Under this designation, gentle reader or severe, you probably never would recognise the straggling settlement of wooden houses, set off by a few minarets and shut in from the southeast by a great black curtain of cypresses, that comes down to the Asiatic shore opposite the mouth of the Golden Horn. That is because you have forgotten its old Greek name, and mix it up in your mind with a certain notorious town in Albania. Moreover, your guide-book assures you that a day, or even half a day, will suffice to absorb its interest. Believe no such nonsense, however. I have reason to know what I am talking about, for I have spent ten of the best years of my life in Scutari, if not eleven, and have not yet seen all its sights. By what series of accidents a New English infant, whose fathers dwelt somewhere about the Five Towns long before Mr. Arnold Bennett or even Mr. Josiah Wedgwood thought of making them famous, came to see the light in this Ultima Thule of Asia, I hesitate to explain. I tried to do so once before an election board in that sympathetic district of New York known as Hell’s Kitchen, and was very nearly disfranchised for my pains. Only the notorious example of the mayor, who also happened to be born on the wrong side of the Atlantic and who nevertheless had reached his high office without any intermediate naturalisation, preserved to me the sacred right of the ballot. But the fact gives me the right to speak of guide-books as cavalierly as I please.

Yet it also singularly complicates, I find, my intention of doing something to draw my native town from the obscurity into which it has too long relapsed. In considering its various claims to interest, for instance, my first impulse is to count among them a certain lordly member of the race of stone-pines. I used to look up at it with a kind of awe, so high did its head tower above my own and so strangely did it parley with the moving air. Our heads are not much nearer together now; but unaccountable changes have taken place in the thatch of mine, while the pine has lost none of the thickness and colour that delighted me long ago. I suppose, however, that other pines are equally miraculous, and that the pre-eminence of this one in my eyes is derived from the simple fact that I happened to be born in sight of it. I will therefore struggle as valiantly as I may against the enormous temptation to do a little Kenneth Grahame over again, with Oriental variations. For the rest, there must have been less difference between a Minor Asiatic infancy and a New English one than might be imagined. It was conducted, for the most part, in the same tongue. It was enlivened by the same games and playthings. It was embittered by the same books and pianos. Its society was much more limited, however, and it was passed, for the most part, behind high garden walls, to adventure beyond which, without governess or guardian of some sort, was anathema.

I could easily lose myself in reminiscences of one or two Scutari gardens. In fact, I can only save myself—and the reader—from such a fate by making up my mind to write a separate chapter about gardens in general. As for the houses that went with the gardens, they were very much like the old houses of Stamboul. They were all halls and windows, and they had enormously high ceilings, so that in winter they were about as cosy as the street. I remember one of them with pleasure by reason of the frescoes that adorned it, with beautiful deer in them and birds as big as the deer stalking horizontally up the trunks of trees. Another was a vast tumble-down wooden palace of which we humbly camped out in one corner. It had originally belonged to an Armenian grandee who rejoiced in the name of the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked. The Son of the Man Who Was Cooked had the honour to be a friend of the Sultan of his day, who not seldom visited him. His majesty used to come at all hours, it is said, and sometimes in disguise. This was partly because the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked loved to go loaded with jewels, as the legend went, and the Sultan hoped by finding him in that case to have the better ground for raising loans. But it is also whispered that other reasons entered into the matter, and that on the men’s side of the house a secret stair was built, enabling majesty to circulate in the house without attracting too much attention. Certain it is that such a stair, black and breakneck, existed, for my room was at the top of it—and as I lay in bed in winter I could look out through the cracks in the wall and see the snow in the garden. But I never wondered then, as I have wondered since, whether the legend that Abd ül Hamid was half an Armenian had any connection with our house. Another of its attractions was that it boasted in the cellar a bottomless pit—or so the servants used to assure us.

These were they who lent, perhaps, the most local colour to that Minor Asiatic youth. They were daughters of Armenia, for the most part. And I sometimes think that if William Watson had enjoyed my opportunities he never would have written “The Purple East.” Surely he never squirmed under an Armenian kiss, which in my day partook both of sniffing and of biting and which left the victim’s cheek offensively red and moist. Yet how can I remember with anything but gratitude the kindly neighbours to whom foreign children, coming and going between the houses that in those distant days made a small Anglo-American colony in upper Scutari, were always a source of interest? For some mysterious reason that is buried in the heart of exiled Anglo-Saxondom, we really knew wonderfully little about our neighbours. We never played with their children or entered other than strangers the world outside our garden wall. Nor was it because our neighbours were unwilling to meet us half-way. They paid us the compliment of naming a certain place of amusement which existed in our vicinity the American Theatre, hoping thereby to gain our patronage. But I fear this hope met with no response. At any rate, I never came nearer the unknown delights of the American Theatre than the top of our garden wall, from which I remember once listening entranced to such strains of music as never issued from our serious piano. I recognised them years afterward, with a jump, in an opera of Suppé. I have also lived to learn that Scutari, or the part of it where we lived, is a sort of Armenian Parnassus, perhaps even an Armenian Montmartre, given over entirely to the muses. Emancipated Armenian ladies, they tell me, do such unheard-of things as to walk, on their own two feet, vast distances over the hills of Asia with emancipated Armenian gentlemen in long locks and flowing neckties; and imperishable Armenian odes have celebrated the beauties of Baghlar Bashi and Selamsîz.

