When I descended from the train one dismal morning in Constantinople, in a bleak terminus just like a hundred others of its kind all over the Continent, it was with the intention of staying in the Ottoman capital for some time. A long residence in the Middle East had rendered me susceptible to the magnetism it certainly exerts, and at the same time had given me a very thorough appreciation of the comforts and conveniences of the Occident. As I was quite ignorant of the western parts of the Turkish Empire, and entertained the same ideas regarding them as I suppose do most people at home, it seemed that Constantinople must furnish a delectable resting-place, a point from which to look out upon East and West with equal facility, choosing from each the features necessary to a pleasant life that should be within reach of books and libraries, and afford equally a way of escape among Oriental people and surroundings, without necessitating a long journey and longer bill.

Unfortunately I knew neither Constantinople nor its winter climate, nor its inhabitants. I had never had dealings with Turks, and had left out of my calculations the Greeks, who make up thirty-five per cent. of the population of this capital, once theirs by right of sovereignty, and still almost theirs in all that concerns the world of commerce.

As a matter of fact, the sum total of my knowledge at the moment I arrived was that Constantinople consisted of three quarters or districts, Pera, Galata, and Stamboul, and possessed an hotel called the Pera Palace, the expenses at which were far too grand for my cottage style of purse.

By some person of doubtful nationality, I had been advised to go to a French pension in Galata, which I was assured was cheap, clean, and comfortable. As French pensions in other parts of the world may be, and often are, all these three, the scheme seemed an excellent one; so having escaped from a weary and bored Customs official at the station, I piled my belongings upon a victoria, and we started to clatter over the knobs of stone, and through the mud-pits that are the roads of Constantinople. Through mean streets we rolled and banged our way where horse trams clanked and crawled, between rows of shops whose wares were just those of the cheap streets of any continental city, to the floating bridge over the water called the Golden Horn, a most perfect misnomer in December, suggesting the crowning sarcasm of some disappointed tourist.

At the approach to this curious bridge, we were halted amid a dense crowd of foot-passengers in the everlasting fez—sprinkled with bowler hats and the headgear of every European nation—and made to pay five piastres (10d.) for the right to pass. In order to prevent any passenger evading the toll, a row of Turkish officials stood across the road, clad in a conspicuous enough uniform—a white smock.

The Golden Horn was of a very ordinary mud colour, and below the bridge, prosaic enough with its crowd of steamers and the busy ferry-boats that ply up and down the Bosphorus and to the Asiatic shore. The wharfs were lined with unbeautiful Customs, port, and shipping offices, backed on the rising ground by the indescribably hideous imitation French and Viennese architecture of Galata and Pera. Tall barracks with rows and rows of filthy windows looked out upon the prospect, and at their vis à vis in Stamboul across the water, and, crowning the mountain of wall and window formed by the successive tiers of houses up the hill-side, rose the Tower of Galata, a circular erection topped by a Turkish flag.

The roadway of the bridge being laid with large baulks of timber placed transversely, no two of which ever arrive at a common level, prevents rapid travelling even were the road clear of foot-passengers, who use it in preference to the footpaths. The Galata end plunges into a street absolutely packed with human beings, carts and carriages, where all the money-changers of Galata—Constantinople’s business town—seem to have congregated. A turn to the right leads to more trams, and a long and weary cobbled street of shops large and small, along whose pavements saunter the deck-hands of steamers hailing from every European and Levantine port. Greeks of course are in the majority, many in their national costume of blue tights, with a huge and pendulous posterior, coloured shirt and little zouave jacket, and a hat of the “pork-pie” order. Armenians, too, abound, and Levantines of all kinds. Italians, in this Italian quarter of Galata, are everywhere, and the language of the streets is anything except Turkish. Here and there an incongruous group of fierce and savage fellows, with packs of stuffed leather upon their backs—the Constantinopolitan edition of “the Porter’s knot”—shout and joke in a tongue understood of none even in this cosmopolitan city. They are Kurds, the strongest, most manly of the population, and the most despised, probably for those very qualities—in this town of sharping and guile.

