Constantinople old and new

Why the Golden Horn should be called the Golden Horn is a question that has agitated many serious pens. A less serious pen is therefore free to declare itself for an explanation that does not explain. The Greeks always seem to have been fond of the word gold. In their language as in ours it has a pleasant sound, and it has pleasant implications—the philosophers to the contrary. At any rate, the Greeks of Constantinople made much use of it. The state entrance to the city was through the Golden Gate. One of the most famous parts of the Great Palace was the Golden Hall. The suburb of Scutari was anciently known as the City of Gold. There were in different parts of the town a Golden Milestone, a Golden Arch, a Golden Roof, and a Golden Stream, while the Greek church abounds in golden springs and golden caves. I have even known a Greek serving-maid to address her mistress in moments of expansion as “my golden one”! The Golden Horn, then, was probably named so for even less reason than the orange valley behind Palermo—because some one a long time ago liked the sound of the words.

I always wish I might have seen the Golden Horn before it was bridged. It must have made, opening out of the lake-like basin where the Bosphorus and the Marmora come together, one of the most satisfactory pieces of geography in nature. However, if the bridges cut up that long curving perspective they add something of their own to it, and whoever stands upon them must acknowledge that the Golden Horn is still a satisfactory piece of geography. Consider, for instance, its colour, which may not be quite so blue as Naples but which is far from the muddiness of New York. Consider also the shores that overlook it—how excellently their height is proportioned to its breadth, how superlatively the southern one, in particular, is set off by the pinnacles of Seraglio Point and the mosques that ride the higher crests. Yet do not fail to consider that more intimate element of its character, its busy water life. I say so with rather a pointed air, as if, having already found something to write about one bank of the Golden Horn, I intended to go on and give a compendious account of the Golden Horn itself, to the last fish that swims in it. Alas, no! I have admired the Golden Horn from every conceivable point of view, I have navigated it in every conceivable sense, I have idled much about its banks and bridges, I have even ventured to swim in its somewhat doubtful waters—only to learn how lamentable is my ignorance in their regard. My one consolation is that I never encountered any other man who knew very much about the Golden Horn—save casual watermen and sea-captains who have much better things to do than to write books, or read them.

All harbours bring the ends of the earth together, and the part of the Golden Horn outside the bridges looks a little like them all. Flags of every country fly there, beside stone quays or moored to red buoys in the open. Trim liners and workaday tramps bring in a little atmosphere from the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the far-off Atlantic. Tugs puff busily about. Cranes take up the white man’s burden as naturally as in any other port. Every harbour brings the ends of the earth together in its own way, however, and so does this. If you happen to tie up at a buoy instead of alongside, you will soon make the acquaintance of a gentleman in a row-boat very much like other row-boats, fringed with bumpers. This gentleman will probably be a Greek, though he may be anything, and he will demand all the gold of Ophir to set you ashore, getting not a little of it in the end. If you prefer to stay on board you will very likely make the acquaintance of another gentleman in a trimmer boat, painted blue and green, pointed at both ends and provided at each with an upstanding post which is convenient for tow-lines. This is a bumboat, and the Maltese in command will furnish you almost anything in the way of supplies—for a consideration. Should you have a cargo to land, you must deal with a yet more redoubtable race of beings. These men are Laz, a race of dare-devils from the region of Trebizond, which was the ancient Colchis. You may know them by their tight black clothes, by the sharpness of their shoes, ending in a leather thong, and by the pointed hood of two long flaps which they wear knotted about their heads like a turban. Some of them are Mohammedans and some of them are Christians, but all of them speak a mysterious language of their own. Two sorts of boats are peculiar to these brothers of Medea: the mahona, a single-masted scow with a raking stem, and a smaller snub-nosed salapouri. I do not include the mad little open taka, broad of beam, high of board, and gay with painted stars, in which they are not afraid to run down the coast from their own country. Woe be you if you happen to displease a mahonaji, for he belongs to a guild that holds the commerce of the port in no gentle hand. He will neither discharge your goods nor let any one else, if so it seem good to him, and not even the government can make him change his mind.

