Constantinople old and new

I often wonder what a Turk, a Turk of the people, would make of a Western church. In an old cathedral close, perhaps, he might feel to a degree at home. The architecture of the building would set it apart from those about it, the canons’ houses and other subsidiary structures would not seem unnatural to him, and, though the arrangement of the interior would be foreign, he would probably understand in what manner of place he was—and his religion would permit him to worship there in his own way. But a modern city church, and particularly an American city church, would offer almost nothing familiar to him. It would, very likely, be less monumental in appearance than neighbouring buildings. There would be little or no open space about it. And strangest of all would be the entire absence of life about the place for six days out of seven. The most active institutional church can never give the sense a mosque does of being a living organism, an acknowledged focus of life. The larger mosques are open every day and all day, from sunrise to sunset, while even the smallest is accessible for the five daily hours of prayer. And, what is more, people go to them. Nor do they go to them as New Yorkers sometimes step into a down-town church at noontime, feeling either exceptionally pious or a little uneasy lest some one catch them in the act. It is as much a matter of course as any other habit of life, and as little one to be self-conscious about. By which I do not mean to imply that there are neither dissenters nor sceptics in Islam. I merely mean that Islam seems to be a far more vital and central force with the mass of those who profess it than Protestant Christianity.

However, I did not set out to compare religions. All I wish is to point out the importance of mosques and their precincts in the picture of Constantinople. The yards of the imperial mosques take the place, in Stamboul, of squares and parks. Even many a smaller mosque enjoys an amplitude of perspective that might be envied by cathedrals like Chartres, or Cologne, or Milan. These roomy enclosures are surrounded by the windowed walls which I have already celebrated. Within them cypresses are wont to cluster, and plane-trees willingly cast their giant shadow. Gravestones also congregate there. And there a centre of life is which can never lack interest for the race of men that likes Stamboul. Scribes sit under the trees ready to write letters for soldiers, women, and others of the less literate sort. Seal cutters ply their cognate trade, and cut your name on a bit of brass almost as quickly as you can write it. Barbers, distinguishable by a brass plate with a nick in it for your chin, are ready to exercise another art upon your person. Pedlers come and go, selling beads, perfumes, fezzes, and sweets which they carry on their heads in big wooden trays, and drinks which may tempt you less than their brass receptacles. A more stable commerce is visible in some mosque yards, or on the day of the week when a peripatetic market elects to pitch its tents there; and coffee-houses, of course, abound. Not that there are coffee-houses in every mosque yard. I know one small mosque yard, that of Mahmoud Pasha—off the busy street of that name leading to the Bazaars—which is entirely given up to coffee-houses. And a perfect mosque yard it is, grove-like with trees and looked upon by a great portico of the time of the Conqueror. There is something both grave and human about mosque yards and coffee-houses both that excellently suits them to each other. The combination is one that I, at any rate, am incapable of resisting. I dare not guess how many days of my life I have I cannot say wasted in the coffee-houses of Mahmoud Pasha, and Yeni Jami, and Baïezid, and Shah-zadeh, and Fatih. The company has an ecclesiastical tinge. Turbans bob much together and the neighbouring fountains of ablution play a part in the scene. And if the company does not disperse altogether it thins very much when the voice of the müezin, the chanter, sounds from his high white tower. “God is most great!” he chants to the four quarters of the earth. “I bear witness that there is not a god save God! I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God! Hasten to the worship of God! Hasten to permanent blessedness! God is most great!”

In the mosque the atmosphere is very much that of the mosque yard. There may be more reverence, perhaps, but people evidently feel very much at home. Men meet there out of prayer time, and women too, for what looks like, though it may not always be, a sacra conversazione of the painters. Students con over their Koran, rocking to and fro on a cushion in front of a little inlaid table. Solitary devotees prostrate themselves in a corner, untroubled by children playing among the pillars or a turbaned professor lecturing, cross-legged, to a cross-legged class in theology. The galleries of some mosques are safety-deposit vaults for their parishioners, and when the parish burns down the parishioners deposit themselves there too. After the greater conflagration of the Balkan War thousands of homeless refugees from Thrace and Macedonia camped out for months in the mosques of Stamboul. Even the pigeons that haunt so many mosque yards know that the doors are always open, and are scarcely to be persuaded from taking up their permanent abode on tiled cornices or among the marble stalactites of capitals.

