Constantinople old and new

It is not the fashion to speak well of Pera and Galata. A good Turk will sigh of another that he has gone to Pera, by way of saying that he has gone to the dogs. A foreign resident will scarcely admit that so much as the view is good. Even a Perote born pretends not to love his Grande Rue if he happens to have read Loti or Claude Farrère. And tourists are supposed to have done the left bank of the Golden Horn when they have watched the Sultan drive to mosque and have giggled at the whirling dervishes. A few of the more thorough-going will, perhaps, take the trouble to climb Galata Tower or to row up the Sweet Waters of Europe. For my part, however, who belong to none of these categories, I am perverse enough to find Pera and Galata a highly superior place of habitation. I consider that their greatest fault is to lie under the shadow of Stamboul—though that gives them one inestimable advantage which Stamboul herself lacks, namely the view of the dark old city crowned by her imperial mosques. Pera—and I now mean the whole promontory between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus—Pera occupies a really magnificent site, it has a history of its own, it contains monuments that would make the fortune of any other town, and it fairly drips with that modern pigment known as local colour. Who knows, it may even be destined to inherit the renown of the older city. Stamboul tends to diminish, whereas Pera grows and has unlimited room for growing. The left bank is already the seat of the Sultan and of the bulk of the commerce and finance of the capital. Moreover, the battles of the revolution fought there in 1909 give the place a peculiar interest in the eyes of the Young Turks. On that soil, less encumbered than Stamboul with the débris of history, they may find conditions more favourable for the city of their future.

If the story of Pera cannot compare with that of the grey mother city, it nevertheless can boast associations of which communities more self-important might be proud. Jason stopped there on his way to get the Golden Fleece, and after him Beshiktash was known in antiquity as Iasonion. In the valley behind that picturesque suburb there later existed a famous laurel grove, sacred of course to Apollo, who, with Poseidon, was patron of Byzantium. The sun-god was also worshipped at a sacred fount which still exists in Galata, within the enclosure of the Latin church of St. George. Legend makes this spring the scene of the martyrdom of St. Irene, daughter of a Roman ruler, who was put to death for refusing to sacrifice to Apollo and who became herself the patron saint of the new Christian city of Constantinople. Christianity is said to have been brought there by no less a person than the apostle Andrew. He is also reputed to have died in Galata, though another tradition makes Patras the scene of his death; but in any case he was buried in Constantine’s Church of the Holy Apostles. The church of St. Irene where he preached, somewhere in the vicinity of Top Haneh, was restored with magnificence by Justinian. An earlier emperor, Leo the Great, had already built in the neighbourhood of Beshiktash the celebrated church of St. Mamas, together with a palace that was long a favourite resort of the imperial family. In the light of recent history it is interesting to recall that Krum, King of Bulgaria, sacked and burned the suburb of St. Mamas, with the rest of Thrace, in 811.

Among the antiquities of the town, its names have been the subject of much research and confusion. Pera is a Romaic word meaning opposite or beyond, and first applied indiscriminately with Galata to the rural suburb on the north shore of the Golden Horn. This hill was also called Sykai, from the fig-trees that abounded there; and when the mortar-loving Justinian beautified and walled the suburb, he renamed it after himself. With regard to the word Galata there has been infinite dispute. I myself thought I had solved the question when I went to Genoa and saw steep little alleys, for all the world like those I knew in Genoese Galata, which were named Calata—a descent to the sea—and of which the local dialect made the c a g. But the accent was different, and I lived to learn that the name, as that of a castle on the water’s edge, has been found in Byzantine MSS. dating from two hundred years earlier than the time Genoa founded her colony there. Villehardouin also speaks of the tower of “Galathas,” which the crusaders stormed as a preliminary to their capture of Constantinople. It apparently stood in the vicinity of the custom-house, and to it was attached the chain that padlocked the Golden Horn. I would like to believe that the name came from Brennus and his Gauls, or Galatians, who passed this way with fire and sword in the third century B. C. There is more certainty, however, with regard to its own derivatives. The Italian word galetta is one of them, more or less familiar in English and very common in its French form of galette. Another French word, galetas, is also derived from Galata, meaning a high garret and hence a poor tenement. Belonging at first to the castle alone, the name seems to have spread to the whole surrounding settlement. It now applies to the lower part of the hill, formerly enclosed by the Genoese wall, while Pera is the newer town on top of the hill, “beyond” the old.

The history of the town we know began in the Latin colonies that originally fringed the opposite shore of the Golden Horn. Constantinople has always been a cosmopolitan city. The emperors themselves were of many races and the empire they governed was as full of unassimilated elements as it is to-day. Then even from so far away as England and Denmark men came to trade in the great city that was named from a citizen of York. It was natural that Italians should come in the greatest number, though they felt less and less at home as the emperors became more and more Greek. The people of Amalfi and Ancona, the Florentines, the Genoese, the Lombards, the Pisans, and the Venetians, all had important colonies in Constantinople. And by the twelfth century four of them at least had their own settlements between Seraglio Point and the Azap Kapou Bridge. The easternmost were the Genoese, whose quarter was near the present railway station; next came the Pisans, then the men of Amalfi—not far from Yeni Jami—and last the Venetians.

