Constantinople old and new

An anonymous American traveller who visited Turkey something less than a hundred years ago wrote, in comparing the water facilities of New York and Constantinople, that “the emporium of the United States is some centuries behind the metropolis of Turkey.” I doubt whether the comparison would still hold, since the building of Croton and other dams. Nevertheless, the fact remains that water—fresh water, at all events—is an element less native to the Anglo-Saxon than to the Turk. We have our proverb about cleanliness and godliness, and we have our morning tubs, and we have our unrivalled systems of plumbing; but we also have our Great Unwashed. In Turkey, however, there is no Great Unwashed—save among those who are not Turks. The reason is that for a follower of the Prophet godliness is next to cleanliness. His religion obliges him to wash his face, hands, and feet before each of his five daily prayers, while innumerable public baths exist for the completer ablutions required of him. Add to that the temperance enjoined upon him, whence is derived his appreciation of good drinking water, and you will begin to understand why there are so many fountains in Stamboul.

The fountains of Constantinople are very little like those of Rome and Paris. There are no figures about them, and not many of them spout or splash. In fact, I recently saw the most famous of them referred to in an architectural handbook as a kiosk, so little resemblance does it bear to the customary fountain. Fountains are, none the less, one of the chief ornaments of Constantinople. If they are intended more strictly for use than Western fountains, they also take the place—and often most happily—of commemorative sculpture in Western countries. And so faithfully have they followed all the vicissitudes of the art of building in Turkey, have they reflected changes of taste and successive foreign influences, that a study of them would yield valuable material toward a history of Ottoman architecture.

I do not propose to make any such study of them now. The variety of these small monuments is so great, however, that I must be academic enough to divide them into four or five categories. Of which the first would include the private fountains alluded to in earlier chapters. Numerous and interesting as private fountains are, a foreigner naturally has little opportunity to become acquainted with them. Their commonest form is that seen in all Turkish houses—of a niche in the wall containing a tap set over a marble basin. This arrangement, of course, amounts to nothing more or less than a wash-stand. But mark that the hole in the bottom of the basin contains no stopper. A Mohammedan would consider that we wash our hands in dirty water, preferring, himself, to use only the stream running from the faucet. Turkish houses—real Turkish houses—are like Japanese ones in that they contain very little furniture or bric-à-brac. The old architects, therefore, made the most of the opportunity afforded by the ritual use of water, and found nothing incongruous in treating a sanitary fixture architecturally, or even in making it an important feature of decoration. This they oftenest accomplished by setting the tap in the lower part of a tall marble tablet, called the aïna tashi, or mirror stone, which they shaped to suit the niche in which it stood and ornamented more or less elaborately with carving and sometimes with painting too.

Not many early examples can remain, on account of the unfortunate propensity of Turkish houses to burn up. A number, however, are to be seen in the old palace of Top Kapou. Perfectly simple but characteristic and charming of their kind are the tiny wall fountains of a room in the “Cage,” at each end of the window-seat in front of each of the four windows. The same principle is used for more ornamental purposes by putting one basin below another in such a way that the second will catch the overflow of the first. There is a big wall fountain of this sort in the splendid hall of Süleïman the Magnificent. In a private house of much later date I have seen three graduated basins projecting from their niche, rounded and scalloped like shells. There is also a pretty selsebil of a new kind in one of the baths of the Seraglio, where the surface of the mirror stone is notched into a series of overlapping scales so as to multiply the ripple of the water. But the prettiest dripping fountain I know is in an old house in Bebek, on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It stands in the entrance hall, at an odd little angle where it will best catch the light, and it combines the miniature basins of an ordinary selsebil with a lower surface of marble scales. What is least ordinary about it, however, are the spaces of marble lace work bordering the shallow arched niche where the water trickles. There is a free space behind them in order to give the proper relief to the design. And there is an irregularity about the intertwined whorls which a Western artist would have thought beneath him, but which only adds interest to the work.