One thing that makes a mosque look more hospitable than a church is its arrangement. There are no seats or aisles to cut up the floor. Matting is spread there, over which are laid in winter the carpets of the country; and before you step on to this clean covering you put off your shoes from off your feet—unless you shuffle about in the big slippers that are kept in some mosques for foreign visitors. The general impression is that of a private interior magnified and dignified. The central object of this open space is the mihrab, a niche pointing toward Mecca. It is usually set in an apse which is raised a step above the level of the nave. In it is a prayer-rug for the imam, and on each side, in a brass or silver standard, an immense candle, which is lighted only on the seven holy nights of the year and during Ramazan. At the right of the mihrab, as you face it, stands the mimber, a sort of pulpit, at the top of a stairway and covered by a pointed canopy, which is used only for the noon prayer of Friday or on other special occasions. To the left, and nearer the door, is a smaller pulpit called the kürsi. This is a big cushioned armchair or throne, reached by a short ladder, where the imam sits to speak on ordinary occasions. There will also be one or more galleries for singers, and in larger mosques, usually at the mihrab end of the left-hand gallery, an imperial tribune enclosed by grille work and containing its own sacred niche. The chandeliers are a noticeable feature of every mosque, hanging very low and containing not candles but glass cups of oil with a floating wick. I am afraid, however, that this soft light will be presently turned into electricity. From the chandeliers often hang ostrich eggs—emblems of eternity—and other homely ornaments.

The place of the mosque in the Turkish community is symbolised, like that of the mediæval cathedral, by its architectural pre-eminence. Mark, however, that Stamboul has half a dozen cathedrals instead of one. It would be hard to overestimate how much of the character of Stamboul depends on the domes and minarets that so inimitably accident the heights between the Golden Horn and the Marmora. And on closer acquaintance the mosques are found to contain almost all that Stamboul has of architectural pretension. They form an achievement, to my mind, much greater than the world at large seems to realise. The easy current dictum that they are merely more or less successful imitations of St. Sophia takes no account of the evolution—particularly of the central dome—which may be traced through the mosques of Konia, Broussa, and Adrianople, and which reaches its legitimate climax in Stamboul. The likelier fact is that the mosque of Stamboul, inspired by the same remote Asiatic impulse as the Byzantine church, absorbed what was proper to it in Byzantine art, refining away the heaviness or overfloridness of the East, until in the hands of a master like Sinan it attained a supreme elegance without losing any of its dignity. Yet it would be a mistake to look for all Turkish architecture in Sinan. The mosques of Atik Ali Pasha and of Sultan Baïezid II are there to prove of what mingled simplicity and nobility was capable an obscure architect of an earlier century. His name is supposed to have been Haïreddin, and he, first among the Turks, used the monolithic shaft and the stalactite capital. How perfect they are, though, in the arcades of Baïezid! Nothing could be better in its way than the forecourt of that mosque, and its inlaid minarets are unique of their kind. Nor did architecture die with Sinan. Yeni Jami, looking at Galata along the outer bridge, is witness thereof. The pile of the Süleïmanieh, whose four minarets catch your eye from so many points of the compass, is perhaps more masculine. But the silhouette of Yeni Jami, that mosque of princesses, has an inimitable grace. The way in which each structural necessity adds to the general effect, the climactic building up of buttress and cupola, the curve of the dome, the proportion of the minarets, could hardly be more perfect. Although brought up in the vociferous tradition of Ruskin, I am so far unfaithful to the creed of my youth as to find pleasure, too, in rococo mosques like Zeïneb Sultan, Nouri Osmanieh, and Laleli Jami. And the present generation, under men like Vedad Bey and the architects of the Evkaf, are reviving their art in a new and interesting direction.