The lightermen are by no means the only guild in the Golden Horn, though I suppose they are doomed to follow the way of the others. These old organisations still persist among the different kinds of watermen. Each guild has its own station, like the traghetti of Venice, each has a headquarters, or lonja—which is a corruption of the Italian loggia—and each a series of officers headed by a kehaya. This dignitary takes no actual part, as a usual thing, in the work of the guild, but earns the lion’s share of the profits, and in return therefor protects the guild in high quarters. Under the old régime the kehayas of the principal guilds were members of the palace camarilla. In older times still the guilds were required to contribute heavily to the expenses of war in recognition of their privileges, and even now the lightermen and the custom-house porters are obliged to give the War Department so many men on so many days a week.

The outer bridge draws a sharp boundary-line between the cosmopolitan part of the harbour and the part where local colour is the rule. For any one who takes an interest in boats and those who have to do with them, the bit of water between Yeni Jami and the Arsenal is one of the happiest hunting-grounds in the world. This is the true home of the water guilds. The lightermen’s headquarters are here, and their four anchored flotillas are a distinct note of the scene. Here also are the headquarters of many lesser watermen such as row you across the Horn for a piastre—or even less if you do not insist on a boat to yourself. The smartest ones have their station just inside the bridge. Most of their boats are trim skiffs, gay with carving and gilding, and fitted out with velvet cushions and summer awnings. This skiff, called a sandal, has almost ousted the true boat of the Golden Horn, which is the legendary caïque. I am sorry to say it, because I do not like to see the Turks change their own customs for European ones, but truth compels me to add that I have lolled too much in gondolas to be an unbridled admirer of the caïque. A gondola is infinitely more roomy and comfortable, and it has the great advantage of not forcing you to sit nose to nose with a perspiring boatman. The caïque is swifter and easier in its gait, however, and, when long enough for two or three pairs of oars, not even a gondola is more graceful. Caïques still remain at the ferries higher up the Golden Horn—and grubby enough most of them are, for they have fallen greatly in the world since bridges were built and steamers began to ply.

If I were really to open the chapter of caïques I would never come to the end. The word is a generic one, and applies to an infinity of boats, from the stubby little single-oared piadeh kaïk of the Golden Horn ferries to the big pazar kaïk. You may admire this boat, and the carving that decorates it, and its magnificent incurving beak, and the tassel that should dangle therefrom, at the wharves of Yemish, off the Dried Fruit Bazaar. They all come, early in the morning, from different villages on the Bosphorus, rowed by men who stand to the heavy-handled oars and drop with them to their backs. There are also caïques with sails, undecked boats built on the lines of a fishing caïque, that bring fruit and vegetables from the villages of the Marmora. They are prettier to look at than to navigate, for they have no keel and their mainsail is a balloon, to be pulled from one side to the other of a fearsome stick, boom and gaff in one, that spears the heavens. The human part of the caïque has its picturesque points as well. The sail caïques are navigated more often than not by Greeks. As with fishing caïques, it depends on the village they come from. The men of the bazaar caïques are all Turks, and none of them ever saw a boat till he took ship for Constantinople. What is odder yet, the same is true of most of the ordinary boatmen of the inner Horn. Many of them are Laz; many others are Turkish peasants from the hinterland of the Black Sea. Those from one village or district enter one guild, serving a long apprenticeship before they can be masters of their own craft.

Another boundless chapter is that of the larger vessels that frequent the inner Horn. You get an inkling of how boundless it is when you stand on the bridge in front of Yeni Jami and look at the shipping that crowds along the shores. A perfect museum of navigation is there. Modern steamers lie beside the caravels of Columbus—as a matter of fact, the Greeks still call them karavia—and motor-boats make way for vessels whose build and rig can have changed very little since the days of the Argo. One notable armada is anchored off Odoun Kapan, the wood market, under the mosque of Süleïman, and the most notable part of it, for me, is always made up of certain ships called gagalî because their bows have the curve of a parrot’s beak. They have two eyes, like the bragozzi of the Adriatic, and their tremendously tilted bowsprit starts from a little one side of the bow. But what is most decorative about them is the stern, a high triangle adorned with much painting and carving and an open balustrade along the top, from either end of which a beam juts out horizontally over the sea in the line of the hull.

