University of Virginia Library

102. LETTER CII.

Pulling up the Golden Horn to-day in a caique
without any definite errand (a sort of excursion particularly
after my own heart), I was amused at the
caikjee's asking my companion, who shaves clean like
a Christian, and has his clothes from Regent street,
and looks for aught I can see, as much like a foreigner
in Constantinople as myself, “in what vessel I had arrived.”
We asked him if he had ever seen either of us
before. “No!” How then did he know that my
friend, who had not hitherto spoken a word of Turkish,
was not as lately arrived as myself? What is it
that so infallibly, in every part of the world, distin
guishes the stranger?

We passed under the stern of an outlandish-looking
vessel just dropping her anchor. Her deck was crowded
with men and women in singular costumes, and
near the helm, apparently under the protection of a
dark-visaged fellow in a voluminous turban, stood three
young, and, as well as we could see, uncommonly
pretty girls. The captain answered to our hail that
he was from Trebizond, and his passengers were slaves
for the bazar. How redolent of the east! Were one
but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for
a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of
surprise and innocence!

We landed at the Fanar. Bow-windows crowded
with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked
shoulders (which I am already so orientalized as to
think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists,
reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian
quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and miserable
suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece,
the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of
Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, intriguing,
but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes.
One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much
is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root
of Palœologus or some equally boasted blood of the
Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G — at the baths of
Lucca last year, whom I except from every disparaging
remark), that he is a little disappointed with the
dirty alleys and the stuffed windows, shown him as
the hereditary homes of these very sounding names.
There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar,
that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial
stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter
that would pass in our country for a respectable barn.
In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior
to any other race of their own nation. The Albanians,
and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were
(except the North American Indians) the finest people,
physically, I have ever been among; while it would
be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate-looking
body of men and women, than swarm in this
nest of Grecian princes.

We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along
leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and
caiques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward
the bazar. Always discovering new passages in that
labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves after an hour's
rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rather
the oldest and narrowest part of the bazar, and the
light of heaven meets with the additional interruption
of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in
the middle of the street. On entering the literary twilight
of the passage in the rear of these columns, the
classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odor of
manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding; and the
trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries,
wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint
rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once
their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complexion
of a shelf at the Harpers', or the Hendees', or the
Careys' — no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem,
no political pamphlet or gay souvenir! And the priceless
treasures of learning are not here doled out by a
talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the
lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in sombre
and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is
not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspondence
of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumbed

tomes of Arabic or Persian; while the venerable
bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his
gray beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an
illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the
page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind,
and murmur a low “pekke!” of approbation.

We had stepped back into the last century. Here
was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed,
not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic
quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less
than the purchase of a whole scrivener's furniture,
from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took
my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste
all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled
farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped
simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed,
by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something
poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbors; for in
Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his
own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar.
A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the
old man's knees, while from a wooden bowl he was
eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evidently
an interruption. He had not even laid aside
his book.

There was something in his handling of the volume,
as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an
affection for the author. He turned it over with a
slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a
careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I
took it from him open at the place, and marked the
passage with my nail, to look for it in the translation.

With my cheaply-bought treasures in my pockets,
we turned up the street of the diamond-merchants,
and making a single purchase more in the bazar, of a
tesbih or Turkish rosary of spice-wood, emerged to the
open air in the neighborhood of the mosque of Sultan
Bajazet.

Whether slipping the pagan beads through my
fingers affected me devoutly, or whether it was the
mellow humor of the moment, I felt a disposition to
forgive my enemies, and indulge in an act of Mohammedan
piety — feeding the unowned dogs of the street.
We stepped into a baker's shop, and laid out a piastre
in bread, and were immediately observed and surrounded,
before we could break a loaf, by twenty or thirty
as ill-looking curs, as ever howled to the moon. Having
distributed about a dozen loaves, and finding that
our largess had by no means satisfied the appetites of
the expecting rabble, we found ourselves embarrassed
to escape. Nothing but the baker's threshold prevented
them from jumping upon us, in their eagerness, and
the array of so many formidable mouths, ferocious
with hunger, was rather staggering. The baker drew
off the hungry pack at last, by walking round the
corner with a loaf in his hand, while we made a speedy
exit, patted on the back in passing by several of the
assembled spectators.

