Théophile Gautier
Constantinople (1852)
Part III: The Dervishes, Scutari, Karagöz, The Sultan
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
- Chapter 11: The Whirling Dervishes.
- Chapter 12: The Howling Dervishes.
- Chapter 13: The Scutari Cemetery.
- Chapter 14: Karagöz.
- Chapter 15: The Sultan at the Mosque - A Turkish Dinner.
Chapter 11: The Whirling Dervishes
The whirling Dervishes, or Mevlevi Order, are a sect of Mohammedan monks who live in communities in monasteries called tekkes. The word ‘dervish’ means ‘beggar’, which does not prevent the Dervishes from possessing great wealth thanks to the legacies and gifts of the faithful. The designation, true in the past, has been preserved, even though it is now an antinomy.
The muftis (jurists) and the ulama (scholars) regard the Dervishes with little favour, either because of some private disagreement regarding doctrine, or because of the influence they have over the common people, or simply because of the contempt that the higher clergy have always professed for the mendicant orders; as for myself, who am not strong enough in Islamic theology to unravel the matter, I will confine myself to considering the Dervishes in their purely physical aspect, and to describing their bizarre exercises.
Unlike other Mohammedans, who prevent the giaours (infidels) from attending their ceremonies of worship as curious onlookers, and in outrage chase them from the mosques if they try to enter during times of prayer, the Dervishes allow Europeans to enter their tekkes, on the sole condition that they leave their shoes at the door, and enter barefoot or in slippers; they sing their litanies and perform their evolutions without the presence of the ‘dogs of Christians’ appearing to disturb them in the least; one would even say they are flattered to have an audience.
The tekke of Pera is located in a square cluttered with tombs, marble-headstones with turbans atop, and age-old cypress trees, a sort of annex or branch of the Petit-Champ-des-Morts, where the tomb of Claude Alexandre, Count of Bonneval, the famous renegade, is located.
The tekke’s facade, simple in the extreme, consists of a door, surmounted by a cartouche decorated with a Turkish inscription; a wall pierced with windows fitted with grilles, revealing the graves of Dervishes, for in Turkey the living always rub shoulders with the dead; and an inbuilt trellised fountain, decorated with iron spoons hanging from chains, so that the poor can drink comfortably, customarily surrounded by groups of hammals (porters), worn out from their difficult ascent of Galata. It is scarcely monumental in appearance, yet not lacking in character; the tall cypresses in the garden, and the dome and white minaret of the mosque that can be seen beyond the wall rising into the blue of the sky, are appropriate reminders of the Orient.
The interior resembles any other Mohammedan dwelling; none of your long, arcaded cloisters, and interminable corridors onto which cells open, the dungeons of pious and voluntary recluses, or silent courtyards in which grass grows, and a fountain tinkles into a viridescent basin. Nothing of the cold, sad, sepulchral aspect of a monastery as it is understood in Catholic countries; but bright lodgings painted in cheerful colours, lit by the sun and, in the background, a marvellous view of the Bosphorus, a magnificent panorama bathed in air and light: Scutari (Üsküdar, ancient Chrysopolis), Kadi-Keuï (Kadikoy, ancient Chalcedon) spreading along the shore of Asia-Minor, the Olympus of Bithynia (Mount Uludağ) all frozen with snow, the Princes’ Islands, spots of azure on the moiré of the sea; Sarayburnu, with its palaces, its kiosks, its gardens; the Sultan-Ahmet Mosque, flanked by its six minarets; Hagia Sophia, striped pink and white like a Yemeni sail, and a forest of ships of all nations, a spectacle always changing, ever new, and of which one never tires!
The room where the whirling dances of the religion are performed occupies the rear of this courtyard. Its exterior appearance indicates the purpose of the building only by means of interlaced script, suras from the Koran traced with the certainty of hand that Turkish calligraphers possess in such high degree. The convoluted and flowery characters play the happiest of roles in Oriental ornamentation; they are arabesques as much as letters.
The interior recalls both a dance hall and a theatre; a perfectly smooth, waxed parquet floor, surrounded by a circular balustrade at platform height, occupies the centre; slender columns support a gallery of the same shape, providing space for distinguished spectators, the Sultan’s box, and the stands reserved for women. This part, which is called the seraglio, is protected from profane glances by tightly interwoven trellises like those seen at the windows of harems. The orchestra faces the mihrab (the niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the qibla, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying) decorated with panels coloured with verses from the Koran and cartouches of sultans or viziers who were benefactors of the tekke. All this is painted in white and blue and extremely clean: one might think it a classroom arranged for pupils of ‘Cellarius’ (Martin Borrhaus, the Protestant reformist) than the place of exercise of a fanatical sect.
I sat down, cross-legged, amidst Turks and Franks also barefoot, close to the lower balustrade, in the first row, so as not to lose anything of the spectacle. After a somewhat prolonged wait, the Dervishes slowly appeared, two by two. The head of the community crouched on a carpet covered with gazelle skins, below the mihrab, between two acolytes: he was a little old man with a worn and leaden complexion, his skin creased with a thousand wrinkles and his chin bristling with a sparse and greying beard; his eyes, glittering in transient flashes in his dull face, in the centre of a large aureole of bistre, alone gave a little life to his otherworldly physiognomy.
The Dervishes filed past him, saluting him in the Oriental manner with marks of the deepest respect, as one does a sultan or a saint; it was at once a show of politeness, a testimony of their obedience, and a religious evolution; the movements were slow, rhythmic, hieratic, and, the rite having been accomplished, each Dervish went to take his place before the mihrab.
The headgear of these Muslim monks consists of a felt cap, an inch thick, of a reddish or brownish hue, which I can best compare, for shape, to an upturned flower-pot, in which the head has been entered; a waistcoat and a jacket of white fabric; and an immense pleated skirt, of the same colour and similar to the Greek fustanella. Narrow white trousers beneath, reaching as far as the ankle, complete this costume, which has nothing monastic about it to our eyes and possesses a certain elegance. For the moment, I could only glimpse it, since the Dervishes were decked out in a kind of cloak or surcoat in green, blue, Corinthian-currant black, cinnamon, or some other shade, which was not part of the uniform, and which they had to remove when they began their dance, and don once more when they withdrew, panting, streaming with sweat, and overcome by ecstasy and fatigue.
The prayers began, and with them the genuflections, prostrations, and commonplace rituals of the Islamic religion, so bizarre to us, and which might easily seem laughable but for the conviction and gravity with which the faithful perform them. Their alternations of abasement and elevation inevitably make one think of chickens bowing to the ground to peck with their beaks and rising again having seized the grain of seed or the worm they covet.
Their orisons are fairly long, or at least a desire to see the dance makes them seem so, especially for a European full of curiosity, who has no expectation of resting after his death beneath the shade of the Tuba tree (referenced in the Koran: surah 13, Ar-Ra’d, verse 29) in the paradisial serai (seraglio) spoken of by Muhammad, and being reflected there, for eternity, in the dark eyes of the ever-virgin houris (according to sundry Hadith or Sayings of Muhammad); nevertheless, this pious murmur, through its monotonous persistence, acts strongly, in the end, on the mind of the unbeliever, and one can understand that it impresses souls who do believe, and attracts them wonderfully to those strange exercises, beyond normal human strength, which can only be explained by a sort of religious catalepsy like to the unnatural insensitivity of martyrs in the midst of the most atrocious tortures.
When sufficient verses of the Koran had been chanted, heads had nodded enough, and a satisfactory number of prostrations had been made, the Dervishes rose, threw off their cloaks, and circled in procession, in pairs, around the hall. Each couple passed before the leader, who stood, and, after an exchange of greetings, made a gesture of blessing or a ‘magnetic’ pass over them; this kind of consecration is performed with singular etiquette. The second Dervish blessed selects one from the couple following, and presents him to the imam, a ceremony which is repeated from pair to pair until all have been blessed.
A remarkable change had already taken place in the physiognomies of the Dervishes thus prepared for ecstasy. On entering, they had a gloomy, dejected, somnolent air; their heads bent beneath their heavy headgear; now their faces brightened, their eyes shone, their stance grew more elevated and firmer, the heels of their bare feet questioned the floor with a nervous trembling motion.
The nasalised Koranic chants, in falsetto, were joined by an accompaniment of flutes and tarboukas (darbukas, goblet drums). The tarboukas marked the rhythm and provided the bass part, the flutes executed, in unison, a song in high tones of infinite sweetness.
The thematic motif, returning invariably after a few undulations, ends by taking possession of the soul through an imperious feeling of empathy, as a woman’s face might whose beauty reveals itself progressively, seemingly increasing the longer one contemplates her. This air, with its strange charm, gave birth within me to a nostalgia for countries unknown, to an inexplicable mixture of sadness and joy, to a mad desire to abandon myself to the intoxicating beat of the rhythm. Memories of previous existence crowded about me, physiognomies known to me, though I had never encountered them in this world, smiled at me with indefinable expressions of reproach and love; a host of images and scenes from dreams long forgotten were outlined luminously in the mists of a bluish distance; I began to sway my head from one shoulder to the other, yielding to the evocative and incantatory power of this music so contrary to our habitual practice, and yet of such penetrating effect. I greatly regret that one of our composers, say Félicien David or Ernest Reyer, both so skilled in grasping the strange rhythms of Oriental music, was not there to note this melody of a truly celestial sweetness.
Motionless in the centre of the enclosure, the Dervishes seemed intoxicated by this music so delicately barbaric and so melodiously wild, whose primitive melody dates perhaps to the first ages of the world; finally, one of them opened and raised arms, spreading them horizontally in the pose of a crucified Christ, then began to turn about himself, slowly moving his bare feet, which made no noise on the parquet floor. His skirt, like a bird that seeks to take flight, began to quiver and beat its wings. His speed became greater; the supple fabric, lifted by the air that rushed into it, spread out in a circle, flaring to a bell-shape in a whirlwind of whiteness of which the Dervish was the centre.
The first dancer was joined by a second, then a third, then the whole troop followed, overcome by an irresistible vertigo.
They whirled, arms outstretched in a cross, heads inclined on their shoulders, eyes half-closed, mouths half-open, like confident swimmers, allowing themselves to be carried away in a flow of ecstasy; their movements, regular, undulating, showed an extraordinary suppleness; there was no perceptible effort, no fatigue apparent; the most intrepid German waltzer would have died of breathlessness; they continued to rotate on themselves as if driven by the force of their efforts, like spinning-tops pivoting, seemingly motionless at the moment of greatest rapidity, lulled by the sounding murmur.
There were twenty or more present, pirouetting amidst their skirts, spread like the chalices of gigantic Javanese flowers, without ever colliding, without escaping their whirlwind orbits, without losing, surprisingly, for a single instant, the meter marked out by the tarboukas.
The imam walked among them, sometimes clapping his hands to tell the orchestra to quicken or slow the rhythm or to encourage the dancers, and applaud them for their pious zeal. His impassive countenance formed a strange contrast with all those illuminated, convulsed figures; the gloomy and cold old man traversed their frenetic evolutions with a ghostly step, as if doubt had touched his arid soul, or as if the intoxication of prayer, the vertigo of sacred incantation, lacked the power to hold him in its grip, as it had for so long, like those teriakis (opium-eaters) and hassasins (hashish-smokers) jaded by the effect of their drug, who are obliged to raise the dose till they reach the point of poisoning themselves.