One or two minor fleets, made up of small Greek alamánas or Turkish chektîrmehs, are usually tied up off other Stamboul markets. But the most imposing one of all hides the Galata shore. It begins, distinguishably enough, just beyond the landing-stage of the skiffs I have mentioned, with a squadron of lighters and the raft that makes a bobbing street between certain tubby-looking sailing vessels. Bombarda is the name of their class, or vouvartha, if you prefer, and they bring oil and wine from as far away as the Greek islands. Beyond them rises so intricate a maze of rigging as would have baffled even an old German engraver. I wonder a man can ever find his own ship there, so closely does one elbow another, nor in any single row, all the way to Azap Kapou. This is where the Genoese had shipyards of old, and galleons that might have sailed out of the Middle Ages anchor there now for repairs, with craft that look a little more like Western seas. I despair of ever really knowing anything about them—of ever being able to tell at first shot a maouna of the Black Sea from a maouna of the White Sea, or a saïka from either, or to discover that Flying Dutchman of a craft of whose existence I have been credibly informed, namely, the Ship of the Prophet Noah.

The Black and the White Sea play a great part in these matters, the White Sea meaning the Marmora and the Mediterranean. In the days when guilds were more important than they are now the Captains of the White Sea were the navy, while the Captains of the Black Sea were the merchant marine, and that must have something to do with the fact that the watermen of the Golden Horn still come from the littoral of the Black Sea. The Prophet Noah also, whom I have just mentioned, is likewise involved in matters maritime, as being the father of ship-builders. The archangel Gabriel, according to Mohammedan tradition, taught him how to model the keel of the ark from the breast-bone of a goose, and wrote talismanic invocations on different parts of the ship—as “O Steadfast One” on the planks, and “O Allotter of the True Path” upon the rudder. The patrons of Turkish seamen are, if you please, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus! Mohammed seems to have entertained a sympathy for these mythic beings, whose adventures are told in the eighteenth chapter of the Koran. The name of their dog, somewhat variously known as Kitmir or Al Rakim, used to be written on the outside of letters in order to ensure their safe passage across the sea, and this happy animal is one of the few to whom paradise is specifically promised. Von Hammer accounts for the association of so curious a company with seamen on the ground that a verse of the Koran mentions their entering a ship. But astrologically, I believe, they are related to the constellation of the Great Bear; whence it is clear enough why they should be concerned with navigation. It is further to be noted of the seamen of the Golden Horn that whether they belong to the Black Sea or the White, and whether they sacrifice to the Seven Sleepers or to St. Nicholas, the jargon of their trade is almost purely Italian. Even the boatmen in the harbour shout sía when they want each other to back water, not suspecting that the gondoliers in Venice do exactly the same—though the gondoliers may not spell it quite as I do. The names of a few kinds of ships and of a few parts of them have been slightly Turkified or Grecicised, as the case may be, but an Italian sailor would be lost only on a steamer. There a Turkish captain uses English words as glibly as you or I. On a motor-boat, however, he would pass to French.