This original selsebil partakes also of the nature of a fîskieh, as the Turks onomatopoetically call a spurting fountain. In the stalactites bordering the two shallow basins at the bottom are jets which used to add to the complicated tinkle of the fountain. Spurting fountains seem to be rarer indoors than out, though I have already mentioned the beautiful one in the Kyöprülü kiosk. They are not uncommon in the outer hall of public baths. One that contravenes the canons of orthodox Mohammedan art is to be admired in the handsome bath of St. Sophia—a work of Sinan—where three dolphins, their tails in the air, spout water into a fluted basin. I have wondered if these unorthodox creatures, like the lions of so many gardens, may not perpetuate a Byzantine tradition if not actual Byzantine workmanship. I have already referred to the pigeons on a selsebil in Candilli. I have not yet referred to, though I have been considerably intrigued by, a fat goose that is the pride of a street fountain outside the Golden Gate. But on another fountain in Stamboul there is to be seen another unorthodox creature, that is of unimpeachable Mohammedan descent. The fountain is of the bubbling kind which sometimes very pleasantly adorns the centre of a room. In this case it was put into a niche in the Tile Pavilion which the Conqueror built in the Seraglio grounds. The fountain, however, would seem to date from Sultan Mourad III, who restored the kiosk in 1590. On either side of the deep rectangular recess are poetical inscriptions of that Sultan, gold on green, with a quaint little climbing border picked out of the marble in gold, and a surmounting shell. That shell, dear to the Renaissance designers and how many before them, is supposed to have made its entrance into Mohammedan architecture from this very niche. At the back of the niche is another shell, and under it the unorthodox creature, a peacock, spreads his fan. It was perhaps to diminish the importance of this unorthodox, of this probably heretical Shiïte peacock, that the artist coloured him more soberly than the flowers that bloom on either side of him, and made him combine with the shell to form the outline of a symbolic egg.

A few interesting interior fountains are to be seen in mosques, though Constantinople cannot equal Broussa in this respect. St. Sophia contains two such fountains, put there by Sultan Mourad III, which are big alabaster jars fitted with taps. Two more typical ones are in Sultan Ahmed, their graceful mirror stones set against two of the enormous piers that hold up the dome. The real mosque fountains, however, are those which exist for purposes of ritual ablution outside of the smallest mesjid. There you will always see a row of small taps, set near the ground against the wall of the mosque or its yard, with stepping-stones in front of them. They are rarely treated with much elaboration except in later mosques like Nouri Osmanieh, but they agreeably break up a flat wall surface. And at Eyoub they really form one element of the picturesqueness of the outer court, with the bracketed roof that protects them from the weather and their clambering vine.

Most mosques, as well as medressehs and other pious institutions, also have a larger and more decorative fountain which usually stands in the middle of the court. The technical name of such a fountain is shadrîvan, or shadîravan, really meaning “for the peace of souls.” The fountain, that is, not only aids the faithful in their religious exercises, but adds so much to the celestial credit of the builder or of the person whom he commemorates. For many shadrîvans were built, after the mosque to which they are attached, by another person. Those in the courts of Baïezid and Selim, for instance, are the work of Mourad IV, whose soul needed what peace it could find, while so late a sultan as Mahmoud I built the fanciful shadrîvan in the somewhat stern court of the Conqueror as well as that in the court of St. Sophia. The last two are charming examples of the Turkish rococo. The commonest form of shadrîvan is a basin or reservoir, encircled about the bottom by taps and protected by a roof from sun and rain. The simplest type is to be seen in the medresseh yard of Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, with a perfectly plain reservoir and a pointed roof held up by wooden pillars. A similar one which lies more on the track of sightseers is in front of the mosque known as Little St. Sophia, anciently the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. Here the reservoir is an octagon terminating in a cone, while the roof is tiled and ornamented at the apex with a bronze alem—a lyre or crescent containing a cobweb of Arabic letters. There are also seats between the posts for the greater convenience of those who use the fountain. Some shadrîvans are partially enclosed and made into pavilions, where it is very pleasant to rest. An excellent example exists in the yard of the mosque of Ramazan Effendi, in Issa Kapou. The perforated marble enclosing the upper part of the reservoir of this shadrîvan is a thing that is seen in many such fountains. Sometimes a handsome grille work protects the water, as at St. Sophia and Sokollî Mehmed Pasha. The latter fountain is uncommon in that the large round reservoir is the whole shadrîvan, with projecting eaves to shelter the people at the taps. But not all shadrîvans are for purposes of ablution. At the Süleïmanieh and at Yeni Jami they are merely covered tanks without taps. The shadrîvan of the Valideh Jedid in Scutari is of the same kind, except that the water falls invisibly from the roof of the tank, filling the court with a mysterious sense of sound and coolness.