The dance stopped for a moment; the Dervishes formed up again, pair by pair, and circled the room in procession two or three times. This evolution, executed slowly, gave them time to catch their breath and to collect themselves. What I had seen was, in fact, only the prelude to the symphony, the preface to the poem, the rehearsal for the main event.
The tarboukas began to drum a more urgent measure, the song of the flutes became livelier, and the Dervishes resumed their dance with redoubled energy.
However, there was nothing disorderly or feverishly demonic about it, unlike the epileptic convulsions of the Isawiyya (a Sufi mystical sect); for rhythm rules and constrains it. The rotation became faster, the number of revolutions performed per minute increased, but the hieratic waltz remained mute and calm like that of a spinning-top falling silent at the height of its speed. The Dervishes raised or let fall their arms slightly, according to the degree of fatigue or ecstasy they felt; they looked like bathers who had lost their footing and now stretched their hands out, abandoning themselves to the current; sometimes their heads tilted backwards, showing the whites of their eyes, their features luminous, lips half-open in an indescribable smile and soaked in a light foam; or drooped on their chests as if overwhelmed by voluptuousness, beards bent against the white fabric of their waistcoats; or most often, lay against a forearm, as on the pillow of some divine dream.
A poor old man, wearing a Socratic mask which was rather ugly when at rest, waltzed with incredible vigour and persistence for his age, and his commonplace face assumed, amidst the enchanted intensity of the whirling, a singular beauty; his soul, so to speak, rose to the surface, and an internal pressure moulded and corrected the imperfection of his features, from within. Another, of twenty-five to thirty years of age, with a noble, regular and gentle face, ending in a reddish-blond beard, made me think involuntarily of the young Nazarene - the most handsome of men - with his arms raised above his head, arms which the nails of an invisible cross seemed to hold in a fixed position. I have never seen a more beautifully ascetic expression. Not the ‘Angel of Fiesole’ (Fra Angelico), nor the divine Luis de Morales, Hans Memling, Fra Bartolomeo, Bartolomé Murillo, or Francisco de Zurbarán, ever created in their religious paintings a head more lost in love of the divine, more drowned in mystical effluvia, more alight with a celestial glow, more drunk with paradisiacal hallucination; if, in the other world, souls retain a human face, they must certainly resemble that of the young whirling Dervish.
His expression was repeated in lesser degrees on the ecstatic faces of the other dancers. What did they see in vision that lulled them? Emerald forests with ruby fruits, mountains of amber and myrrh, the diamantine kiosks and pearly tents of Muhammad’s paradise? Their smiling mouths doubtless seemed to receive perfumed kisses of musk and benzoin from the white, green and red houris: their fixed gaze contemplated the splendours of Allah, shining with a brilliance that would make the sun appear black, a blaze of blinding light; the earth, to which they held only by the tips of their toes, had vanished like a paper tissue thrown on a fire, and those twin aspects of God floated madly in the eternal infinite.
The tarboukas murmured, the flute raised its notes to an impossible pitch, tenuous as a crystal thread; the Dervishes were cloaked in their own brightness; their skirts swelled, expanded, rounded, spread wider, bringing a delicious freshness to the burning air, and fanning me like a flight of celestial spirits or great mystical birds, swooping down upon the earth.
Sometimes a Dervish would cease. His fustanella would continue to quiver for a few moments; then, no longer supported by the whirlwind-like motion, would slowly sag, and the flared fabric would fall, resuming its perpendicular folds, like those of ancient Greek drapery. Then, after whirling intensely, he would throw himself on his knees, face to the ground, and a comrade, there to serve, would run to cover him with one of those cloaks of which I spoke but now; just as a jockey throws a blanket over a thoroughbred after the race. The imam would approach the Dervish, prostrate and frozen in complete immobility, murmur a few sacramental words, and pass on to another. After some time, all had dropped to the floor, overcome by ecstasy. But they soon rose, repeated their circular walk in pairs, and left the room in the same order in which they had entered; while I went to retrieve my shoes at the door, from a pile of boots and slippers, and, dazed, until evening, by the dizzying spectacle, saw wide white skirts spreading and whirling before my eyes, heard the relentlessly sweet melody of the little flute sounding in my ears, and skipped to the thunderous bass rhythm of the tarboukas.
Chapter 12: The Howling Dervishes
When one has seen the whirling Dervishes of Pera (Beyoğlu), one is obliged to visit the howling Dervishes of Scutari (Üsküdar); so, I took a caique at Tophane, and two pairs of oars, handled by vigorous Albanians, carried me towards the shore of Asia-Minor, despite the violence of the current. The bubbling waters broke, beneath the sun, into millions of silver flakes, sliced through by swarms of white and black birds, designated under the poetic name of souls in pain, because of their perpetual agitation; one sees them darting over the Bosphorus, in flights of two or three hundred, legs in the water, wings in the air, with extraordinary speed, as if they were pursuing an invisible prey, which has also won them the name of wind-chasers (‘yel kovan’, shearwaters, puffinus yelkouan). I myself am ignorant of their ornithological label, but these two popular nicknames are abundantly sufficient for me. When they pass near the boats, they look like dry leaves carried away by an autumn whirlwind, awakening all sorts of dreamy and melancholy ideas.
The landing stage of Scutari presents the most picturesque aspect. A sort of floating platform, composed of large beams on which the gulls and albatrosses perch, forms one of those foregrounds of which English engravers know how to make such good use; a café, surrounded by benches populated by smokers, projects into the water, set on a small pier alongside feluccas, caiques, canoes and boats of all kinds, moored or at anchor, and the fig-trees, and other vegetation, of a perennial green hue, in a small garden adjoining the café, which they highlight with their vigorous tones.
The white walls of the Buyuk Djami Mosque appear in the background. This mosque creates a fine effect, with its dome, minaret, terraces with small lead domes, Arab arcades, staircases on which soldiers and hammals sleep, and its masses of masonry interspersed with tufts of greenery.
Mosque of Buyuk Djami
A fountain bordered with arabesques, foliage and flowers, varied by Turkish inscriptions sculpted in relief in the marble, and surmounted by one of those charming canopied roofs of which modern good taste has robbed the fountain of Tophane, gracefully occupies the centre of the small quay-shaped square where the main street of Scutari ends.
At the foot of this fountain, whose dried-up spouts no longer pour water, shelter swarms of women in white, pink, green or lilac feredjes, sitting, standing, or crouching in poses of graceful nonchalance, rocking beautiful children in their arms, and watching the games of the older ones with long glances from their black eyes.
Renters of horses with their beasts; sais (grooms) holding the bridles of their masters’ mounts; talikas, a kind of Turkish hackney-carriage; old-fashioned arabas (carts), harnessed to black buffalo or silver-grey oxen; and reddish dogs sleeping in heaps in the sun, enliven the picture with their varied groupings and their contrasting shapes and colours.
In the background lies the town of Scutari with its red-painted houses; its white minarets standing out against the black curtain of cypresses of its Field of the Dead. The main street of Scutari, which rises gradually to the summit of the hill, has a physiognomy much more Turkish in appearance than the streets of Constantinople. One feels that one is in Asia, on the true soil of Islam. No European idea has traversed this narrow arm of the sea which a few strokes of the oars are enough to cross. Traditional costumes, flared turbans, long pelisses, light-coloured kaftans, are much more frequently found in Scutari than in Constantinople. The Reform Movement seems not to have penetrated here.
The street is lined with tobacco-merchants displaying on a board their blond wheels of Latakia topped with a lemon, with tavern-owners roasting kebabs on perpendicular spits, with pastry-chefs sliding trays of baklava into their ovens, with butchers hanging quarters of meat on chains amidst a whirlwind of flies, with writers tracing messages of supplication in shops plastered with calligraphic paintings, and coffee vendors bringing to their occupation the narghile with its clear glass carafe and long flexible leather pipe.
Sometimes the street is punctuated by a small cemetery inserted familiarly between a confectionery shop and a corn-cob seller. Further on, about twenty houses are missing, turned to a pile of ashes amidst which rise the brick chimneys which alone were able to resist the violence of the fire.
Arabas, filled with women seated cross-legged, go up and down the street, at the moderate pace of the large bluish oxen drawing them, led by a sais, who often grips the horn of a beast with his hand. Dogs, asleep in the middle of the public roadway, barely move, at the risk of being crushed under the hooves of these heavy fissipedes, or the rims of the massive wheels. Happily, the pace of these primitive chariots is slow, and the Turks are never in a hurry.
From these gilded and painted arabas, covered with canvas stretched on hoops, come loud voices and bursts of joyful laughter; the eye plunging, furtively, into them glimpses less strictly veiled faces, belonging to those who believe themselves sheltered from profane gaze. At the front, little girls of about ten years old, not yet masked by the pitiless yashmak, betray, by their precocious beauty, the incognito of their mothers crouching a little behind. By accentuating those long black almond-shaped eyes, eyebrows marked as with Indian ink, slightly aquiline noses, regular oval faces, and mouths flushed the colour of pomegranate seeds, a little, it is not difficult to divine an overall type mysteriously stolen from some Turkish equivalent to Venus.
Here a convoy passes: a coffin, covered with green drapery, supported on the shoulders of six men walking at a rapid pace, is heading, in all haste, to the ‘Large Field of the Dead’ of Scutari; it will find there, beneath the shade of the tall cypresses, in the Asian motherland, a rest that the Franks of Europe will not disturb.
Shepherds, dragging a monstrous sheep, of phenomenal obesity, rendered even vaster by its long wool, cross paths with the convoy, which races on as if the Devil himself were bearing it away; soldiers on horseback pass by with a proud and indolent air; a line of camels, led by a small donkey, parade along, swinging their ostrich necks, shaking their hairy lips, leaving for some distant caravan, and, amidst this motley crowd in motion, I and my companions arrive in upper Scutari, at the tekke of the Howling Dervishes.
We are too early. Turkish time, which counts the hours from sunrise, fails to coincide with French time, and requires perpetual calculation, the cause of many errors, especially at first. In the meantime, we partake of coffee, smoke a chibouk and drink glasses of water on the benches outside a café located at the entrance to the cemetery. We are served by a little boy with lively eyes and an intelligent face, who is everywhere, meeting the often-opposing demands of the customers. He brings fire in one hand and water in the other, like the little spirits attendant on ancient initiations hovering on the brown background of Etruscan vases.
Having exhausted all the resources that Turkish coffee can offer enforced idleness, we entered the courtyard of the tekke, adorned with a fountain in the form of a tomb, recalling those coffins with sloping ‘roofs’ covered with cashmere, which one sees, through the grilles, in the turbés (funeral chapels) of the sultans. A vendor of cakes made with rice starch, which one eats sprinkled with a few drops of cherry-water or rose-water, provided us with the means of appeasing or rather cheating our appetite, awakened by the sea air, the long wait, and the space of time elapsed since our frugal and tasteless breakfast, taken that morning in Constantinople. The merchant displayed his cakes on a spotless tin tray, placed in front of him in the form of a counter, and his merchandise, which Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Marie-Antoine Carême would doubtless have criticised, at least had the merit of being inexpensive. For a few small coins, one could fill up on them.