It is rather surprising that the Greeks, who were always a seafaring people, should have taken over so much of the ship language of their Latin conquerors. The case of the Turks is less surprising, for they are tent men born. Nor have their coreligionaries in general ever been great adventurers upon the deep. The Caliph Omar even went so far as to forbid them sea voyages. Nevertheless, the science of navigation owes much to the Arabs, and we get from them our words arsenal and admiral—meaning “house of construction” and “prince of the sea”—while some of the greatest exploits of the Turks were connected with the sea. The deep valley of Kassîm Pasha, inside the Azap Kapou bridge, is supposed to have been the final scene of one of the most celebrated of those exploits, the one successfully carried out by Sultan Mehmed II during his siege of the city, when he hauled a squadron of eighty galleys out of the Bosphorus, dragged them over the hills in a night, and relaunched them inside the chain that locked the Golden Horn. That chain may be seen to-day in the military museum of St. Irene. Kassîm Pasha does not seem to me altogether to fit the contemporary descriptions, although it would offer the easiest route. There is no doubt, however, about the famous arsenal that sits solidly at the mouth of the valley to this day. How many days it will continue to sit there is another matter, for its long water-front may become more valuable for commercial purposes than for those of a modern shipyard. It was founded by Sultan Selim I in 1515, was enlarged by his son Süleïman the Magnificent, and reached the climax of its importance under his grandson Selim II. Those were the great days when the Captains of the White Sea were the terror of the Mediterranean, and when a disaster like the battle of Lepanto, in which the Turks lost two hundred and twenty-four ships and thirty thousand men, could not shake the empire. The Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha said to the Venetian Balio, apropos of that battle and of the conquest of Cyprus by the Turks which preceded it: “There is a great difference between your loss and ours. In taking a kingdom from you it is an arm of yours that we have cut off, while you, in beating our fleet, have merely shaved our beard.” Nor was this a piece of rodomontade. The winter after Lepanto, 1571-2, one hundred and fifty-eight galleys of different sizes were laid down in the Arsenal. And when that famous Prince of the Sea Kîlîj Ali Pasha expressed a doubt as to whether he could find the rigging and anchors he needed, the Grand Vizier said to him: “Lord Admiral, the wealth and power of the empire are such that if it were necessary we would make anchors of silver, cables of silk, and sails of satin.”

A few relics of this fallen greatness are to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal, some distance up the Horn from the Admiralty proper. Some wonderful figureheads of galleys are there, flags and pennants of different sorts, a chart of the time of the Conqueror painted on parchment, a few interesting models, and one or two of the big ship lanterns that were the sign of the dignity of an admiral, corresponding to the horsetails of the vezirs. A pasha of three lanterns, however, was a much more important personage than a pasha of three tails. Most picturesque of all are a number of great gilded caïques, with swooping bows and high sterns, in which the sultans used to go abroad. The largest of them is said to have been a Venetian galley. It has twenty-two rowlocks on either side, and each oar was rowed by three or four men. As a matter of fact, the long horizontal overhang of the bow does look rather like some of the models in the Arsenal at Venice, while two lions guard the stern. But the lions have no wings, they were always a favourite ornament of Turkish as of Byzantine galleys, and the lines of the hull are precisely those of any caïque. As to the imperial cabin at the stern there is no doubt. It is a triple cupola rather, supported by columns, and all inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl and lumps of garnet glass. Reclining under this wonderful canopy Sultan Mehmed IV used to go about the Bosphorus, while over a hundred men in front of him rose and fell with their oars. What a splash they must have made!

The Arsenal has given a certain colour to the whole suburb of Kassîm Pasha. It is chiefly inhabited by naval officers, who under Abd ül Hamid II outnumbered their men! There is a quarter of it called Kalliounjou Koullouk, which means the Guard-house of the Galleon Men. There are also a number of fountains in Kassîm Pasha carved with three ship lanterns to show who built them. And not the least famous of the Princes of the Sea lies there himself beside the mosque he raised out of the spoils of his piracies. This Pialeh Pasha was by birth a Croat and the son of a shoemaker. Captured as a boy by the Janissaries, he grew up to command the fleets of his captors, to conquer Chio and sixty-six other islands, and to marry the daughter of Sultan Selim II. But he failed to take Malta from the Knights of St. John, and it was the bitterness of his life. His mosque is almost unknown, so far does it lie in the back of Kassîm Pasha. They say that Pialeh dug a canal to its doors. They also say that he wanted to make it like a ship. The mosque, at all events, is different from all other mosques I know. The nave is shallower than it is wide, its six equal domes being held up by two central pillars like masts, while the single minaret rises out of the wall opposite the mihrab. The mihrab itself, contained in no apse, is perhaps the finest tiled mihrab I know. Some of the tiles have been stolen, however, and the mosque in general has a pillaged appearance. I thought from the bareness of the entrance wall that a large part of the magnificent frieze of blue and white tiles, an inscription by the famous Hassan Chelibi, must have been stolen too, until the imam told me that the frieze originally stopped there, as no true believer may turn his back on any part of the Koran. The outside of the mosque is also unusual, with its deep porch, two-storied at either end. It is the largest mosque on the left bank of the Golden Horn, and even without its historical and architectural interest it would be worth a visit for the charm of its plane-shaded yard and the cypress grove behind the mosque where Pialeh lies in a neglected türbeh.