Nevertheless, we did not suffer the consequences of our aloofness. Between our garden and another one, to which we were in time allowed to go alone, there existed, unbeknownst to our elders, certain post stations, as it were, where a wayfarer might stop for rest and refreshment. Out of one barred window a lady always passed me a glass of water. She rather reminded me of some docile overgrown animal in a cage. Indeed I am not sure she could have got out if she tried—which apparently she never did—for she was of immeasurable proportions. I thought of her when I later came to read of a certain Palace lady pet-named Little Elephant, who built a mosque in Scutari. I know not whether this was the same whom a Sultan, having sent messengers to the four quarters of the empire in search of the fattest beauty imaginable, found in my native town, almost under his palace windows, and led away in triumph. As George Ade has told us, slim princesses used not to be the fashion in Turkey. From another window, higher above the street, attentions of another sort used to be showered on us by an old gentleman who never seemed to dress. He was always sitting there in a loose white gown, as if he had just got up or were just going to bed, and he would toss us down pinks or chrysanthemums, according to the season. But the person most popular with us was a little old woman who lived in a house so old and so little that I blush when I remember how greedy I used to be at her expense. She used to reach out between the bars of her window spoonfuls of the most heavenly preserve I have ever tasted, thick and white and faintly flavoured with lemon. So distinguished a sweetmeat could only possess so distinguished a name as bergamot.

Returning to Scutari long afterward, it came upon me with a certain surprise that no one offered me sweets or flowers, or even a glass of water. My case was oddly put to me by a man like one of Shakespeare’s fools, who perhaps should not have been at large but who asked himself aloud when he met me at a mosque gate: “I wonder what he is looking for—his country?” If Scutari tempts me to do Kenneth Grahame over again, it also tempts me to do Dr. Hale over again, to whose famous hero I could give other points than that of the election board in Hell’s Kitchen. The enduring taunt of my school-days was that I never could be President, and it was a bitter blow to me when I learned that my name could never be carved in the Hall of Fame above the Hudson. Yet when I went back to Scutari, as a man will go back to the home of his youth, the inhabitants were so far from recognising me as one of themselves that the thought occurred to me how amusingly like life it would be if I, who am not notable for the orthodoxy of my opinions, were massacred for a Christian in the town where I was born! Nevertheless I have discovered with a good deal of surprise, in the room of the vanished Scutari I used to know, a Scutari that I never saw or heard of when I was young—I speak, of course, to the race of men that likes Stamboul—a place of boundless resources, of priceless possibilities—a true City of Gold.

The favourite story is that Chrysopolis was so called because of the Persian satraps who once lived there and heaped up the gold of tribute. Others have it, and I like their theory better, that the city took its name from Chryses, son of Chryseis and Agamemnon, who, fleeing after the fall of Troy from Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, met there his end. A few poetic-minded individuals have found an origin for the word in the appearance the town presents from Constantinople at sunset with all its panes on fire. I don’t know that the idea is more far-fetched than any other. An equal variety of opinion prevails with regard to the modern name. Certain authorities claim that it is a corruption of Üsküdar, used by the Turks, which is from a Persian word meaning a post messenger. For myself, I am feebly impressed by all these Persians, who seem to me dragged in by the ears. A Turkish savant told me once that he believed Üsküdar to be a corruption of an old Armenian name, Oskitar or Voskitar, which is merely a translation of Chrysopolis. When Mehmed II captured Constantinople he brought a great many Armenians into it, to repopulate the city and to offset the Greeks; and the richest of them, who came from Broussa, he settled in Scutari, which has always retained a certain Armenian tinge. I learn that in ancient Armenian some such word could have been made out of Chrysopolis. But the name Scutari is much older than the Turkish conquest. Villehardouin and at least one Byzantine historian speak of the palace of Scutari, on the promontory that juts out toward Seraglio Point. Also, I seem to remember reading in Gibbon of a corps of scutarii who had their barracks on that side of the strait. I have never been able to lay my hand on those scutarii again, and so cannot found very much of an argument upon them. Any Latin lexicon, however, will give you the word scutarius, a shield-bearer, and tell you that a corps of them existed under the later empire. Wherefore I formally reject and contemn Murray, Von Hammer and Company, with their Persian postboys, and take my stand on those Roman shields. In all probability the name spread, as in the case of Galata, from a barracks or a palace to the entire locality, and Üsküdar must be a Turkish attempt to pronounce the Greek Σκουτάριον.