To give any comprehensive account of the mosques of Stamboul would be to write a history of Ottoman architecture, and for that I lack both space and competence. I may, however, as an irresponsible lounger in mosque yards, touch on one or two characteristic aspects of mosques and their decoration which strike a foreigner’s eye. The frescoing or stencilling of domes and other curved interior surfaces, for instance, is an art that has very little been noticed—even by the Turks, judging from the sad estate to which the art has fallen. Some people might object to calling it an art at all. Let such a one be given a series of domes and vaults to ornament by this simple means, however, and he will find how difficult it is to produce an effect both decorative and dignified. The restorers of the nineteenth century spoiled many a fine interior by their atrocious baroque draperies or colour-blind colour schemes. If I were a true believer I could never pray in mosques like Ahmed I or Yeni Jami, because the decorator evidently noticed that the prevailing tone of the tiles was blue and dipped his brush accordingly—into a blue of a different key. Yet there are domes which prove how fine an art the Turks once made of this half-mechanical decoration. One of the best in Stamboul is in the tomb of the princes, behind the Shah-zadeh mosque. The stencilling is a charming arabesque design in black, dark red, pale blue, and orange, perhaps happily toned by time, which a recent restoration was wise enough to spare. The tomb of Roxelana and the great tomb beside Yeni Jami also contain a little interesting stencilling. But the most complete example of good work of this kind is outside Stamboul, in the Yeni Valideh mosque of Scutari. The means used are of the simplest, the colours being merely black and dull red, with a little dull yellow; but the lines are so fine and so sapiently spaced on their broad background of white that the effect is very much that of a Persian shawl. A study of that ceiling should be made compulsory for every decorator of a mosque—and might yield suggestions not a few to his Western cousin.

The windows of mosques are another detail that always interests me. They are rarely very large, but there are a great many of them and they give no dim religious light, making up a great part as they do of the human sunniness of the interior. A first tier of square windows stand almost at the level of the floor, and are provided with folding shutters which are carved with many little panels or with a Moorish pattern of interlaced stars. Higher up the windows are arched and are made more interesting by the broad plaster mullions of which I have already spoken. These make against the light a grille of round, oval, or drop-shaped openings which are wonderfully decorative in themselves. The same principle is refined and complicated into a result more decorative still when the plaster setting forms a complete design of arabesques, flowers, or writing, sometimes framing symmetrically spaced circles or quadrangles, sometimes composing an all-over pattern, and filled in with minute panes of coloured glass. Huysmans compared the windows of Chartres to Persian rugs, because the smallness of the figures and their height above the floor make them merely conventional arrangements of colour. Here, however, we have the real principle of the Oriental rug. Turkish windows contain no figures at all, nor any of that unhappy attempt at realism that mars so much modern glass. The secret of the effect lies in the smallness of the panes used and the visibility of the plaster design in which they are set. And what an effect of jewelry may be produced in this way is to be seen in the Süleïmanieh, and Yeni Jami—where two slim cypresses make delicious panels of green light above the mihrab—besides other mosques and tombs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Mosques are even more notable than private houses for the inscriptions on their walls. Every visitor to St. Sophia remembers the great green medallions bearing the names of the chief personages of Islam in letters of gold. In purely Turkish mosques similar medallions may be seen, or large inscriptions stencilled like panels on the white walls, or small texts hanging near the floor. But there is a more architectural use of writing, above doors and windows or in the form of a frieze. When designed by a master like Hassan Chelibi of Kara Hissar, the great calligrapher of Süleïman’s time, and executed in simple dark blue and white in one of the imperial tile factories, this art became a means of decoration which we can only envy the Turks. Such inscriptions are always from the Koran, of course, and they are often happily chosen for the place they occupy. Around the great dome of the Süleïmanieh, and lighted by its circle of windows, runs this verse: “God is the light of the heavens and of the earth. His light is like a window in the wall, wherein a lamp burns, covered with glass. The glass shines like a star. The lamp is kindled from the oil of a blessed tree: not of the east, not of the west, it lights whom he wills.”