I perceive that I am now embarked on a chapter more boundless than any. Yet how can one speak of the Golden Horn and be silent with regard to its shores? I have already written three chapters about one of them, to be sure, and I propose to write a fourth about the other. But the quiet inner reaches of the Golden Horn contain much less in the way of water life, and depend much more upon the colour of their banks. This colour must have been vivider before steam lengthened the radius of the dweller in Stamboul and when the Golden Horn was still a favourite resort of the court. Nevertheless there is a great deal of character in the quiet, in the not too prosperous and evidently superseded settlements that follow the outer bustle of the harbour. One of the most characteristic of them is the Greek quarter of Phanar—or Fener, as the Turks call it. In both languages the name means lantern or lighthouse. It originally pertained to a gate of the city wall, being derived from a beacon anciently marking a spit of land in front of the gate. There stood more anciently an inner fortified enclosure in this vicinity called the Petrion. A convent of that name once existed, I know not whether founded by a certain Petrus, a noble of the time of Justinian, who lived or owned property in this neighbourhood. It was here that the Venetians were able to effect their entrance into the city in 1203 and 1204, by throwing bridges from their galleys to the battlements of the wall. No galley would be able to come so close to the wall to-day. But the wall is still there, or large parts of it. And behind it, occupying perhaps the site of the old Petrion, the Greek Patriarchs of Constantinople have had their headquarters for the past three hundred years.

You would never guess, to look at the rambling wooden konak or the simple church beside it, that you were looking at the Vatican of the Greek world. Neither would you suspect that the long alley skirting the water, hemmed in between dark old stone houses with heavily barred windows and upper stories jutting out toward each other on massive stone brackets, was once the Corso of Constantinople. That was when the great Greek families that furnished princes to Moldavia and Wallachia and dragomans to the European embassies and to the Porte maintained the splendour of a court around the Patriarchate. The ambassadors of the tributary principalities lived there, too, and a house is still pointed out as the Venetian embassy. A very different air blows in the Phanar to-day. Many of the Phanariotes emigrated to Greece or otherwise disappeared at the time of the Greek revolution, while those of their descendants who still remain in Constantinople prefer the heights of Pera. None but the poorest, together with Armenians and Jews not a few, now live in those old stone houses. They are worth looking at, however—and I hope prefectures bursting with modernity and the zeal of street-widening will remember it. None of them, I believe, dates from before the fifteenth century, but after the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus they are all that is left to give an idea what a Byzantine house may have looked like. They also suggest how the old wooden house of Stamboul may have come by its curving bracket. If none of them are very decorative on the outside, we must remember that the house of a mediæval Greek in Stamboul was very literally his castle. Some of the houses originally contained no stairs at all, unless secret ones. Beside the stone house stood a wooden one which contained the stairs, and each floor of the two houses communicated by a narrow passage and two or three heavy iron doors. In case of fire or massacre the inmates betook themselves to the top floor of their stone house and barricaded their iron doors until the coast was clear. Occasionally it was so clear that no wooden house and no stairs were left them. But you would never suspect from outside what pillars and arches, what monumental fireplaces, what plaster mouldings, what marquetry of mother-of-pearl, what details of painting and gilding and carving those top floors hide. And under many of them gardens still run green to the water’s edge.