Near the door of the tekke sat a very strange character, wrapped in a coarse threadbare camel’s-hair sayon (tunic), his head encircled by a piece of rag twisted in the manner of a turban. I shall never forget his short, snub-nosed, broad face, which seemed to have been crushed under the pressure of a powerful hand, like those grotesque rubber masks the expression on which is altered by pressing a thumb into them. Large bluish lips, thick as those of an African; toad’s eyes, round, fixed, and protruding; a nose lacking cartilage, a short, sparse, curly beard; a complexion the colour of tawny leather, glazed in rancid hues, and more seasoned in tone than an españolito (Spanish commoner) made a strangely hideous ensemble, more like a figure from nightmare than a real human being. If, instead of his sordid rags, this monster had worn a parti-coloured surcoat, he might have been taken for one of those court jesters that one sees in old ceremonial paintings, with a parrot on his fist, or holding a greyhound on a leash.
He was, in truth, a madman. The Turks let them wander about, and venerate them as saints. They think that the deity dwells in these minds empty of rational thought, and forgive them just as they forgive little children, because they know not what they do.
This fellow had taken a liking to the courtyard of the tekke, and would remain there on his block of stone all day long, nodding his head, mumbling the formulae of Islam, rolling a rosary between his fingers, and following with his idiotic eye some vague vision that made him smile. Stupefied, in a kief (idle rest) from which he was distracted only by a too importunate swarm of lice, which he rid himself of in the manner of Murillo’s The Young Beggar, he seemed to enjoy the most perfect bliss. A pipe with a worn mouthpiece, a maple stem, and a bowl blackened by long use, was leaning against the wall near him, and from time to time he would inhale a few mouthfuls of smoke with a profound and childish satisfaction.
Various devotees, piously and with a fanatical air, embraced this disgusting personage, who permitted their attentions like some deformed Hindu or Japanese idol; then, taking off their slippers, entered the inner room of the tekke. As for ourselves, we were not allowed to enter until the introductory prayers had been said; we listened from outside to those serious psalmodies of a beautifully religious character recalling Gregorian plainsong, to which the guttural accent peculiar to men of the Orient gave a wilder stamp.
We added our shoes to the pile of slippers piled up at the door, and took our places behind a wooden balustrade with a few other people, among whom were two Capuchins in costume, in sackcloth robes with a rope around the waist. There was no sign of their being viewed with disfavour by the Mohammedan part of the assembly, a laudable show of tolerance, especially amidst a conventicle of fanatics.
The hall of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari was not circular in shape like that of the Whirling Dervishes of Pera. It was a rectangle devoid of any architectural character; on the bare walls were hung fifteen or so enormous Basque drums and a few signs inscribed with verses from the Koran. On the side containing the mihrab, above the carpet where the imam and his acolytes sat, the wall offered a kind of savage display, recalling the workshop of a torturer or inquisitor; it consisted of darts of a kind terminating in a lead heart, from which hung small chains, sharpened larding-rods, maces, pincers, tongs and all sorts of instruments, disturbing and barbarous in shape, intended for some incomprehensible but frightening use, which made one’s flesh crawl like the surgeon’s set of instruments unfolded before an operation. It is with these atrocious tools that the howling Dervishes scourge, slash and perforate themselves, when they have reached the highest degree of religious fury, and when cries are no longer sufficient to express their sacred and orgiastic delirium.
The imam was a tall, bony, dry old man, with a scored and furrowed face, most dignified and majestic. Beside him stood a handsome young man wearing a white turban held by a transverse gold band, and an emir-green pelisse, such as is worn by descendants of the prophet or hadjis who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca; his profile, pure, sad and gentle, was of the Arab type more than the Turkish, and his complexion, of a uniform olive tone, seemed to confirm such an origin.
Opposite were the Dervishes in sacramental attitudes, repeating, in unison, a kind of litany intoned by a large fellow with a Herculean chest and the neck of a bull, and endowed with iron lungs and a stentorian voice. At each verse, they swayed their heads from front to back, and from back to front, with the motion of those ape-like poussahs (tumbler toys) which ultimately produce an empathetic feeling of vertigo when looked at long enough.
Sometimes one of the Muslim spectators, dazed by this irresistible oscillation, would stagger from his place, mingle with the Dervishes, prostrate himself, and then begin padding about like a bear in a cage.
The sound of the singing rose higher and higher; the swaying became more rapid, faces grew livid and chests heaved. The coryphaeus (leader of the chorus) accentuated the sacred words with redoubled energy, and we awaited, full of anxiety and terror, the scenes which might follow.
A few Dervishes, well-accustomed to the rite, had risen and continued their jolting, at the risk of striking their heads against the walls, and dislocating their neck vertebrae through their furious movements.
Soon all were on their feet. This was the moment when the drumming usually picked up speed, but this time did not do so, the subjects being roused enough; moreover, because of the Ramadan fast, the drummers did not want to over-excite them. The Dervishes formed a chain, each placing their arms on the shoulders of the fellow in front, and began to justify their name by drawing from the depths of their chests a hoarse and prolonged howl: Allāhu! which did not seem to belong to the human voice.
The whole band, united in movement, stepped back and threw themselves forward with a simultaneous burst of energy, howling in a dull, hoarse tone, which resembled the sound of zoo creatures, in a bad mood; lions, tigers, panthers, and hyenas that think the hour of feeding is long overdue.
Inspiration arose little by little, the Dervishes’ eyes shone like the pupils of wild beasts in the depths of a cavern; an epileptic foam frothed at the corners of their lips, their faces melted and gleamed, lividly, with sweat; the whole line bowed down and rose again as if beneath an invisible gust, like ears of corn in a storm, and always, with each burst of activity, the terrible Allāhu! was repeated with increased energy.
How such screams, repeated for over an hour, fail to burst the bony cage of the chest and cause blood to spurt from the ruptured vessels, I cannot explain.
One of the Dervishes, in the middle of the line, had a very characteristic head; you have seen, without doubt, hanging on the wall of some studio, the plaster mortuary mask of Théodore Géricault (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) with its hollow temples, sunken eye sockets, cheekbones sculpted in relief, aquiline nose pinched in death, and its beard wet and sticky with the sweat of agony; spread an old yellow parchment over that funereal cast, and you would have an exact image of that howling Dervish of Scutari, emaciated, and as if dissected, by fanatical effort. His wild and vigorous leanness made me think of those fierce verses in which Al-Shanfara, the pre-Islamic poet, sketches his rugged physiognomy. The Dervish could have said like him: ‘At dawn I set out to run, where one wilderness leads to another, having eaten only a mouthful, like a wolf with lean buttocks and greying fur; when the callused soles of my feet strike the harsh ground strewn with pebbles, they draw sparks, they shatter them; lean as I am, I choose the ground for my bed, on the earth I stretch, a spine held high by dry vertebrae; for a pillow, my bony arm whose protruding joints look like knuckle bones thrown down by a gambler, cast to the field.’
The howls became roars; the Dervish whose portrait I have sketched swung his head scourged by his long black hair, and drew from his skeletal chest the hoarse snarls of a tiger, the growls of a lion, the yelps of a wounded wolf bleeding in the snow, cries full of rage and desire, death-rattles of strange voluptuousness, and sometimes sighs of mortal sadness, protests of the body crushed by the millstone of the soul.
Excited by the feverish ardour of this raging devotee, the whole troop, gathering a remnant of strength, threw themselves backward in unison, then launched themselves forward, like a line of drunken soldiers, howling a supreme Allāhu! unrelated to any known sound, such as one might imagine the bellow of a mammoth or a mastodon to have been amidst the colossal horsetails (equisetum) of the antediluvian marshes; the floor trembled under the rhythmic trampling of the howling band, and the walls seemed ready to split, like the ramparts of Jericho, at this horrid clamour.
The two Capuchins laughed imbecilely in their beards, finding all this most absurd, without reflecting on the fact that they themselves were Catholic Dervishes of a kind, mortifying themselves in a different way to draw closer to a different god; the Dervishes sought Allah and called upon him with their howls, as the Capuchins seek Jehovah through prayer, fasting and ascetic exercises. I confess that their lack of empathy stirred a bad mood in me, I who understand the priests of Attis (the Galli), the Hindu fakirs, the Trappists and the Dervishes writhing beneath the immense pressure of infinity and eternity, seeking to appease the unknown god by immolation of the flesh and libations of their blood. This Dervish who roused the Capuchins to laughter seemed to me as beautiful, with his ecstatic face, as Francisco de Zurbarán’s painting of some monk, livid with a like ecstasy, revealing in the shadows a praying mouth and two eternally joined hands.
The excitement was at its height; their howls followed one another without pause; a wild menagerie odour was released from all those sweating bodies. Through the dust raised by the feet of these madmen, their convulsed, epileptic masks, illuminated by white eyes and strange smiles grimaced vaguely, as through a reddish fog.
The imam stood before the mihrab, encouraging the growing frenzy of voice and gesture. A young boy broke from the group and advanced towards the old man; I realised then what the terrible instruments hanging on the wall were for; acolytes took from its nail an exceedingly sharp larding-skewer and handed it to the imam, who pierced the young devotee’s cheeks from side to side with the pointed iron, without the lad giving the slightest sign of pain. The operation done, the penitent returned to his place and continued his frantic nodding. Nothing was more bizarre than this head on a spit; one might have thought it one of those pantomime piercings whereby Harlequin passes his stick through Pierrot’s body; only here the piercing was real.
Two other fanatics, naked to the waist, hurled themselves into the centre of the room; they were given two of those sharp darts ending in a lead heart and iron chains, and, brandishing one in each hand, they began to perform a sort of violent disorderly dagger-dance, full of unexpected jolts and galvanic somersaults. Only, instead of avoiding the points of the darts, they rushed at them furiously in order to prick and wound themselves; they soon rolled on the ground, exhausted, panting, streaming with blood, sweat, and foam, like horses ploughed by the spur and dropping from fatigue near to their goal.
A pretty little girl of seven or eight, as pale as Goethe’s Mignon, with black wistful eyes, who had been standing by the door during the whole ceremony, advanced all alone towards the imam. The old man received her in a friendly and paternal manner. The little girl stretched out on a sheepskin unrolled on the ground, and the imam, his feet in large slippers, supported by his two assistants, stepped onto her frail body and stood there for a few seconds. Then he descended from this living pedestal, and the little girl rose again all joyful.
Women brought little children of three or four who were laid down one after the other on the sheepskin and gently trampled underfoot by the imam. Some took it well, others cried in a lively manner like jays being plucked. One could see their eyes popping out of their heads, and their little ribs bending under the enormous pressure; the mothers, their eyes shining with faith, took them up in their arms and soothed them with a few caresses; the children were succeeded by youngsters, grown men, soldiers, and even a senior officer, who submitted to the salutary imposition of those feet, since, according to Muslim notions, the pressure cures all illness.