Of that oldest Scutari I did not set out to write an account, but it is convenient that the visitor should be aware of how ancient and honourable a town he is treading the streets. I find it a little difficult to write coherently, however, for two ancient and honourable towns are there. The second one, lying next to the south and facing the Marmora instead of the Bosphorus, is the more ancient, and I suppose in the eyes of the world the more honourable. Chalcedon was its name—derived, by one report, from the Homeric soothsayer Chalkas—and it is represented to-day by the suburbs of Haïdar Pasha, Kadi Kyöi, and Moda. The history of these adjoining quarters is so intertwined that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between Chalcedon and Chrysopolis. Chalcedon, like Byzantium, was founded by colonists from Megara, but a few years earlier. Its greater accessibility and hospitality to ships and the flatness of its site gave it advantages which Chrysopolis did not possess. Chrysopolis, on the other hand, nearer Byzantium and commanding the mouth of the Bosphorus, occupied the more strategic position with regard to the traffic of the strait. Both cities suffered greatly during the Persian wars, and were for a time ruled by the satraps of Darius. The Athenians seized them early in the history of their league, in order to levy tolls on passing ships. So early arose the vexed question of the straits. Philip of Macedon included the two cities in his siege of Byzantium, but was driven away by the Athenians. Xenophon stopped a week in Chrysopolis on his way back from Persia. Hannibal ended his troubled days in a suburb of Chalcedon. Nicomedes III of Bithynia left that town in his will to the Romans, who fought over it with Mithridates of Pontus. The Goths ravaged it on the occasion of their first raid into Asia Minor. The fate of the Roman world was settled on the heights of Chrysopolis in 324, when that other man without a country, Constantine of York, vanquished his last rival, Licinius, and took him prisoner. The experiences and associations of that victory must have had much to do with the transfer of the capital from the Tiber to the Bosphorus. From that time onward the two Asiatic cities lost something in importance but gained in peace—though Persians, Saracens, and Turks later troubled them again. The fourth Ecumenical Council sat in Chalcedon in 451, in that church of St. Euphemia which had been a temple of Venus. The famous oracle of Apollo Constantine destroyed, using its marbles for his own constructions on the opposite side of the strait. From Chrysopolis he also took a celebrated statue of Alexander the Great. His example was followed by the emperor Valens, who utilised the walls of Chalcedon as a quarry for the aqueduct that still strides across a valley of Stamboul. And even Süleïman the Magnificent was able to find materials for his greatest mosque in the ruins of the church of St. Euphemia and of the palace of Belisarius.

To-day a few sculptured capitals remain above ground in Scutari, and every now and then some one in Kadi Kyöi digs up in his garden a terra-cotta figurine. Otherwise there is nothing left to remind you of the antique cities that sat in front of Byzantium. They have disappeared as completely as the quaint little Scutari of my youth. But two settlements still remain there, and still different, although so long united under one destiny. When projected trolley-cars and motor roads come into being, as they are destined shortly to do, I fancy that this separation will become less and less marked. For the time being, however, Scutari and Kadi Kyöi might be on opposite sides of the Bosphorus. Kadi Kyöi, with its warmer winds, its smoother lands, its better harbours, its trim yachts, its affluent-looking villas, its international Bagdadbahn, has acquired a good deal of the outward appearance of Europe. Whereas Scutari remains Asiatic and old-fashioned. It is very much what it was before Bagdad railways, when the caravans of the East marched through its narrow streets, when the Janissaries pounded their kettledrums in the square of Doghanjiler—the Falconers. And it contains almost all that is to be seen in the two towns of interest to the comer from afar.