Of a very different character is the hollow of converging valleys outside the city wall where lies, at the end of the Golden Horn proper, the suburb of Eyoub Soultan. Eyoub Soultan, anglice Prince Job, takes its name from a friend and standard-bearer of the Prophet who took part in the third Arab siege of Constantinople in 668 and fell outside the walls. Of this good man and his last resting-place so many legendary things are related that I don’t know where my chapter would end if I repeated only the few of them I have heard. I can only say that when Sultan Mehmed II was making his own siege, eight hundred years later, he opportunely discovered the burial-place of the saintly warrior. This discovery having stimulated the flagging ardour of the besiegers, with what results we know, the Conqueror built a splendid mausoleum above the grave of the Prophet’s friend and beside it the first of the imperial mosques. To this, the holiest shrine of Islam in Constantinople, the sultans come for that ceremony which takes for them the place of a coronation—to be girded with the sword of Osman. So holy a shrine is it that until the re-establishment of the constitution in 1908 no Christian had ever entered that mosque except in disguise, or so much as its outer court. Even now it is not easy for a Christian to see the inside of the türbeh. I have not, at all events. But I count myself happy to have seen its outer wall of blue and green tiles, shaded by broad eaves and pierced in the centre by an intricate grille of brass which shines where the fingers of the faithful pass over the letters of the creed. And I must confess that I lay up no grudge against the imams for keeping me out. I cannot say it is for the same reason that another man of God, with whom I sometimes sit in front of another tomb in Stamboul, once gave me for never having been himself in the tomb of Eyoub: that he did not feel himself worthy. It is, rather, an inconsistent feeling that I am not sorry if some things and some places still be held sacred in the world. On one side of the tomb, opening out of the same tiled wall, is a sebil where an attendant waits to give cups of cold water to the thirsty. On the other side a window opens through a grille of small green bronze hexagons into a patch of garden where a few rose-bushes stand among graves. And in the centre of the quadrangle stand two enormous plane-trees, or what is left of them, planted there by the Conqueror five hundred years ago. The mosque itself is not very interesting, having been restored too many times. It contains one much-prized relic, however, consisting of a print of the Prophet’s foot in stone. Beside the mosque and the forecourt is a second court, larger and irregular in shape, also shaded by plane-trees, where, furthermore, are a fountain of ablution and painted gravestones in railings and a colony of pigeons that are pampered like those of St. Mark’s.

The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but they all have the grave dignity which the Turks contrive to put into everything they do, and the streets take a tone from the great number of pious institutions that line them, interspersed with cypresses and tombs. The quarter is indeed, more than any other, the Pantheon of Stamboul, so many important personages have chosen to be buried near the friend of the Prophet. The pious Mehmed V, however, is the first sultan who has chosen to lie to the last day in the company of all those good and famous men. Several of the most notable mausoleums, though the most neglected, are of the period of Süleïman I, and built by Sinan. In one of them, separated from a little library by a porch of precious tiles, lies the Bosnian slave, nicknamed from his birthplace Sokollî Mehmed, whose destiny it was to become the Treasurer of Süleïman, successor to the terrible admiral Barbarossa, and Grand Vizier of the empire. When his imperial master died on the battle-field of Szigeth, in Hungary, Mehmed Pasha succeeded in hiding the fact until Selim II could reach Constantinople. The young sultan was the worst who had yet ascended the throne, but he stood in such awe of his father’s great minister that Sokollî ruled the empire throughout Selim’s reign and part of that of Mourad III. Three hundred years before De Lesseps he conceived the idea of the Suez Canal, and might have carried it out had he lived. He was murdered in 1579—at the instigation, it was whispered, of the jealous and cruel Lala Moustafa Pasha. The latter also has a place in this Turkish Pantheon. He was the barbarian who flayed alive Marcantonio Bragadin, the heroic defender of Famagusta, and stuffed his skin with straw. Having been paraded before the troops in Cyprus and hung up in the Arsenal at Kassîm Pasha for the edification of the galley-slaves, this bloody trophy was at last presented to the Venetians, who gave it honourable burial in their own Pantheon of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Lala Moustafa was himself of Christian origin, being of the same Serb race as Sokollî Mehmed Pasha, the admiral Pialeh Pasha, and still another son-in-law of the imperial house who lies in Eyoub, Ferhad Pasha, a vizier of Mourad III and Mehmed IV. Although not born in the faith, Ferhad Pasha was renowned for the beauty of his calligraphy. Among this group of mausoleums is that of one real Turk, the celebrated Sheï’h ül Islam Ebou Sououd Effendi, who drew up and interpreted the laws of Süleïman.