As we left the tekke, we saw the young boy again, whose cheeks the imam had pierced with the larding-pin. He had withdrawn the instrument of torture, and two slight purple scars, already closed, alone indicated the passage of the iron skewer.
Chapter 13: The Scutari Cemetery
I know not why, but Turkish cemeteries fail to inspire me with the same sadness as Christian ones. A visit to Père-Lachaise plunges me into a funereal melancholy for several days, yet I have spent entire hours at the Champ-des-Morts of Pera and Scutari without experiencing any other feeling than a vague, sweet reverie. Is it to the beauty of the sky, the brilliance of the light, and the romantic charm of the site that this indifference should be attributed, or to religious prejudice, acting without one’s knowledge and making one despise the tombs of infidels with whom one has no shared destiny in the other world? This is what I have not been able to clearly unravel, although I have often reflected on it; it is perhaps due to some purely physical cause.
Catholicism has clothed death with a dark and terrifying poetry unknown to paganism and Mohammedanism; it has clothed its tombs with lugubrious, cadaverous forms, combining to evoke dread, while Classical urns are surrounded by charming bas-reliefs in which graceful spirits play amidst foliage, and Muslim cippi, dappled with azure and gold, seem, beneath the shade of beautiful trees, rather kiosks of eternal rest than abodes for corpses. In Istanbul I often smoked my pipe seated on a tomb, an action which would seem irreverent to me at home, and yet a thin slab of marble alone separated me from the body buried at ground level.
More than once I have crossed the cemetery of Pera, at the most enchanted of moonlit hours, when the white funeral columns rise, amidst the shadows, like the nuns of Sainte-Rosalie in the third act of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, without my heart gaining a single beat; a thing I could not perform in the Montmartre cemetery except with a feeling of unconquerable horror, with an icy sweat on the skin of my back, and shuddering nervously at the slightest noise, though I have, a hundred times, faced in my life as a traveller, objects of terror far more real; yet, in the Orient, death is mingled so familiarly with life, that one no longer dreads it. The dead beside whom one drinks one’s coffee, and smokes one’s chibouk, cannot rise as ghosts. So, on leaving the menagerie of howling Dervishes, I accepted with pleasure, as a relief from that hideous spectacle, the proposal of a walk to Scutari’s ‘Field of the Dead’, the best situated, largest, and most populated in the Orient.
An immense cypress wood covers its hilly terrain, transected by wide avenues and bristling with cippi over an area of more than a league. One can gain no idea, in the countries of the North, on seeing the thin poles we designate as cypresses, of the degree of beauty and development which the tree acquires in warmer latitudes, a friend of tombs, but one which awakens no melancholy thoughts in the East and adorns gardens as well as cemeteries.
With age, the cypress trunks reveal rough ribs similar to the aggregations of Gothic columns in cathedrals; their crumbling bark becomes silvery with shades of grey, their branches project unexpectedly, and bend curiously in unsymmetrical curves, without however destroying the pyramidal design and upward ascent of the foliage, massed sometimes in thick clumps, sometimes in sparse tufts. Their bare and tortuous roots grip the earth at the edge of roads, like the talons of a vulture perched over its prey, and sometimes resemble serpents half-retracted into their holes.
The cypress-tree’s dense, dark verdure resists the harsh fires of the sun, and always retains enough vigor to contrast in hue with the intense blue of the sky. No tree has a more majestic attitude, at the same time graver and more serious than that of others. Its apparent uniformity shows chance variations appreciated by the painter, but not disturbing the general order. It complements, admirably, the architecture of Italian villas, and the black tips of tall specimens mingle fittingly with the white columns of the minarets; while such trees’ brown drapery forms, on the higher slopes of the hills, a background against which the coloured wooden houses of the Turkish cities are highlighted in flickering touches of vermilion.
I had already acquired a love of cypresses in Spain, in the gardens of the Generalife and the Alhambra itself, which my stay in Constantinople, by satisfying it, only increased. Two cypresses in particular indelibly engraved their silhouette in my memory, and the name Granada cannot be pronounced without my seeing them spring up immediately above the red walls of that ancient palace of the Moorish kings, of which they are certainly contemporaries. With what pleasure I perceived them,
‘Noirs soupirs de feuillage élancés vers les cieux,’
‘Black sighs of foliage launched towards the skies,’
(See Gautier’s poem: ‘La Fontaine du Cimetière’)
when I returned from my excursions in the Alpujarras, mounted on a mule, its harnesses covered with frills and bells, in the company of that hunter of eagles, Romero, or my guide, Lanza! But let us return to the cypresses of Scutari, worthy of posing for Prosper Marilhat, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, or Louis Godefroy Jadin.
A cypress is planted beside each grave; every standing tree represents a dead person lying flat, and as, in this earth saturated with human fertiliser, the vegetation enjoys rapid growth, and every day new graves are dug, the funereal forest swiftly increases in breadth and height. The Turks do not know the system of temporary concession and reclamation of land which renders the cemeteries of Paris like regularly-felled woodland. The economics of death are not understood as thoroughly by these honest barbarians: the dead, rich or poor, once stretched on their last bed, sleep there till the trumpets of the Last Judgment shall waken them, and the hand of Man, at least, does not disturb them there.
Close to the living city, extends the wide necropolis, recruiting peaceful inhabitants who never emigrate. The inexhaustible quarries of Marmara provide each of these mute citizens with a marble headstone that gives their name and home, and, though a coffin occupies little space and the ranks are tight-pressed, the city of the dead covers more area than its counterpart: millions of corpses have lain there since the conquest of Byzantium by Mahmud II. If time, which destroys everything, even the grave, did not tumble the tombstones and rob them of their turbans, and if the dust of the ages, and its invisible gravediggers, did not slowly cover the ruins of shattered tombs, a patient statistician could, by counting these funeral columns, obtain a total for the past population of Constantinople, since 1453, the date of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. Without the intervention of Nature, which everywhere tends to resume a primitive form, the Turkish empire would soon be nothing more than a vast cemetery from which the dead would drive the living.
I first followed the main path, bordered by two immense curtains of a dark green that produces the most magically funereal effect; marble-workers, squatting quietly on their haunches, were sculpting tombs at the edge of the way; arabas passed filled with women going to Haydarpaşa; Muslim ladies of pleasure, their eyebrows joined by a stroke of Indian ink, and whose rouge showed through under yashmaks of light muslin, strolled by, irritating Turkish citizens by means of their lascivious glances and loud laughter. Soon I left the beaten path, and, quitting my companions, headed at random among the tombs to study the Oriental funeral style more closely. I have already said, concerning the Petit-Champ of Pera, that Turkish tombs consist of a kind of marble term ending in an orb vaguely simulating a human face and topped with a turban whose folds and shape indicate the rank of the deceased, the turban is these days replaced by a coloured fez. A stone decorated with a lotus-stem or a vine-stock, with branches and bunches of grapes sculpted in relief and painted, designates a woman. Usually, at the foot of each cippus, varying little except in the degree of richness of the gilding and colours, lies a slab, scooped out at the centre to form a small basin a few inches deep, in which the relatives and friends of the deceased place flowers, and into which they pour milk or perfume.
One day the flowers fade and are no longer renewed, for no grief is eternal, and life would be impossible without forgetfulness. Rain-water replaces rose-water; little birds come to drink these tears fallen from the sky, where tears from the heart once fell. Doves dip their wings in this marble bathtub, and dry themselves, cooing in the sun on a neighbouring cippus, and the dead, deceived, think they hear a loyal sigh. Nothing is fresher and more graceful than this winged life warbling among the tombs. Sometimes a turbé (funeral chapel) with Moorish arcades rises, monumentally, between the humbler tombs, serving as the sepulchral kiosk for a Pasha surrounded by his family.
The Turks, who are serious, slow, and majestic in all the actions of life, hasten only to death. The body, as soon as it has undergone the lustral ablutions, is carried to the cemetery at a run, then oriented towards Mecca, and promptly covered with a few handfuls of dust; this is due to ancient superstition. Muslims believe that the corpse suffers as long as it is not returned to the earth, from which it came. The imam questions the deceased on the principal articles of faith of the Koran, silence being taken for acquiescence; the assistants answer Amin, and the procession disperses, leaving the dead alone for all eternity.
Then Munkar and Nakir, two funereal angels whose turquoise eyes shine in their ebony faces, question him about his virtues or perversities in life, and, according to his answers, assign him the place that his soul should occupy, in Hell or Paradise, though the Muslim Hell is merely purgatory, since, the deceased’s faults having been expiated by means of more or less lengthy and atrocious torments, every male believer ends up enjoying the embraces of the houris, and both sexes the ineffable sight of Allah.
At the head of the grave, a kind of hole or conduit is left open leading to the ear of the corpse so it may hear the moans, utterances, and protests of family and friends. This opening, too often widened by dogs and jackals, is like an air vent for the sepulchre, or a peephole through which this world can gaze into the other.
Walking without a specific aim, I had arrived at a portion of the cemetery that was older and consequently more deserted. The funeral columns, almost all out of true, leaned to right or left. Many had fallen as if tired of having remained so long standing, and judging it useless to mark a grave now erased and un-remembered. The earth, compacted by the collapse of the coffins, or washed away by the rain, guarded the secrets of the tomb less closely. At almost every step my foot struck some fragment of a jaw, a vertebra, a section of rib, the head of a femur; through the short and sparse lawn, I sometimes saw a lone protuberance gleam, white as ivory and as spherical and polished as an ostrich egg. It was a skull, flush with the ground. In the pits that had been exposed, pious hands had placed the small bones that had been excavated more or less in the correct order; other skeletal fragments rolled like pebbles along the empty pathways.
I felt seized by a strange, horrible curiosity: a desire to look through those holes of which I spoke just now, so as to surprise the mysteries of the tomb and see death within its interior. I leaned through such a ‘skylight’ opening onto nothingness, and was able to view, at my ease, human remains in a state of undress. I could see the skull, yellow, livid, grimacing, with hollow eye-sockets and dislocated mandibles, and the slender cage of the chest half-obliterated by sand or black humus, over which the bones of an arm fell nonchalantly. The rest was lost in the shadowy earth: the sleeper seemed peaceful and, far from frightening me as I expected, the spectacle reassured me. There was really nothing there but phosphate of lime and, the soul having evaporated, Nature gradually took back into herself these physical elements, so as to produce new variants.
Though I had once dreamed a Comedy of Death (Gautier’s poetic reflections, ‘La Comédie de la Morte’, of 1838) in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, I could never have written a stanza of it in the cemetery of Scutari. In the shade of those tranquil cypresses, a human skull had no more effect on me than a stone, and the peaceful fatalism of the Orient took hold despite my Christian terror of death, and my Catholic studies of the sepulchre. None of the corpses in question answered me. All was silence, rest, oblivion, a dreamless sleep in the bosom of Cybele, the sacred Mother of all. I put my ear to each half-open coffin, but heard no other sound than that of the spider spinning its web; none of those sleeping forms, lying on their sides, had turned about, through feeling ill at ease; and I continued my walk, stepping over the fragments of marble, walking on human remains, calm, serene, almost smiling, and thinking without too much fear of the day when the foot of some passer-by would make my hollow and sonorous skull roll about like an empty cup.