The Venetian colony was long the most important. Basil II, the Slayer of the Bulgarians, as early as 991 granted to Venice definite commercial privileges, which were greatly extended a hundred years later by Alexius II in gratitude for the help the Republic had given him against Robert Guiscard and the Normans. The colony occupied an important strip of water-front, from the western side of the outer bridge to the anchorage of the wood galleons under the Süleïmanieh. During the Latin occupation the Venetians naturally extended their borders, since the Republic had taken so important a part in the Fourth Crusade; and the Doge now added to his other titles that of Lord of a Quarter and a Half of the Roman Empire. But in spite of the Greek restoration of 1261 and the consequent rise of Genoese influence, the Venetians still maintained their foothold. They continued to keep their strip of the Golden Horn and to form an imperium in imperio after the manner of foreign colonies in Constantinople to-day. The origin, indeed, of the capitulations which embarrass the Turks so much is perhaps the Capitulare Baiulis Constantinopolitani which governed the Balio. This functionary, sent every two years from Venice, was both the viceroy of his colony and minister resident to the emperor. As such he had places of honour in St. Sophia and the Hippodrome, and the Byzantine government allowed him certain supplies. The office continued, in fact, down to the end of the Republic, though under the Turks the Balio was less viceroy than ambassador. No trace seems to remain, however, of that long occupation. I have often wondered if any of the old stone hans in the quarter of the Dried Fruit Bazaar go back so far, or the two marble lions which still spout water into a pool in the court of one of them. I have also asked myself whether the small medresseh of Kefenek Sinan, with its odd octagonal tower, ever had anything to do with Venice. But the only indisputable relic of Venice I have come across is the Varda! the porters shout when they warn you out of their way. That is the Venetian dialect for guarda, or “look out”—as any man can verify in Venice to-day.

In the growing rivalry between Venice and Genoa the former enjoyed a constant advantage in Constantinople until 1261. Then the Genoese very nearly succeeded in dislodging the Venetians from Stamboul altogether. They took possession of the Venetian churches and destroyed the palace of the Balio, sending its stones to Genoa to be built into the cathedral of San Lorenzo. A generation later they provoked a massacre of the Venetians, in which the Balio himself was killed; and the fleets of the two republics more than once came to blows in the Bosphorus. In the meantime Michael Palæologus had given the Genoese, partly as a reward for their services against the Venetians, partly to get rid of allies so formidable, the town of Perinthos, or Eregli, in the Marmora. About 1267, however, the Genoese succeeded in obtaining the far more important site of Galata. The conditions were that they should not fortify it, and that they should respect the emperor as their suzerain. But the enmity of Venice and the decadence of the Greeks brought it about that Galata presently built walls, captured the old castle of the chain, and otherwise conducted herself as an independent city. The existing Galata Tower marks the highest point of the walls, which were twice enlarged, and which in their greatest extent ran down on one side to Azap Kapou and on the other as far as Top Haneh. The colony was governed by a Podestà, sent every year from Genoa, who, like the Venetian Balio, was also accredited as minister to the emperor.

Galata existed as a flourishing Genoese city for nearly two hundred years. The coming of the Turks in 1453 put an end to the conditions which had made her independence possible. Although cut off from Genoa, however, she did not immediately cease to be an Italian city. Indeed, the Conqueror might have been expected to deal more hardly with the Latin suburb than he did; for while the Galatiotes had entered into amicable relations with the invaders and had in the end voluntarily surrendered, they had also been the backbone of the Greek defence. But in accepting the keys of Galata Sultan Mehmed II assured the colonists the enjoyment of their goods and their faith, merely enjoining them to build no more churches, to forego the use of bells, and to throw down their land fortifications. This last condition seems never to have been carried out.

Under the new régime Galata proceeded to reorganise herself as the Magnifica Communità di Pera. The head of this Magnificent Community was a magnifico, prior of the Brotherhood of St. Anne, who was aided by a sub-prior and twelve councillors. Their deliberations chiefly concerned the churches, since in civil affairs they were naturally subject to the Porte. The Rue Voïvoda, the Wall Street of Galata, perpetuates the title of the Turkish functionary who was the superior temporal power of the Magnificent Community. The churches diminished in number, however, as the Latin population dwindled, and by 1682 their administration had passed into the hands of religious orders, or of the Patriarchal Vicar. This dignitary represented that member of the papal court whose title of Patriarch of Constantinople was the last shadow of the Latin occupation. The Patriarchal Vicar has now been succeeded by an Apostolic Delegate. On the other hand, the ambassadors of the Catholic powers, and particularly of France, gradually assumed protection of the Latin colony—which was no longer distinctively Genoese or Venetian. The Magnificent Community, accordingly, ceased to have corporate existence. But the Latin “nation” still forms one of the constituent elements of the Ottoman empire. And while the population of Galata is now more Greek, even more Turkish and Hebrew, than European, it is only within a generation or two that French has begun to supersede Italian as the lingua franca of the town, and it still retains an indefinable Italian air.