The türbehs cluster so thickly between the mosque and the water that one avenue is lined by nothing else, and from it little paved alleys wander away between crowded gravestones and arching trees. Few of the trees are cypresses here. The cypresses inhabit a hill beyond this silent quarter, and through them climbs the most picturesque street in Eyoub. Toward the top it forks. Whichever way you take, you will do well, particularly in the spring, when the left-hand lane brings you into sight of a blossoming valley of fruit-trees. But you will do better after all to take the right-hand turn and climb a little farther, the cypresses and gravestones thinning as you climb, till you come to a coffee-house that did not need Pierre Loti to make it famous. Any man who gazes from a height upon leagues of space and many habitations of his fellow men is forced into philosophy. Here, however, you sip in with your coffee strange things indeed as you look down from your high cemetery edge, past cypresses and turbaned stones and the minarets of the mosque and the procession of siege-battered towers scaling the slope beyond, upon the whole picture of the Golden Horn framed between its two beetling cities. The outer bridge, to be sure, is cut off by the curve of Galata; but the heights of Scutari, or sometimes those of the Bithynian Olympus, are visible to remind you what a meeting-place of nations is here.

On this hilltop stood in old times the castle of Cosmidion, where Godfrey of Bouillon and Bohemund stopped with their men on the way to the first crusade. The castle took its name from the adjoining church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, built by Theodosius the Younger and rebuilt with magnificence by Justinian. In times still older this was the hill called Semistra—or so I shall choose to believe until some one proves me wrong. Walking along its bare crest, where you sometimes meet camels marching strangely in from the villages of Thrace, you overlook that last reach of the Golden Horn which used to be called Argyrolimnai, the Silver Pools. Two small streams come together here, the Cydaris and the Barbyses as they once were called, and they played a particular part in the mythology of Byzantium. Io, fleeing from the jealousy of Hera, gave birth to her daughter Keroessa at the foot of the hill where the two streams meet. The child was nursed by Semistra, who gave her name to the hill in question, and in whose honour an altar anciently stood at the meeting-place of the rivers. Keroessa became in turn the mother of Byzas, founder of Byzantium. The father of Byzas was no less a personage than Poseidon, god of the sea, and the son married Phidalia, daughter of the river Barbyses. How it happened that Byzas also came from so far away as Megara I do not pretend to know; but in the name Keroessa, which seems to be connected with the metamorphosis of Io, we have the mythic origin of the name of the Golden Horn.

The two rivers are now called Ali Bey Souyou and Kiat Haneh Souyou, and a power-house has taken the place of the altar of Semistra. The upper branches of both valleys are bridged by a number of aqueducts, of all periods from Justinian to Süleïman, and emperors and sultans alike loved to take refuge in this pleasant wilderness. How it may have been with the Greeks I do not know, but for the Turks spring has always been the season of the rivers. The northern extremity of Eyoub, bordering the Silver Pools, is still called Beharieh, from a spring palace of Sultan Mahmoud I that exists no more. It is with the name of his uncle Ahmed III, however, that the two valleys are chiefly associated. The last words of Nero might more justly have been uttered by this humane and splendour-loving prince—qualis artifex pereo! He delighted above all things in flowers, water, and illuminations—though I cannot conceal that he also cherished an extreme admiration for breathing beauty. He was one of the greatest builders who have reigned in Constantinople, and he had the good fortune to discover a grand vizier of like tastes with himself. It happened that an intelligent young envoy of theirs, known by the curious name of Twenty-eight Mehmed, from the number of his years when he signed the Peace of Passarowitz went, in 1720, on a special embassy to Paris. He brought back such accounts of the court of Louis XV, such pictures and presents also, as to change the whole course of Ottoman architecture. So vivid a description in particular did the ambassador give of the new palace of Versailles and of its older rival at Marly-le-Roi, that Ahmed III resolved to imitate them. He had already built a seat on the banks of the Ali Bey Souyou, whose magnificent planes and cypresses may still be admired there. He then turned his attention to the Kiat Haneh valley, where he played strange tricks with the river, laid out gardens, built a palace, and commanded his courtiers to follow his example—à la Louis XIV and the Signs of the Zodiac. There grew up as by magic a continuous line of villas and gardens from the village of Kiat Haneh to that of Sütlüjeh, opposite Eyoub. And the fête which the sultan gave when he inaugurated this new pleasure-ground was the most splendid of the many that marked his long reign. It befell him, however, in 1730, to be dethroned. Whereupon a fanatical mob asked permission of his successor to burn the palaces of Kiat Haneh. Mahmoud I replied that he could not allow the palaces to be burned, lest other nations draw unfavourable conclusions with regard to the inner harmony of the empire, but that the palaces might be destroyed! They accordingly were—one hundred and seventy-three of them. Of so much magnificence not one stone now remains upon another, and he who rows past the Silver Pools to-day is almost asphyxiated by the fumes of the brick-kilns that have replaced the pleasances of old.

