apropos of dogs, my landmark, which allowed me to recognise my lodgings throughout the first days after my arrival, was a large hole dug in the middle of the public street, in the depths of which a bad-tempered bitch suckled four or five pups in perfect security and with complete disregard for pedestrians and riders. Some streets do possess a traditional name derived from a khan or a mosque in the vicinity, and the one on which I lodged, as I learned later, was called Dervish Street, but the name was not apparent and is no use as a guide.
My lodgings were built of stone, a circumstance which was emphasised in conversation, and not to be disdained in a city as combustible as Constantinople. For greater security, an iron door, its leaves consisting of plates of thick sheet metal, was intended to intercept the sparks and flames in the event of a fire in the area, and isolate it completely. I had a drawing-room, with whitewashed walls and a wooden ceiling painted grey and decorated with threads of blue, furnished with a long divan, a table, and a Venetian mirror in a black and gold frame; the bedroom contained an iron-framed bed and a chest of drawers. There was nothing very Oriental about it, you see; though my hostess was from Smyrna, and her niece, while dressed in the European style in a pink dressing-gown, displayed languidly Asiatic eyes in a pale face fringed by matte black hair. A Greek servant, very pretty under the little kerchief twisted on the top of her head, completed, along with a kind of simpleton from the Cyclades, the staff of the house, and gave it a tinge of local colour. The niece knew a little French, the aunt a little Italian, by means of which we ended up understanding each other, more or less. Constantinople is, indeed, a real Tower of Babel, and one might believe oneself at that same Biblical place on the day of the confusion of tongues. The knowledge of four languages is indispensable for the everyday intercourse of life: Greek, Turkish, Italian, and French, are spoken in Pera by its polyglot children. In Constantinople, the abilities of the famous Cardinal Mezzofanti would surprise no one; it is we French, who know only our own language, who remain confounded by this prodigious facility.
My habit, when travelling, is to set off alone through a city previously unknown to me, like Captain Cook on his voyages of exploration. Nothing is more delightful than to discover a fountain, a mosque, a monument, and to grant it its true name without an idiot of a dragoman informing you, with the hiss of a boa constrictor, of that same; besides, by wandering about in this way, you discover what you will never be otherwise shown, that is to say, what is truly interesting in the country you are visiting.
Wearing a fez, dressed in a buttoned-up frock-coat, my face tanned by the sea air, my beard six months long, I looked enough like a Turk of the Tanzimat Reforms (The Tanzimat is the name given to the series of Ottoman reforms from 1839 onwards) not to attract attention in the streets, and I bravely advanced towards the ‘Petit-Champ-des-Morts’, carefully noting the location of my house, and the path I was taking, so as not to lose my way.
This ‘Little Field of the Dead’, commonly abbreviated, so as to avoid its melancholy resonance, to the Little Field, covers the rear of a hill which rises from the shore of the Golden Horn to the crest of Pera, marked by a terrace bordered by tall houses and cafés. It is an old Turkish cemetery where no one has been buried for some years, either because there is no more space, or because the dead Muslims would have had to be buried too close to the living giaours (‘infidels’).
A bright sun scorched this slope bristling with cypresses, with black foliage and greyish trunks, beneath which stood an army of columnar marble headstones, topped with painted marble turbans; these semi-pillars, leaning some to the right, others to the left, some forward, some backward, according to how the ground had given way beneath their weight, vaguely simulated a human form, and recalled those children’s toys depicting a blacksmith, whose head alone is shown, beating an anvil with a wooden hammer stuck to his belly. In several places, the marble decorated with verses from the Koran had yielded to the force of gravity, and, carelessly sited in crumbling earth, had overturned, or broken to pieces. Some of the funerary columns were decapitated, and their turbans lay at their feet like severed heads. It is said that these truncated tombs cover old Janissaries (the Sultan’s infantry guards) pursued beyond death by Muhammad’s rancour. No symmetry is observed in this scattered cemetery, which extends, in a swathe of cypresses and tombs dividing the houses of Pera, as far as the tekke or monastery of the whirling Dervishes. A few paths, paved and revetted with the debris of funerary monuments cross it diagonally; and here and there rise earthworks of a kind, sometimes surrounded by small walls or balustrades, forming sepulchres reserved for rich or powerful families. These enclosures usually contain a pillar ending in a majestic turban, adorned with three or four marble leaves, rounded at the top like the handle of a spoon, as well as a dozen small childish-looking cippuses (stellae): there lies a pasha with his wives, and their offspring who died in infancy, a sort of funereal harem keeping him company in the other world.
In the open spaces, workmen create door frames and treads for stairs; idlers sleep in the shade or smoke their pipes, seated on a tomb; veiled women pass, in yellow boots at a nonchalant pace; children play hide-and-seek among the tombstones, uttering little joyful cries; cake-sellers offer their light wares encrusted with almonds. Between the interstices of the dilapidated monuments, chickens peck, cows search out a few meagre clumps of grass, and, in its absence, graze on the remnants of slippers and old hats. Dogs have settled themselves in holes caused by the rotting away of the coffins, or rather the boards that support the ground around the corpses, and have made hideous burrows for themselves, the refuges of the dead having been enlarged by their voracity.
The most transient tombs are in places worn by the careless feet of passers-by, and are gradually obliterated amidst dust and debris of all kinds; broken pillars are scattered over the ground like pieces from a game of jonchets (a pick-up game played with carved sticks), and are buried like the corpses they designated, buried by those invisible gravediggers that make everything that is neglected disappear, tomb, temple or city; here, it is not solitude that clothes oblivion, but life that reclaims a place temporarily granted to death. More compact clumps of cypresses have, however, protected some corners of this desecrated cemetery, and preserve its melancholy. Turtledoves nest in the black foliage, and bearded vultures hover above the dark spires, tracing great circles in the azure sky.
A few small wooden houses, made from boards, slats and trellises, painted a red turned pink by rain and sun, are grouped among the trees, sagging, swaying, out of true, and in a state of disrepair most favourable to English watercolours and engravings.
Before descending the slope which leads to the Golden Horn, I stopped for a moment and contemplated the admirable spectacle which unfolded before my eyes: the foreground was formed by the Little Field and its slopes planted with cypresses and tombs; further off rose the brown tiled roofs and reddish houses of the Kasimpasa quarter; next the blue waters of the gulf which extends from Sarayburnu to the Eaux Douces d’Europe, and then by the line of undulating hills, on the far side of which Constantinople unfolds like an amphitheatre. The bluish domes of the bazaars, the white minarets of the mosques, the arches of the old Aqueduct of Valens, highlighted in black against the sky, the clumps of cypresses and plane trees, and acres of sloping roofs punctuated the magnificent horizon line extending from the Seven Towers to the heights of Eyüp: all this silvered by a pale light like transparent gauze amidst which floated the smoke of the steamboats on the Bosphorus heading for Therapia (Tarabya) or Kadi-Keuï (Kadikoy), their lightness of tone forming the happiest contrast with the warm, raw strength of the foreground.
After a few minutes of thoughtful admiration, I set off again, sometimes following a vague path, sometimes stepping over tombs, and arrived at a network of alleys lined with black houses, inhabited by charcoal-burners, blacksmiths, and other members of the ironworking industry. I said ‘houses’ just now, but the word is rather too splendid, and I retract it. Say huts, hovels, lean-tos, slums, everything you can imagine that is smokiest, dirtiest, and most wretched, but without those fine old walls, patched, scored, leprous, rotten, mouldy, and crumbling, that Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’ palette knife depicts so happily in his paintings of the Orient, and which grant such a high tone to the corresponding prints. Sad little donkeys, with flaccid ears and thin bloodstained backs, laden with coal or scrap iron, scraped past black workshops. Old beggar women, squatting on their flattened thighs, bent like the joints of a grasshopper, stretched out toward me, pitifully, from a ragged ferace (a loose robe with full-length sleeves), their bare mummified hands. Their owlish eyes punctuated the muslin veil, dented by the arch of their hawkish beaks and thrown like a shroud over their hideous faces; others, nimbler, passed by, backs bent, heads bowed to their chests, one hand resting on a large cane, like Mother Goose in the pantomime intros at the Théâtre des Funambules (on the Boulevard du Temple, in Paris).
One can scarcely credit the fantastic ugliness at which old women in the Orient arrive, women who, to speak frankly, have renounced their sex, and are no longer disguised by the learned artifices of a laborious toilette; here the face-covering even adds to the impression; what one sees is dreadful, yet what one dreams of is more terrible. Sadly, the Turks lack a Sabbath which might prompt these witches to soar away on their broomsticks.
A few Albanian or Bulgarian hamals, bowed beneath enormous loads, like those whom Dante depicts in his Purgatorio (see the ‘Divine Comedy’: Canto X), and not raising a foot till the other was securely grounded, went up and down the alleys; horses clattered on their way noisily, drawing showers of sparks at every pace from the rough, uneven paving of a district rather more working-class than fashionable.
I thus arrived at the Golden Horn, emerging near the white buildings of the arsenal, raised on vast foundations and crowned with a tower in the form of a belfry. This arsenal, built in a civilised style, holds little of interest for a European, though the Turks are very proud of it; I did not stop long to contemplate the buildings, as a consequence, but reserved my attention for the movement in the harbour, crowded with ships of all nations, and furrowed in all directions by caiques (fishing-boats), and especially for the marvellous panorama of Constantinople in view on the far shore.
The sight is so beautiful and strange one doubts its reality. One would think one had before oneself one of those opera canvases made for the set of an Oriental fairy-tale and bathed, by the stage-painter’s fantasy and the radiance of the footlights, in the impossible gleams of the Apotheosis. The palace of Seraï-Bournou (the fourth courtyard of the Topkapi Palace), with its Chinese capped roofs, crenellated white walls, trellised kiosks, gardens of cypresses, umbrella pines, sycamores and plane-trees; the mosque of Sultan Ahmed (the Blue Mosque), its rounded dome rising amidst its six minarets like ivory masts; Hagia Sophia, its Byzantine dome raised on thick buttresses striped transversely with white and pink courses, and flanked by its four minarets; the Bayezit Mosque, over which clouds of doves hover; Yeni Cami (the New Mosque); the Seraskier (Beyazit) tower, an immense hollow column which bears on its capital a perpetual stylite gazing to every point of the horizon to detect fires; and the Süleymaniye Mosque with its Arab elegance, its dome like a steel helm; are outlined in lines of light on a background of bluish, pearly, opaline hues, of inconceivable finesse, and form a picture which seems to belong rather to the mirages of the Fata Morgana than to prosaic reality. The silvery water of the Golden Horn reflects these splendours in its quivering mirror, adding yet more to the magic of the spectacle. Ships at anchor, and Turkish boats their sails brailed like birds’ wings, serve, with their vigorous tones and the black hatching of their rigging, as foils to this backcloth of vapour through which the city of the Emperor Constantine and of Mehmed II is outlined in dreamlike colours.