The great sight of Scutari, after all, is Scutari itself—which very few people ever seem to have noticed. In front of it opens, somewhat north of west, a nick in the shore known as the Great Harbour. As a matter of fact it is very little of a harbour, whose inner waters are barely safe from the swirl of the Bosphorus as it begins to squeeze past Seraglio Point. The front door of Scutari is here, however, and one altogether worthy of the City of Gold. Seen from the water it is admirably bordered with boats and boat-houses, being no less admirably overlooked by minarets and hanging gardens and climbing roofs and the dark overtopping wall of the great cemetery, while nearer acquaintance proves it to be amply provided with local colour in the way of plane-trees, fountains, and coffee-houses galore. The heart of the town lies in an irregular amphitheatre which twists back from the Great Harbour. Into the floor of the amphitheatre project half a dozen buttresses of an upper gallery, and through the long narrow corridors between them streets climb, sometimes by steps, to the cypresses and their amply sweeping terrace. In this scene, if you like, a lesser Stamboul is set. It has its old houses, its vines, its fountains, its windows of grille work, its mosque yards, its markets, its covered bazaar, even its own edition of the Sacred Caravan and the Persian solemnity of Mouharrem. But it has an air of its own, as the storks will tell you who nest near the flower market. It does not imitate, it complements Stamboul. And it contains monuments so remarkable that I am constantly amazed and scandalised to find out how little people know about them.

Four mosques in particular are the pride and jewels of my native town. They were all erected by princesses—the two oldest after the designs of Sinan. The earliest one, dating from 1547, is the first you see when you come to Scutari. It stands, like the mosque of Rüstem Pasha, on a terrace above the hum of the landing stage. As a matter of fact it was built by the wife of Rüstem Pasha, who was also the daughter of Süleïman the Magnificent and Roxelana. Mihrîmah, this lady was called, which means Moon and Sun. Her mosque is named after her, though it is also called the Great Mosque and the Mosque of the Pitcher—for what reason I have yet to penetrate. It is a little stiff and severe, to my way of thinking. The minarets have not the spring that Sinan afterward learned to evoke, and the interior is rather bare. Perhaps it has been pillaged. But the courtyard, looking out through trees to the Bosphorus, is a delightful spot, and it contains one of the most admirable mosque fountains I know. There are also other fountains in the court, and an old sun-dial, too overgrown by leaves to do its work, and a mouvakît haneh. When I was speaking of mosque yards in general I did not mention this institution. It may seem to us that people who count twelve o’clock at sunset cannot pay much attention to the science of time keeping. But the exact hours of prayer, like the exact direction of Mecca, are very important matters for Mohammedans. The Arabs, I believe, were the first inventors of clocks. At all events, the first clock seen in Europe was a present to Charlemagne from Haroun al Rashid. A clock is an essential part of the furniture of every mosque. Haroun al Rashid is a long time dead, however, and most of the clocks seen to-day were made in England. Mosques of any size, nevertheless, have their own corps of timekeepers, who do their work in a pavilion called the mouvakît haneh—the house of time—and incidentally repair the watches of the neighbourhood. Some of them also take solar observations with instruments that were made for a museum.

Next in chronological order is the mosque of the Valideh Atik—which might be translated as the Old or, more politely, as the Wise Mother. It is more popularly known as Top Tashi, or Cannon Stone. In a steep street near the mosque lies a big stone cannon-ball from which the quarter may take its name. However, the Wise Mother was a certain Nour Banou, Lady of Light, who lies buried beside her husband, Sultan Selim II, in the courtyard of St. Sophia. Her mosque stands on the second story of Scutari, and its two minarets and contrasting cypresses, with their encompassing arcade and massive-walled dependencies, make the most imposing architectural group in the town. The mosque has recently undergone a thorough restoration, which is rarely a very happy proceeding. Luckily the restorers left the painted wooden ceilings that decorate the under-side of the gallery—or so much of them as had not been painted out before. There is also an elaborately perforated marble mimber, whose two flags would seem to indicate that a church once stood here. But what is best is the tiled recess of the mihrab. The tile makers of Nicæa had evidently not begun to lose their cunning in the day of the Lady of Light—unless she borrowed from some other place. In any case, the two panels at right angles to the mihrab are so high an ornament of my native town that Scutari deserves to be celebrated for them alone. They seem to me to rank among the finest tiles in Constantinople, though Murray passes them by without a word. In Turkish eyes this mosque has a further interest as being one of the spots known to have been visited by Hîdîr or Hîzîr, lord of the Fountain of Life. In the porch of the mosque hangs an illuminated manuscript commemorating this illustrious visit, and near it are three holes by which Hîzîr is supposed to have moved the mosque in token of his presence.