Of that old Italian town modern Galata contains little enough, except for the fanatic in things of other times. The Tower, of course, the whilom Torre del Cristo, is the most visible memorial of the Genoese period. The top, however, has been repeatedly remodelled. This great round keep was built in 1348, during the first enlargement of the walls, which originally extended no farther than the Rue Voïvoda. The Genoese took advantage of the absence of the emperor John Cantacuzene to carry out this contravention of his authority, and they further secured themselves against reprisals by burning his fleet. He built another one in order to punish his so-called vassals, but they defeated it and trailed the emperor’s flag in disgrace through the Golden Horn. Galata Tower has now degenerated to the peaceful uses of fire watchers and of those who love a view, the small square at its base being also visited once a year by a Birnam Wood of Christmas-trees. Of the fortifications that originally extended from it there remains here only a reminiscence in the name of the Rue Hendek—Moat Street. The greater part of the walls was torn down in 1864, the inscriptions and coats of arms they contained being ultimately removed to the imperial museum. Further down the hill remnants of masonry still exist, and a few turrets. The garden of the monastery of S. Pierre is bounded by a fragment of the turreted city wall of 1348, while in the wall of S. Benoît is another turret, probably of the wall of 1352. One or two others are to be seen along the water-front at Yagh Kapan. The most picturesque fragment of all, and perhaps the oldest, is behind the bath of Azap Kapou, where a little Turkish street called Akar Cheshmeh—the Fountain Drips—passes through an archway in a high wall. Above the arch is a tablet containing the arms of Genoa—the cross of St. George—between the escutcheons of the two noble houses of Doria and De Merude[1]; and an olive-tree waves banner-like from the top of the wall.

Galata has always been famous for its fires, to say nothing of its earthquakes. These, and changes of population, with the street-widening and rebuilding of our day, have left us very little idea of the architecture of the Genoese colony. In the steep alleys on either side of the Rue Voïvoda are a number of stone buildings, with corbelled upper stories and heavily grated windows, which are popularly called Genoese. They bear too close a resemblance to Turkish structures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to the old houses of the Phanar, to be so named without more study than any one has taken the trouble to give them. But they are certainly mediæval and they suggest how Galata may once have looked. The façade of one of them, in the Rue Perchembé Bazaar, is decorated with a Byzantine marble panel. This was the fashionable quarter of Genoese Galata. The palace of the Podestà was there, at the northeast corner of the place where Perchembé Bazaar crosses Voïvoda. Indeed, this Ducal Palace, much transformed, still survives as an office building and rejoices in the name of Bereket Han—the House of Plenty.

Such slender honours of antiquity as Galata may boast cluster chiefly about certain churches and missions. The story of these is a picturesque chapter in the history of the mediæval orders. The Franciscans were the first to come to Constantinople, opening a mission on Seraglio Point in 1219, during the lifetime of St. Francis, and establishing themselves in Galata as early as 1227. No trace of them now remains in either place, each of the various branches into which the order divided having eventually removed to Pera. The church of San Francesco d’Assisi, belonging to the Conventuals, was the cathedral of the colony, and one worthy of Genoa the Superb. Partially destroyed by fire in 1696, it was seized by the mother of Sultans Moustafa II and Ahmed III, who built on its site—below the Imperial Ottoman Bank—the existing Yeni Valideh mosque. The church of Sant’ Antonio, on the Grande Rue de Pera, is the direct descendant of the cathedral of San Francesco and the missionaries of 1219.

The Dominicans were also settled at an early date on both sides of the Golden Horn. Arab Jami, the mosque whose campanile-like minaret is so conspicuous from the water, was formerly their church of San Paolo. Tradition ascribes its foundation to St. Hyacinth, the great Dominican missionary of the Levant. The fathers were dispossessed about 1535 in favour of the Moorish refugees from Spain, who also invaded the surrounding quarter. The quarter is still Mohammedan, though the Albanian costume now gives it most colour. Refugees of a less turbulent character had come from Spain a few years earlier and found hospitality at different points along the Golden Horn. These were the Jews driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. There was already a considerable colony of Jews in Constantinople. Many of them had been Venetian subjects and lived on the edge of the Venetian settlement, at the point where the mosque of Yeni Jami now stands. When the great sultana Kyössem acquired that property she exempted forty of the residents from taxation for life and engaged herself to pay the Karaïte community an annual ground rent of thirty-two piastres. This was a considerable sum in 1640, but it now amounts to little more than a dollar a year! The sultana furthermore granted the Jews new lands at the place called Hass-kyöi—which might roughly be translated as Village of the Privy Purse—and a large Jewish colony still lives there, most of whose members speak a corrupt Spanish.