I know from friends, who have made the journey to Constantinople before myself, that these marvels need, like theatre decorations, lighting and perspective; when one approaches too near, the glamour vanishes, the palaces are nothing more than worm-eaten hovels, the minarets nothing more than large whitewashed pillars; the narrow, steep, and filthy streets lack character; but what matter, as long as the incoherent assembly of houses, mosques and trees tinted by the sun’s palette, produces an admirable effect between sky and sea? Its appearance, though the result of illusion, is truly beautiful nonetheless.
I remained for some time at the water’s edge watching the seagulls fly, the caiques swim past with the agility of sea-bream, and types of every people, represented by one or more examples, swarming by, a perpetual carnival of which one never tires; I was very keen to risk crossing the bridge of boats which joins the two banks, and walk eis tin Polin (εἰς τὴν πόλιν, into the City), as the ancient Greeks said: a phrase which the Turks, by dint of hearing it repeated, turned into Istanbul, the modern name of ancient Byzantium, though certain learned folk claim that one should pronounce it Islambol, the city of Islam. But that would have been a truly bold undertaking that the already advanced day left me no time to accomplish. I therefore turned back, and ascended the Little Field of the Dead to return to Pera. I turned right, which brought me, following the ancient Genoese walls, at the foot of which there is a dried-up moat half filled with rubbish, where dogs sleep and children play, to the front of the Galata Tower, a tall building that can be seen from far out at sea, and which, like the Seraskier Tower, has a fire-lookout at its summit.
It is a true Gothic keep, crowned with a circle of machicolations and topped with a pointed roof of copper oxidised by time, and which, instead of the crescent, might well bear the dove-tailed weather-vane of a feudal manor. At the bottom of this tower are grouped an agglomeration of huts and low houses which give one the scale of its elevation, which is very great. Its construction dates back to the heyday of the Genoese traders. These merchant-soldiers made fortresses of their warehouses, and crenellated their district as if prepared for war; their trading posts could withstand sieges, and indeed withstood more than one.
At the top of the hill occupied by the Little Field there is a broad path, bordered on one side by houses, which enjoys an admirable view: I followed it to a corner where an old cypress tree stands, its trunk ribbed with thick veins, and soon found myself, quite weary and dying of hunger, facing the street where I was lodging.
I was served a dinner, borne from the neighbouring locanda (tavern), which quickly lessened my appetite, though, alas, more through disgust with the food than by sating my quite legitimate hunger. I am not in the habit of writing elegies on my culinary disappointments when travelling, and a thready omelette flavoured with rancid butter is a minor misfortune which I do not seek, like some choosy gastronome on tour, to elevate to the status of a public catastrophe, but I note here, in passing, that this initial revelation of Constantinopolitan cuisine seemed to me a sad omen for the future. Spain had accustomed me to wine smelling of goat and tar, and I had resigned myself quite readily to the black wine of Tenedos brought in a kid’s skin; but the yellow, brackish water, carrying the slime of old aqueducts, made me regret the gargoulettes of Algiers and the alcarrazas (water-jugs) of Granada.
Chapter 7: A Ramadan Night
In Paris, the idea of walking about from eight in the evening to eleven at night in Père-Lachaise, or the Montmartre cemetery, as if in a vignette from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, would seem excessively odd and cadaverously Romantic; the most courageous dandies would be frightened at the idea; as for women, the very proposition of such an excursion, for pleasure, would make them faint with fear. In Constantinople, no one pays any attention to the act. The Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens) of Pera is situated on the crest of the hill occupied by the Petit-Champ-des-Morts. Imagine, my dear sir, or my beautiful lady, that seated in summer on the steps of Tortoni’s, you see before you, in the shadow of the cypress trees, pale in the moonlight, like tapering silver columns, thousands of gravestones and tombs, all the while carving away at your ice-cream, and talking about love or the like.
A frail fence, collapsing in several places, traces the demarcation line, crossed at every moment, between the funereal field and the lively promenade. A row of chairs and tables where customers lean over their cup of coffee, their sorbet or glass of water, runs from one end of this terrace to the other, which curves further on to join the Grand-Champ-des-Morts, the Large Field of the Dead, behind upper Pera. Ugly houses, six or seven stories high, belonging to that dreadful order of architecture unknown to Da Vignola (the architect Giacomo Barozzi), the bourgeois order that is, an amiable cross between that of a barracks and that of a cotton-mill, line the roadway on one side and enjoy an admirable view of which they are unworthy. It is true that these houses are considered the most beautiful in Constantinople, and that Pera is proud of them, deeming them capable, with good reason, of figuring honourably amongst those of Marseilles, Barcelona, and even Paris. They are indeed of the most civilised and modern hideousness; however, it is fair to say that at night, lit by the vague light of the lanterns and the twinkling of the stars, or the violet glow of the moon glazing their whitewashed facades, they take on, because of their very mass, a rather imposing appearance.
At either end of the terrace is a café-concert, that is to say, a café combining the delights of eating with the pleasure of an open-air orchestra of bohemian musicians who perform German waltzes and overtures from Italian operas.
Nothing is more cheerful than this promenade lined with tombs; the music, which never stops, the one orchestra starting up as the other finishes, gives a festive air to the customary gathering of strollers, whose friendly murmur serves as a bass to Verdi’s brassy phrases. Vapour from the latakyeh (Latakia, aromatic tobacco) and tombeki (Turkish tobacco) rise in perfumed spirals from chibouks, narghiles and cigarettes, for everyone smokes in Constantinople, even the women. The shadows are dotted with bright points of light, like swarms of fireflies. The cry: ‘A light!’ resounds in all possible languages, and the waiters rush to satisfy these polyglot calls each brandishing a red-hot coal held at the end of a little pair of tongs.
Numerous clans of the families of Pera, dressed in European style, except for a few insignificant amendments to the hairstyle and the women’s attire, walk about in the space left free by the seated customers. The young men are dressed as in the engravings of Jules David, in the latest-but-one style; one could distinguish them from elegant Parisians only by a slightly too raw air of novelty; they seek not to follow fashion, but anticipate it. Each item of their attire bears the signature of some famous supplier from the Rue Richelieu or the Rue de la Paix; their shirts are from Lami-Housset; canes from Verdier; hats from Bandoni; gloves from Jouvin; some, however, mostly along the Armenian families, wear red skullcaps with a black silk tassel, but they are few in number. The Orient is recalled to mind in this gathering only by some Greek who passes by, throwing back the sleeves of his embroidered jacket, his white fustanella flared like a bell swaying, or by some Turkish official on horseback, returning to Constantinople from the Grand-Champ and heading towards the Galata bridge, followed by his cavass (armed guard) and his pipe-bearer.
Turkish custom has survived the advances of European custom, and the women of Pera live very withdrawn lives, a voluntary seclusion of course, being scarcely seen outside except to take a walk in the Petit-Champ and breathe the cool night air; there are many who still do not allow themselves even this innocent distraction, which deprives the traveller of an opportunity to review the feminine types of the country, as one can in the Cascine Park (Florence), the Prado (Madrid), Hyde Park, or on the Champs-Élysées; only Man appears to exist in the Orient, Woman occupies a mythical state, and the Christians there share the Muslim view of the matter.
That evening, the Petit-Champ was very animated; Ramadan had commenced with the new moon, the appearance of which above the summit of the Bithynian Olympus (Mount Uludağ), watched by pious astrologers and proclaimed by the whole Ottoman Empire, announces the return of the great Mohammedan jubilee. Ramadan, as everyone knows, is Lent doubling as a carnival; the day belongs to austerity, the night to pleasure; penance is entwined with debauchery, as a legitimate reparation. From sunrise to sunset, the precise moment of which is indicated by the firing of a cannon, the Koran forbids the partaking of food, however light the sustenance may be. One cannot even smoke, the most painful deprivation of all for people whose lips rarely quit the amber mouthpieces; to quench the most ardent thirst with a mouthful of water would be a sin and destroy the merit of abstinence; but from evening to morning everything is permitted, and one is amply compensated for the privations of the day. For, then, the Turkish city celebrates.
From the promenade of the Petit-Champ, I enjoyed the most wondrous spectacle. On the other side of the Golden Horn, Constantinople sparkled like the jewelled crown of some emperor of the East; the minarets of the mosques bore bracelets of lanterns on each of their galleries, and from one spire to the other ran, in letters of fire, verses from the Koran, inscribed on the azure as on the pages of a divine book; Hagia Sophia, Sultan-Ahmet, Yeni-Cami, Süleymaniye, all the temples of Allah which rise from Sarayburnu to the hills of Eyüp, shone with lights, and proclaimed in fiery exclamations the religion of Islam. The crescent moon, accompanied by a star, seemed to embroider the coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire on a celestial standard.
The water of the gulf multiplied, in scattering them, the reflections of this million-fold phosphorescence and seemed to roll in their flow torrents of half-melted gems. Reality, it is said, is always inferior to dream; but here the dream was surpassed by reality. The tales of the Thousand and One Nights offer nothing more magical, and the heaped treasure of Harun al-Rashid, if poured forth, would have paled beside this colossal and flamboyant scene extending over a league in length.
During Ramadan, one enjoys complete freedom; carrying a lantern is not obligatory as at other times; the streets, brilliantly lit, render this precaution, insisted on by the police, unnecessary. The giaours (infidels) can enjoy Constantinople until the last lights are quenched, a show of boldness which would not be without its dangers at another time. So, I eagerly accepted the proposal made to me by a young Constantinopolitan, to whom I was recommended, to descend to the harbour of Tophane, charter a caique, make a visit to see the Sultan say his prayers in his Ciragan Palace, and end our evening in the city.