The sun’s rays, gliding through the black pyramids of the cypress trees, fluttered like will-o’-the-wisps over the whiteness of those tombs; the doves cooed, and, in the blue of the sky, the kites described their circles.
A few groups of women, seated in the centre of a small carpet in the company of an African servant or a child, were dreaming melancholically or resting, lulled by the mirage of some tender memory. The air was charmingly sweet, and I felt life flooding through every pore, amidst this dark forest whose ground was composed of once living dust.
I rejoined my friends, and we traversed a modern portion of the cemetery. I saw, there, recent tombs, surrounded by railings, and small gardens in imitation of those in Père-Lachaise. Death also has its fashions, and there were none but decent folk there, buried in accord with the latest taste. For my part, I prefer those markers made of marble from Marmara, with a sculpted turban, and a verse from the Koran in gold letters.
The road leading from the cemetery led to the large plain of Haydarpasha, a sort of parade ground which extends between Scutari and the enormous neighbouring barracks of Kadi-Keuï (Kadikoy); retaining walls, of old broken tombs, bordered both sides of the path, and formed a terrace three or four feet high which presented the most cheerful sight; one might have thought it an immense bed of animated flowers, for two or three rows of women, squatted on mats and rugs, draped elegantly in their feredjes, of contrasting colours of pink, sky-blue, apple-green, and lilac. In front of them, the red jackets, daffodil-yellow trousers, and brocade waistcoats of their children sparkled, adorned with luminous sequins and gold embroidery.
At first, the effect of the feredje and the yashmak, on the traveller, is that of the domino at an Opéra ball, where at first one can divine nothing; one experiences a sort of bedazzlement before those anonymous shadows which whirl before you, all similar to each other in appearance. One fails to distinguish them; but soon the eye grows accustomed to this uniformity, discovers differences, appreciates forms under the satin which veils them. Some ill-disguised grace betrays youth; mature age is marked by some forty-year-old feature. A propitious or fatal breath lifts the covering of lace; the mask allows the face to appear, the dark phantom changes to a woman. It is the same in the Orient: the ample drapery of merino, resembling a dressing-gown or a bath-wrap, ends up losing its mystery; the yashmak becomes unexpectedly transparent, and, despite all the envelopes with which Muslim jealousy burdens her, a Turkish woman, when one does not look at her too formally, ends up being as visible as a French woman.
The feredje that hides the form can also emphasise it: tightly-fitting folds outline what they should veil; by opening it under the pretext of adjusting it, a Turkish coquette (there are some) sometimes shows, through the notch of her gold-embroidered velvet jacket, an opulent throat barely clouded by a gauzy vest, a marble chest that owes nothing to the corset’s deceit; those who have pretty hands knowingly extend their tapering fingers, the nails dyed with henna, outside the cloak that envelops them. There are certain ways of making the muslin of the yashmak opaque or transparent by doubling the folds or leaving them be; one can make that initially unwelcoming white mask sit higher or lower, and enlarge or narrow, at will, the space between it and the head-dress. Between these two white bands shine, like black diamonds, like stars of jet, the most charming eyes in the world, further brightened by kohl, which seem to concentrate in them all the expression of the half-obscured face.
Walking slowly along the middle of the street, I was able to review, at my leisure, this gallery of Turkish beauties as I would have examined a row of boxes at the Opéra or the Théâtre-Italien. My red fez, my buttoned frock-coat, my beard, and my swarthy complexion, moreover, allowed me to blend in among the crowd, and my appearance was not too scandalously Parisian.
On the turf of Haydarpasha arabas, talikas, even coupés and broughams, paraded gravely, filled with richly adorned women whose diamonds sparkled in the sunlight, barely dimmed by the white mists of their muslins, like stars behind thin cloud; kavasses on foot and on horseback accompanied some of these carriages, in which odalisques from the imperial harem indolently displayed their boredom.
Here and there small groups, of half a dozen women or so, rested in the shade, sheltering there, beneath the guarded gaze of a black eunuch, near the araba which had brought them, and seeming to pose for a painting by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps or Narcisse Diaz. The large greyish oxen ruminated peacefully and waved, to disperse the flies, the tufts of red wool suspended from the curved projections planted in their yoke, or attached to their tails by a string; with their grave air and their foreheads studded with steel plates, those beautiful beasts had the air of priests of Mithras or Zoroaster.
Vendors of snow-water, sherbet, grapes, and cherries ran from one group to another, offering their wares to the Greeks and Armenians, and contributed to the animation of the scene. There were also vendors of sliced Smyrna carpous (melons) and pink-fleshed watermelons.
Riders, mounted on beautiful horses, indulged in fantastic evolutions at some distance from the carriages, doubtless in honour of some invisible beauty; thoroughbreds from the Nedj, Hejaz, and Kurdistan shook their long silken manes, proudly, and made their jewelled caparisons sparkle, feeling themselves admired, and sometimes, when a rider’s back was turned, a charming head leaned out of the window of a talika.
The sun was setting, and I took the road to Scutari again, dreamily, and filled with vague desires, where my caïdji (boatman) was awaiting me patiently, enjoying a cup of cloudy coffee and a chibouk of Latakia as was his right, being a Greek Christian and not subject to the rigours of Ramadan.
Chapter 14: Karagöz
I am fearful, in talking endlessly about cemeteries, of seeming to write The Travel Impressions of a Mortician! But I am not at fault: my intention was scarcely lugubrious. I wished to take you with me to see Karagöz, the Turkish Punchinello; and, to get to his booth, one is obliged to cross the ‘Great Field of the Dead’ of Pera: what can one do? However, there is no trace of melancholy about the leading character that this Chinese shadow-theatre, lodged between two tombs, presents.
When you have pursued the long main street of Pera to its end, you reach a fountain shaded by a clump of plane-trees, near which stand renters of horses, offering you their beasts while shouting çelebi, signor, or monsou, according to whether they are more or less polyglot; talikas and arabas waiting for fares; and sellers of sorbets, lemonade, white mulberries, cucumbers, cakes and solid confectionery, always surrounded by a large clientele.
Groups of women seated at the edge of the road, which has widened vaguely into a square, fix their large black eyes on you, boldly, and amuse themselves by watching the motley crowd of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Bulgarians, and Europeans, who come and go on foot, horseback, mules, and donkeys, and in carriages of every shape and from every country.
The cannon-shot that signals sunset, and ends the Ramadan fast, has just sounded. The cafés are filling, and clouds of tobacco-smoke are rising on every side; the tarboukas are sounding, the metal discs of the tambourines are shivering, the rebecs are screeching, the flutes shrilling, and the nasal voices of the itinerant singers are yelping and crying in every possible tone, forming a joyous charivari.
On the esplanade of the artillery barracks, elegant men parade their horses, and black eunuchs, with their puffy, hairless cheeks and enormous legs, launch their superb mounts at full speed. They challenge each other to races, uttering little shrill cries, and gallop along without displaying the least concern for the red and yellow dogs sleeping with imperturbable fatalism in the dust.
Further on, children play tag, perched on the flat graves of Armenians and Greek Christians, graves deprived of any religious emblem, as if this Muslim land only tolerates the dead of a different faith; these philosophical urchins seem wholly unaware that they are treading on ground kneaded from human dust; they display an ardour for life, bursts of gaiety, that folk would have difficulty comprehending in France, but which seem quite natural in Turkey.
The Petit-Champ-des-Morts represents our Boulevard des Italiens, the Grand-Champ stands in for our Bois de Boulogne: it is a kind of turf where fashionable Europeans and Turkish çelebis display their English or Barbary steeds; a few carriages, calèches, American buggies, or coupés, brought from Paris or Vienna by steamboat, transport the rich families of Pera to the spot. They would be more numerous if the execrable paving-stones and the narrowness of the streets allowed; but the picture is no less lively, and these products of civilised coachwork contrast well enough with the heavy shapes, and outdated gilding and paintwork of the arabas, though the latter are much preferable from the artistic viewpoint.
Perhaps the dead lying beneath the cypress trees prefer this lively tumult to the chill silence, the gloomy solitude, the glacial abandonment which surrounds them elsewhere; they remain amongst their contemporaries, their friends, or their descendants, and are not relegated beyond their circle as sinister objects, in the way scarecrows are; the living city does not reject them in horror and disgust; this show of familiarity, which seems impious at first sight, displays more tenderness, in truth, than our superstitious reserve.
While waiting for the performance involving Karagöz, I entered a small café whose windows at the rear, wide open, framed an admirable view. Beyond the cypresses of the cemetery, one could see the Bosphorus and the shore of Asia-Minor. Through the rosy twilit air, Scutari was highlighted against its dark green background, and the minarets of the Buyuk-Cami and Grand Selimiye mosques were crowned with their illuminated tiaras; the tip of Chalcedon (Kadikoy) advanced, burdened with its monumental barracks, and Leander’s Tower emerged, from the blue water, sparkling with foam, bearing on its brow a light like a gold spangle on a muslin turban.
Leaning on the window-sill against which the divan was placed, I was nonchalantly smoking my chibouk, which had already been renewed several times, when my Constantinopolitan friend, previously detained by some business matter, arrived to join me. We crossed the cemetery, and, in the shadow of a large curtain of cypresses, discovered a line of small wooden houses forming a kind of street, one side of which was composed of tombs.
At the door of one of these houses a yellowish glow flickered, shed by a night light set in a glass; a naive means of lighting widely used in Constantinople. The performance was to take place here. We entered after having thrown a few piastres to an old Turk, crouching near a chest which both represented the cash register and marked the entrance.
The performance took place in a garden planted with a few trees; low stools for the natives, straw chairs for the giaours, replaced the usual benches and stalls; the audience was numerous; pipes and hookahs emitted bluish spirals which met in a fragrant mist above the heads of the smokers, while the bowls of their pipes, propped against the ground, sparkled like glow-worms. The blue night-sky, dotted with stars, served as the ceiling, and the moon played the role of a chandelier; waiters ran about carrying cups of coffee and glasses of water, the obligatory accompaniment to any Turkish pleasure. We were seated in the front row, directly opposite the Karagöz Theatre, next to some young fellows, wearing tarbooshes whose long blue silk tufts fell to the middle of their backs like Chinese pigtails, who were laughing loudly in anticipation as they awaited the play.
The Karagöz theatre was even more primitively simple than a Punchinello booth: a walled corner over which an opaque tapestry was hung, from which a square of white canvas had been cut, and which was lit from behind, was enough to establish its form; a lantern illuminated it, a tambourine served as its orchestra; nothing could be less complex. The impresario stands in the triangle formed by the corner of the walls and the tapestry, surrounded by the figurines that he makes speak and move.
The luminous field on which the silhouettes of the little actors were to be projected shone amidst the darkness, the focal point on which all the impatient glances converged. Soon a shadow interposed itself between the canvas and the lantern flame. A translucent, coloured cut-out was placed against the gauze. It was of a Chinese pheasant perched on a shrub; the tambourine rattled and banged; a guttural and strident voice, singing a strange melody with a rhythm elusive to European ears, rose in the silence; for, at the appearance of the bird, the hum of conversation and the vague murmurs resulting from a crowd of men, even quiet ones, had suddenly died. It was the equivalent of raising the curtain to begin the performance.