The third princess to build in Scutari was one whose acquaintance we have already made, the great valideh Kyössem. Her mosque also stands on the upper terrace, at the head of the long corridor known as Chaoush Deresi. The Turks call it Chinili Jami, which really means the China Mosque. It is a tiled mosque, much smaller than Rüstem Pasha, faced on the inside and along the porch with blue and white tiles of not so good a period. Between 1582, when the Lady of Light tiled her mihrab, and 1643 something had evidently happened in Nicæa. As a matter of fact, I believe the tiles came from Kütahya. Nevertheless the mosque is charming, there is the quaintest pagoda-like fountain in one corner of the court, and the main gate of the yard composes with the fountain and the mosque and the cypresses around it in the happiest possible way.

The latest of our four mosques was erected by the sultana who, being by birth a Greek, took away San Francesco in Galata from the Conventuals. At least that lady was the builder if she was the mother of Ahmed III as well as of Moustafa II. She atoned, however, for that eminently feminine piece of high-handedness by her mosque in Scutari. It is popularly called the Valideh Jedid, the mosque of the New Mother, and it belongs to that early period of Turkish rococo which Ahmed III borrowed from Louis XV. For the mosque of a new mother, the style is admirably adapted. It is to be seen at its most characteristic in the fountain of marble embroideries which stands outside the north gate of the mosque yard. A second fountain stands beside the first, of the sort where cups of water are filled for passers-by. Then comes the tomb of the foundress, who lies like the Kyöprülüs under a skeleton dome of bronze. And you should see the roses that make a little garden around her in May. They are an allusion, I suppose, to her graceful Turkish name, which may be less gracefully rendered as Rose Attar of Spring. The mosque yard has no great interest—except on Fridays, when a fair is established along its outer edge. But I must draw attention to the bird-house, like a cross-section of a little mosque with two minarets, on the façade of the forecourt, and to the small marble beehive that balances it. This forecourt is the only one of its kind in Scutari. As for the mosque itself, you may find the windows too coquettish even for a New Mother. For myself I rather like their flower-pots and flowers, though they clearly belong to a day other than that of the old window jewellery of Sinan’s time. The green tiles about the mihrab also betray a symptom of decadence in that they are of a repeating pattern. But the chief point of the mosque is one to which I drew attention a good many pages back, namely its stencilling. Being a native of Scutari, I can without presumption recommend to all Ministers of Pious Foundations that they preserve that old painting as long as the last flake of it hangs to the ceiling, and that before the last flake falls they learn the secret of its effect. So may they in days to come restore to Rüstem Pasha and Sultan Ahmed and Yeni Jami a part of their lost dignity.

You are not to suppose that Scutari has no other mosques than these. Áyazma Jami and the Selimieh are two other imperial monuments whose delightful yards make up for their baroque interiors. And the small Ahmedieh is an older structure which you must not attribute to any Sultan Ahmed. Oldest of all is Roum Mehmed Pasha, once a Greek church. If I pass it by, however, I simply cannot pass by a mosque which stands in its own medresseh court on the south side of Scutari harbour. I would rather study theology there than anywhere else in the world. At least, I do not believe any other theological school has so perfect a little cloister lying so close to the sea. And while other cloisters were designed by Sinan, I know of no other that was founded by a poet. The name of this poet was Shemsi Pasha, and he was a soldier and a courtier as well. But it was the poetry in him, together with his quick wit and gay humour, that first drew him into the notice of Süleïman the Magnificent. Unlike many men of his circle, he was a real Turk, being descended from a Seljukian family that reigned at one time on the shores of the Black Sea. He became a greater favourite of Selim II than he had been of Süleïman. Selim made him master of ceremonies to receive the ambassadors who came to Adrianople to congratulate the new Sultan on his accession. Among these was a Persian, whom his European colleagues greatly astonished by taking off their hats as he rode in with his magnificent suite. The Persian asked Shemsi Pasha what the extraordinary gesture might signify, and Shemsi Pasha told him it was a Christian way of showing that they were ready to drop their heads at the feet of the Sultan. Under Mourad III Shemsi Pasha reached an even higher pitch of fortune, and it was then that he built his medresseh. He jokingly began to call himself the Falcon of Petitions, for it was his business to receive petitions that people brought to the Sultan—and the presents that accompanied them. One day he came away from the Sultan in high good humour, saying: “At last I have avenged the dynasty of my fathers, for if the house of Osman caused our ruin I have prepared that of the house of Osman.” Asked what he meant, he explained that he had just induced the Sultan—for forty thousand ducats—to sell his favour. “From to-day the Sultan himself will give the example of corruption, and corruption will dissolve the empire.”