Leaving this street and crawling up some very steep inclines lined by tenement houses, the carriage reached a long road running along the side of the hill. I suppose it should be called a street, for want of a better, or worse, name; but as we associate the word with another order of thing, it is well to explain that this, an important enough artery of Galata traffic, was—and doubtless still is—a wide alley of cobble paving, with huge holes at frequent and irregular intervals. In the absence of underground drainage, the paving sloped to the middle, and after filling the holes, the excess liquid filth flowed downhill. The solid variety, however, to which every resident contributed with assiduity, lay in heaps and figures about the street, proclaiming in the language of putrescence the quality of the inhabitants. In describing this main street of the Italian quarter,1 I have described most of Constantinople, excepting only a few excellent streets on the Bosphorus side of Pera, where the wealthy foreigners live.

At the door of a kind of restaurant I was deposited, and no sooner had the carriage stopped than an ancient woman opened the door and welcomed me in fluent Italian. As my knowledge of that language is limited, she called loudly for “Marie,” a shrewd and kindly woman of about thirty, who appeared from a sort of cellar from behind the eating-room, and in French informed me that she had a room, told me the very reasonable terms, and asked for a deposit; and very soon I found myself installed in an uncarpeted apartment furnished with an iron stove, a bed, a washhand-stand, and a small table. This was the best room. A powerful and eloquent odour pervaded the house, telling of the thoroughly Italian nature of the cooking, and hinting at the existence of innumerable cesspools on the premises. I found afterwards that there were five latrines in the house.

It needed but a dinner in the eating-room to complete the tale of excellence of this exceptional pension, where one met Armenians and Levantines performing the usual skilful feats with knives and awkward morsels, regarding the fork as an instrument fit only for the inexperienced and timorous.

Next morning I climbed by devious alleys, and through lakes and torrents of filth to Pera, and spent hours trying to find better accommodation at a moderate price; but after being shown the loathsome dens of various Armenians and Greeks, and retiring with the best grace possible before the astonishing charges of every clean and relatively wholesome place, I was fortunate enough to meet a Russian, a tenant of an “appartement”—the Constantinopolitan flat—who wished to find an occupier during a three months’ visit to Moscow.

To my great delight the “appartement”—in a new building close to the Pera Palace Hotel, in one of the best parts of Constantinople—was clean and well-furnished, and we closed, with as much satisfaction on his side, I hope, as on mine. At any rate, he insisted upon sealing the arrangement with innumerable “aperitifs,” followed by vodkas and liqueurs at various brasseries about Pera, and having become friendly with a resplendent lady of Roumania, he bade me farewell and departed with his new acquaintance.

While in Constantinople I never regretted the arrangement, for the place was comfortable and convenient, and being in the midst of Pera, which is nothing but a semi-French town with no more evidence of Turks about it than a few porters and cabmen in fez, and drunken police, I began to forget what I had come for, namely, to get in touch with the Oriental side of the city. As a matter of fact, one made so many curious and interesting acquaintances among the French, Armenian, Roumanian, Russian, Balkan, and other elements, that one’s time seemed fully absorbed with them. I quite forgot to commence studying the Turkish language, and acquired a fine proficiency in French, and picked up a little Greek, a language as useful in Constantinople as Turkish. After some time, however, when the execrable weather permitted, I began to make excursions to Stamboul, and avoiding all guide-books, found out the show-places myself, and many other interesting corners, among which I counted the shops of the Persian Turks in the Great Bazaar, where I always was sure of a warm welcome, simply because I affected a liking for their Persia, and hoped with them—perhaps against hope—for her regeneration and independence.

In the Great Bazaar, too, was just a touch of that East in which I had lived, and was to see once more, though the effect was so often spoiled by the interpreter of Mr T. Cook and his train of amiable creatures, seeking the “secret of the mysterious East” in the shops of Greeks.

There, donning a fez, I would stroll, my headgear saving me from the disagreeable attentions of the Greek shopkeepers, the most pertinacious of their calling in the city. For a long time among the natives of Persia in the bazaar I could find none but Tabrizi. Persian Turks often enough know little Persian; but at last I found a native of Shiraz, much to my delight, for a residence of two years among the Shirazi has always been a pleasant memory, and this particular Shirazi, too, seemed as glad as I was to meet a sincere admirer of the Jewel of Southern Persia, “The Pearl among the Emeralds.”