As for the river itself, it comes nearer deserving the name which Europeans have given it, of the Sweet Waters of Europe. Why they did so I do not know, unless they thought the real name too prosaic. Kiat Haneh means Paper House, from a mill originally built there by Süleïman I. The valley it waters has remained an open meadow of occasional trees—perhaps in accordance with the old Turkish usage, whereby any place where the sultan pitches his tent belongs thereafter to his people to the end of time. I presume the meadow of Kiat Haneh is destined ultimately to become a city park. In the meantime a palace of Abd ül Aziz, looking rather like a frosted cake, stands in the walled park of Ahmed III. The huge rooms are empty of furniture, and no one is there to watch the river splash down its marble cascades except two sour custodians and the gentle old imam of the adjoining mosque. But for a few weeks in spring, beginning with the open-air festival of Hîdîr Eless, the lower part of the valley is a favourite place of resort. Sunday and Friday are the popular days. Then arbours of saplings thatched with dried boughs follow the curve of the river; then picnic parties spread rugs or matting on the grass, partaking of strange meats while masters of pipe and drum enchant their ears; then groups of Turkish ladies, in gay silks, dot the sward like tulips; then itinerant venders of fruit, of sweets, of nuts, of ice-cream, do hawk about their wares; then fortune-tellers, mountebanks, bear tamers, dancers, Punch and Judy shows may be seen; and boats pass and repass on the river like carriages on the Corso. Most of them are sandals of the smarter kind. But once in a while the most elegant craft in the world skims into sight—a three-oared caïque, with a piece of embroidered velvet, whose corner tassels trail in the water, thrown over the little deck behind the seat. The kaïkjis are handsome fellows, in fuller white cotton knickerbockers than you can imagine, in white stockings, in shirts of crinkly Broussa gauze and short sleeveless jackets embroidered with gold.

Most of the ladies are in the modern Turkish costume, with a kind of silk mantilla of the same material as the dress falling from the head to the waist. The effect is very Spanish and graceful—more so than when the ladies wear a white scarf over their hair and a long garment as shapeless as a waterproof. In these degenerate days veils are more often absent than not. I must warn you, however, that the Sweet Waters of Europe are not the Sweet Waters of Asia. I remember noticing one day on the river a gaudy little skiff rowed by two young and gaily costumed boatmen. In the stern sat an extremely fat Turkish lady, steering. She was dressed decorously in black, and the black veil thrown back from her face allowed every one to remark that she was neither in her first youth nor particularly handsome. Yet boatmen snickered as she passed, and rowdies called after her in slang which it seemed to me should not be used to a lady. I said as much to my kaïkji, who told me that the lady was a famous demi-mondaine, named Madam Falcon, and that for the rest I must never expect such good manners at Kiat Haneh as at Gyök Sou. I must confess that I looked at Madam Falcon with some interest the next time we passed; for the Turkish half-world is of all half-worlds the most invisible, and so far as I knew I had never seen a member of it before. Madam Falcon paid no attention to the curiosity she aroused. Sitting there impassively in her black dress, with her smooth yellow skin, she made one think of a graven image, of some Indian Bouddha in old ivory. So venerable a person she seemed, so benevolent, so decorous and dead to the world, that she only made her half-world more remote and invisible than ever. But she was a sign—in spite of the smart brougham driving slowly along the shore with a Palace eunuch sitting on the box—that the great days of Kiat Haneh are gone. Nevertheless it has, during its brief time of early green, a colour of its own. And the serpentine river, winding between tufts of trees and under Japanesey wooden bridges, is always a pleasant piece of line and light in a spring sun. But beware of the coffee-house men on the shore! For their season is short, and if they catch you they will skin you alive.