We descended from Pera to Tophane by a sort of switchback alley, similar to the bed of a dry torrent. For Parisian feet accustomed to the elasticity of bitumen, the softness of macadam, this tumble is a salutary exercise. Thanks to the arm lent me by my companion, who was an expert in the geography of the daredevil slopes of this Calvary, I arrived at the bottom without injury - an unexpected and surprising result. I even avoided stepping on the paws of the dogs lying there, or a single of those amiable animals leaping at my legs.
As we progressed, and especially after passing a small Turkish fountain with a projecting roof where the street divided, the crowd increased and was compacted; the shops, brightly lit, illuminated the public way, which had been invaded by Turks squatting on the ground or seated on low stools, smoking with that show of voluptuousness which a day of abstinence gives; the to-ing and fro-ing of this perpetual swarm, creates the most animated and picturesque scene in the world; for, between the two banks of motionless smokers, flowed a stream of walkers of all nations, all sexes, and all ages.
Borne along by the flow, we arrived at Tophane Square, traversing the arcaded courtyard of the mosque, which, on this side, forms the corner, and we found ourselves in front of that charming fountain in the Arab style (built by order of Sultan Mahmud I, in 1732) which English engravings have made familiar to everyone, and which has been stripped of its pretty Chinese dome of a roof, now replaced by a vile hollow iron balustrade.
Gustave’s Masked Ball (the opera ‘Gustave III, ou Le Bal Masqué’ by Danial Auber, 1833) offers no greater variety of costume than Tophane Square during a Ramadan night: the Bulgarians, with their coarse sleeveless jackets, and hats encircled by a crown of fur, accoutrements scarcely differing from those of a Danube peasant; the slender-waisted Circassians, with flared tunics adorned with cartouches which make them look like organ cases; the Georgians, their short tunics tightened by a metal band, in Russian caps of patent leather; the Albanians, wearing embroidered sleeveless jackets over bare torsos; the Jews, designated by their robes, slit at the side, and their black skullcaps surrounded by a blue kerchief; the Greeks of the Isles, with their immense high-waisted trousers, their belt-straps, and tarbooshes (similar to a fez) with silk tassels; the Turks of the Reform Movement, in straight frock-coats and red fezzes; the traditionally-dressed Turks, with their flared turbans and their pink, daffodil-yellow, cinnamon-coloured, or sky-blue kaftans, recalling the fashion of the days of the Janissaries; the Persians, with their large black lambskin caps from Astrakan; the Syrians, recognizable by their gold-striped kerchiefs and their large mashlas (a surcoat, like an aba) shaped like a Byzantine dalmatic; the Turkish women, draped in white yashmak (a veil, or niqab) and feredje (a light-coloured surcoat); the Armenian women, less strictly veiled, dressed in violet and shod in black, form for the eye, in groups which are constantly forming and dissolving, the most interesting carnival one can imagine.
Open-air stalls selling yogurt (curdled milk), or kaymak (clotted cream); confectionery shops, of which the Turks are very fond; water-merchants’ counters on which are rung, by means of a hydraulic device, little chimes of bells, crotals, or glass orbs; and refreshment stands vending sorbets, granitas, and snow-water; are lined up along the edges of the square, brightened by their illuminations. The tobacco-merchants’ shops, brilliantly lit, are filled with high-ranking personages who watch the festive goings-on while smoking quality tobacco in cherry or jasmine pipes with enormous stems. At the rear of the cafes the darbuka (drum) hums, the tambourine quivers, the rebab (an instrument like a lute) screeches, and the reed-flute squawks; monotonous, nasal chants, mingled now and then with Tyrolean calls, and shrill cries, rise from the clouds of smoke. It took us all the trouble in the world, amidst this crowd that would not yield, to reach the waterfront of Tophane, where we could board a caique.
In a few strokes of the oars, we had put out to sea, and from the middle of the Bosphorus could gaze at the illumination of the Sultan Mahmud II Mosque (the Nusretiye Mosque) and the cannon foundry which adjoins it and gives its name to the port (‘Top’, in Turkish, means cannon; ‘hane’, place, square, or store.) The minarets of the Sultan Mahmud Mosque are considered the most elegant in Constantinople and are cited as classic examples of Turkish architecture; they rose slenderly into the blue night air, sketched in lines of fire, and linked by verses from the Koran, producing the most graceful of effects. In front of the foundry, the illuminations depicted a gigantic cannon complete with gun-carriage and wheels, the fiery coat of arms of the Turkish artillery symbolised most precisely by that naive outline.
We skirted the European shore of the Bosphorus, glittering with light, bordered by the summer palaces of the viziers and pashas, and punctuated by illuminations mounted on iron frames presenting sentences from the Koran in a complicated calligraphy, in the Oriental manner, as well as the outlines of steamboats, and bouquets in fiery vases, and arrived at the Ciragan palace, composed of a main building with a triangular pediment and slender columns, in the style of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, and two wings latticed with windows and resembling immense cages. The name of the Sultan written in lines of fire sparkled on the facade, and through the open doorway one could see a vast room where, amidst the luminous glare from the candelabra, moved several opaque shadows seemingly agitated by pious convulsions. The Padishah (emperor) was praying, surrounded by his great officers kneeling on carpets; a nasal murmur of psalmody escaped from the room along with the yellow glow of the candles, and rose into the calm blue of the night.
After a few minutes contemplation, we signalled to the caique to return, and I was able to gaze across at the far bank, the shores of Asia-Minor, on which stood Scutari (Üsküdar), the ancient Chrysopolis, with its illuminated mosques, the background draped in the folds of its curtain of cypress trees with funereal foliage.
Cavalry Barracks on the Bosphorus
During the passage I had the opportunity to admire the skill with which the oarsmen in these frail craft navigate the currents, and thread the crowd of boats, which would render a crossing of the Bosphorus extremely dangerous for less skilful boatmen. The caiques have no rudder, and the rowers, unlike the gondoliers of Venice who face the prow of the gondola, turn their backs to the goal towards which they are heading, which means that at each stroke of the oar they must turn their heads to assure themselves that some unexpected obstacle is not about to obstruct them. They also employ certain conventional cries, by means of which they warn each other, and avoid collisions with inconceivable agility.
Seated on a cushion in the depths of the caique, next to my companion, I enjoyed the admirable spectacle, in silence and absolute immobility since the slightest movement is enough to capsize these narrow gondolas, designed more for the weight of a Turkish crew; the night dew pearled on our pea-jackets, and made the Latakia tobacco in our chibouks crackle, because, however hot the day, the nights are cool on the Bosphorus, always fanned by the sea breezes and affected by the columns of air displaced by its currents.
We entered the Golden Horn, and, skimming the tip of Sarayburnu, we were able to disembark, in the midst of a flotilla of caiques, between which ours, after turning about, insinuated itself like an axe-head, near a large kiosk with a Chinese roof and walls hung with green canvas, the Sultan’s pleasure pavilion, now abandoned by him and changed to a guardhouse. It was a pleasure to see the long boats with gilded prows carrying the approaching pashas and high officers, who were awaited at the quayside by fine Barbary horses, magnificently harnessed and held by North-Africans, Albanians or the imperial guards, the crowd moving aside respectfully to give them passage.
In normal times, the streets of Constantinople are unlit, and one must carry a means of illumination in one’s hand, as if in search of someone; but, at the time of Ramadan, nothing is more joyously lit than its usually dark alleys and squares, in which paper lanterns flicker near and far; the shops, open all night, blaze and emit bright streaks of light which are gaily reflected by the houses opposite; the stalls display nothing but lamps, candles, and night-lights swimming in oil; the rotisseries, where mutton cut into small pieces (kebab) sizzles on perpendicular skewers, are illuminated by the ardent glow of embers; the red mouths of ovens, baking baklava cakes, yawn; the open-air tradesmen surround themselves with little candles to attract their customers’ attention and make visible their merchandise; groups of friends dine together, around a lamp suspended by three strands of wire, whose flame flickers in the fresh air, or around a large brightly-coloured lantern; while smokers, seated at the doors of the cafés, revive the red coals of their chibouks and narghiles with each inhalation, and over this crowd in good spirits the light falls and is mirrored in strangely picturesque reflections.
These folk ate, and with an appetite whetted by a fourteen-hour fast, rice balls and minced meat wrapped in vine leaves, or kebab rolled in a kind of crepe, boiled or roasted corn, enormous cucumbers or Smyrna carpous (figs), with green skin and white flesh; some, richer or more sensual, were served large portions of baklava or gorged themselves on sweets with a childish greed laughable in big, bearded men hefty as sappers; others feasted more frugally on white mulberries, piled up in heaps in the windows of the fruit shops.
My friend took me into a confectioner’s shop, which is the Boissier’s (Pierre-Bélisaire Boissier founded his confectionery stall and then shop, Maison Boissier, at 9 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, in 1835) of Constantinople, to introduce me to the delights of Turkish gourmandising, which are more refined than Paris might think.
This shop deserves an individual description: the shutters, half-raised, like those on the portholes of a ship, formed a kind of sculpted awning, chequered and painted in yellow and blue, above large glass vases filled with pink and white sugared almonds; stalagmites of rahat-lokoum (Turkish Delight), a kind of transparent paste made with fine flour and sugar, and variously coloured; jars of preserved roses; and jars of pistachios.
We entered the establishment, in which three people would have had difficulty moving about, but which is nonetheless one of the largest in Constantinople, and the master, a substantial Turk with a dark complexion, a black beard, and a good-naturedly fierce countenance served us, with a friendly yet terrifying air, pink and white rahat-lokoum, and all sorts of exotic sweets, both fragrant and exquisite, though a little too honeyed for a Parisian palate. A cup of excellent mocha came to enhance, with its salutary bitterness, these sickening sweets, which I had abused out of love for the local colour. At the back of the shop, young lads, a tightly-fastened Rouen-calico apron around their waists, a rag around their heads, their arms bare, were stirring copper basin-loads of almonds and pistachios over a hot fire, dressing them in their sugar coats, or rolling out sausages of white-powdered rahat-lokoum, making no secret of their recipes.