As for the Dominican fathers, they took refuge in what is now the Mission of S. Pierre. The building had originally been a convent of nuns of St. Catherine and gardens were added to it by a generous Venetian, in whose memory a mass is still performed once a year. This monastery has been burned and remodelled so many times that little can be left of its original appearance. Among its other claims to interest, however, is a Byzantine icon kept in the church, said to be none other than that celebrated icon of the Shower of the Way which I have already mentioned. The latter end of this venerable work of art is involved in as great mystery as its origin. According to the Greeks it was found in Kahrieh Jami by the Turks in 1453 and cut to pieces. Whether they admit the icon of Kahrieh Jami to have been the identical icon which the emperor Baldwin presented to St. Sophia in 1204, and which the Venetian Balio took away by force and put into the church of Pantocrator, now Zeïrek Kilisseh Jami, I cannot say. The Latins, however, claim that the Venetians never lost it, and that consequently it was never cut to pieces by the Turks, but that it ultimately came into possession of the Dominican fathers. Where doctors of divinity disagree so radically, let me not presume to utter an opinion!

In the court of the church and on the façade of the monastery toward the Rue Tchinar—the Street of the Plane-Tree—are stone escutcheons bearing the lilies of France and the arms of a Comte de St. Priest. He was a French ambassador at the time of our Revolutionary War. The building being under French protection and on the central street of old, of oldest Galata—the one which climbs past the palace of the Podestà from the water’s edge to the Tower—was occupied at different times by the notables of the French colony. Among these, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was a merchant named Louis Chénier. Settling as a young man in Galata, he had become deputy of the nation—an office peculiar to the colony from the time of Colbert—right-hand-man to the ambassador, and husband, like many a European before and after him, of a Levantine lady. Her family, that is, were of European—in this case of Spanish—origin, but by long residence in the Levant and by intermarriage with Greeks had lost their own language. The seventh child of this couple was André Chénier, the poet of the French Revolution. His birthplace is marked by a marble tablet. The poet never saw the Street of the Plane-Tree, however, after he was three years old. He grew up in Paris, where, as every one knows, he was almost the last victim of the Terror.

The largest mission left in Galata is S. Benoît, whose walls now overshadow the least monastic quarter of the town. Its history is even more varied than that of S. Pierre, having been occupied and reoccupied at different times by the Benedictines, the Observants, the Capuchins, and the Jesuits. The last were the longest tenants, carrying on a devoted work for nearly two hundred years. After the secularisation of their order in 1773 they were succeeded by the Lazarists, who have not fallen behind in the high traditions of the mission. The place has a distinctly mediæval air, with its high walls, its Gothic gateway, and its machicolated campanile. Nothing is left, alas, of the mosaics which used to decorate the church. After so many fires I fear there is no chance of their being discovered under modern plaster. But the pillars of the porch are doubtless those which a diplomatic father obtained by gift from the Sheï’h ül Islam in 1686. And there are a number of interesting tablets about the building. One of them records not too truthfully the rebuilding of the church by Louis XIV. The most notable, perhaps, is the tombstone of Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania and pretender to the throne of Hungary, who lived twenty years in exile at Rodosto, on the Sea of Marmora. When he died there in 1738 his friends asked permission to bury him in Galata, but were refused. They accordingly pretended to inter him at Rodosto. As a matter of fact, his coffin was sent in one of the many boxes containing his effects to S. Benoît. There the royal exile was secretly buried in the church, his grave long remaining unmarked. Another grave, all mark of which seems to have disappeared, is that of Jan Van Mour, a Fleming whom Louis XV made “peintre ordinaire du roy en Levant.” He had the good fortune to live in Constantinople during the brilliant reign of Ahmed III, and he was the painter who started in France the eighteenth-century fashion of turquerie. The Museum of Amsterdam contains a large collection of Turkish documents from his brush, while there are others in France and in the castle of Biby in Sweden.

The stones of Galata have more to tell than those who ungratefully tread them are wont to imagine. But they are by no means Christian stones alone. Although the Latins naturally diminished in number after the Turkish conquest, the city quickly outgrew its walls. While part of this growth was due to the influx of Venetians, and later of Greeks, from the opposite side of the Horn, a good deal of it came about through Turkish colonisation. This was chiefly without the walls. You can almost trace the line of them to-day by the boundary between populations. The Turkish settlements gathered around mosques, palaces, and military establishments built by different sultans in the country about Galata, mainly on the water-front. One of the oldest of these settlements grew up in the deep ravine just west of the Galata wall. It is now engaged in readjusting its relations to the rest of the world, but it still remains like a piece of Stamboul, and it is the home of many dervishes. It took its name from a vizier of Süleïman the Magnificent, the conqueror of Nauplia and twice governor of Egypt. He was known as Handsome Kassîm, but he ended his days in bad odour. His quarter is supposed to take after him in the latter rather than in the former particular by those who do not appreciate what Kassîm Pasha adds to the resources of Pera. No one, however, should be incapable of appreciating what the cypresses of Kassîm Pasha do for the windows of Pera. They are all that is left of the great grove of the Petits Champs des Morts, the old burial-ground of Galata. As the city grew, the cemeteries, both Christian and Mohammedan, were removed to the Grands Champs des Morts at the Taxim. They, too, have now been overtaken by the streets and turned in great part to other uses. But a field of the dead was there again when the Young Turks took Pera from Abd ül Hamid in 1909.