It is not only for inscriptions, however, that tiles are used in mosques. Stamboul, indeed, is a museum of tiles that has never been adequately explored. Nor, in general, is very much known about Turkish ceramics. I suppose nothing definite will be known till the Turks themselves, or some one who can read their language, takes the trouble to look up the records of mosques and other public buildings. The splendid tiles of Süleïman’s period have sometimes been attributed a Persian and sometimes a Rhodian origin—for they have many similarities with the famous Rhodian plates. The Turks themselves generally suppose that their tiles came from Kütahya, where a factory still produces work of an inferior kind. The truth lies between these various theories. That any number of the tiles of Constantinople came from Persia is impossible. So many of them could not have been safely brought so far overland, and it is inconceivable that they would have fitted into their places as they do, or that any number of buildings would have been erected to fit their tiles. The Rhodian theory is equally improbable, partly for similar reasons though chiefly because the legend of Rhodes is all but exploded. The Musée de Cluny is almost the last believer in the idea that its unrivalled collection of Rhodian plates ever came from Rhodes. Many of them probably came from different parts of Asia Minor. That tiles were produced in Asia Minor long before the capture of Constantinople we know from the monuments of Broussa, Konia, and other places. They were quite a different kind of tile, to be sure, of only one colour or containing a simple arabesque design, which was varied by a sort of tile mosaic. Many of them, too, were six-sided. The only examples of these older tiles in Constantinople are to be seen at the Chinili Kyöshk of the imperial museum—the Tile Pavilion—and the tomb of Mahmoud Pasha. It is a notorious fact, however, that the sultans who fought against the Persians brought back craftsmen of all kinds from that country and settled them in different parts of the empire. Selim I, for instance, when he captured Tabriz, imported the best tile makers of that city, as well as from Ardebil and Kashan—whence one of the words for tiles, kyashi—and settled them in Isnik. This is the city which under an older name had already produced the historian Dion Cassius and the Nicene Creed. Other factories are known to have existed in Kastambol, Konia, Nicomedia, and Constantinople itself. One is supposed to have been in Eyoub, though no trace of it remains to-day unless in the potteries of Chömlekjiler. Another, I have been told, flourished at Balat. I know not whether it may have been the same which Sultan Ahmed III transferred in 1724 from Nicæa to the ruined Byzantine palace of Tekfour Seraï. A colony of glass-blowers there are the last remnant to-day of the tile makers of two hundred years ago.

The art itself declined and gradually died out as the sultans stopped making conquests and building mosques. For the imperial mosques are monuments of victory, built and endowed out of the spoils of war. After the martial period of the empire came to an end with Süleïman I only one mosque of importance, that of Ahmed I, was built by a reigning sultan in his own name. But the tiles of the imperial factories, after many fires and much thieving, still make up what is most brilliant and most durable in the colour of Stamboul. The best tiles are Nicene of the sixteenth century, that extraordinary cinque-cento, when so many of the best things of the world were produced. They are distinguished by the transparent white glaze of their background, on which are drawn tulips, carnations, wild hyacinths, and a certain long bent serrated leaf common to the Rhodian plate. The chief colours are a dark and a turquoise blue and a tomato red, green and yellow occurring more rarely. And they are never quite smooth, the red in particular usually being in slight relief. This gives them a variety which is absent from many modern tiles.

The feeling for variety, in fact, was one great secret of Turkish tile making and tile setting. Sinan, for instance, used tiles very sparingly in his larger buildings. He was great enough to depend very little on ornament for his effect, and he knew that tiles would look like paper or linoleum—if such things existed in his day!—on a monumental surface. But he had a perfect tact of using this tapestry wherever he wanted a touch of colour or distinction—over a window, along a cornice, around a mihrab. His masterpiece in this decoration is the mosque of Rüstem Pasha, son-in-law and Grand Vizier to Süleïman the Magnificent. This mosque, lifted on retaining walls above the noise of its busy quarter, has a portico which must have been magnificently tiled—judging from the panel at the left of the main door—and the whole interior is tiled to the spring of the dome. The mosque is small enough for the effect of the tiles to tell—and to be almost ruined by the fearful modern frescoes of the vaulting. The guides of Pera have a favourite legend to the effect that Rüstem Pasha brought back these tiles from his wars in Persia and built a mosque for them to save giving them up to his imperial master. But no one need be an expert to see the impossibility of any such story. The tiles must have been designed for the walls which they incrust, and by a supreme master of decoration. I should not be surprised to learn that Sinan himself drew them all. There is a tall narrow panel on either side of the mosque, between two windows, which seems to me one of the most perfect ways imaginable of filling such a space. So are the spandrels of the arches supporting the gallery, and the niche of the mihrab, and the back of the mimber. All through the mosque, however, the way in which the artist has varied his designs and colours, while never losing his unity of effect, is a piece of genius. Narrow spaces and points of special interest are treated each in its own way; but unbroken surfaces of wall are never allowed to become monotonous by covering them with only one form of tile. They are broken up by narrower border tiles into panels, each of which is treated differently though harmonising with its neighbour and balancing the corresponding space on the opposite side of the mosque. Even within one of these spaces monotony is avoided by the fact that the tiles are almost never of a repeating pattern. Two or four tiles are required to make up the scheme. And then the pattern does not always fit the tiles, so that the interstices come in different places in different parts of the design, and you feel that the tiles could only have been made for that one space. In the case of special panels, of course, many tiles are required to make up the pattern. The splendid flowered panel in the portico contains forty-five tiles, exclusive of the border, and every one of them different. Such work was not commercial tile making. It was an art.