Seated on one of those low stools which, with the divans, alone form seats for the Turks, I watched a compact, motley crowd, threaded by sellers of sorbet and criers of iced water and cakes, pass along the street, a crowd through which a mounted official, preceded by his kavas and followed by his pipe-holder, would make his way imperturbably and without warning, or which would part before a talika (a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage) jolting horribly over stones and through quagmires, and led by a coachman on foot. I was scarcely sated by this scene so new to me, and it was after one in the morning when, guided by my companion, I headed towards the landing stage where our boat awaited.
On the way, we crossed the courtyard of Yeni Cami (the New Mosque), which is surrounded by a gallery of ancient columns surmounted by Arab arches, in a superb style, that the moon whitened with its silvery light and bathed in bluish shadow; beneath the arcades lay various groups of beggars rolled up in their rags, with the tranquility of folk who are at home. Any Muslim who has no place of refuge can, without fear of the night patrols, stretch out on the steps of a mosque; he will sleep there as safely as a Spanish beggar beneath a church porch.
The celebrations in Constantinople would continue until the cannon shot which announces, at the first rays of dawn, the return of the fast; but it was time to depart and seek a little rest, and we still had to make the ascent from Tophane to Pera, a sorry exercise after a day of physical fatigue and intellectual bedazzlement. The dogs grumbled to themselves a little as I passed, sensing that I was French and a new arrival; but they calmed down after my friend muttered a few words to them in Turkish, and they let me pass without harming my calves; thanks to him, I returned to my lodgings free of wounds from their formidable fangs.
Chapter 8: The Cafés
The Turkish café on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris (the ‘Jardin Turc’ at No. 29) has misled many Parisians as to the luxury of Oriental cafés. Constantinople remains far from that magnificence of heart-shaped arches, little columns, mirrors, and ostrich eggs: nothing is plainer than a Turkish café in Turkey.
I will describe one which might pass for one of the finest, yet nonetheless in no way recalls the luxury of Oriental fairy tales; you would look in vain for the glazed earthenware tiles, the stucco lacework, the beehive vaults, trefoil windows, and gold, green and red colouring of the rooms in the Alhambra, now well-known from the illuminated lithographs of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. Many establishments that serve Dutch broth, in Paris, are equally splendid.
Imagine a room about twelve feet square, vaulted and limewashed, surrounded by wood panelling at head height, and with a bench-sofa covered with a straw mat. In the middle, and this is its most elegantly Oriental detail, is a white marble fountain with basins on three levels emitting a trickle of water which tinkles in falling. In a corner blazes a stove with a hood, on which coffee is boiled, cup by cup, in small yellow-copper coffee pots, at the customer’s request.
On the walls hang shelves loaded with razors, with pretty little mother-of-pearl mirrors above, shaped like shields, in which customers may check that their appearance is to their liking; for, in Turkey, every café is at the same time a barber’s shop; and, while I squatted on the mat smoking my chibouk, between a big Turk with a parrot’s beak, and a thin Persian with that of an eagle, a young Greek opposite, a dandy from the Phanar (Fener) district, was having his moustache waxed, and his eyebrows, previously plucked with a small pair of tweezers, darkened.
We choose to believe that, following the proscriptions in the Koran, Turks absolutely forbid images of human beings, and regard the products of the plastic arts as works of idolatry: this is true in principle, but is much less rigorously adhered to in practice, and the cafés are adorned with all sorts of engravings of the most baroque taste and choice, which do not seem to offend Muslim orthodoxy in any significant way.
The Café de la Fontaine, among others, contains a complete art gallery, characteristically grotesque enough for me to transcribe the catalogue of its works here, which I noted on the spot with the care it deserved: a drawing of a Dervish turban, placed on a tripod and accompanied by verses from the Koran; a scene involving the national dance; a Santon (Turkish saint) seated on a gazelle skin, taming a lion in vivid cinnabar, doubtless one of those red lions of which Henrich Heine speaks in his preface to his Reisebilder (‘Travel Pictures’, 1826); studies of animals, by Victor Adam; warriors from Khorasan with ferocious moustaches, and barbarous crests, brandishing maces and mounted on six-legged blue horses; Napoleon at the Battle of Regensburg (The Battle of Ratisbon, of 1809); the names of Allah and Ali in beautiful calligraphic script, interspersed with arabesques and flowers; The Young Spanish Woman, a print from the rue Saint-Jacques, with this epigraph in verse taken from a mirliton (kazoo) from the Saint-Cloud Fair, or a garter from Tembleque (in Spain):
‘J’ai cru voir dans tes yeux l’image du bonheur,
Aussi je te confie et ma vie et mon cœur.’
‘I thought I saw the image of happiness in your eyes,
So, I entrust my life to you, and my heart likewise.’
Also Turkish ships, steamboats and caiques, whose sailors are represented by Turkish letters their legs extended in the shape of oars; a battle between twenty-two Frenchmen and two hundred Arabs; fakirs, followed in the desert by goats, antelopes, and snakes, of most primitive design; the Emperor of Russia and his august family; Turkish women’s costumes; Grivas, a Greek hero (one of a number of famous warriors from the Grivas family who fought in the Greek War of Independence); a Turk, drawing his own blood; the Battle of Austerlitz; a portrait of Muhammad-Ali, the Pasha of Egypt and of phenomenal plumpness; the Tomaski balloon, which performed a famous ascent over Constantinople; a lion, a stag, and an Angora goat; various fantastic creatures, chimeras of natural history the likes of which one finds only in paintings of fairground menageries; various views of the arsenal and the principal mosques; a likeness of Geneviève de Brabant (heroine of a story in the medieval ‘Golden Legend’), etc., etc. All these contained in little two-bit frames.
A similar bizarre mixture can be seen everywhere, with some variations of subject; Turkish calligraphy gives friendly aid to French imagery, and forms without malice the most bizarre antitheses of ideas on benevolent walls, which tolerate everything, like the daily paper: sirens swim there next to steamboats, and the heroes of the Shahnameh (the Persian epic by Ferdowsi) brandish their battle axes above the ‘grumblers’ of Napoleon’s Empire.
It is a genuine pleasure to be served one of those little cups of cloudy coffee by a young rascal with big black eyes, who delivers it to the tips of your fingers in a large ‘eggcup’ of silver or copper openwork filigree, after a long walk through the oh-so-tiring streets of Constantinople, which refreshes you more than any iced drink could. The cup of coffee is accompanied by a glass of water, which the Turks drink before their coffee and the Franks after. There is a somewhat characteristic anecdote told on this subject. A European, who spoke the languages of the Orient perfectly well, and wore the Muslim costume with the ease acquired by long habit, and whose complexion tanned by the hot sun of the country displayed the local hue to the highest degree, was recognised as a Frank in a small one-eyed café in Syria by a poor Bedouin in rags, despite his being unable to find fault with the pure Arabic of this exotic customer. - ‘How could you tell I was a Frank?’ said the European, as annoyed as Theophrastus was when called a foreigner by the herb-seller in the Athens marketplace, for a misplaced accent. - ‘You drank the water after your coffee,’ replied the Bedouin.
Everyone brings their tobacco in a pouch, the café simply provides the chibouk, whose amber mouthpiece must be unstained, and the narghile, a rather complicated device that would be difficult to carry. The price of a cup of coffee is twenty paras (about two and a half sous); if you offer a piastre (four and a half sous), you are a magnificent lord. The money is deposited in a chest pierced with an opening, like a money-box, and placed near the door.
Although in Turkey any beggar in rags may seat himself on the café’s sofa beside the most sumptuously dressed Turk without the latter drawing back so as to avoid his gold-embroidered sleeve coming into contact with the former’s frayed and greasy rags, nonetheless members of the lower classes favour their usual haunts. The café by the marble fountain, situated between the Seraï Bournou (Topkapi Palace) and the mosque of Yeni-Cami (The New Mosque), in one of the most beautiful districts of Constantinople, is one of the most-frequented in the city.
A charming and very oriental detail poeticises this café in the eyes of a European. Swallows have built their nest in the vault, and, as access is always available, they come and go with quick beats of their wings, uttering little joyful cries and bringing insects to their young, careless of the pipe smoke and the presence of the café’s customers, their dark feathers sometimes brushing a fez or a turban. Their fledglings, heads poking from the opening to the nest, watch, calmly, with eyes like little black nails, these customers come and go, and fall asleep to the hum of the water in the hookahs’ carafes.
It is a touching sight, the birds’ confidence in mankind, sufficient for them to nest above the café; Orientals, often cruel to other men, are very gentle with animals, and know how to make themselves loved by them; and the animals approach them willingly. The customers do not trouble them, as do Europeans with their turbulence, loud outbursts, and incessant laughter. Those governed by fatalism possess something of the serene passivity of the creatures.
Near the tekke or monastery of the whirling Dervishes at Pera, opposite a cemetery annexed to, or an extension of, the Petit-Champ-des-Morts, there is a café frequented mainly by Franks and Armenians. It is a large square room, half-height panelled with yellowish woodwork enhanced with white fillets, surrounded by a tapestry-work divan, and brightened by mirrors, with gold and black frames supported on ropes with gilded tassels and adorned with small hooks of stamped copper on which napkins are hung; for this café, like every establishment of the kind in Constantinople, is enhanced by a barberia (shaving area) to borrow from Spanish a useful word which the French language lacks. On a board, at the back, are arranged hookahs of cut glass, Bohemian glass, and Damascene steel, the light striking their facets, entwined like Laocoon in their flexible morocco pipes, and ringed with brass wire. Near the hookahs, like shields on the sides of an antique trireme, gleam large copper basins in which the barber soaps the heads of his customers. One can sit, dreamily, on the bench by the door, and watch the tradesmen pass by on their way to their counters in Galata, or contemplate the skewed tombs, that lean above the public highway from the top of their cypress-planted terrace.