Were I a little more didactically inclined, this speech should inspire the severest reflections on the man who made it and on the ironical truth of his lightly uttered prophecy. As it is, I am more inclined to reflect on the irony of the fact that ill-gotten gains may do more good or create something nearer the immortal than the savings of honest toil. At any rate, the medresseh of Shemsi Pasha is such a place as only a poet or a great architect could imagine; and many homeless people found refuge there during the late Balkan War. The cloister is very small and irregular. There are cells and a covered arcade on two sides. The third, I think, from three or four quaint little windows of perforated marble that remain in a corner of the wall, must once have been more open to the Bosphorus than it is now. On the fourth side, and taking up a good deal of the court, are the mosque and the tomb of the founder. The mosque must have been a little jewel in its day. It is half a ruin now. The minaret is gone and so is all but the pillars of the portico that looked into the court. Within, however, are intricately panelled shutters, and a little gallery painted on the under-side, and a carved mimber of woodwork like that in the tombs of Roxelana and her sons. The refugees of 1912, poor wretches, saw no reason why they should not drive as many nails as they needed into that precious wood. The greatest ornament of the mosque is a magnificent bronze grille in the archway that opens into the adjoining tomb. This grille is rather like one they show you at Ravenna, in a crypt window of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, except that it has an arrow in each of the arched openings; and the surmounting lunette is a more complicated design. Did Shemsi Pasha, who seems to have had rather a genius for picking things up, get hold of a real Byzantine grille and make this perfect use of it? The tomb itself is in a piteous state of neglect. Nothing is left to show which of the three bare and broken wooden catafalques marked the grave of the dead poet. Windows in the outer wall look through a little marble portico upon a ruined quay. And, tempered so, the splash and flicker of the Bosphorus come into the mosque.

One of the sights of Scutari which always interests me is to be seen behind Shemsi Pasha, where a bluff first begins to lift itself above the sea. Here on any summer day you will notice what you may think to be lines of clothes drying in the wind. The clothes are really those soft figured handkerchiefs which are so greatly used in the East. Bare-legged men dip them in the sea to set the colours; and from them you may follow a gory trail of dye till you come to a house with thick wooden bars tilted strangely out under the eaves like gigantic clothes-horses. This is the bassma haneh—the printing-house. It has belonged to the same family for two hundred years, and during that time it can hardly have changed its methods of wood-block printing. Every bit of the work is done by hand. Every stitch of it is lugged down to the salt water for the colours to be made fast, and lugged back. And the factory, like other old-fashioned institutions in Constantinople, is open only from the day of Hîd’r Eless, in May, to that of Kassîm, in November. Once, as I rather intrusively poked my way about it, I came upon a man, whether old or young I could not say, who sat on the floor blocking out the first pattern on long white strips of cloth that were ultimately, as he told me, to make turbans for the people of Kürdistan. The room was almost dark, and it contained hardly anything beside the mattress where the man slept at night and a sizzling caldron beside him. The mixture in the caldron, into which he kept dipping his block, was a dye of death: so he told me, literally in those words, adding that it had already cut ten years off his life. But his employers never could afford to put some sort of a chimney over the caldron—and they assured him that employment like his was to be found in no other country. Was it true? he asked me. I thought to myself that the idyllic old days of hand labour, after which so many of us sigh, may not always have been so idyllic after all.

If you go to the bassma haneh by following the shore from the Great Harbour, it is very likely that you will never get there, by reason of the bluff to which I have just alluded. No road runs along the edge of that bluff to Haïdar Pasha and Moda, as perhaps in some far distant day of civic improvement may be the case; but here and there the houses are set a little back, and so many streets come vertically down toward the water that there are plenty of places to take in what the bluff has to offer. And then you will see why so many sultans and emperors built palaces there of old. I may, however, draw your attention for a moment to the island lighthouse falsely known as Leander’s Tower. In an old Italian map it is put down as Torre della Bella Leandra, and I have wondered if there, haply, was a clew to the name or whether it is simply a sailor’s jumble of the legend of the Dardanelles. In Turkish it is called Kîz Koulesi—the Maiden’s Tower—and it has a legend of its own. This relates to a Greek emperor who, being told that his daughter would one day be stung by a serpent, built a little castle for her on that sea-protected rock. But it happened to her to be seen by an Arab gallant, who expressed his admiration by bringing her flowers in disguise. Among them a viper chanced to creep one day, before the gallant left the mainland, and the princess’s prophecy was fulfilled. The gallant immediately sucked the poison out of her wound, however, and ran away with the princess. He was the celebrated hero Sid el Battal, forerunner of the Spanish Cid, who commanded the fifth Arab siege of Constantinople in 739 and who now lies buried in a town named after him in Asia Minor. The existing Maiden’s Tower was built in 1763 by Sultan Moustafa III. But a Byzantine one existed before it, of the emperor Manuel Comnenus, from which a chain used to be stretched in time of war across to Seraglio Point. And many centuries earlier the rock bore the statue of a heifer in memory of Damalis, wife of that Athenian Chares who drove away Philip of Macedon. After her the bluff itself used to be called Damalis—which again may be connected with the intricate myth of Io and the Bosphorus.