Two mosques of a later period in Stamboul are completely tiled, that of Sultan Ahmed I and the one begun by his wife—Yeni Jami. They prove the wisdom of Sinan in not attempting to tile a large interior. Still, the gallery of Sultan Ahmed also proves that the architect was not altogether ignorant of what he was about. He put his best tiles there, where they can only be seen at close range. And his best is very good. I have counted twenty-nine varieties of tiles there, or rather of designs, divided, like those of Rüstem Pasha, into framed panels. The tiles facing the mihrab, where the gallery widens over the main doorway, are so good that I sometimes ask myself if the architect did not borrow from an earlier building. Two series of eleven panels, one above the other, make a tall wainscot whose only fault is that too much richness is crowded into too narrow a space. The lower series is the finer. Five panels to the right balance five panels to the left of a spindle-shaped Persian design. Its two neighbours are conventionalised cypress trees, than which nothing more decorative was ever invented. Then come two magnificent panels of larger spindles against a thicket of peach-blossoms or Judas blossoms, red with small blue centres, followed by two more cypresses. Five panels of the upper series, one of them forming the axis, are latticed again with blossoming sprays. In this case there is no spindle to hide the greater part of the flowers, which are blue with small red centres. The tiles are very nearly if not quite as good as those of the preceding century, and they make a wall more splendid than exists outside the old Seraglio.

Yeni Jami is better suited for tiling, being comparatively a smaller mosque. Its proportions are also much better and the frescoing is not so bad as that of Sultan Ahmed. The tiles themselves are not so interesting. But attached to the mosque, and giving entrance to the imperial tribune, is a suite of rooms which are also tiled. This imperial apartment is carried across the street on a great pointed arch, and is reached from outside by a covered inclined way which enabled the Sultan to ride directly up to the level of his gallery. At the same level is also a little garden, held up by a massive retaining wall, and a balcony with a rail of perforated marble once gave a magnificent view over the harbour. The view has since been cut off by shops, and the apartment itself has fallen into a sad state of neglect or has been subjected to unfortunate restorations. A later and more intelligent restoration has brought to light, under a vandal coat of brown paint, the old gilding of the woodwork. But the tiles of the walls remain—except where they have been replaced by horrible panels of some composition imitating Florentine mosaic. Among them are charming cypresses and peach-trees. There are also remains of lovely old windows, to say nothing of tall hooded fireplaces and doors incrusted with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl. The tiles are palpably of a poorer period than those I have described. But there is a great attractiveness about this quaint apartment, that only adds to the general distinction of Yeni Jami.

The original founder of the mosque, as I have said, was the favourite wife of Ahmed I. This princess is one of the most famous women in Turkish chronicles. Whether she was a Greek or a Turk, history does not confirm, though the custom of the sultans to marry none but slaves would point to the former origin. Her name in the Seraglio was Mahpeïker—Moon Face. She is oftenest remembered, however, by the name Kyössem, Leader of a Flock, from the fact that she was the first of a troop of slaves presented to the young sultan. During his reign she gained an increasing voice in the affairs of the empire, and during those of her sons Mourad IV and Ibrahim her word was law. The position of empress mother is an exceptional one in Turkey, as in China, the occupant of it being the first lady in the palace and the land. She is known as the valideh soultan, or princess mother—for the word sultan properly has no sex. Our word sultana does not exist in Turkish, being a Greek or Italian invention. The reigning sultan prefixes the title to his own name, while other persons of his blood put it after theirs. When the grandson of Kyössem, the boy Mehmed IV, came to the throne, the great valideh continued, against all precedent, to inhabit the Seraglio and to exercise her old influence. But at last the jealousy of Mehmed’s mother, defrauded of her natural rank, kindled a palace intrigue that caused the older valideh, at the age of eighty, to be strangled one night in the Seraglio. Her mosque, still unfinished, suffered by a fire which ravaged the quarter; and it was finally completed by her young rival, a Russian named Tar’han, or Hadijeh. After the latter the mosque is called to-day the yeni valideh soultan jamisi, the mosque of the new empress mother. In common parlance, however, it goes by the name of yeni jami, the new mosque—though it has had time to become fairly venerable. And she who became the new valideh in 1649 now occupies the place of honour under the dome of the tomb beside the mosque, while the murdered Kyössem rests near her husband in their little marble house on the Hippodrome.