The pheasant vanished, yielding to a kind of stage-set representing the exterior of a garden enclosed by gates and trellis-work, above which grew green trees quite similar, in their naivety of the form, to those of Nuremberg toys cut chip by chip from a piece of fir-wood.
A hoarse burst of laughter was heard announcing the entrance of Karagöz, and a grotesque figurine, six to eight inches high, came and planted itself before the garden trellis with extravagant gestures.
Karagöz deserves particular description. His mask, necessarily always seen in silhouette as his state, being a Chinese shadow-puppet, requires, presents a fairly successful caricature of the Turkish type. His parrot-shaped nose curves over a short, curly, black beard, projecting forward from a chin like a sabot. A broad eyebrow traces an inky line above his eye, viewed from the front of his profiled head, with a boldness of drawing that is wholly Byzantine; his face presents a mixture of stupidity, lust and cunning, for he is at once Monsieur Prudhomme (a foolish character created on-stage by the actor Henry-Bonaventure Monnier,), Priapus (the Greek god of fertility and sexuality), and Robert Macaire (a swindler, created on stage by the actor Frédérick Lemaître after an original character devised by Benjamin Antier); an old-fashioned turban covers Karagöz’s shaved head; he removes it at every opportunity, a comic device that never fails to produce its effect; a jacket, a vest of variegated colours, and broad trousers, complete his costume. His arms and legs are mobile.
Karagöz differs from the fantoccini (puppet shows) of François Dominique Séraphin (who popularised shadow-plays) in that, instead of the shapes being highlighted in opaque black on oiled paper, they are painted in translucent colours, like the figures of a magic lantern. The most accurate idea I can give is that of forms in stained glass detached from the leaded surround that circumscribes and outlines them. To the black strips, made of cardboard, tinplate or any other resistant material, which create highlights and shadows, are applied translucent films tinted green, blue, yellow, or red, according to the colour of the clothing, or the object that one sets out to represent. Javanese shadow-figures are therefore much closer to Karagöz’s theatre than their Chinese equivalents. But enough of the structure and colouring of the Turkish Punchinello. This same description serves for all the other actors, constructed according to the same principles.
Like a prince in some tragedy, Karagöz has a confidant named Hadji-aïvat (Hacivat), half Mascarille (the cunning valet in Molière’s comedies) and half Bertrand (companion to Robert Macaire in the play L’Auberge des Adrets, by Benjamin Antier), a dubious aide, who gives him his cue, and mocks him while serving him: Karagöz cannot be conceived without Hadji-aïvat, any more than Orestes without Pylades (in Greek myth), Euryale without Nisus (in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’), or Castor without Pollux (the twin Greek gods), and the mischievous and quarrelsome pairing is employed throughout the entire burlesque repertoire; Hadji-aïvat has a body slender as a sprite, and his slenderness contrasts with Karagöz’s robust build.
The garden described a moment ago contains a mysterious beauty, a houri of Mahommed’s, who excites Karagöz’s libidinous desire to the highest degree. He would like to enter this paradise garden defended by fierce guards, and to achieve his aim invents all sorts of ploys which are successively thwarted: sometimes a eunuch threatens him with his sabre; sometimes a dog with sharp teeth, baying loudly, hurls itself at his legs and savages his ankles; Hadji-aïvat, no less a libertine than his master, seeks to disguise himself as Karagöz and take his place close to the lovely girl. He complicates the action with all sorts of perfidious blunders, the cause of altercations and comical battles between himself and his master. This scoundrel does not even possess Mascarille’s virtues, the latter at least refrains from courting the objects of Lélie’s affection (see Molière’s play ‘L’Étourdi ou les Contretemps’).
A new character now presents himself. He is a young man, the son of people of note, dressed in a frock-coat and wearing a tarbouch, like a young Turk in an embassy. He holds in his hand a pot of basil, a symbol of the state of his soul, a visible and permanent declaration of love; Karagöz notes this naive lover and becomes attached to him; he extracts money from him by promising to send it to the one he loves, and leads him around like one of Molière’s slavish characters, an idiotic and credulous Valère or Éraste (see Moliere’s plays ‘Tartuffe’ and ‘Le Dépit Amoureux’ respectively); Karagöz’s aim is to follow the effendi into this paradise defended by black Africans with fiery whips, and villainously steal his sweetheart.
Persians, attracted by the reputation of the beautiful one, also arrive, and wait in front of the garden gates. They are mounted on horses, striped like tigers and strangely caparisoned. Tall Astrakan hats adorn their heads, and they hold in their hands battle axes from which they are inseparable. Karagöz tries to conciliate the newcomers, and tells them all sorts of tales, each more absurd than the last, but proportionate to the stupidity that the Turks suppose the Persians to possess. Hadji-aïvat also captures their attention; and the competitiveness aroused incites a dispute which ends with a prodigious volley of kicks and punches administered by Karagöz to his confidant. During this brawl, the lover slips into the harem, the door of which closes in the faces of the astonished Persians who, with altered disposition, fall as one on Karagöz and Hadji-aïvat, and a general melee ensues greeted by the audience with inextinguishable laughter.
I can only report here the action of the play; I know no Turkish unless it be the bizarre words inserted by Molière when penning the special ceremony in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and besides it is not one of those transparent Romance tongues, say Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, the meaning of whose phrases can be guessed at, even if one has little knowledge of the language itself; but it seems the dialogue was mostly burlesque, judging by the hilarity and bursts of laughter of those onlookers capable of understanding it.
The Turkish language lends itself to a host of the most droll and bizarre puns and equivocations. A letter or an accent suffices to change the meaning of a word. For example, acem means Persian; acemi means a bungler. Instead of acem baba, Karagöz never fails to say acemi baba (‘master bungler’), which excites Homeric laughter, the Persian playing, in Turkish theatre, the same role as the Englishman in vaudeville and the Frenchman in English drama. The poor Persians serve as a foil for all jokes and mystifications: their looks, emphatic pronunciation, awkwardly stiff attitudes, strange costumes, and the maces they always carry in their fists, like heroes of the Shahnameh, are parodied, even in situations which least require warlike apparatus. Probably in Persia the comical characters are Turks, just compensation between nations for such usage.
My polyglot friend translated for me here and there some of the salient passages; but it is impossible to give the slightest idea in our language of these broad jests, this hyperbolic bawdiness, which would require, if such were attempted, the dictionary of François Rabelais or François Béroualde de Verville, or of Eutrapel (a character in the works of Noël du Fail), supported by the poissard-genre catechisms of Jean-Joseph Vadé (the ‘poissard’ theatrical and poetic genre imitated the language of the market halls, notably that of the fishmongers). However, the Karagöz theatre of the Large Field-of-the-Dead has undergone censorship, or to put it more strongly, castration: he speaks obscenities, but no longer performs them; morality has disarmed him; he is a Punchinello without a stick, a satyr without horns, a god of Lampsacus in Abelard’s state, and, instead of acting, he tells of his lewd exploits in speeches in the style of Théramène (a character in Racine’s play ‘Phaedra’ whose speech at the end is notably turgid and lengthy). It is a more Classical style; but, quite frankly, tedious, and the originality of the drama loses much by it.
The dialogue is interspersed with pieces of poetry and ariettas (brief arias) in the style of vaudeville couplets, screeched to extravagant tunes, and supported by a ferocious tambourine accompaniment.
The Marriage of Karagöz is a spectacular piece. Karagöz has seen a charming young girl, and as he is of a very inflammable nature, has conceived a most lively passion for her. Let me note, in passing, that the female figures have their faces uncovered, contrary to Turkish custom. Karagöz’s beloved is in truth a rather pretty Chinese-puppet, her eyes tinted with surmeh (black eye-shadow), with a red mouth, cheeks plastered with rouge, and dressed in the costume of a Sultana from a comic opera, who wiggles about very coquettishly. The marriage concluded, Karagöz sends her the wedding presents: four arabas (carriages), four talikas (carts), four saddle-horses, four camels, four cows, four goats, four dogs, four cats, four cages full of birds, followed by hammals (porters) bearing sofas, pipes, hookahs, stools, pedestal-tables, carpets, lanterns, jewellery-boxes, clothes chests, crockery and domestic pottery. This parade, most instructive for a foreigner, to whom it introduces the details of Turkish housekeeping, is performed to a persistent Tartar march, in 4/4 time, which ends up sounding quite pleasant and lodges the motif firmly in one’s mind. All this magnificence does not save Karagöz from early marital misfortune. The young girl, erstwhile so slender, swells visibly due to a pregnancy in which her husband has no claim; poor Karagöz finds himself about to become a stepfather on the very day of his wedding, a phenomenon which singularly astonishes him, and to which he resigns himself, in the end, as a Parisian husband would.
All this amused me greatly, since it required, like the first, no knowledge of the language, and gave me the pleasure that ballet offers foreigners at the Opéra, who have no understanding of French.
The horses, camels, dogs, all the accompaniments to the parade were shaped with most delightful naivety, recalling the primitive style of Épinal prints (brightly coloured prints of popular subjects produced in Épinal, France, by a local company, Imagerie Pellerin); the Turks, whose religion forbids them to draw or paint likenesses of any living thing, have remained, in this respect, in a state of Gothic barbarity, and the Karagöz theatre puppets, the only representations of the human figure tolerated, suffer from a lack of sophistication; however the figures, like everything primitive, possess character, which a more skilled execution would take from them.
I returned to Pera through a deserted section of the cemetery, following an avenue lined with enormous cypress trees. The moon’s silver rays, filtered by their dark masses, highlighted, against a background of blackest opacity, the many white tombs which stood beside the path, like ghosts in their shrouds. A profound silence reigned within this funereal forest, disturbed from time to time only by the distant barking of a dog; I seemed to hear my own heartbeats, being the only living thing amidst the crowd of dead, when suddenly a voice rang in my ear, like the trumpet of the Last Judgment, and spoke a sentence to me, in French, which scarcely justified the shudder it provoked: ‘Monsieur, do you wish to buy the last of my rolls?’
The untimely offer of a pastry, in the depths of a cemetery, at midnight, the Romantic hour, the hour of apparitions, seemed so formidably grotesque that it both frightened me and roused my laughter; was this the shade of some compatriot of mine, a baker who had died in Constantinople, and risen from the tomb to offer me a phantom brioche? It was hardly likely. So, I walked towards the place whence the voice came.
A most real and solid fellow, heavily moustachioed, and well-built, held before him a small counter loaded with croquettes (fried rolls), awaiting unlikely custom at this solitary crossroads. He spoke French because he had served for some years as a ‘Turco’ (a nickname for the generally Algerian, not Turkish, soldiers who served in the French army’s light infantry in Algeria), and, disgusted with warfare, had devoted himself to this peaceful nocturnal pastry business.
I bought his stock for about thirty paras, reserving the right to pay tribute to any dogs I might meet out late, and continued on my way.