Every one knows the old story of the Delphian Oracle, who told the colonists of Byzantium to settle opposite the City of the Blind. The City of the Blind turned out to be the place whose inhabitants had passed by the site of Seraglio Point. The reproach cannot be fastened on the City of Gold, because Chalcedon really incurred it. But I have already associated the two towns, and I am willing to do so again. For to live in Scutari is to prove either that the oracle was blind or that Byzas made a mistake. No other conclusion is possible for him who loiters on the bluffs opposite Seraglio Point. One of the best places to see Stamboul is there, where you look at it against the light. And it is something to see in the early morning, with mists melting out of the Golden Horn and making a fairyland of all those domes and pinnacles. As for the sunsets of Scutari, with Stamboul pricking up black against them, they are so notable among exhibitions of their kind that I cannot imagine why they were not long ago put down among sunsets of San Marco and moonlights of the Parthenon and I know not how many other favourite wonders of the world.

I never heard, however, of guides recommending so simple an excursion. What they will sometimes grudgingly recommend is to climb the hill of Chamlîja. Chamlîja—the Place of Pines—is a hill of two peaks, one a little higher than the other, on the descending terraces of which amphitheatrically sprawls the City of Gold. Chamlîja is the highest hill on the Bosphorus, and therefore is it dear to the Turks, who are like the Canaanites of old in that they love groves and high places. The groves, it is true, are now rather thinly represented by the stone-pines that give the height its name; but Turkish princes, like their Byzantine predecessors, have villas among them, while the hill is a favourite resort of their subjects. The widest prospect, of course, is to be had from the top of Big Chamlîja. But a more picturesque one is visible from the south side of Little Chamlîja, taking in a vivid geography of cypress forest and broken Marmora coast, and Princes’ Isles seen for once swimming each in its own blue, and far-away Bithynian mountains; while to the explorer of a certain northern spur, running straight to Beïlerbeï Palace, is vouchsafed one of the most romantic of all visions of the Bosphorus. Chamlîja has an especial charm for the people of the country because of its water. No European can quite understand what that means to a Turk. Being forbidden to indulge in fermented liquors, he is a connoisseur of water—not mineral water, but plain H₂O—as other men are of wine. He calls for the product of his favourite spring as might a Westerner for a special vintage, and he can tell when an inferior brand is palmed off on him. A dervish named Hafid Effendi once published a monograph on the waters of Constantinople in which he described the sixteen best springs, which he himself had tested. I will not enumerate all the conditions which he laid down for perfect water. One of them is that it must be “light”; another is that it should flow from south to north or from west to east. A certain spring of Chamlîja meets these requirements better than any other in Constantinople. A sultan, therefore, did not think it beneath him to house this famous water of my native town, and gourmets pay a price to put it on their tables.

A second pretext do guides and guide-books, out of the capriciousness of their hearts, allow outsiders for visiting Scutari, and that is to see the great cemetery. For that matter, few people with eyes of their own and a whim to follow them could look up from the water at that wood of cypresses, curving so wide and sombre above the town, without desiring to know more of it. I have wondered if Arnold Böcklin ever saw it, for in certain lights, and from the right point of the Bosphorus, Scutari looks strangely like a greater Island of Death. In spite of its vast population of old grey stones, however, there is to me nothing so melancholy there as in our trim Western places of burial, shut away from the world and visited only with whispers. There is, of course, a gravity, the inseparable Turkish gravity, but withal a quiet colour of the human. For the Turks have a different attitude toward death from ours. I do not mean that they lack feeling, but they seem to take more literally than we their religious teaching on the subject. They have no conventional mourning, and the living and the dead seem much nearer to each other. Nor is it merely that tombs and patches of cemetery ornament the busiest street. “Visit graves,” says a tradition of the Prophet: “Of a truth they shall make you think of futurity.” And “Whoso visiteth every Friday the graves of his two parents, or one of the two, he shall be written a pious son, even though he had been disobedient to them in the world.” And people do visit graves. The cult of the türbeh is a thing by itself, while every cemetery is a place of resort. The cypresses of Scutari are, therefore, the less funereal because the highways of common life run between them. I speak literally, for the main thoroughfares between Scutari and Kadi Kyöi pass through the cemetery. Under the trees the stone-cutters fashion the quaint marble of the graves. Fountains are scattered here and there for the convenience of passers-by. People sit familiarly among the stones or in the coffee-houses that do not fail to keep them company. I remember an old man who used to keep one of the coffee-houses, and how he said to me, like a Book of Proverbs: “Death in youth and poverty in age are hard, but both are of God.” He was born in Bulgaria, he told me, when it was still a part of Turkey, but he wished to die in Asia, and so he had already taken up his abode among the cypresses of Scutari. A more tragic anticipation of that last journey has been made by a colony of lepers. I went to visit them once, when I thought less of my skin than I do now. They live in a stone quadrangle set back from the Haïdar Pasha road, with windows opening only into their own court. In front of the gate is a stone post where people leave them food. When they offered me some of it, out of the hospitality of their hearts, I must confess I drew the line. They kept house in families, each in its own little apartment, and the rooms were clean and comfortable in the simple Turkish way. But the faces and hands of some of the inmates were not good to see. It made one’s heart sick for the children who are born and innocently grow up in that place of death.