The café of Beschick-Tash (Beşiktaş), on the European shore of the Bosphorus, is of more picturesque construction; it resembles those huts on piles, from the summit of which fishermen watch for the passage of schools of fish; shaded by clumps of trees, made of trellises and planks on stilts, it is bathed by the rapid current which washes the quay of Arnaut Keuï (Arnavutköy) and freshened by the breezes of the Black Sea; seen from open water, it produces a graceful effect, its lights spreading their reflections on the water. A perpetual riot of caiques seeking shore animates the surroundings of this aerial café, recalling, but with more elegance, those which border the Gulf of Smyrna.
To conclude this monograph on Constantinople’s cafés, let me mention another located near the Yeni-Cami harbour, which is rarely frequented except by sailors. The lighting is quite original: it consists of glasses full of oil in which a wick burns, suspended from the ceiling by a spiral wire, like those used in little children’s wooden cannons, serving as a spring. The kahveci (coffee-master) touches the glasses from time to time, which, through the elasticity of the metal, rise and fall, performing a sort of pyrotechnic ballet, to the great delight of the assembly, dressed in such a manner as to fear no oil stains. A chandelier composed of a brass wire frame representing a ship and decorated with a quantity of candles which highlights its lines, completes this bizarre illumination, its delicate allusion easily grasped by the café’s customers.
Seeing a Frank enter, the kahveci gave the light a furious thrust to honour me; and the glasses began to dance like will-o’-the-wisps, while the nautical chandelier pitched and rolled like a caravel (sailing-ship) in a storm, scattering drops of rancid oil like dew.
To render the physiognomy of the regulars of this den, one would need Auguste Raffet’s pencil or Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’ brush; either would scarcely suffice. There were fellows there with forbidding moustaches, battered noses in violent tones, complexions coloured like Havana cigars or baked brick, large white oriental eyes with black pupils, shaved and bluish temples, ferocious attitudes and extraordinary accents; heads that one cannot forget once seen, and that make the savagery of the most truculent of masters appear mild.
The wavering brightness of the oscillating night-lights highlighted their figures amidst the tobacco smoke, revealing abrupt planes, unexpectedly flat areas, and deep shades of mummy, sienna, and bitumen, bathing them, vigorously, in a Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro. Instead of the tranquil wall of a café, one involuntarily dreamed a background, for them, of harsh rocks in a mountain gorge, or the black crevices of a brigand’s cave, though they were, when all is said, the most honest people in the world; for curved noses, deep tans, bushy eyebrows, and skulls in exaggerated tones do not render the souls within villainous, and those beings of fierce appearance sniffed at their coffee and indulged in the sweetness of kief (rest and idleness) with a placidity astonishing for mortals so characteristic and so worthy as they were of serving as a model for the bandits of Salvator Rosa or Jean-Adrien Guignet.
Their attire consisted of old jackets over a bare torso, wide breeches of canvas glazed with pitch and tar, red belts reaching to the armpits, faded ragged tarbooshes twisted around their heads, down-at-heel slippers, and coarsely decorated peacoats stiffened with sea water and dried by the sun; marvellous rags which appeared picturesque rather than decrepit, the cast-offs of a lazzarone (casual worker) and not a poor man, the holes in which reveal muscles of steel and bronzed flesh.
The arms of nearly all these sailors were tattooed in red and blue. The crudest individual instinctively feels that ornamentation creates an insurmountable line of demarcation between himself and the animal kingdom; and, if he cannot embroider his clothes, he embroiders his skin. This custom is found everywhere: it was not the daughter of the potter Dibutades (Butades of Sicyon) tracing the shadow of her lover on a wall, but a savage tracing an arabesque on his tawny skin with a fishbone, who invented the art.
I was able to distinguish, first of all, on those swarthy arms, with their athletic biceps and prominent veins, talismanic mashallahs (mashallah is Arabic for ‘Allah has so willed’) which protect against the evil eye so feared in the East; then flaming hearts pierced by an arrow, exactly like those on the arms of French military drummers or the letter-paper of amorous female cooks; suras from the Koran, pious souvenirs of the pilgrimage to Mecca, intertwined with flowers and foliage; anchors in saltire; and steamboats with their paddle-wheels and corkscrews of smoke.
I noted, among the rest, a strong young man, a little more elegantly ragged than the others, whose arms, bare to the shoulder, revealed, framed by arabesques: on the right a young Turk, in Reform costume, blue frock-coat and red fez, holding a pot of basil in his hand, and on the left a little dancer in a short petticoat, and the corset of a peri (fay), who seemed to have been arrested in the middle of her capers so as to accept the flowery homage of the tattoo’s gallant owner. This masterpiece alluded, no doubt, to some tale of good fortune the memory of which the prudent sailor had commanded to be etched on his skin lest it fade from his heart.
Two fearful but very polite fellows graciously made room for me on the straw-filled divan; and the coffee I drank there was assuredly finer than the black concoctions of the most famous café in Paris. The absence of inebriation renders passable the lowest classes of Constantinople, and Orientals have a natural dignity unknown amongst us. Imagine a Turk entering, at night, the Cabaret Paul Niquet (a tavern on the right bank of the Seine, popular among the Parisian working class). Of what jeers and mockery, of what crude curiosity would he not have been the object and the victim! That was my position in this smoke-filled den, yet no one seemed to notice me or allow themselves the slightest impropriety. It is true that the only drink sold was water, peddled around the room by young Greek children repeating in monotonous, screeching voices: ‘Cryonero, cryonero (ice-water)’; while at Paul Niquet’s they drink rough wine (petit bleu) and brandy (eau d’affe) being excessively civilised.
Let me also mention a rather remarkable café, located near the Old Bridge (Cisr-i Atik, not extant) at Oun-Capan (Unkapani), on the Golden Horn, mainly haunted by the Greeks of the Phanar (Fener) district. One approaches by caique, and, while smoking one’s pipe, enjoys the view of the boats coming and going, and the evolutions of the gulls skimming the water with the tips of their wings, or the buzzards (turkey vultures) tracing great circles in the blue of the sky.
Such are, with a few variations, the main kinds of Turkish café, which hardly resemble the idea that one has of them in France, but which were no surprise to me, prepared as I was by having visited Algerian cafés which were even more primitive, if that is possible. They are often enlivened by troops of musicians, singing and playing instruments, in strange keys and rhythms unfamiliar to European ears, but which the Orientals listen to for hours on end with signs of pleasure I have sometimes shared, I confess, even if Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy and Hector Berlioz despise me profoundly for it, and treat me as a barbarian. I will have occasion to return to these Turkish musicians, who, if not harmonious, are at least picturesque.
Chapter 9: The Shops
The Oriental shop differs greatly from the European shop: it is a kind of alcove, cut into the wall, which is closed in the evening with shutters which are drawn down like porthole-covers; the merchant, crouching cross-legged on a piece of matting or Smyrna carpet, nonchalantly smokes his chibouk or spins the beads of his komboloi (a cord of devotional beads, in Arabic a ‘misbaha’) through his distracted fingers with an impassive and detached air, maintaining the same pose for hours on end, and seeming to care very little for trade; the buyers usually stand outside, in the street, examining the goods piled up on the front counter, without the slightest mercantile coquetry; the art of display, pushed to such a high degree in France, is entirely unknown or wholly disdained in Turkey; nothing recalls, even in the most beautiful streets of Constantinople, the splendid shops of the Rue Vivienne or the Strand.
Smoking is a primary need of the Turkish people; therefore, shops which sell tobacco, amber mouthpieces, and pipe-bowls abound. The tobacco, chopped very finely into long silky tufts of a blond colour, is arranged in piles on the display board, according to price and quality; it is divided into four main sorts, the names of which are as follows: iavach (yavaș, mild), orta (medium), dokan akleu (spicy), and sert (strong), and sells for eighteen to twenty piastres per oke (the oke is about two and three quarter pounds in weight), according to its origin. These tobaccos, of graduated strength, are smoked in the chibouk or rolled into cigarettes, the use of which is beginning to spread there. The most esteemed tobaccos are those from Macedonia.
Tombeki (tombac), tobacco exclusively intended for the narghile, comes from Persia; it is not chopped like the rest, but crumpled and broken into small pieces; its colour is browner, and its strength is such that it cannot be smoked without having previously undergone two or three washings. As it might be at risk of being scattered, it is enclosed in glass jars, like apothecary’s drugs. Without tombeki, the narghile is impractical, and it is unfortunate that this tobacco can only be obtained with great difficulty in France, since nothing is more favourable to poetic reverie than to inhale in small sips, on a cushioned sofa, this fragrant smoke, enlivened by the water it passes through, and which reaches you after having circulated in a red or green morocco tube which one winds about the arm, like a Cairo snake-charmer toying with a serpent. It is the sybaritism of smoking, the smoker, the smoking-den - a more precise word is lacking, and I try all three while waiting for the right term to arise of its own accord - taken to its highest degree of perfection; art is not foreign to this subtle pleasure; there are narghiles of gold, silver and steel, chiselled, damascened, nielloed, ornamented in a wondrous manner, and with a curve as elegant as that of the purest antique vases; coral, garnets, turquoises, and other more precious stones often stud its capricious arabesques, you inhale, from a masterpiece, tobacco metamorphosed into perfume, and the most aristocratically disdainful of Duchesses could not, I think, object to this pastime which provides Sultanas with long hours of peace and happy oblivion, by the rim of marble fountains, beneath the trelliswork of their kiosks.
The tobacco merchants in Constantinople are called tutungis (tütüncüs). They are, for the most part, Greek or Armenian; as regards the former they are from Janina (Ioannina), Larissa, and Salonica (Thessaloniki); the latter are from Samsoun (Samsun), Trebizond (Trabzon), and Erzeroum (Erzerum); they have very engaging manners, and sometimes, especially in the evenings during Ramadan, viziers, pashas, beys and other great dignitaries, seat themselves, familiarly, in their shops, on small stools or bales of tobacco to smoke, talk and learn the news, as the British Lord Speaker seats himself on his woolsack.
An odd thing! Tobacco, so universally consumed today in the East, has been, on the part of certain Sultans, the object of the most rigorous prohibitions; more than one Turk has paid with his life for the pleasure of smoking, and the ferocious Murad IV more than once struck off the smoker’s head pipe in mouth; coffee had no less blood-stained a beginning in Constantinople: it has spawned fanatics and martyrs.