The tombs that accompany mosques are only less interesting than the mosques themselves, both for their architectural character and for their historical associations. When space permits they lie in an inner enclosure of the mosque yard, technically called the garden, behind the mosque. Long before Constantinople became their capital the sultans had perfected a type of mausoleum, or türbeh. This is a domed structure, usually octagonal in shape, cheerfully lighted by two or three tiers of windows. Every tomb has its own guardian, called the türbedar, and some are attached to a school or other philanthropic institution. These mausoleums are often extremely elaborate in decoration, but they all retain a certain primitive simplicity with regard to their central feature. There is no sarcophagus of marble or porphyry. The occupant of the türbeh is buried in the floor, and over his grave stands a plain wooden catafalque covered with green cloth. Like a Turkish coffin, it is ridged and inclined from the head, where a wooden standard supports the turban of the deceased. A woman’s catafalque has no standard, a scarf being thrown across the head. Embroideries, of gold on velvet, or of quotations from the Koran in a zigzag pattern, may cover the green cloth. Such embroideries are often a piece of a last year’s hanging from the Kaaba at Mecca or from the Prophet’s tomb at Medina. But nothing is imposing about the catafalque unless its size, which indicates the importance of the person commemorated. The largest one I remember is that of Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror. And the rail around the catafalque is all that suggests permanence, and that is generally of wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The simple epitaph is written on a placard which hangs casually from the rail, or perhaps from an immense candle to be lighted on holy nights. Near by may be an inlaid folding stand with an illuminated Koran. The floor is matted and covered with rugs like a mosque or a house.

The tombs attached to the imperial mosques are naturally the most important. Not every sultan built his own, however. In the türbeh of Ahmed I two other sultans are buried, his sons Osman II—who was the first sultan to be murdered by his own people—and the bloody Mourad IV. Among the innumerable people whom the latter put to death was his brother Prince Baïezid, the hero of Racine’s “Bajazet,” who lies beside him. In the tomb of Hadijeh at Yeni Jami five sultans rest: her son Mehmed IV, her grandsons Moustafa II and Ahmed III, and her great-grandsons Mahmoud I and Osman III. These and others of the larger tombs are noticeable for the number of little catafalques they contain, marking the graves of little princes who were strangled on the accession of their eldest brother.

The most interesting tombs, from an artistic point of view, are those of the period of Süleïman the Magnificent. How this later Solomon came by his European nickname I can not tell, for the Turks know him as Solomon the Lawgiver. But magnificent without doubt he was, and Stamboul would be another city if all trace of his magnificence were to disappear. His türbeh, behind the mosque he built in his own name, is perhaps the most imposing in Constantinople, though neither the largest nor the most splendidly decorated. A covered ambulatory surrounds it, and within are handsome tiles and stained-glass windows. I prefer, however, the tomb of his famous consort. The legend of this lady has enjoyed outside of her own country a success that proves again the capriciousness of fame. For the great Kyössem was a more celebrated princess whose name has been forgotten in Europe. It is perfectly true that Süleïman did put to death his eldest son Moustafa, a prince of the greatest promise, and that Roxelana’s son, Selim II, did inherit the throne accordingly—and so cut off the line of great sultans. But it has yet to be proved that Roxelana really was the “fatal woman” of popular history, who instigated her stepson’s murder. I suspect the truth of the matter was largely that she had a good press, as they say in French. She happened to fall into the orbit of one of the greatest men of her time, she furnished copy for the despatches of one or two famous ambassadors, and—they gave her a pronounceable name! I have been told that it is a corruption of a Persian name meaning red-cheeked; but I have privately wondered if it had anything to do with the Slavic tribe of Roxolani. Be that as it may, this princess was a Russian slave of so great wit and charm that the Lord of the Two Earths and the Sovereign of All the Seas paid her the unprecedented compliment of making her his legal wife. He even built for her, unlike any other sultan I remember, a tomb to herself. And Sinan subtly put into it a feminine grace that is set off by the neighbouring mausoleum of her husband. In the little vestibule are two panels of rose-red flowers that must have been lovely in their day. In consequence of some accident the tiles have been stupidly patched and mixed up. The interior is sixteen-sided, with alternate windows and pointed marble niches. The spaces between are delicately tiled, and most so in the spandrels of the niches, where are sprays of rose-coloured flowers like those in the vestibule.