I have already mentioned the mosque of Pialeh Pasha and the naval station which are among the greater lions of the left bank. A detail of history connected with this famous shipyard is that we perhaps get our word arsenal from it, through the Italian darsena. The accepted derivation is from the Arabic dar es sanaat, house of construction, from an ancient shipyard in Egypt captured by the founder of this Arsenal. But as likely an origin is the Turkish word—from the Persian, I believe—terssaneh, the house of slaves. At all events, this is where the great bagnio of the galley-slaves used to be. These were Christians captured in war; and of course the Christian powers repaid the compliment by capturing all the Turks they could for their own galleys. At all times during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries there were from three to four thousand slaves in the Arsenal, while several thousand more were chained to the oars of the imperial galleys. No less than fifteen thousand were said to have been freed at the battle of Lepanto. As the Turks became less warlike the number naturally declined, and came to an end with the abolition of slavery in 1846. One of the principal activities of the Catholic missions was among the inmates of this and other bagnios. The fathers were allowed access to the Arsenal and even maintained chapels there, confessing the slaves, arranging when they could for their ransom, and heroically caring for them through epidemics. St. Joseph of Leonissa, one of the pioneer Capuchins, caught the plague himself from the slaves but recovered to labour again in the bagnio—so zealously that he even aspired to reach the ear of the Sultan. He was accordingly arrested and condemned to death. The sentence was already supposed to have been executed when he was miraculously rescued by an angel and borne away to his native Italy, living there to a ripe old age. If the angel might have been discovered to bear some resemblance to the Venetian Balio, his intervention doubtless seemed no less angelic to the good missionary.

Another Turkish settlement grew up on the east side of Galata wall at Top Haneh, Cannon House. The place has been the seat of artillery works from the beginning of the Turkish era, for it must be remembered that Mehmed II, in the siege of Constantinople, was the first general to prove the practicability of cannon, and that during the whole of their martial period the Turks had no superiors in this branch of warfare. The conqueror turned a church and its adjoining cloisters into a foundery, and his son Baïezid II built barracks there for the artillerymen, while Süleïman I and Ahmed III restored and added to these constructions. There was also another shipyard at Top Haneh, and another Prince of the Sea is buried there near the mosque he built.

I know not how it is that this mosque has so miraculously escaped notoriety. The exterior, to be sure, is less imposing than the neighbouring Nousretieh Jami, but there is a perfect little stone courtyard, with such doorways as only Sinan knew how to draw, while the interior is as happy in proportion as it is in detail. The mihrab is unusual in being brightly lighted, and the windows, set among tiles, contain exquisite fragments of old stained glass. There are also tiled inscriptions, by Hassan Chelibi of Kara Hissar, above the other windows. The mimber, too, is a masterpiece of its kind, with its delicately perforated marbles. Then the gallery contains a finely designed arcade and an interesting marble rail and small rose windows—apparently of brickwork—above the spandrels of the arches. A characteristic touch is the big ship’s lantern that swings in front of the mihrab. This beautiful mosque was built by an Italian. Born in Calabria and captured by Algerian pirates, he turned Turk after fourteen years in the galleys, and changed his name of Ochiali to Oulouj Ali—Big Ali. The ex-galley-slave then became a commander of galleys. At the battle of Lepanto he saved a shred of Turkish honour by capturing the flag-ship of the Knights of Malta, turning the squadron of Doria, and bringing forty galleys safely back to Constantinople. For this exploit he was made high admiral of the fleet and his name was turned into Sword Ali—Kîlîj Ali. An interesting side-light is thrown on this picturesque character from so unexpected a source as the novel of “Don Quixote.” In chapter XXXII of the first part of that book, “in which the captive relates his life and adventures,” Cervantes tells, with very little deviation from the fact, how he himself lost his left hand in the battle of Lepanto, how four years later he was captured by pirates and taken to Algiers, and how he lived there five years as the slave of a cruel Albanian master. Trying then to escape, he was caught and brought for trial before a personage whom he calls Uchali, but who was none other than our friend Kîlîj Ali. The upshot of the matter was that the builder of our beautiful mosque bought the author of our immortal novel, whom he treated with great kindness, and presently accepted for him, in 1581, the very moderate ransom of five hundred crowns. So might a half-forgotten building in Top Haneh be brought back to light as the mosque of Don Quixote!