In modern Byzantium, extreme care and often great luxury are dedicated to everything that concerns the pipe, the favourite instrument of Turkish pleasure. The shops of merchants selling mouthpieces, pipe-stems, and bowls, are very numerous and well supplied. The most esteemed stems are pierced lengths of cherry or jasmine wood, the branches having been trained appropriately, and they attain considerable prices, according to their size and degree of perfection.
A fine cherry-tree stem with its bark intact and shining with a dark lustre like a polished garnet, or a jasmine shoot with smoothed calluses and a charming blond hue, are worth up to five hundred piastres.
I sometimes lingered for a long time in front of the shop of a pipe-stem merchant, in the street that goes down to Tophane, opposite the walled cemetery, the rich tombs of which, variegated with gold and azure, one could see, through openings adorned with grilles. The merchant was an old man with a sparse grey beard, eyes surrounded by whitish skin, a curved nose, the overall physiognomy of a plucked macaw, and whose face was, in all innocence, an excellent caricature of a Turk, that the artist ‘Cham’ (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé) might envy. From the armhole of a waistcoat with worn buttons, protruded a flat, thin, yellow arm, in motion, like to that of a violinist sawing away at the E string with their bow when performing a difficult passage à la Paganini. On an iron spike, set in rotation by a like bow, a cherry-wood pipe was rotating, with dazzling rapidity, while the delicate operation of drilling was undertaken; which pipe the old merchant struck from time to time on the edge of his counter to shake off wood turned to dust; near to the old man a young boy, his son no doubt, was labouring; he was practicing on less valuable pipes. A family of little cats was playing nonchalantly in the sun, and rolling around in the fine sawdust; unworked lengths of wood, as well as those already worked, filled the back of the shop bathed in shade, and the whole formed a pretty Oriental genre scene that I might recommend to the artist Théodore Frère; a scene which, with a few variations, is to be found framed on every street corner.
The workplaces turning out pipe bowls are recognisable by the red dust with which they are sprinkled; an infinite number of bowls of yellow clay, which the firing will turn a pinkish red, arranged in order on boards, await the moment when they will enter the kiln; the bowls, of very fine and very soft material, on which the potter engraves various decorations using a wheel, and which he marks with a small seal, do not require curing like French pipes, and are sold at very low prices. Incredible quantities are consumed.
As for the amber mouthpieces, they are subject to their own individual craft, similar to that required for jewellery, due to the value of the material and the skill involved. Amber comes from the Baltic Sea, on the shores of which it is collected more abundantly than anywhere else; in Constantinople, where it is very expensive, the Turks prefer the pale, lemon-shaded, semi-opaque kind, demanding that the piece possesses neither stain, flaw, nor vein, conditions which are quite difficult to meet, and which considerably raise the price of the mouthpiece. A pair of perfect ones would fetch eight or ten thousand piastres.
A rack of pipes worth a hundred and fifty thousand francs is no rare thing among the high dignitaries and wealthy individuals of Stamboul; the valuable mouthpieces are encircled with a ring of enamelled gold, sometimes enriched with diamonds, rubies and other precious stones; which constitutes an oriental way of displaying luxury, similar to our liking for English silverware and Boulle furniture (André-Charles Boulle was furniture-maker to Louis XIV); all these amber pieces, various in tone and transparency, polished, turned, and hollowed out with extreme care, take on warm and golden nuances in the sun that would have made Titian jealous, and which might create even in the most rabid sufferer from capnophobia the urge to smoke. In the humbler shops, one finds less expensive mouthpieces, possessing some imperceptible defect, but capable of doing their job no less well and just as pleasant to the lips.
There are also imitations of amber in coloured Bohemian glass, which are produced in large quantities, and cost very little; but these counterfeit items are sold only to Greeks or Armenians of the lowest class. To every self-respecting Turk, one may apply a line from Alfred de Musset’s Namouna, thus modified:
‘Happy Turk! – He was smoking opium through amber,’
(See De Musset’s ‘Namourna’: Canto I, verse 9)
I hope my readers will not hold it against me that I choose to record all these details of tobacco and pipes which a traveller’s exactness forces me to utter, but Constantinople is, indeed, enveloped in a perpetual cloud of smoke, opaquer than the clouds which Homer’s deities trod.
This stroll through the streets has caused my pen to wander despite myself; sentence follows sentence as step followed step; there is, I feel, a lack of continuity given so many disparate objects, but it would perhaps be useless to seek it; accept then, if you will, all these small characteristic details, usually overlooked by tourists, as you would glass beads of various colours strung unsymmetrically on the same thread, which, if they are worthless, at least have the merit of a certain baroque extravagance.
Near the store selling amber mouthpieces, I noticed a small confectioner’s shop whose display offered, if not splendour, originality at least: a sugar steamboat, with paddle-wheels and imitation smoke, appeared next to a small child’s cradle of the same material; a whirling Dervish, arms outstretched, head bent, and of a style even more primitive than that of gingerbread men, brushed, with the folds of his flying skirt, a chimerical lion with a green mane, a blue forelock, and a pink tail, vaguely recalling, in its pose, the great crouching lion brought from Piraeus to Venice (by Francesco Morosini, in 1687), or, better still, that by Antoine-Louis Barye, on the waterfront terrace of the Louvre; not far from the Turkish lion floated a squadron of birds of an indefinite species that Alphonse Toussenel, the naturalist, would himself find difficulty in classifying, and which were striped with tricoloured stripes like the trousers of a soldier of the Republic in summer uniform; I think, however, without daring to decide such a serious matter, that they were meant to represent ducks or seagulls, and that their blue, white, and red colour was a delicate and flattering nod to the French flag. Steamboats singularly occupy Turkish attention, and the sugar Pyroscaphe (the Pyroscaphe was an early experimental steamship built by Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans in 1783) reminded me of the little steamboats in the English toy shops in the Strand; barbarism and civilisation united in the same idea.
The Turks, eating with their fingers, naturally have no silverware, with the exception of a few visitors to France or England who have returned from Paris or London with these luxury items almost unknown in the East, and even if they do possess such they use their forks and spoons solely in front of foreigners, to show their degree of civilisation. But one cannot eat yoghurt, kaimak (cream cheese) or cherry-compote with the fingers, so the tableware-makers produce pretty spatulas of tortoiseshell or boxwood of charming workmanship, which replace the absent silverware. In one of these merchants’ shops, I saw a service of this kind, composed of a large spoon and six smaller ones fitting one within the other, thus forming a set in its case, of an exquisite originality of form and organisation.
The handle of the large spoon was decorated with fretwork piercings representing arabesques of a thinness and delicacy unmatched by the finest Chinese ivories; some light niello work, flowers, and foliage in the best of tastes, completed the ornamentation. The smaller spoons, less richly worked, also had their merit. It seems to me that Parisian goldsmiths, always in search of new ideas, might happily imitate this service in silver or silver-gilt, and that it might then appear with honour on the most splendid tables for the entremets (dishes served between courses) or dessert. I possess one exactly like it, from Trebizond, gifted to me by Monsieur R… of the Sardinian legation, which is at the disposal of François Froment-Meurice, or of any other modern Georg Wechter (the sixteenth century artist who made designs for goldsmith’s work) or Benvenuto Cellini.
In the street that borders the Golden Horn, between the New Bridge and the Old Bridge, is the marble-works where they carve those herms topped with turbans that bristle, like white ghosts emerging from their tombs, amidst the numerous cemeteries of Constantinople. There is a perpetual noise of mallets and hammers; a cloud of sparkling micaceous dust sprinkles all this portion of the road with an un-melting snow; illuminators, surrounded by pots of green, red and blue, colour the backgrounds on which the name of the deceased will be highlighted in gold lettering, accompanied by a verse from the Koran, or such ornamentation of flowers, vines, and grape clusters as decorates the tombs of women more especially, being emblems of grace, gentleness and fertility.
It is here also that the marble basins of the fountains are fashioned, which are intended to refresh the air in courtyards, apartments, and kiosks, or serve for the frequent ablutions required by Muslim law, which elevates cleanliness to the height of a virtue, contrary to Catholicism, where filth is sanctified; so much so that for a long time, people in Spain who bathed frequently were suspected of heresy, and regarded as Moors rather than Christians.
This funereal industry seems not to sadden those who profess it, and they carve their sombre marble gravestones in the happiest mood in the world; in Turkey, the idea of death seems neither to scare anyone nor arouse the slightest melancholy feeling. Doubtless their familiarity with it, and the proximity of the cemeteries located within the living city, instead of being relegated as amongst us to some solitary place outside the walls, diminishes the impact of death’s mystery and terror.
Beside this tomb-makers’ yard, which is ever in operation and never lacks orders since death provides them with the busiest of occupations, life teems, swarms and buzzes joyfully: food-sellers display their victuals; everywhere there are barrels of whitish cheese, like greasy plaster, which the Turks use as butter; barrels of black olives and kegs of Russian caviar; heaps of watermelons and cucumbers; mounds of aubergines and tomatoes, violet and purple in hue; and blood-stained quarters of meat hanging from butchers’ hooks, surrounded by a circle of skinny dogs in ecstasy; Further on, the fishmonger’s fills your nose with an acrid maritime smell, while you grimace at the monstrous forms of cuttlefish, octopuses, wrasses, sea-scorpions and other bizarre inhabitants of the briny empire, that Nature seems not to have shaped for the clear light of day, but prudently hides in the greenish depths of the abyss.
The swordfish eaten in Constantinople are of a particularly formidable appearance: they are six to eight feet long, and are cut into large slabs; the severed heads, glaring from a round, glassy and blood-red eye, still threaten you with their blades, strong, rigid and blue as burnished steel. Nothing is stranger than this nose to which Nature has fixed a sword, completing the strange physiognomy of the creature. When I passed the fish-shop, there were four enormous swordfish, on slabs facing each other, brandishing their blades formidably like courtly seamen challenging each other to a duel. Frans Snyders, the Flemish artist, could have made excellent use of this motif.