At any rate, if kindness and hospitality be any criterion, my Shirazi was certainly pleased to find a kindred spirit.

Great amusement was caused among my friends of Persia by a passage-at-arms I had with the Persian Consul. I had heard that an old acquaintance was second secretary at the Consulate, and one day found my way by the steep and crooked alleys of Stamboul to the dirty red-painted building that flies the Persian flag. Entering the courtyard, I was accosted by the doorkeeper in Turkish, and as at that time I had considerable difficulty in understanding that language, I addressed him in Persian. This was more than he had expected from a stray European, and as his knowledge of Persian was as feeble as mine of Turkish, he passed me on to a suave little “mirza” or clerk, a Teherani.

I asked after my friend Mirza Hasan Khan, and was told that he had left for Persia some time ago, so I turned to leave the place. I had hardly reached the gate, however, than the little man came running after, and in polite Persian asked me to “bring my excellence” to the Consul-General, who desired to see me.

Following him upstairs and through a group of waiting peasants of Azarbaijan, I was introduced into a large room well carpeted with Persian rugs, where sat at a writing-table the Consul-General, a middle-aged Persian gentleman. Beside him upon a couch was his first secretary, a smiling little man from Tabriz.

I was at a loss to know why he wanted to see me, and could only suppose that he wished to know who I was and what was my business with Mirza Hasan Khan. Entering, I saluted him in the Persian fashion, whose etiquette demands that the entrant shall first salute the occupants of a room. Receiving the usual reply, I accepted his invitation to be seated, and waited for him to speak, again following Persian custom, which forbids the less important of two men to open conversation.

He began by asking if I had been long in Constantinople, whether I intended to stay, how I liked it, and so on, and having exhausted his preliminary questions a pause occurred, during which the two Persians regarded me in a steadfast and interested manner, which I was at a loss to account for, as they are usually far too well-mannered to embarrass a visitor in any way.

After a rather awkward minute thus, the Consul, in an abrupt and official manner, exclaimed—

“Why this disguise? wherefore these lies? the truth were better; tell me your native town.”

For a moment astonishment held me; this kind of conversation is possible from a Turk, but from a Persian! To say nothing of being quite at a loss to account for this extraordinary change of manner, I could not at all fathom the reason for such inquiries politely or impolitely made. In my innocence I had imagined myself paying a mere complimentary call, and found myself addressed as a defaulter of some kind, and so waited for further enlightenment.

“Lies?” I asked.

“Yes, lies; it is evident to me that you are a Shirazi, your tongue betrays you, and I wish to know what you have done to render expedient this kind of appearance, and this weak story of being an Englishman.”

It occurred to me suddenly that here was the representative of Muhammad Ali Shah who had, six months before, by a coup, replaced himself upon the throne of absolute power, dissolving in the most drastic way the Chamber of Representatives, many of whose supporters had fled to Europe and were travelling about in European dress. Evidently I was being mistaken for one of these.

In this dilemma I bethought myself of my passport, and fortunately discovered it, together with a number of letters, including one from the Persian Ambassador addressed to “Mūsīū Soon,” and after some difficulty succeeded in proving my identity.

The Consul’s cordiality returned in a moment. With the utmost effusiveness he invited me to a large armchair, produced cigarettes, and called for tea. The visit from that moment took the form of usual ceremonial call upon a Persian. As I took my leave, remarking that I hoped he would not seek to have me arrested as a revolutionist, he said, thinking the whole affair a good joke:

“Well, you shouldn’t speak Persian so fluently; you see your countrymen are usually so backward in acquiring our language, that when one appears talking as we do, can you expect us to believe it?”

I saw him several times afterwards, and he always met me with the air of a man who shares some great and confidential jest with one.

About this time, December 1908, the Turkish Parliament was inaugurated, and amid the discord of Turkish bands and through avenues of flags and festoons, the procession of deputies and foreign representatives fought its way to the House at Stamboul, to sit for a few months and prove its futility.