The greatest of the Princes of the Sea lies farther up the Bosphorus, at Beshiktash. The name is a corruption of besh tash, five stones, from the row of pillars on the shore to which he used to moor his galleys. Known to Europe by the nickname Barbarossa, from his great red beard, his true name was Haïreddin. Beginning life as a Greek pirate of Mitylene, he entered the service of the Sultan of Tunis, captured Algiers on his own account, and had the diplomacy to offer his prize to Selim I. Under Süleïman the Magnificent he became the terror of the Mediterranean and his master’s chief instrument in a lifelong rivalry with Charles V. He died in 1546, full of years and honours, leaving a fortune of sixty thousand ducats and three thousand slaves. He wished to be buried by the sea, at the spot where he moored so often in his lifetime; but shanties and boat yards now shut him off from the water. Nothing could be quainter or quieter than the little railed garden near the steamer landing, where a vine-covered pergola leads to the türbeh of that turbulent man of blood. His green admiral’s flag hangs over his catafalque, marked in white with inscriptions, with an open hand, and with the double-bladed sword that was the emblem of his dignity, while his admiral’s lanterns hang in niches on either side of the simple mausoleum.

The harbour of Jason and Barbarossa—and very likely the one that gave access to the Byzantine suburb of St. Mamas—is also the place where Sultan Mehmed II started his ships on their overland voyage. At least I can never see the valley of Dolma Ba’hcheh—the Filled-in Garden—into which the sea formerly entered, without convincing myself that it must have been the channel of that celebrated cruise and not the steeper hill of Top Haneh. However that may be, the descendants of Mehmed II have long shown a partiality for the neighbourhood. Ahmed I built a summer palace there as long ago as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Mehmed IV, Ahmed III, and Mahmoud I constructed others, while for the last hundred years the sultans have lived there altogether. The existing palace of Dolma Ba’hcheh, which occupies most of the old harbour, dates only from 1853. The villas of Yîldîz are more recent still. The neighbourhood of majesty has done less for the imperial suburb than might elsewhere be the case. No one seems to find anything incongruous in the fact that one of the Sultan’s nearest neighbours is a gas house. The ceremony of selamlîk, salutation, when the Sultan drives in state to mosque on Friday noon, is the weekly spectacle of Beshiktash—though less dazzling than it used to be. After his prayer the Sultan gives audience to ambassadors and visitors of mark. I know not whether this custom goes back to the time of Albert de Wyss, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, who used to turn out his embassy when Selim II rode by to mosque, or to that of the later Byzantine emperors, who received every Sunday the heads of the Latin communities.

The waterside settlements outside the walls of Galata were and are prevailingly Turkish. The Christian expansion followed the crest of the hill, founding the modern Pera. But there is a leaven of Islam even in Pera. Baïezid II built a mosque in the quarter of Asmalî Mesjid—Vine Chapel—and a palace at Galata Seraï. This palace finally became a school for the imperial pages, recruited from among the Christian boys captured by the Janissaries, and existed intermittently as such until it was turned into the Imperial Lyceum. Galata Seraï means Galata Palace, which is interesting as showing the old application of the name. The word Pera the Turks have never adopted. They call the place Bey O’lou—the Son of the Bey. There is dispute as to the identity of this Bey. Some say he was David Comnenus, last emperor of Trebizond, or Demetrius Palæologus, despot of Epirus—the youngest son of the latter of whom, at any rate, turned Turk and was given lands in the vicinity of the Russian embassy. Others identify the Son of the Bey with Alvise Gritti, natural son of a Doge of Venice, who became Dragoman of the Porte during the reign of Süleïman the Magnificent, and exercised much influence in the foreign relations of that monarch. Süleïman himself built in Pera, or on that steep eastward slope of it which is called Fîndîklî—the Place of Filberts. The view from the terrace of the mosque he erected there in memory of his son Jihangir is one of the finest in Constantinople. It was his father Selim I who established the Mevlevi, popularly called the Whirling Dervishes, in Pera. There they remain to this day, though they have sold the greater part of the vast estates they once owned, a little island of peace and mysticism in the unbelieving town that has engulfed them. It is the classic amusement of tourists on Friday afternoons to visit their tekkeh; and a classic contrast do the noise and smiles of the superior children of the West make with the plaintive piping, the silent turning, the symbolism and ecstasy of that ritual octagon. Among the roses and ivy of the courtyard is buried a child of the West who also makes a contrast of a kind. He was a Frenchman, the Comte de Bonneval, who, after serving in the French and Austrian armies and quarrelling with the redoubtable Prince Eugene, came to Constantinople, became general of bombardiers, governor of Karamania, and pasha of three tails. He negotiated the first treaty of alliance made by Turkey with a Western country, namely, with Sweden, in 1740.