What continually strikes the foreigner in Constantinople is the absence of women in the shops; there are only male tradesmen, no female ones. Muslim jealousy fails to accommodate itself to the relationships that commerce requires; so, it has rigorously excluded a sex in which it has little confidence. Many small public roles, granted to women in our country, are filled in Turkey by athletic fellows with bulging biceps, frizzy beards, and broad bull-necks, which seems to me quite ridiculous.
If, on the other hand, women are not the sellers, they are often the buyers; one sees them stationed in front of shops in groups of two or three, followed by their North African servants holding an open bag, to whom they pass their purchases, as Judith held out the head of Holofernes to hers. Bargaining seems to delight the Turkish women as much as it does the English; it is a way, like any other, to pass the time and exchange words with a human being other than their lords and masters, and there are few women who deny themselves this pleasure, especially women of the bourgeois class; cadines (ladies) have the fabrics and goods brought to them in their homes.
Chapter 10: The Bazaars
If you follow the winding streets that lead from the Yeni-Cami harbour to the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, you arrive at the Egyptian or Spice Bazaar, a large hall traversed from one door to the other by a broad alleyway intended for the circulation of goods and buyers. A penetrating odour, composed of the aromas of all the exotic products sold, rises to one’s nostrils and intoxicates. Displayed in heaps or open bags, one finds henna, sandalwood, antimony, powdery dyes, dates, cinnamon, benzoin, pistachios, ambergris, mastic, ginger, nutmeg, opium, and hashish, guarded by merchants seated, legs crossed, in a nonchalant pose, who seem as if numbed by the heaviness of an atmosphere saturated with fragrances. These ‘beds of spice, towers of perfume’, recalling the metaphors of the Shir Hashirim (The ‘Song of Songs’ or ‘The Song of Solomon’, see verse 5:13), cannot but tempt one to linger.
One continues one’s route amidst the deafening hammering of the boilermakers and the fatty exhalations from the eateries which display, on their counters, bowls full of Turkish ratatouilles, unappetizing to the Parisian, and you reach the Grand Bazaar, whose external appearance is in no way imposing: to its high greyish walls, surmounted by small leaden domes resembling warts, cling a host of lean-tos and stalls occupied by minor trades.
The Grand Bazaar, to retain the name with which the Franks endowed it, covers an immense area of land, and forms almost a city within a city, its streets, alleys, passageways, crossroads, squares, and fountains forming an inextricable labyrinth through which one has difficulty finding one’s way, even after several visits. This vast space is vaulted, and the light falls from those little domes of which I spoke just now, which hummock the flat roof of the building; it is a soft, vague, shifting light, more favourable to the merchant than to the buyer. I would not wish to lessen the idea of Oriental magnificence that the phrase ‘the Bedesten of Constantinople’ inspires, but the best equivalent to the Turkish bazaar I can suggest is the Carreau du Temple in Paris (the reference is to the wood-built market of 1811, replaced by an iron-framed one in 1863) which it closely resembles in layout.
I entered through an arcade devoid of architectural character, and found myself in an alley reserved for the perfumers: it is there that they sell essences of bergamot and jasmine, bottles of attar of roses in velvet cases fringed with sequins, rose-water, depilatory pastes, pastilles from the seraglio embossed with Turkish characters, sachets of musk, rosaries of jade, amber, coconut, ivory, fruit-stones, rosewood and sandalwood, fine Persian mirrors with painted frames, square combs with broad teeth: the whole arsenal of Turkish coquetry. In front of these shops stand numerous groups of women whose apple-green, mauve-pink or sky-blue feredjes, their opaque and carefully closed yashmaks, their yellow morocco-leather boots fitted with galoshes of the same colour, proclaim them, in every way, to be Muslims; often they hold by the hand lovely children dressed in red or green jackets trimmed with gold, in Mameluke-style trousers in cherry, daffodil or any other bright colour of taffeta, who glow like flowers in the cool and transparent shade; African servants, wrapped in the blue and white cross-stitched habbarah (abaya, a long, loose robe) of Cairo, stand behind them, and complete the picturesque effect. Sometimes also a black eunuch, recognisable by his short chest, long legs, and broad, beardless, flabby head, sunk into the shoulders, watches with a morose air the small troop entrusted to his care, and waves, so as to make the crowd part, the kurbash (whip) of hippopotamus leather which is the distinctive mark of his authority. The merchant, leaning on his elbow, answers with a phlegmatic air the thousand questions of the young women who rummage through the goods, and turn his display upside down, interrogating him at random, asking the prices, and exclaiming at them with little bursts of incredulous laughter.
Behind these displays there are floors at the rear, which one ascends to by two or three steps, and where the more precious objects are locked away in chests and cupboards which are opened only for serious buyers. There, one finds beautiful striped scarves from Tunis; carpets and shawls from Persia, whose embroidery imitates most cunningly the palm-trees of Kashmir; mirrors framed in shell and mother-of-pearl; carved and inlaid tables to bear trays of sorbets; desks at which to read the Koran; perfume-burners in gold or silver filigree, in enamelled and guillochéd copper; little hands in ivory or tortoiseshell with which to scratch one’s back; narghile bowls in steel from Khorasan; cups from China or Japan: all the intriguing bric-a-brac of the Orient.
The main street of the Bazaar is adorned with arches of alternately black and white stone, and the vaulting offers arabesques in half-effaced grisaille in the Turkish-Rococo style, which is closer than one might think to the type of ornamentation employed under Louis XV. It ends in a crossroads where a historiated and painted fountain stands, the water of which is used for ablution, for the Turks never forget their religious duties, and they will halt calmly in the middle of a sale, leaving the buyer in suspense, to kneel on their carpets oriented towards Mecca and say their prayers, with as much devotion as if they were beneath the dome of Hagia Sophia or the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.
One of the shops most frequented by foreigners is that of Ludovic, an Armenian merchant who speaks French and allows you, with perfect patience, to turn his interesting store upside down. I lingered there for a good while, savouring excellent mocha coffee, in small Chinese cups held in silver filigree frames in the old Turkish fashion. Rembrandt would have found enough curiosities to enrich his museum of antiques: old weapons, old fabrics, bizarre goldwork, singular pottery, and heterogeneous utensils of unknown use. The wardrobes and odd furniture that sparkle amidst the shadows of his mysterious paintings are piled high in the corners of Ludovic’s shop, where the picturesque Orient seems to have left its rags, forced as it now is to don the absurd costume of the Reform Movement, the false livery of civilisation clothing a barbarous body. On a small low table are spread khanjars (daggers), yatagans (short sabres), knives with embossed silver scabbards, sheaths of velvet, shagreen, Yemeni leather, wood, and copper, with handles of jade, agate, and ivory, and studded with garnets, turquoise, coral; long, narrow, broad, curved, wavy, of all shapes, times, and countries, from the damascene blade of the pasha, inlaid with verses from the Koran in gold lettering, to the crude knife of the camel-driver. How many Zeybec and Albanian irregulars, how many beys and effendis, how many omrahs (Indian Muslim courtiers) and rajahs (Indian kings and princes) have been deprived of the weapons from their belts to create this precious and baroque arsenal that would drive Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps mad with joy!
On the walls, beneath their helmets, hang gleaming iron suits of Circassian chainmail. Shields made of tortoiseshell, hippopotamus, and damascene steel, studded with copper bosses glitter; Mongol quivers crumple; long, nielloed and inlaid rifles lean against one another, at one and the same time both weapons and treasures; maces clash, similar to those the knights of the Middle Ages wielded, and which Turkish imagery never fails to place in the fists of Persians as a distinctive jibe.
The shelves and hangers are full of fluttering Brousse (Bursa) silks, shimmering like water in the moonlight beneath their sprinkling of silver; Lebanese slippers and tobacco pouches, with their light gold weave, intricate designs and coloured lozenges; fine silken crepe shirts with opaque or translucent stripes; kerchiefs embroidered with golden spangles; cashmeres from India and Persia; emir-green pelisses lined with marten or sable, jackets with braiding more complex than the arabesques on the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors in the Alhambra; stiff gold dolmans; diamond brocades with dazzling orphreys (borders); mashlas (abas, short-sleeved surcoats) from Cairo cut in the style of Byzantine dalmatics; all the fabulous luxury, all the chimerical wealth of those sunlit lands that we glimpse like the mirages of a dream from the depths of our cold Europe. Ludovic allows you to handle, unfold, examine, and toy in the light with, these oriental wonders; you rummage through the wardrobe of the Thousand and One Nights; for, if you wish, you may try on the jacket of Prince Caramalzaman, and unfurl the authentic robe of Princess Boudroulboudour.
Amongst the amber, ebony, coral, and sandalwood rosaries; the enamelled gold cassolettes; the Persian writing-cases; the caskets and mirrors whose paintings represent scenes from the Mahabharata; the fans of peacock or argus-pheasant feathers; the chiselled and nielloed silver Hookahs bells; all those delightful Turkish wares; one finds, unexpectedly, porcelain from Sèvres and Saxony, earthenware from Vincennes, enamels from Limoges, brought there who knows how. But nothing is impossible as regards bric-a-brac, and Mademoiselle Delaunay’s antique shop (on the Quai Voltaire, Paris) finds itself transported to the Bedesten of Constantinople. I even noted, between two noble helmets from Kurdistan with chainmail gorgets, exactly like those of Godfrey de Bouillon’s crusaders, one of those Prussian helmets (pickelhaubes), with lightning-rod spike, a romantic and medieval invention of King Louis, so pleasantly mocked by Heinrich Heine in his A Winter’s Tale (See Heine’s ‘Ein Wintermärchen’ III: lines 39-60).
Whatever you desire, you will find it at Ludovic’s, be it the Janissaries’ cooking pot, the battle-axe of Mehmed II, or the saddle of Al-Buraq (Buraq is Mohammad’s supernatural steed in Islamic tradition on which he flew through the heavens).