Next day, in order that I might continue my study of the Turkish Punchinello, my friend suggested I visit Tophane, where, uncensored performances of Karagöz were produced in the rear courtyard of a café, with all the lewd and ludicrous freedom they entailed.
The courtyard was full of folk. Children, especially little girls of eight or nine years old, abounded. There were some delightful ones, recalling, in their still uncertain gender, those pretty heads of Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’ painting Leaving the Turkish School (1841, Louvre), so gracefully bizarre and fantastically charming. Their lovely eyes, wide with astonishment and delight, blooming like black flowers, watched Karagöz giving himself over to a Saturnalia of impurities, soiling everything with his monstrous caprices. Each erotic feat of his wrung from these naively corrupt little angels bursts of silvery laughter and endless hand-clapping; modern prudishness would not tolerate an attempt on my part to describe this mad Atellan farce (the Atellan plays were masked and improvised farces in ancient Rome), in which the lascivious scenes of Aristophanes merge with the droll dreams of Rabelais; Imagine the ancient god of fertility (Priapus) dressed as a Turk, and let loose amidst the harems, bazaars, slave-markets, and cafés, whirling, in a thousand imbroglios of oriental life, among his victims, impudently, cynically and with joyous ferocity. It is impossible to take ithyphallic extravagance, and the obscenities of a debauched imagination, further.
The Medak or Eastern Story-Teller
The Karagöz booth often visits seraglios, and performances are given there, which the women follow hidden behind screens with grilles. How can such an unrestrained spectacle be reconciled with such a severe moral code? Is it not because the steam from an over-heated boiler always needs an outlet, and the strictest morality must leave room for human salaciousness? Besides, these unregulated fantasies are tame enough, and vanish like shadows when the stage-light is extinguished.
Viewing Karagöz, I connected him in my mind, via the line of Polichinelle, Pulcinella, Punch, Pickelhëring, and Old-Vice (a character in Medieval English morality plays), to Maccus, the Oscan puppet (a stock character in Atellan farce), and even to the automatons of the neurospaste (puppeteer: ‘neurospaste’ from the ancient Greek ‘puller of wires or threads’) Potheinus (see Athenaeus of Naucratis ‘Deipnosophistae: Book I, 35’ where the puppeteer Potheinos is said to have performed on ‘the very stage where Euripides and his contemporaries himself presented their inspired tragedies’) but all this erudite scaffolding was rendered useless on my being told that Karagöz was quite simply the caricature of one of Saladin’s viziers known for his deportment and lubricity, an origin for Karagöz that is contemporary with the Crusades, yet of sufficient antiquity for the noble lineage of a shadow-puppet.
Chapter 15: The Sultan at the Mosque - A Turkish Dinner.
It is customary for the Padishah to visit a mosque, every Friday, in great pomp, and perform his prayers publicly. Friday, as everyone knows, is to Muslims what Sunday is to Christians and Saturday to Jews: a day more especially devoted to religious practices, without however bringing with it the idea of obligatory rest.
Each week the ‘Commander of the Faithful’ visits a different mosque: Hagia Sophia, Suleymaniye, Nuruosmaniye, Sultan Bayezid II, Yeni-Cami, the Tulip (Laleli) Mosque, or some other, following a route known and marked in advance. Besides the fact that prayer in a religious building is required on that day according to the precepts of the Koran, which the Padisha, as head of the religion, cannot ignore, there is also, in this exercise of official piety, a political reason: which is to demonstrate to the eyes of the populace that the Sultan, who dwells all week deep in the mysterious solitude of the Seraglio or in one of the summer palaces scattered along the banks of the Bosphorus, is a living person. Crossing the city on horseback, visible to all, he certifies, in front of his people and the foreign embassies his very existence, no idle precaution, since palace intrigue might seek to conceal his natural or violent death. Even a serious illness fails to deter him from this parade, though Mahmud I, the son of Mustafa II, on returning from one of these Friday excursions, to which, barely able to support himself on his saddle, he had dragged himself, wearing make-up to hide his pallor, died on horseback (in 1754) betwixt the two gates of the Seraglio.
The hotel dragomans always know, on the day before, or on the day itself early in the morning, at which mosque the Sultan will offer his devotions, and I learned from the dragoman at the Byzantium Hotel that the Sultan would pass from the Çırağan Palace to the Küçük Mecidiye Mosque, situated close by. As the journey is quite long from Dervish-Sokak to Çırağan, and as Turkish timekeeping is somewhat difficult for foreigners to understand, when I arrived, in a sweat and half-baked by the torrid July sun, the procession had already filed by and the Sultan was reciting his prayers inside the mosque; but I had the option of waiting till he had finished, and seeing his exit and return, which amounted to exactly the same thing, except for an hour spent in the company of the English, Americans, Germans, and Russians who had arrived for the same reason.
The Küçük Mecidiye is attached to the Çırağan Palace, whose façade overlooks the Bosphorus, and which, on the landward side, shows only large walls surmounted by kitchen chimneys painted green and disguised by a columnar surround. The mosque is entirely modern, and its architecture with volutes and chicory-leaves in the Genoese rococo style is nothing remarkable, though its sparkling whiteness shows well against the dark blue of the sky.
The door of the mosque was open, and one could glimpse the viziers, Pashas and high officers wearing tarbouches, all with gold breastplates and large wide epaulettes, performing, despite their obesity, the rather complicated pantomimes of Oriental prayer; they knelt and rose heavily with a piety that seemed sincere, for philosophical ideas have made much less progress in Constantinople than is generally reported; even Turks raised in the European manner, on their return from London or Paris, are no less attached to the Koran, and it is enough to lightly scratch the varnish of civilisation to find the faithful believer.
Black African slaves and sais held the bridles or walked the horses of the Sultan and his suite, mounts cloaked in magnificent caparisons; fine robust creatures, solid in form, lacking the nervous elegance of the Arab breeds, but said to be highly resistant to fatigue; the slender steeds of the desert would bow beneath the weight of the massive Turkish horsemen, the majority of an excessive plumpness, especially those of high rank; these horses are of the Barbary breed and of a particular line. That of the Sultan could be recognised by the jewels that studded his shabraque (saddlecloth), and by the imperial cipher whose complicated arabesque embroidered each corner of the velvet which almost vanished beneath the decorative work.
Lines of soldiers were ranked along the walls, awaiting the exit of His Highness; they wore the red tarbouch (fez), and their uniform, similar to that of our regular troops in undress, consisted of a rounded jacket of blue cloth and trousers of coarse white canvas; this costume, which is more or less that of the ordinary citizen, produced a rather singular contrast with their characteristic, swarthy heads which the turbans of the Janissaries would have far better suited.
On the forecourt of the mosque a strip of black cashmere was spread, narrow enough for the passage of the Sultan; it led from the door, and followed the steps of the staircase, to a marble mounting block, such as is found at the entrance to palaces and near the landing stages for caiques. It seems to me, without however being able to confirm the fact, that this black carpet is assigned to the Sultan as Great Khan of Tartary, a land of which that colour is the emblem.
The genuflections, prostrations, and psalmody continued within the sanctuary, and the midday sun, ever shortening the shadows, made the pebbles of the square gleam; the white walls returned blinding reflections, all the more inconvenient for the three or four ladies who were there, since etiquette forbids opening a parasol in the presence of the Sultan, or even in front of the palace which he occupies; in the Orient, the parasol has always been an emblem of supreme power. The master rests in the shade, while the slave roasts in the sun. The previous rigour on this point has been relaxed as in all things, and one would not today, by breaking this custom, run the risk to which one would have exposed oneself formerly; but foreigners of good taste conform to the custom. What is the point of hurting the feelings of the citizens of a country one is merely visiting, rather than accommodating oneself to their habits, which have a reason for their existence and are often, no more ridiculous, in essence, than one’s own?
There was movement inside the Mosque; the officers recovered their shoes at the door; the sais (grooms) led the Sultan’s horse to the mounting block, and soon, between a hedge of viziers, Pashas, and beys saluting in the Oriental style, a salute which I much prefer, as a graceful show of respect, to the European salute, His Highness Sultan Abdülmecid I appeared, standing forth clearly against the dark background of the doorway, whose jamb formed a sort of frame for his person. His costume, which was very simple, consisted of a kind of paletot (a sac-like overcoat) in dark blue cloth, white moire trousers, patent-leather boots, and a fez to which the imperial aigrette of heron-feathers was pinned by a button of enormous diamonds; through the gap in his coat, one could see gilded metal shining on his chest; for my part, I greatly regret the loss of the old Asiatic magnificence; I love those impassive Sultans, much like the idols in jewelled shrines, peacocks of power blossoming amidst a halo of suns. In countries under absolute rule, a sovereign cannot separate himself sufficiently from common humanity, and employs imposing, solemn, hieratic forms, of a dazzling, chimerical and fabulous luxury; like God to Moses, he must appear to his people only amidst a burning-bush, in this case of phosphorescent diamonds. However, despite the austere simplicity of his clothes, Abdülmecid’s character could prove mysterious to none. A supreme satiety could be read on his pale face; the consciousness of unassailable power gave to his features, though rather irregular, the tranquility of marble. His fixed, unchanging gaze, at once piercing and gloomy, observing everything and seeing nothing, bore no resemblance to that of a human being; while a short, thin brown beard bordered his sad, imperious, but gentle face.
In a few steps, performed with extreme slowness, rather by gliding than walking, the steps of a god or a phantom moving by non-human means, Abdülmecid crossed the space which separated the door of the mosque from the marble block, over the strip of black cloth on which no one but himself set foot, and slid onto rather than mounted his horse’s back, the animal as motionless as if it were sculpted. The large officers hoisted themselves, with greater difficulty, onto their respective beasts, and the procession set itself in motion so as to regain the palace to the cry of ‘Long live the Sultan!’ shouted, in Turkish, by the soldiers with a real show of enthusiasm.
By hurrying my pace, a little, I was able to overhaul the procession, and take up position further on, so as to keep His Highness in sight. I gave my arm to a young Italian lady who had asked me to accompany her, and who leaned eagerly over the barrier to contemplate the Sultan’s features, since a man who commands sixteen hundred concubines is a phenomenon that interests a women’s curiosity to the highest degree; Abdülmecid, whose horse was advancing quietly, bowing its noble head with swan-neck undulations, and as if conscious of the burden it was carrying, noticed the foreigner and fixed his eagle eyes on her for a few seconds, imperceptibly turning his impassive face, which is the Sultan’s manner of saluting, a thing he does most rarely.
During this parade, the music played a march, an arrangement of Turkish motifs by Gaetano Donizetti’s brother (Guiseppe), Instructor-General of the Imperial music, interspersed with enough Basque drums and Dervish flutes to satisfy Mohammedan ears without, however, shocking those of Catholics; the march was spirited and not lacking in character.
Then all returned to the palace, whose open doors revealed a vast courtyard in a modern architectural style; the doors were closed, and there remained, in the street, only a few onlookers who dispersed in various directions; Bulgarian peasants in coarse sayons and fur caps; and a few old mummified beggars in rags squatting, on the flats of their thighs, beside the walls incandescent with heat.