There is another tomb behind another mosque of Süleïman, which is, perhaps, the most perfect monument of its kind in Stamboul. I did not always think so. But the more I look at its fluted dome and at the scheme of its interior tiling, the more I seem to see that here again Sinan, or the great decorator who worked with him, exquisitely found means to express an idea of individuality. This tomb was built, like the mosque to which it belongs, in memory of Süleïman’s second and best-beloved son, the young Prince Mehmed. The mosque—so-called of the Shah-zadeh, the Prince—has lost its original decoration, but its graceful lines and its incrusted minarets combine with the smaller buildings and the trees about it to make one of the happiest architectural groups in Stamboul. As for the türbeh, it fortunately remains very much as Sinan left it. The design of the tiles is more abstract and masculine than those in Roxelana’s türbeh, being mainly an intricate weaving of lines and arabesques. But there is about them a refinement, a distinction, which, it is hardly too fantastic to say, insensibly suggest the youth and the royal station of the boy whose burial chamber they beautify. For the colour—rarest of all in Turkish tiles—is a spring green and a golden yellow, set off by a little dark blue. The tomb is also remarkable, as I have already said, for the stencilling of its dome, as well as for the lovely fragments of old stained glass in the upper windows and for a sort of wooden canopy, perforated in the wheel pattern common to the balustrades of the period, covering the prince’s catafalque. It is supposed to symbolise the throne which Süleïman hoped his son might inherit. Beside the prince, but not under the canopy, rests his humpbacked younger brother Jihangir. As for the unhappy Prince Moustafa, he was buried in Broussa, in the beautiful garden of the Mouradieh.

The türbeh of Prince Mehmed has, in my mind, another pre-eminence which perhaps it does not deserve. As in most other public buildings of Stamboul, an inscription is carved over the door. These inscriptions are generally in poetry and sometimes very long. The uninitiated reader would never guess that the last verse of many of them is also a date, for the Arabic letters, like certain Roman letters, have a numerical value. And the date of many a Turkish monument is hidden in a chronogram, always the last line of the inscription, in which the arithmetical sum of the letters is equivalent to the numeral of the year in which the monument was erected. I am not learned enough to say when this recondite fashion started, but the chronogram of this tomb is the earliest I happen to know about in Stamboul. It reads: “Grant, Lord, to him who rests here to win the grove of Eden.” The arithmetical value of the line is 950, which year of the Hegira is equivalent to 1543 of our era.

There are several other interesting tombs in this enclosure, of which the most important are those of Rüstem Pasha, builder of the tile mosque we have already noticed, and of a certain Ibrahim Pasha, Grand Vizier to Sultan Mourad III. I have a particular fancy for the latter türbeh, which seems to me in its neglected way a little masterpiece. Consider me now its door—how admirably drawn it is, provided with what green bronze knockers in the shape of lyres! The tiles of the interior, or the more important of them, are simplified from those of Prince Mehmed, transposed into another key—dark red and less dark blue on white—and set between two encircling inscriptions. There are also certain panels of flowers between high windows. But I think I am most undone by a little dado, one tile high, where two outward curving sprays of wild hyacinth that just do not fit into the breadth of a tile enclose a small cluster of tulips and carnations—inimitably conventionalised and symmetrical. Nothing more simple or more decorative was ever imagined.

Selim II, the unworthy supplanter of him who might have been Mehmed III, lies in a tomb handsomer than he deserves, in the court of a mosque built by a greater than he—St. Sophia. His large türbeh lacks the elegant proportion of his brother’s, but the tile panels of its porch are very effective. So is the tile tapestry of its inner walls, though a little monotonous—mainly white in effect, dotted with little tulips and other flowers enclosed in small Persian spindles. Four other sultans are buried in the precincts of St. Sophia, the mad Moustafa I and the dethroned Ibrahim lying in dishonourable neglect in the bare, whitewashed chamber that was once the baptistery of the cathedral. And it was through having been the slave of Ibrahim that the valideh soultan Hadijeh was able to complete Yeni Jami in her own name and build beside it the great mausoleum in which she lies!