There are many other Turkish buildings in Pera, but the suburb is essentially Christian and was built up by the Galatiotes. It began to exist as a distinct community during the seventeenth century—about the time, that is, when the Dutch were starting the city of New York. The French and Venetian embassies and the Franciscan missions clustered around them were the nucleus of the settlement on a hillside then known as The Vineyards. We have already seen how the Conventuals moved to Pera after the loss of San Francesco. Their grounds for two hundred years adjoined those of the French embassy, but have gradually been absorbed by the latter until the fathers lately built on another site. The first Latin church in Pera, however, was S. Louis, of the Capuchins, who have been chaplains for the French embassy since 1628. Ste. Marie Draperis is also older in Pera than Sant’ Antonio. The church is so called from a philanthropic lady who gave land in Galata to the Observants in 1584. It passed to the Riformati because of the scandal which arose through two of the brothers turning Turk, and in 1678 moved to The Vineyards for the same reason as the Conventuals. It is now under Austrian protection and serves as chapel for the embassy of that Power, though the fathers are still Italians. The Observants, also known as Padri di Terra Santa, preceded them by a few years in Pera, where they acted as chaplains for the Venetian Balio. Their hospice, marked by the cross of Jerusalem is between Ste. Marie and the Austrian embassy.

The first European ambassadors were not many in number nor did they regularly follow each other, and they were usually quartered in a han detailed for that use in Stamboul, facing the Burnt Column. The Venetian Balio, I believe, always had a residence of his own. The French, however, set up a country-seat at The Vineyards as early as the time of Henri IV. And during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim, who in his rage at the Venetians over the Cretan War threatened to kill every Christian in the empire, beginning with the Balio, the ambassadors moved to the other side for good. The Venetians occupied the site since pre-empted by the Austrians. The Austrian embassy was originally on the other side of the Grande Rue, beside the now disused church of the Trinitarians, while the Russian embassy was the present Russian consulate. The existing Russian embassy was the Polish embassy. The Dutch and the Swedes acquired pleasant properties on the same slope. All these big gateways and gardens opening off the Grande Rue give colour to another theory for the Turkish name of Pera—that it was originally Bey Yolou, or the Street of Grandees.

The British embassy is by no means so young a member of this venerable diplomatic colony as our own, but its early traditions are of a special order. They are bound up with the history of the Levant Company. This was one of those great foreign trading associations of which the East India Company and the South Sea Company are, perhaps, more familiar examples. Hakluyt tells us that at least as early as 1511 British vessels were trading in the Levant, and that this trade became more active about 1575. In 1579 it was in some sort regularised by letters which were exchanged between Sultan Mourad III and Queen Elizabeth—“most wise governor of the causes and affairs of the people and family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue,” as her imperial correspondent addressed her. At a later date high-sounding epistles also passed between the Virgin Queen and her majesty Safieh—otherwise the Pure—favourite wife of the Grand Turk, who wrote: “I send your majesty so honourable and sweet a salutation of peace that all the flock of nightingales with their melody cannot attain to the like, much less this simple letter of mine.” The latter lady adds a touch of her own to her time, having been in reality a Venetian, of the house of Baffo. While on her way from Venice to Corfu, where her father was governor, she was kidnapped by Turkish corsairs and sent as a present to the young prince Mourad. So great became her influence over him that when he succeeded to the throne she had to be reckoned with in the politics of the Porte. Another royal correspondent of the Baffa, as the Balio called his countrywoman in his reports to the Council of Ten, was Catherine de’ Medici. In the meantime Queen Elizabeth had already issued, in 1581, letters patent to certain London merchants to trade in the Levant. In 1582 the first ambassador, Master William Harbone, or Hareborne, who was also chief factor of the Levant Company, betook himself and his credentials from London to Constantinople in the good ship Susan. The charter of “the Right Worshipful the Levant Company” was revised from time to time, but it was not definitely surrendered until 1825. And until 1821 the ambassador to the “Grand Signior,” as well as the consuls in the Levant, were nominated and paid by the company. It was under these not always satisfactory conditions that Mr. Wortley Montagu brought his lively Lady Mary to the court of Ahmed III in 1717. Lord Elgin, of the marbles, was the first ambassador appointed by the government. I have not succeeded in gaining very much light as to the quarters provided by the Levant Company for its distinguished employees. In the Rue de Pologne there is a funny little stone house, now fallen, I believe, to the light uses of a dancing-school, which was once the British consulate. The present embassy is a Victorian structure and known to be in a different place from the one where Lady Mary wrote her letters.

The town that grew up around these embassies is one of the most extraordinary towns in creation. First composed of a few Galatiotes who followed their several protectors into the wilderness, it has continued ever since to receive accretions from the various nationalities of Europe and Asia until it has become a perfect babel, faintly Italian in appearance but actually no more Italian than Turkish, no more Turkish than Greek, no more Greek than anything else you please. Half a dozen larger worlds and nobody knows how many lesser ones live there, inextricably intermingled, yet somehow remaining miraculously distinct. There is, to be sure, a considerable body of Levantines—of those, namely, who have mixed—but even they are a peculiar people. The fact gives Pera society, so far as it exists, a bewildering hydra-headedness. The court is not the centre of things in the sense that European courts are. The Palace ladies do not receive, and it is an unheard-of thing for the Sultan to go to a private house, while in other ways there are profound causes of separation between the ruling race and the non-Moslem elements of the empire. By the very constitution of the country the Armenians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other fractions of the population form communities apart. Even the surprisingly large European colony has historic reasons for tending to divide into so many “nations.” These have little in common with the foreign colonies of Berlin, Paris, or Rome. Not students and people of leisure but merchants and missionaries make up the better part of the family that each embassy presides over in a sense unknown in Western cities. The days are gone by when the protection of the embassies had the literal meaning that once attached to many a garden wall. But the ambassadors cling to the privileges and exemptions granted them by early treaties, and through the quarter that grew up around their gates the Sultan himself passes almost as a stranger.