A midday silence reigned all about this mysterious palace, which contains, behind its latticed windows, a deal of troubled languor, and I could not help but think of all those beauties lost to the human eye, of all those marvellous female faces and forms, from Greece, Circassia, Georgia, India and Africa, which vanish without having been captured in marble or on canvas, without art eternalising them, and bequeathing them to the loving admiration of the centuries: Venuses never to find their Praxiteles, Violantes lacking their Titian (see the portrait ‘Violante’ 1515, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Fornarinas devoid of their Raphael (see the portrait ‘La Fornarina’ 1518/19, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome).
In the human lottery how fortunate that of the lot of this Padisha! What is Don Juan, with his mille e tre (thousand and three), compared to the Sultan? A minor adventurer, deceived more than deceiving, spending his wretched compliments on a few mistresses already three-quarters lost, seduced long ago, who have known husbands, and lovers, and whose faces, arms, and shoulders are known to everyone; whose hands have been clasped by rakes while dancing, and whose ears have heard the litany of mindless madrigals whispered a hundred times. What is he but a handsome lord, who strolls about in the moonlight beneath balconies, and loiters there, guitar slung at his back, in the company of a half-somnolent Leporello!
Tell me instead of the Sultan, who gathers only the purest of lilies, the most immaculate of roses from the garden of beauty, and whose eye rests only on the perfect forms that no mortal gaze has stained, of those who will pass unknown from cradle to grave, in magnificent solitude, guarded by sexless monsters, in a solitude no audacity would risk penetrating, a mystery that renders even the vaguest desire for a meeting impossible.
I changed lodgings, the one I occupied in the Dervish-Sokak being somewhat gloomy, the sole view being a narrow alley like all those to be found in Constantinople. I found rooms at the Hotel de France, where, from a large drawing room with eight windows, furnished with a long divan, one could gaze at the Little Field of the Dead, the roofs and minarets of the Şemsi Pasha Mosque, and the heights of Saint Dimitrios, a charming perspective which would seem somewhat melancholy in Paris, but justifiably cheerful in Constantinople; and, in this hotel, I made the acquaintance of a young man whose medical studies and the perfection with which he spoke the languages of the Orient had endowed him with the ability to penetrate the homes of the Turks, and learn their intimate customs: he was a subscriber to La Presse, a great admirer of the journalist and publisher Émile de Girardin, while my being known to him as a man of letters, made him take an interest in my excursions and my research as a traveller; to him I owed the good fortune of an invitation to dine with a former Pasha of Kurdistan who was a friend of his.
We left about six in the evening so as to reach Beşiktaş, where the Pasha was staying, around sunset, since it was Ramadan, and the fast is not broken until the sun’s disk has vanished behind the hills of Eyüp. At the harbour of Tophane, we chartered a four-oared caique, and after a vigorous half an hour rowing against a fairly rapid current, our kayıkçı (boatmen) disembarked us at the foot of the café, built on the water like a halcyon’s nest or a fisherman’s lookout post, of which I have already made a brief sketch, and which was full of Turks, waiting, timepieces in hand and chibouks filled, for the precise moment when they could bring the blessed amber mouthpieces to their lips and inhale the fragrant smoke.
After traversing a few streets lined with sellers of pipe-bowls, sweets, cucumbers, corn cobs, and other Oriental items, and filled with a dense crowd of people, we climbed a deserted alley, formed by the pink-plastered walls of large gardens, at the top of which was perched the house of the ex-Pasha of Kurdistan.
A door in the process of closing half-revealed an elegant coupé returning to its yard. The Pasha’s wife had returned from a walk, for, contrary to the idea that one has of them, Turkish ladies, far from remaining enclosed in harems, go about wherever they please, on condition that they remain veiled, and unaccompanied by their husbands.
A low door, preceded by a flight of three steps, opened to reveal a servant, dressed in European style except for the obligatory red skullcap and, after replacing our shoes with the slippers we had taken care to bring with us, we were led to the first floor, and to the selamlik (men’s apartment, where guests were received), always separate from the haremlik (family apartment) in the arrangement of Turkish houses, rich or poor, large or small.
We found the ex-Pasha in a very simple room with a wooden ceiling, painted grey and adorned with blue meshwork, with no furniture other than two rectangular cupboards, a Manila straw mat, and a sofa covered in purple fabric, at the end of which sat the master of the house, rolling the beads of a sandalwood rosary through his fingers.
The corner of the sofa is the place of honour which the master of the house never leaves, unless he is visited by a person of a higher rank than himself.
This air of simplicity was unsurprising. The selamlik is, an exterior apartment, so to speak, a sort of parlour, an antechamber that foreigners do not stray beyond, which is reserved for public affairs. All luxury is reserved for the harem. It is there that carpets from Isfahan and Smyrna (Izmir) are spread, brocaded cushions are heaped, soft silk-covered sofas extend, little tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl gleam, gold and silver filigreed incense-burners smoke, Venetian bevelled mirrors shimmer, rare flowers bloom in Chinese vases, and musical clocks chime capriciously; it is there that inextricably knotted arabesques hang from the ceilings; marble chimneys of Marmara rise like stalagmites, and streams of perfumed water tinkle into white basins. In that mysterious retreat, domestic life takes place, the life of pleasure and intimacy into which no relative or friend penetrates.
The ex-Pasha of Kurdistan wore a fez, the straight-buttoned frock-coat of the Nizam (the regular army), and broad white twill trousers. His head, thin, slender, and bowed somewhat wearily, ending in a beard into which silvery tints were already creeping, gave him an air of great distinction, and if an English expression could be applied to a Turk, I would say the Pasha had the air of a perfect gentleman.
My friend translated the compliments I made him, to which he responded in a most gracious manner; then he motioned for me to sit down beside him. My ease in crossing my legs in the Oriental manner, often an effort for a Frenchman, made him smile, and allowed him to form a good opinion of me.
The day was declining; the last orange tints of the setting sun were fading on the horizon, and the welcome sound of the cannon-shot rang joyously in the air; the fast was over, and servants appeared bringing pipes, glasses of water, and some pieces of confectionery; the light collation serving to prove that the faithful were now allowed to eat and drink.
Then beside the sofa they placed a large yellow copper disk, highly polished and shining like a golden shield, on which were arranged various dishes in porcelain bowls. These disks, supported by a low foot, serve as a table in Turkey, and three or four guests can sit to them. Table linen, like bed linen, is a luxury unknown in the Orient. One eats at a table without a tablecloth, but to wipe your fingers you are given small squares of muslin, embroidered with gold thread, quite similar to the napkins employed when tea is served at our ‘English’ evenings, a precaution which is essential, since at these meals the only forks are those our ancestor Adam was born with. The master of the house, full of politeness and consideration, foreseeing my embarrassment, wished me to accept, as the musicologist ‘Castil-Blaze’ (François-Henri-Joseph Blaze) has it: ‘the silver spoon used for eating’; but I thanked him, seeking to conform in every way to the rules of Turkish gastronomy.
From the point of view of those gourmands Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Ferdinand de Cornot Baron de Cussy, Grimod de la Reynière, and Marie-Antoine Carême, Turkish culinary art cannot but seem quite barbaric and patriarchal; consisting, to Parisian palates, of wholly unusual combinations of substances, extravagant mixtures which nevertheless do not lack thought and are not contrived randomly. The dishes, of which one takes a few mouthfuls with one’s fingers, are large in number and follow one another in swift succession. They consist of pieces of mutton, chicken pieces, fish in oil, and raw cucumbers, stuffed and arranged in every way; small viscous salsify roots, similar to mallow roots and highly esteemed for their stomachic qualities; rice balls wrapped in vine leaves; pumpkin puree with sugar; and pancakes with honey; all sprinkled with rose-water, seasoned with mint, and aromatic herbs, and crowned with the sacred pilaf, a national dish like the Spanish puchero, the Arab couscous, the German sauerkraut and the English plum-pudding, which is an obligatory part of every meal whether in the palace or the cottage. To drink, there was water, sherbet, and cherry-juice which they drew from their respective bowls with ivory-handled, tortoiseshell spoons.
The feast over, the copper tray was taken away to be cleansed, an indispensable ceremony when one has dined with no other silverware than one’s fingers; coffee was served, and the chiboukdji (pipe-keepers) presented to each guest a fine pipe, with a large amber mouthpiece, a stem of cherry-wood smooth as satin, and a bowl capped with a beautiful straw-coloured mass of Macedonian tobacco, detached in a single piece, the pipe resting on a metal circle placed on the ground to protect the mat from the coals and ashes which might fall from its fiery orifice.
The conversation began as animatedly as is possible when one talks mere gossip. The ex-Pasha, who seemed quite well-informed about European politics, asked me a host of questions about the coup d’état of December 2nd (that of 1851, carried out by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, later Emperor Napoleon III of the French) which he strongly approved of, the abstract idea of a republic entering with difficulty into a mind shaped by Oriental despotism; he asked me if the president (the Second Empire had not yet been proclaimed) possessed many cannons, and commanded a large number of troops; what uniform Louis wore; whether he rode a horse well; and if he was going to make war like his uncle Bounaberdi (a corruption of ‘Bonaparte’); whether I knew him; whether I had spoken to him; and other questions of the sort, which I answered as best I could. The ex-Pasha’s brother, seated near him, who knew a few words of French, seemed to be following the conversation with interest.
The servants removed the pipes; the ex-Pasha rose, and went to say his prayers on a corner of the carpet in a room next door, returning after a few minutes, with a calm and serious expression, having satisfied his religious duties as a good Muslim; we exchanged a few more sentences, and as I took my leave, the master of the house told me that I might visit again whenever I pleased and that I would always be welcome, words which, in a Turkish mouth, are no empty formula.
Before we departed, we chatted for a few moments with the secretary, who was seated in a room on the ground floor. He was a very gentle, polite young man, probably an Armenian, who spoke French very well. He asked me questions about Paris, which he very much wished to see, and while chatting, he saw on my finger an engraved cornelian, containing my name in flowery Persian, and because of the beauty of the characters cut by one of the most skilled artists in Teheran, he took an impression of them by rubbing them with black ink and applying them to a piece of paper, so as to obtain the letters in plain text.
We found our kayıkçı waiting for us at Beşiktaş; they soon delivered us to Tophane, where we stopped by a small café frequented by Circassians, fierce political debaters who maintain a kind of Krakow Tree there. (The Krakow Tree, in the chestnut avenue of the Palais-Royal, an avenue planted by Cardinal Richelieu, was where the news-writers of the time met to exchange information on current affairs. See the engraving by Antoine Humblot, of 1742). My companion translated their speeches for me, and I was quite astonished to hear these men in fur-trimmed bonnets, their goatskin skirts fastened by a metal belt, their legs wrapped in linen held there by cords, talking of the affairs of Paris and London, and offering their critiques of the ministers and diplomats with perfect knowledge of the facts.
While they were thus politicking, a little Dervish arrived and began singing, in a nasal voice and no known key, a strange and melancholy cantilena, with the aim of obtaining alms, thereby recalling me to the Orient, which I had well-nigh forgotten while listening to these Circassians who talked like subscribers to the Constitutionnel or the Journal des Débats.
The End of Part III of Gautier’s ‘Constantinople’