Each street of the Bazaar is assigned to some specialty. Here are the sellers of babouches (light shoes), slippers and boots; nothing is more interesting than the stalls cluttered with extravagant shoes with turned-up toes like Chinese roofs, with folded uppers, in leather, morocco, velvet, and brocade, stitched, spangled, braided, decorated with swans’ feathers and flossed silk, impractical for European feet. There are some that are arched and raised at the prow like Venetian gondolas; others would drive Rhodopis (a Greek girl in a Cinderella-like story first recorded by Strabo in his ‘Geographica’) and Cinderella herself to despair so charmingly small are they, looking more like jewel-cases than slippers; their yellow, red, and green disappearing beneath threads of gold and silver. The children’s shoes are the subject of most charmingly capricious forms and ornamentation. As streetwear, the women employ yellow morocco-leather boots, of which I have already had occasion to speak; for all the wondrous charms of feet born for the mats of India and the carpets of Persia, would soon be lost in the deep mud of Constantinople.
Here are the sellers of kaftans, gandouras (long tunics), and dressing-gowns in Brousse (Bursa) silk. These costumes are modestly priced, though the colours are of a charming tone and the fabric of an extreme softness. I greatly regret not having bought a large cerise dolman densely woven, with long hanging sleeves, which in Paris would have lent me the air of a very respectable mamamouchi (a self-important person, see Molière’s ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ IV, 3, 1670) and in which I would have appeared as handsome as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain during the special ceremony. But the Customs show scant indulgence for these innocent fancies of a traveller. These merchants also sell Bursa fabrics, half-silk and half-thread, for dresses, waistcoats and trousers in the European fashion, very airy, light, and attractive. This manufacture is new, and is sponsored by the Sultan, Abdülmecid I.
Drapers display English cloth in garish colours, the edges of which are adorned with large gold letters and coats of arms in copper-foil, to satisfy Oriental taste. One recognises in them the dumb perfection of mechanical process, and the innate tastelessness of the British. I confess that such dissonances of colour make me grind my teeth, and send to the Devil, most wholeheartedly, the industry, commerce, and very civilisation which produce such hostile reds, cantankerous blues, and insolent yellows, disturbing, to what end I know not, the serene harmony of tones offered by the Orient.
When I consider the fact that I shall doubtless encounter these dreadful fabrics in the form of jackets, waistcoats and kaftans, in some mosque, street, or wider scene, the entire effect of which they will destroy with their unsociable colours, a secret fury rises within me, and I long for the sea to swallow the ships that carry these abominations, flames to destroy the factories where they are woven, and Great Britain itself to vanish in its own fog. Yet I would say the same of those execrable cottons from Rouen, Roubaix and Mulhouse, which are beginning to spread their frightful little flowery bouquets, atrocious garlands, and vile speckling like squashed insects throughout the Orient. If I speak of this with bitterness, it is because I felt the pain, one of which I shall never be eased, of seeing three little Turkish girls, between eight and ten years old, as beautiful as houris, more so since houris do not exist, who wore kaftans made of English cloth over dresses from Rouen. The sun’s rays, though illuminating their charming faces, did not dare to shine upon these modern monstrosities, and recoiled in terror.
Fortunately, I was distracted from such painful thoughts by a display of Turkish children’s clothes: there were charming jackets embroidered with gold and silver, baggy silk trousers, little braided kaftans, and childish tarbouches decorated with crescents, forming a miniature Orient, the prettiest and most attractive in the world.
Next, in their own dedicated alley, I found the weavers, who produce the silver and gold thread with which mottoes, slippers, kerchiefs, waistcoats, dolmans, and jackets are embroidered; behind the display windows those bright strands which, later, will be flowers, foliage, and arabesques gleam on their bobbins. There they also create the cords and knots, so gracefully and attractively interwoven, which our trimmings cannot match. The Turks make them by hand, using a bare toe as a point of anchorage.
Here are jewellers, also, whose precious stones are locked in chests from which they never take their eyes, or in glass cases placed out of reach of thieves; in these dark shops, rather like cobbler’s stalls, incredible riches abound. Indian diamonds from Vijapur and Golconda brought by caravan; the rubies of Jamshid (a mythological Shah of Persia), sapphires from Hormuz (on the eastern side of the Persian Gulf), pearls from Ophir (an unknown region mentioned in the Bible), Brazilian topazes, Bohemian opals, Macedonian turquoises, not to mention garnets, chrysoberyls, aquamarines, azurites, agates, aventurines, and lapis lazuli, piled in heaps, for the Turks employ many precious stones, not only as luxuries, but as items of worth. Unaware of the refinements of modern finance, they earn no interest on their capital, a means of profit, moreover, which is strictly forbidden by the Koran, hostile to usury as are the Gospels, as we witnessed in regard to the Turkish Loan, which was rejected by the old nationalist and religious party. A diamond easy to hide, and carry away, represents a large sum in a small volume. From the Oriental viewpoint, it is a safe investment, though it yields nothing; try and persuade Arab or Turkish avarice to part with the stoneware pot which contains his treasure, on the pretext of offering three or four percent, even if such a thing were permitted by Muhammad!
These stones are generally cabochons (unfaceted), because the Orientals do not cut diamonds or rubies, either because they have no knowledge of sanding powder, or because they fear to reduce their weight in carats by faceting the stones. The settings are rather heavy in the Genoese or Rococo styles. The refined, elegant. and pure artistry of the Arabs has left few traces among the Turks. Their jewellery consists mainly of necklaces, earrings, head-ornaments, stars, flowers, crescents, bracelets, leg-rings, and sabre and dagger hilts; but is revealed in all its brilliance only in the shadows of the harems, on the heads and chests of the odalisques, crouched in a corner of the divan beneath the eyes of their master, and as far as foreigners are concerned all this luxury is as if it never existed.
Though the opulence revealed by the preceding passages, studded with the names of precious stones, may have inspired you to think of the treasure of Harun al-Rashid and the cellar of Aboulcasem (see the ‘Thousand and One Days’, ‘Les Mille et Un Jours’ by François Pétis de la Croix, 1710), refrain from imagining dazzlingly wild flashes of light cast to right and left. The Turks have no understanding of display in the manner of Parisian jewellers such as Jean-Baptiste Fossin, Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier, François Meller (Mellerio), and Paul-Alfred Bapst; and their rough diamonds, thrown by the handful into small wooden bowls, appear to be mere lumps of glass; yet one could easily spend a million in one of these humble shops.
The arms-bazaar may be considered the very heart of Islam. Nothing new has crossed its threshold; the old Turkish traditionalists sit there, gravely crouched, professing a contempt for us dogs of Christians a contempt as profound as in the time of Mahmud II. No time has passed for these worthy Osmanlis (Turks of the Ottoman Empire), who regret the Janissaries and their ancient barbarism, perhaps with reason. Here again are the large flared turbans, the dolmans bordered with fur, the wide Mameluke trousers, the belts worn high, and all the pure classical costume, such as one sees in the collection of the Elbicei Atika (the Costume Museum in Constantinople), in the tragedy of Bajazet (the tragedy by Racine) or the special ceremony in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. You see there, once more, those faces impassive as fate, eyes serenely fixed, aquiline noses curving over long white beards, brown cheeks tanned by frequent steam baths, and those bodies with robust frames ruined by the pleasures of the harem and the ecstasies of opium; that whole aspect of pure-blooded Turkishness that is slowly disappearing, and that we will soon be forced to go and seek in the depths of Asia.
At noon the arms-bazaar closes disdainfully, and these millionaire merchants retire to their kiosks on the bank of the Bosphorus, to gaze with an angry air as the steamboats pass by, those diabolical Frankish inventions.
The riches heaped in this bazaar are of incalculable value: here are damascene blades, inscribed with Arabic letters, with which the Sultan Saladin, in the legend, cut feather pillows in flight in the presence of Richard the Lionheart, who in turn sliced an iron bar with his great two-handed sword; blades which bear on their edges as many notches as the heads they have severed; khanjars (daggers), whose dull, bluish steel pierces a breastplate as if the latter were a sheet of paper, and which possess hilts encased in precious stones; old wheel-lock and matchlock rifles, marvels of chiselling and inlay; battle axes which might have served Timur (Tamerlane), Genghis Khan, or ‘Skanderbeg’ (Gjergj Kastrioti, an Albanian rebel against the Ottoman Empire) to hammer at helmets and skulls; the whole ferocious and picturesque arsenal of ancient Islam. Here, in a shaft of sunlight falling from the high vault, gleam, sparkle, and glitter, saddles and covers embroidered with silver and gold, studded with sun-like precious stones, moons of diamond, stars of sapphire; and the bridles, bits, and stirrups of silver-gilt, the magical caparisons whose oriental luxury adorns the noble steeds of the Nedj (the central plateau of Saudi Arabia), the worthy descendants of Dahi, Rabra, Al Haffar, Al Naamah, and other equestrian representatives of the ancient Islamic turf.
Remarkably, given Muslim insouciance, this bazaar is considered so precious that smoking is not permitted; which says everything, for the fatalistic Turks would light a pipe on a powder magazine.
As a foil to all this magnificence, let me speak awhile of the Flea-Market. It is the morgue, the charnel house, the knacker’s yard, the ultimate destination for all such beautiful things, having undergone their various phases of dilapidation. The kaftan which glowed on the shoulders of the vizier or pasha ends its career on the back of a hammal or a caulker; the jacket, which held the opulent charms of a Georgian slave from the harem, envelops, soiled and withered, the mummified carcass of some old beggar. It is an incredible jumble of tattered rags and shreds, where everything that is not a hole is a stain; all hang limply, sinisterly, from rusty nails, with the vague human appearance that long-worn clothes retain, and seethe, vaguely stirred by vermin. Formerly the plague was concealed beneath the crumpled folds of these indescribable rags stained with the pus from buboes, lurking there in some filthy corner like a black spider in the depths of its dusty web.
Madrid’s El Rastro, the Temple district in Paris, the old Alsatia area of London (Whitefriars), are nothing compared to this Montfaucon (the Gibbet area in Paris near the modern Place du Colonel Fabien) of Oriental second-hand clothes, a market described by that significant qualifier I need not repeat.
I hope I will be forgiven this unpleasant description, and be granted credit rather for the precious stones, brocades, and flasks of rose-essence with which I began. Besides, the traveller like the doctor, is permitted to utter whatever is required.
I hope I will be forgiven this unpleasant description, and be granted credit rather for the precious stones, brocades, and flasks of rose-essence with which I began. Besides, the traveller like the doctor, is permitted to utter whatever is required.
The End of Part II of Gautier’s ‘Constantinople’