The stones of Scutari are a study which I have often wished I had the knowledge to take up. Every grave has a headstone and a footstone, taller and narrower than our old-fashioned tombstones. You can tell at a glance whether a man or a woman is buried beneath the marble slab that generally joins the two stones. In old times every man wore a special turban, according to his rank and profession, and when he died that turban was carved at the top of his headstone. The custom is still continued, although the fez has now so largely taken the place of the turban. Women’s stones are finished with a carving of flowers. Floral reliefs are common on all monuments, which may also be painted and gilded. And in the flat slab will be a little hollow to catch the rain—for thirsty spirits and the birds. The epitaphs that are the chief decoration are not very different from epitaphs all over the world, though perhaps a little more flowery than is now the fashion in the West. The simpler ones give only the name and estate of the deceased, with a request for a prayer or a fatiha—the opening invocation of the Koran—and some such verse as “He is the Everlasting,” “Every soul shall taste death,” or “We are God’s and we return to God.” This sentiment is also characteristic: “Think of the dead. Lift up your hands in prayer, that men may some time visit your grave and pray.” The epitaph is often rhymed, though it may be of a touching simplicity—like “O my daughter! O! She flew to Paradise and left to her mother only the sorrow of parting,” or “To the memory of the spirit of the blessed Fatma, mother of Ömer Agha, whose children find no way out of their grief.” Others are more complicated and Oriental, ending, like the inscriptions on public buildings, in a chronogram. Von Hammer quotes one, not in this cemetery, which is peculiarly effective in Turkish:

Behind the house of the lepers a trail branches away into the most lonely part of this strange forest, ultimately leading down a hill, too rough for any but the most adventurous carriage, to a quaint little stone arch mysteriously called Bloody Bridge that spans a thread of water beside a giant plane-tree. On this southward-looking slope the cypresses attain a symmetry, a slenderness, a height, a thickness of texture and richness of colour unmatched in Stamboul. They grow in squares, many of them, or in magic circles. The stones under them are older than the others, and more like things of nature in the flowered grass. On certain happy afternoons, when the sun brings a fairy depth and softness of green out of the cypresses, when their shadows fall lance-like across bare or mossy aisles, and the note of a solitary bird echoes between them, it is hard not to imagine oneself in an enchanted wood.

In the eyes of most comers from afar the dervishes, those who are ignorantly called the howling dervishes, stand for Scutari and all its works. And the fact always irritates me because it indicates so perfect a blindness to the treasures of the City of Gold—and something else that no sightseer ever pardons in another. The tourists are not in the least interested in dervishes in general. The subject of mysticism and its Oriental ramifications is not one they would willingly go into. They do not dream that Scutari is full of other kinds of dervishes. They have never heard of the Halveti, as it were the descendants of the Sleepless Ones of the Studion, who consider it a lack of respect to the Creator to sleep lying down, or even to cross their legs, and who repeat every night in the year the temjid, the prayer for pity of insomnia, which is heard elsewhere only in Ramazan. No one has ever taken a tourist to see so much as the beautiful ironwork of the tomb of the holy Aziz Mahmoud Hüdaï, who lived eighteen years in a cell of the ancient mosque of Roum Mehmed Pasha. They do not even know that Roufaï is the true name of the dervishes they go to stare at, and that there is more than one tekkeh of them in Scutari. The traditional “howling” is all that concerns them. And if I were the sheikh of that tekkeh I would shut its doors to all tourists—or at least to more than one or two of them at a time. They make more noise than the dervishes.