The attitude of the Persians, who had been the first to experience the pains and penalties of popular representation, was interesting. It was, of course, popularly supposed that the Persian element in Constantinople and Smyrna—some ten thousand people—displayed heartwhole enthusiasm for the Turkish “Mejliss,” and if the addresses and congratulations of the Persian political clubs were to have been believed, this supposition would have been true. Persians, however, are always alive to the value of expediency, and obviously clubs which, existing only by the tolerance of the Turks, propagated doctrines only to be regarded as heterodox by the Persian Ambassador and consuls, must display conspicuously their sympathy with any popular Ottoman movement.

In the privacy of their own houses, the sarcasm and deprecation of foreigners so near the tip of the Persian tongue found ready articulation.

As Shi’a, these refugees, to put it but mildly, lack sympathy with any movement of the Sunni Turks, and having seen repeated in the election and the arrangement of the Turkish “Mejliss” several of the errors which contributed to the discord and downfall of the first Persian Parliament, were disposed to look on with supercilious superiority at the efforts of a nation which they ever regarded as rather barbarian. Besides which, bad as Persia was under the old regime, the lot of the peasant and the humbler town-dweller was never so bad as was that of the equivalent classes in Turkey; and if there are degrees in the perfection of corruption arrived at by the administrative powers of both empires, there are few experienced Turks and Persians who will not give the palm for completeness in this art to Turkey, at any rate in her Asiatic provinces.

So the Persians, looking on, seeing all the difficulties to be surmounted, difficulties complicated by the turbulent and treacherous temperament of Greek and Armenian, waited to see an eventful crisis, and when it came as they had predicted, the triumphant attitude of “I told you so,” for which they had prepared themselves, was intensified by the feeling of having also scored off an old enemy.

The only immediate outcome of the Parliament’s inauguration, so far as it affected the dweller in the city, was to provide a number of newspapers with columns filled with reports of speeches—no whit more or less puerile than those provided by our Parliament for the London papers—and a large increase in drunkenness, particularly among the police. The provinces responded with their own interpretation of “Hurriat” by lawlessness of every description, which increased to a point almost unknown in Turkish history, at least in the Asiatic provinces, with which alone this book is concerned.

After all, it was a faithful enough repetition of Persia in early 1907, when the dying Muzaffar ud Din Shah granted the first Persian Constitution. In that unfortunate country the ignorant mass looked to the Majlis to produce, within a few days, a panacea for the ills that had grown up and become an integral part of the nation during centuries of misrule, and the failure of the people’s representatives even to adjust minor matters resulted in the outbursts all over the country which eventually, fanned by Muhammad Ali Shah, enabled him to regain his absolute power for a time.

In the Turkish Empire practically exactly the same thing happened. Needless to say, a very large section of the people was vitally interested in the existence of Sultan Abdul Hamid as a despot, particularly those powerful priests and place-holders who amassed wealth by means possible only when the Sultan was there to consent, and participate. The victims of this large class expected that with the proclamation of “Hurriat” (“freedom”) these tyrants would retire swiftly into oblivion, but as time went on and the bloodsuckers (and bloodspillers too) continued their operations with increased vigour, the people, emboldened by the new political doctrines, rose in every direction. Tribes of Arabs and Kurds, who had regarded the new regime as a partial revival of their importance and a return—in a degree—to some of their ancient independence, finding levies upon them of taxes and recruits undiminished, rebelled against the Majlis and Sultan alike—a situation resulting which, at the time of writing,2 bids fair to give the Turks and their army as much as they can do for some time to come.

It is fair to add that many of these outbursts are said to have been aggravated secretly by Sultan Abdul Hamid, who had submitted with a meekness never seen in the Persian monarch to the drastic changes his people effected. At any rate, his end was the same as that of Muhammad Ali Shah, for after a few months both find themselves deposed and in retirement.

In any case, the politics of Constantinople are too well known to need ventilation here, so we may as well return to our original subject of Persians.

