University of Virginia Library

104. LETTER CIV.

A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the
Bosphorus this morning. I was idling away the day
in the bazar and did not see her. The ward-room
steward of the “United States,” a very intelligent
man, who was at the pier when she was brought down
to the caique, describes her as a young woman of
twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful; and
with the exception of a short quick sob in her throat,
as if she had wearied herself out with weeping, she
was quite calm and submitted composedly to her fate.
She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress,
her yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off
to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was drawn
over her without resistance. The plash of her body
in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had
followed her to the water.

It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions,
knowing as we do, that the poor victim is taken
before the judge, upon the least jealous whim of her
husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspicion,
and hurried instantly from the tribunal to this
violent and revolting death. Any suspicion of commerce
with a Christian particularly, is, with or without
evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants
of Arnaout-keni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus,
were shocked with the spectacle of a Turkish woman
and a young Greek, hanging dead from the shutters
of a window on the water's-side. He had been detected
in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less
than an hour the unfortunate lovers had met their
fate. They are said to have died most heroically, embracing
and declaring their attachment to the last.

Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople,
and it is not wonderful, considering the

superiority of the educated and picturesque Greek to
his brutal neighbor, or the daring and romance of Europeans
in the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The
liberty of going and coming, which the Turkish women
enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by their
secrecy, is temptingly favorable to intrigue, and the
self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is
concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the demand
for it.

An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of
the sultan's sister, consisting of a great number of
women, tells me that their time is principally occupied
in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers,
with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These
platonic passions for persons whom they have only
seen from their gilded lattices, are their only amusement,
and they are permitted by the sultana, who has
herself the reputation of being partial to Franks, and
old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to obtain their
society. My intelligent informant thinks the Turkish
women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat
remarkable for their sentiment of character.

With two English travellers, whom I had known in
Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran
down under the wall of the city, on the side of the
sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath
the wall of the seraglio, whose small water-gates,
whence so many victims have found

are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with
the dramatis personœ of a thousand tragedies. One
smiles to detect himself gazing on an old postern,
with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end,
in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of
September!

We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven
Towers, and dismissed our boat to walk across to the
Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the triple
walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers
look as if they were toppling after an earthquake, and
are overgrown superbly with ivy. Large trees, rooted
in the crevices, and gradually bursting the thick walls,
overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for
the whole length of the five or six miles across, it is
one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no
country such beautiful ruins.

At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of
horsemen, armed in the wild manner of the east, who
had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the mountains.
They were not allowed to enter the city, and,
with their horses picketed on the plain, were lying
about in groups, waiting till their leader should conclude
his audience with the seraskier. They were as
cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see.
The extreme richness of eastern arms, mounted
showily in silver, and of shapes so cumbersome, yet
picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged capotes,
and torn leggins, and their way-worn and weary
countenances. Yet they were almost without exception
fine-featured, and of a resolute expression of face,
and they had flung themselves, as savages will,
into attitudes that art would find it difficult to improve.

Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs,
indicating the spots in which are buried the heads of
Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three sons and grandson.
The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head for
having dared to aspire to independence. He was a
brave old barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief
of the most warlike people of modern times, one
stands over his grave with regret. It would have been
a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event
in his travels made more impression on his mind than
the pacha's detecting his rank by the beauty of his
hands. His fine description of the wild court of
Yanina, in Childe Harold, has already made the poet's
return of immortality, but had he survived the revolution
in Greece, with his increased knowledge of the
Albanian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the
old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have
been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen
whether the age or the language will produce another
Byron to take up the broken thread.

As we were poring over the Turkish inscription,
four men, apparently quite intoxicated, came running
and hallooing from the city gate, bearing upon their
shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the cemetery,
they went stumbling on over the footstones, tossing
the corpse about so violently, that the helpless
limbs frequently fell beyond the limits of the rude
barrow, while the grave-digger, the only sober person,
save the dead man, in the company, followed at his
best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These extraordinary
bearers set down their burden not far from
the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like
men who had merely engaged in a moment's frolic by
the way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed
a little the posture of the disordered body, and sat
down to get breath for his task.

My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran
blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces
on its way to the grave. The poor are thus carried
out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after
they have completed their prescribed paces, change
with the first individual whose reckoning with heaven
may be in arrears.

The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last
journey, was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He
had neither shroud nor coffin, but

in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his
bosom the only token that he was dressed for any particular
occasion. We had not time to stay and see
his grave dug, and “his face laid toward the tomb of
the prophet.”

We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the
triangle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line
approaching its hypothenuse. Though in a city so
thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks
conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a
street; and the perfect silence, and the cheerless look
of the Turkish houses, with their jealously closed
windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by the
plague. The population of Constantinople is only
seen in the bazars, or in the streets bordering on the
Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by
dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy
apartments opening on their secluded gardens,
or are hidden from the gaze of the street by their fine
dull-colored lattices. It strikes one with melancholy
after the gay balconies and open doors of France and
Italy!

We passed the Eskai serai, the palace in which the
imperial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude;
and, weary with our long walk, emerged from the silent
streets at the bazar of wax-candles, and took
caique for the Argentopolis of the ancients, the “Silver
city” of Galatia.

The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman
fleet in the Bosphorus announced, some days since,
that the sultan had changed his summer for his winter
serai, and the commodore received yesterday, a firman
to visit the deserted palace of Beylerbey.

We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party
of officers increased by the captain of the Acteon,
sloop-of-war, some gentlemen of the English ambassador's

household, and several strangers who took advantage
of the commodore's courtesy to enjoy a privilege
granted so very rarely.

As we pulled up the strait, some one pointed out
the residence, on the European shore, of the once favorite
wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan Selim. She
is called by the Turks, the “boneless sultana,” and is
the model of shape by the oriental standard. The
poet's lines,

though a very neat compliment in some countries,
would be downright rudeness in the East. Near this
jelly in weeds lives a venerable Turk, who was once
ambassador to England. He came back too much
enlightened, and the mufti immediately procured his
exile, for infidelity. He passes his day, we are told,
in looking at a large map hung on the wall before him,
and wondering at his own travels.

We were received at the shining brazen gate of
Beylerbey, by Hamik Pacha (a strikingly elegant
man, just returned from a mission to England), deputed
by the sultan to do the honors. A side-door introduced
us immediately to the grand hall upon the
lower floor, which was separated only by four marble
pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at will, from the
gravel walk of the garden in the rear. We ascended
thence by an open staircase of wood, prettily inlaid,
to the second floor, which was one long suite of spacious
rooms, built entirely in the French style, and
thence to the third floor, the same thing over again.
It was quite like looking at lodgings in Paris. There
was no furniture, except an occasional ottoman turned
with its face upon another, and a prodigious quantity
of French musical clocks, three or four in every
room, and all playing in our honor with an amusing
confusion. One other article, by the way—a large,
common, American rocking-chair! The poor thing
stood in a great gilded room, all alone, looking pitiably
home-sick. I seated myself in it, malgre a thick
coat of dust upon the bottom, as I would visit a sick
countryman in exile.

The harem was locked, and the polite pacha regretted
that he had no orders to open it. We descended
to the gardens, which rise by terraces to a gim-crack
temple and orangery, and having looked at the sultan's
poultry, we took our leave. If his pink palace in Europe
is no finer than his yellow palace in Asia, there
is many a merchant in America better lodged than the
padishah of the Ottoman empire. We have not seen
the old seraglio, however, and in its inaccessible recesses,
probably, moulders that true oriental splendor
which this upholsterer monarch abandons in his rage
for the novel luxuries of Europe.