It is surprising that the Turks can tolerate this filthy
breed of curs, in such extraordinary numbers. They
have a whimsical punishment for killing one of them.
The dead dog is hung by his heels, so that his nose
just touches the ground, and the canicide is compelled
to heap wheat about him, till he is entirely covered;
the wheat is then given to the poor, and the dog buried
at the expense of the culprit. There are, probably,
five dogs to every man in Constantinople, and besides
their incessant barking, they often endanger the lives
of children and strangers. MacFarlane, I think, tells
the story of a drunken sea-captain, who was entirely
devoured by the dogs at Tophana; nothing being
found of him in the morning but his “indigestible pigtail!”

We entered the court of Sultan Bajazet, and found
the majestic plane-trees that shadow its arabesque
fountains, bending beneath the weight of hundreds of
pensionary pigeons. Here, as at several of the
mosques, an old man sits by the gate, whose business
it is to expend the alms given him in distributing
grain to these sacred birds. Not to be outdone in
piety, my friend gave the blind old Turk a piastre;
and, as he arose and unlocked the box beneath him,
the pigeons descended about us in such a cloud, as
literally to darken the air. Handful after handful was
then thrown among them, and the beautiful creatures
ran over our feet and fluttered round us with a fearlessness
that sufficiently proved the safety in which
they haunted the sacred precincts. In a few minutes
they soared altogether again to the trees, and their
mussulman-feeder resumed his seat upon the box to
wait for another charity.

A crowd of women at the harem gate, in the rear
of the seraskier's palace, attracted our attention.
Upon inquiry, we found that he had married a daughter
to one of the sultan's military officers, and the bridal
party was expected presently to come out in arubahs,
and make the tour of the Hippodrome, on the
way to the house of the bridegroom. We wiled away
an hour returning the gaze of curiosity bent upon us
from the idle and bright eyes of a hundred women, and
the first of the gilded vehicles made its appearance;
though in the same style of ornament with the one I
have already described, it differed in being drawn by
horses, and having a frame top, with small round mirrors
set in the corners. Within sat four very young
women, one of whom was the bride; but which, we
found no one who could tell us. It is no description
of a face in the east to say, that the eyes were dark,
and the nose regular — all that the jealous yashmack
permitted us to ascertain of the beauty of the bride.
Their eyes are all dark, and their noses are all regular;
the Turkish nose differing from the Grecian, as that
of the Antinous from the Apollo, only in its more voluptuous
fullness, and a nostril less dilated. Four
darker pairs of eyes, however, and four brows of whiter
orb, never pined in a harem, or were reflected in those
golden-rimmed mirrors; and as the twelve succeeding
arubas rattled by, and in each suit four young women,
with the same eternal dark eyes, “full of sleep,” and
the same curved and pearly forehead, and noses like
the Antinous, I thought of toujours perdrix, and felt
that if there had been but one with a slight toss in
that prominent member, it would not have been displeasing.

In a conversation with a Greek lady the other day,
she remarked that the veils of the Turkish ladies conceal
no charms. Their mouths, she says, are generally
coarse, and their teeth, from the immoderate use
of sweetmeats, or neglect, or some other cause, almost
universally defective. How far the interest excited by
these hidden features may have jaundiced the eyes of
my fair informer, I can not say; but as a general fact,
uneducated women, whatever other beauties they may
possess, have rarely expressive or agreeable mouths.
Nature forms and colors the nose, the eyes, the forehead,
and the complexion; but the character, from
the cradle up, moulds gradually to its own inward
changes, the plastic and passion-breathing lines of the
lips. Allowing this, it would be rather surprising if
there was a mouth in all Turkey that had more than
a pretty silliness at the most — the art of dying their
finger-nails, and painting their eyebrows, being the
highest branches of female education. How they
came by these “eyes that teach us what the sun is
made of,” the vales of Georgia and Circassia best can
tell.

And so having rambled away a sunny autumn day,
and earned some little appetite, if not experience, we
will get out of Stamboul, before the sunset guard
makes us prisoners, and climb up to our dinner in
Pera.