I learned soon after my arrival in Constantinople that Kurds abounded, but all of the Kermānjī or Zaza tribes of Northern Turkish Kurdistan, and my hopes of finding a Kurd of Southern Persian Kurdistan seemed as if they would certainly end in disappointment. My reason for wanting to meet one of these people was to complete certain studies to which I had already devoted a year, in Kermanshah of Western Persia.

By chance, however, one of my Persian friends informed me one day that a priest had recently arrived from Sina of Persian Kurdistan; but beyond telling me his title, Shaikh ul Islām, and indicating vaguely where he imagined him to be living, in one of the curious caravanserais of Stamboul, he could tell me nothing; and as the Shaikh in question was a fanatical Sunni, I naturally could not expect my Shi’a friend to interest himself more deeply.

I was resolved to find him, however, and so spent some days tramping up and down the terrible alleys and streets of Stamboul, inquiring at every Muhammadan hotel and doing the round of all the caravanserais I could find, asking for the Shaikh ul Islām of Sina, a question that evoked considerable merriment among most of the Turks to whom I succeeded in communicating my meaning in the few Turkish words I knew. As is always the case in Turkey, inquisitiveness was the greatest impediment and nuisance. Anyone of whom I asked would put a string of questions as to why and wherefore, and who and whence, which my ignorance fortunately prevented my answering.

At last, however, by dint of getting a list of caravanserais, and taking them one by one, I found the Shaikh’s habitation. This particular serai was like most in Constantinople, a two-storeyed building of tiny, windowless rooms round a courtyard, amid which a small house was erected, equally containing separate cells. The first floor had a gallery running round it upon which the rooms opened, and I found my man in a corner cell, or rather found where he was when at home. All this time the weather was indescribably awful, daily blizzards, rainstorms and blizzards again, freezing hurricanes from the plains and uplands to the north and west; and I wondered how this native of sunny Persia, a stranger to these terrible days of darkness, could live, and what is more, raise the courage to go forth into the mire and filth of Constantinople streets.

His servant I saw, a Kurd of Sina, who spoke a little Persian, and who was so astounded at hearing a European speak Kurdish that he quite lost his tongue. However, we made an appointment, and two days after saw me once more facing a blinding snowstorm to shuffle for half an hour from Pera through Galata across the Golden Horn, now a funnel where all the winds of all the ice on earth seemed to blow into Stamboul.

Crawling over the heaps of snow in the caravanserai courtyard, where not a soul was visible, I ascended the rickety staircase and knocked at the low door at the gallery end. Some one shouted in Persian “Kī a” (“Who is it?”), and getting a reply in the same language, told me to walk in—which I did.

A small skylight sufficiently illuminated the place, and at once its arrangements stamped the occupants as natives of Persia. Opposite me, a tin road-samovar sang behind a row of little tea-glasses. Upon the samovar head sat a squat little teapot, and the Kurdish servant was filling a Persian hubble-bubble beside a brazier. Three or four Persian wooden boxes ornamented with brass-headed nails were by the walls, and in a corner were the necessaries of the road, earthen water-pots, tin “af tābeh”—a kind of jug for ablutions—tin wash-basin, and other articles with which every traveller in Persia is familiar. Commencing half-way and covering the floor to the farther end was a gilīm, a kind of carpet, woven in Persian Kurdistan, and seated facing one another, their legs concealed under a quilt apparently supported upon a stool, were two men. Him I sought was a black-browed and bearded priest, an individual surly looking enough to scare away any uninvited visitor. His companion was but an older edition of himself. Their heads were covered by small white turbans, but whether they had changed their native dress for that of Constantinople I could not see, as they both wore heavy overcoats.

The stool under the quilt covered in its turn a brazier of charcoal, and formed the “kursi,” which is the Kurdish method of keeping oneself warm. Obviously the heat, which is considerable, is confined to the space under the quilt and does not escape into the room, which in this case was bitterly cold.

The Shaikh had been informed of my coming, and welcomed me in Persian, with just enough Kurdish accent to be perceptible; and I squeezed my legs under the quilt, which he pulled up to our chins, and spent a few minutes exchanging compliments with him and the older man. The situation might have struck an outsider unused to a “kursi” as absurd: the spectacle of three men apparently sitting up in a kind of a huge bed, for the quilt was an ordinary bed-quilt, and pillows supported our backs—nodding gravely over the top of the bed-clothes at one another.