I do not suppose that street fountains are actually more numerous than private ones, but they naturally seem so to a foreigner wandering through Stamboul. It is not easy to classify them clearly, so many are the forms they take. They affect, however, two principal types, known in Turkish as cheshmeh and sebil, either of which may be attached to a wall or may exist as an independent structure. The original form is the applied cheshmeh, which is merely a wall fountain put outside the house, and enlarged in scale accordingly. These fountains are a very characteristic feature of Constantinople streets. There are literally thousands of them, and they offer so great a variety of interest that it is a wonder no one has taken the trouble to give them the study they deserve. They are a wide-spread example, for one thing, of Turkish philanthropy—and incidentally of a passing conception of public utilities. Every one of those fountains was originally a public benefaction, often made by a Sultan, it is true, and on an imperial scale, but oftener by a private citizen who wished to commemorate some member of his family, to ornament the street in which he lived, or to confer a benefit upon his neighbours. He therefore endowed his fountain, in many instances. Such endowments form an appreciable fraction of the property administered by the Department of Pious Foundations. Sometimes the benefactor stipulated that water-carriers or other persons were or were not to have the right of selling the water of his fountain. The water-carrier, the saka, belongs to a race by no means yet extinct in Constantinople, though I doubt if his guilds are quite what they were. There used to be two such guilds, of the horse sakas and of the hand sakas. The patron of both was the hero who attempted to carry water to Hüsseïn in the battle of Kerbela. The members of both may be recognised by the dripping goatskins in which they carry water from house to house. In these degenerate days, however, a hand saka is more likely to carry a couple of kerosene tins, slung over his shoulder from either end of a pole. But if he has the right to be paid for carrying water, every man has the right to go himself to the fountain and draw water without money and without price.

Until a few years ago Constantinople possessed no other water-system. Now modern water companies operate in their more invisible ways. But the Ministry of Pious Foundations is still the greatest water company of them all. That it was a fairly adequate one our American traveller of a hundred years ago is witness. Only recently, however, has the department attempted to make some sort of order out of the chaos of systems which it administers—some larger, like the water-supplies of the Sultans, some limited to the capacity of one small spring, and all based on the idea of a charity rather than that of a self-paying utility. Even now I doubt if any exact and complete map exists of the water-supply of Constantinople. The knowledge necessary to make such a map is distributed between an infinity of individuals known as souyoljîs, waterway men, who alone can tell, often, just where the pipes lie and how they are fed. And very useful, if occasionally very trying, gentlemen are these to know. This is sometimes amusingly illustrated on the outskirts of the city, where a house or a group of houses may be supplied from some small independent source of water. As time has passed and property has changed hands, the tradition of the waterway has been preserved only in some humble family that has profited by its knowledge, perhaps, to cultivate a tidy vegetable garden. And every now and then the water runs low or stops altogether in the quarter for whose benefit it was originally made to flow, until on payment of a tip to the souyoljî it miraculously begins to flow again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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