This diversity of traditions and interests has, of course, influenced the development of Pera. Not the least remarkable feature of this remarkable town is its lack of almost every modern convenience. I must admit, of course, that a generation before New York thought of a subway Pera had one—a mile long. And it is now installing those electric facilities which Abd ül Hamid always objected to, on the ground that a dynamo must have something to do with dynamite. But it will be long before Pera, which with its neighbours sprawls over as much ground as New York, will really take in the conception of rapid transit, or even the more primitive one of home comfort. I hardly need, therefore, go into the account of the more complicated paraphernalia of modern life. There are no public pleasure or sporting grounds other than two dusty little municipal gardens, laid out in old cemeteries, which you pay to enter. Pictures, libraries, collections ancient or modern, there are none. I had almost said there is neither music nor drama. There are, to be sure, a few modest places of assembly where excellent companies from Athens may be heard, where a visitor from the Comédie Française occasionally gives half a dozen performances, and where the failures of European music-halls oftenest air their doubtful charms. On these boards I have beheld a peripatetic Aïda welcome Rhadames and a conquering host of five Greek supers; but Brünnhilde and the Rhine maidens have yet to know the Bosphorus. Not so, however, a translated “Tante de Charles.” When the “Merry Widow” first tried to make her début, she met with an unexpected rebuff. Every inhabitant of Pera who respects himself has a big Croat or Montenegrin, who are the same rose under different names, to decorate his front door with a display of hanging sleeves and gold embroidery. It having been whispered among these magnificent creatures that the “Lustige Witwe” was a slander on the principality—as it was then—of Nicholas I, they assembled in force in the gallery of the theatre and proceeded to bombard the stage with chairs and other detachable objects until the company withdrew the piece.

Consisting of an accretion of villages, containing the conveniences of a village, Pera keeps, in strange contradiction to her urban dimensions, the air of a village, the separation of a village from the larger world, the love of a village for gossip and the credulity of a village in rumour. This is partly due, of course, to the ingrained belief of the Turks that it is not well for people to know exactly what is going on. The papers of Pera have always lived under a strict censorship, and consequently there is nothing too fantastic for Pera to repeat or believe. Hence it is that Pera is sniffed at by those who should know her best, while the tarriers for a night console themselves with imagining that there is nothing to see. I have never been able to understand why it should be thought necessary nowadays for one town to be exactly like another. I, therefore, applaud Pera for having the originality to be herself. And within her walls I have learned that one may be happy even without steam-heat and telephones. In despite, moreover, of the general contempt for her want of intellectual resources, I submit that merely to live in Pera is as good as a university. No one can hope to entertain relations with the good people of that municipality without speaking at least one language beside his own. It is by no means uncommon for a Perote to have five or six at his tongue’s end. Turkish and French are the official languages, but Greek is more common in Pera and Galata proper, while you must have acquaintance with two or three alphabets more if you wish to read the signs in the streets or the daily papers. And then there remain an indeterminate number of dialects used by large bodies of citizens.

A town so varied in its discourse is not less liberal in other particulars. Pera observes three holy days a week: Friday for the Turks, Saturday for the Jews, Sunday for the Christians. How many holidays she keeps I would be afraid to guess. She recognises four separate calendars. Two of them, the Julian and the Gregorian, followed by Eastern and Western Christians respectively, are practically identical save that they are thirteen days apart. There are, however, three Christmases in Pera, because the Armenians celebrate Epiphany (Old Style); and sometimes only one Easter. As for the Jews, they adhere to their ancient lunar calendar, which is supposed to start from the creation of the world. The Turks also follow a lunar calendar, not quite the same, which makes their anniversaries fall eleven days earlier every year. Their era begins with the Hegira. But in 1789 Selim III also adopted for financial purposes an adaptation of the Julian calendar, beginning on the first of March and not retroactive in calculating earlier dates. Thus the Christian year 1914 is 5674 for the Jews, and 1332 or 1330 for the Turks. There are also two ways of counting the hours of Pera, the most popular one considering twelve o’clock to fall at sunset. These independences cause less confusion than might be supposed. They interfere very little, unless with the happiness of employers. But where the liberty of Pera runs to licence is in the matter of post-offices. Of these there are no less than seven, for in addition to the Turks the six powers of Europe each maintain their own. They do not deliver letters, however, and to be certain of getting all your mail—there is not too much certainty even then—you must go or send every day to every one of those six post-offices.