They were much depressed by the weather, but on my telling them that I had been to their Kurdistan and knew their country and language they revived somewhat, and with tea and cigarettes became jovial and communicative, supplying me with a great deal of the information upon tribes, that I had come to seek, but had not hoped to acquire in the first interview.

However, the climate of Constantinople had done sufficient to disgust them with the place, and the Shaikh announced his intention of leaving by the first steamer for Beyrouth, and returning to a place called Halabja, on the Persio-Turkish frontier, in the Southern Kurdish country. Not unnaturally I was curious to know, first, the reason for his leaving Kurdistan; and second, why he did not propose to return there, stopping short on the frontier at the nearest spot. Tentatively I put a question or two, but he evidently had a suspicion of all strangers, and I had to be content with my own theories, which could evolve nothing more probable than classing him as a political refugee; at any rate, he seemed pretty miserable in these strange and squalid surroundings, and, bearing in his language and manner the strong reminiscence of Persian Kurdistan, seemed terribly out of place in this town that aped Europe and all its meanest features.

In all, I had three interviews; he would not be induced to come over to Pera, which he had heard of as a town full of European women and shops “à la ferangi,” where he considered his priestly turban and flowing garments very out of place. So each time I found him under the quilt with his companion, much depressed, very silent, sighing heavily, and talking of nothing but places and people he had left behind in his native mountains.

My acquaintance with him, though little enough, was the cause of ripening an idea which ever since I had arrived in, and disliked, Constantinople, had gradually been springing up in my mind. Though no Kurd, nor separated from kin and custom, yet as a former dweller in the east of Persia, I yearned for the freedom of plain and mountain, the slow march of the clanging caravan, the droning song of the shepherds on the hills, the fresh clean air, and the burning sun. His talk was of all this, and my thoughts of it too. His dialect and his rough Persian recalled too vividly scenes of a year before. Irresistibly pictures arose of the plain and hill of Kurdistan, the glorious sunsets over plain and on snowy peak, and the more I gave way to these day-dreams, the more I let the rude accents linger in my ear, the stronger grew the attraction of the road.

The Shaikh left and I heard no more of him, but I missed him and his little room, a corner of Kurdistan in Constantinople, with occupants whose home habits remained unassailed by all the temptations of the city’s coffee-houses and comforts, and daily I could not help picturing his progress across Syria, and gradually to the borders of Kurdistan, the Tigris lowlands. I even hailed the day he should have got to the first Kurdish town as notable, little dreaming that he had been robbed and nearly killed before he got there—by Kurds.

At last I made a compact with the weather: if it really cleared and warmed by a certain date, I would stay; otherwise, permitting no other consideration to hinder, I would resolutely book a passage to Beyrouth, and find my way to Kurdistan.

Funds certainly were scarce; I could not afford to travel as a European usually does, with servants, paying double for everything and occupying the best quarters everywhere. If I went I must don a fez and pass as a native of the East, must buy my own food, and do my own haggling, must do all those things which no European could or would ever think of doing. In Persia I had had experience of life in disguise as a Persian, and this would be an easier task for I was a stranger among strangers, and any difference in our ways and habits would be put down to that fact. There was a certain attraction, too, in going unattended by anyone, knowing practically no Turkish nor Arabic, across Syria and down the Tigris to Kurdistan. Once there I should be more at home, for I knew two or three dialects and Persian pretty perfectly, which would enable me to pass as a Persian among the Kurds, and to hide ignorance of that habit and custom which are the rule of life in the East. As to Muhammadan observances, I had in Persia learned all that, and as a Shi’a could say my prayers, and dispute the Qur’an with the best of them.

So, all things considered, the scheme recommended itself. It was cheap, I should see much new country, and many new tribes. I should learn many more Kurdish dialects, and when I had finished should be in possession of a truer knowledge of the people, their ways and nature, than a European possibly could in ten years.

So I sat down and waited for the decision of the weather.