These türbehs, with the fountains of the outer courtyard and the trees that shade them and the minarets that tower above the trees, give an oddly Turkish air to the precincts of St. Sophia. It is to a real mosque, however, that one must go for a typical mosque yard. A part of it that is lacking to St. Sophia, and, indeed, to many mosques, is another inner enclosure called the haram, or sanctuary. This forecourt of the mosque is always more architectural than the “garden,” being a paved quadrangle surrounded by an arcade. In the centre of the cloister a covered fountain should bubble, sometimes under trees. I have already mentioned one of the best examples of such a court. It belongs to the old mosque of Sultan Baïezid II, more popularly known as the Pigeon Mosque. This is less of a sanctuary than any other forecourt in Stamboul. But the reason is that the mosque lacks an outer yard other than the square of the War Department. And I would be the last to find fault with the scribes who sit in the arcades, or to call them Pharisees who sell beads and perfumes there. During the month of Ramazan a busy fair is held there, open only during the afternoon, where the complicated sweetmeats of the season are sold together with other things worthy to be given as presents at Baïram. I must say, however, that I have a weakness for the court of another old mosque, that of Sultan Selim I, in a less accessible part of Stamboul. Part of its charm is perhaps due to the fact that it is more remote and therefore more subject to silence. Above the barred windows that look into the outer sunlight are lunettes of tiles, while around the fountain cypresses and grape-vines make an inimitable shade. Nor can I pass by the court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the last and greatest vizier of Süleïman I. This is supposed to be a lesser work of Sinan, but I like it almost better than any other. Within the mosque are treasures of tiles, of stained glass, of painted wood, of perforated marble. Without is one of the noblest porticoes in Stamboul, looking down upon a cloister that is a real cloister. For into its colonnade open cells where live the students of a medresseh.

A medresseh is a theological school and law school combined, since in Islam the teachings of the Prophet, as embodied in the Koran and the traditions, form not only the rule of life but the law of the land. It is only recently that a difference has been recognised between the Sheriat or sacred law and the civil law, but their boundaries are still indistinct, and for many men the same door leads to legal or to spiritual preferment. I have said so much about tombs and tiles and other matters that I have left myself no room to speak of medressehs—or schools of other kinds, or libraries, or caravansaries, or baths, or hospitals, or soup-kitchens, or any other of the charitable institutions that cluster around a mosque yard. We are wont to imagine that philanthropy was invented in the West, and that the institutional church is a peculiarly modern development. But before America was discovered institutional mosques flourished in Stamboul and all over Asia Minor, and continue to do so to this day. Almost no mosque, indeed, has not some philanthropy connected with it. They are administered, mosques and dependencies and all, by a separate and very important department of government called the Ministry of the Erkaf—of Pious Foundations.

The necessities of space do not always allow these dependencies to gather around their central mosque yard. Or sometimes they are independent foundations and may have a yard of their own of which a small mosque is merely one feature. Two very interesting examples are medressehs in the vicinity of the mosque of the Conqueror. They both belong to the same period and their founders were both ministers of Sultan Moustafa II, who was dethroned in 1703. The smaller and more ruinous was built by Feïzoullah Effendi, Sheï’h ül Islam, a mighty man of God who did and undid viziers in his day and perished miserably at Adrianople in the upheaval that drove his imperial master from the throne. His medresseh nearly perished too, in 1912, to make way for a new boulevard. But it was happily saved by the society of the Friends of Stamboul, and in time its little cloister may become less of a jungle. Its chief ornament is the structure to the left of the gateway, where a flight of steps mounts under a wonderful arch or crocket of perforated marble to a pillared porch with a mosque on one side and a library on the other. The mosque is the more dilapidated, but it contains fragments of good tiling and a charming little door. The library has the same little door, shallow-arched and ornamented with fine stalactites of marble. The interior of the library is almost filled by a square cage, which has a corresponding door of its own and a dark inner compartment. On the wired shelves of this structure big books are piled on their sides, and their titles and numbers are written on the edges of the leaves. They are all manuscripts, and some of them are illuminated or beautifully bound. I also saw a finely bound catalogue to which nothing has been added for two hundred years. For that matter the library does not look as if any one had consulted it for two hundred years, though the librarian is supposed to be there every day except Tuesday and Friday. He accordingly spends most of his time in his book-shop in the mosque yard of the Conqueror.