There are larger villages. There are more prosperous villages. There are villages more fashionable. Great ladies lift their eyebrows when we pronounce its name, even ladies not so great, and decide that we will hardly do for their visiting lists. But few villages are so picturesque as ours. And in one respect at least we are surpassed by no village. For we sit on that cleft promontory of the Bosphorus where, during the league-long coquetry of the two continents before their final union, Europe most closely approaches Asia. The mother of nations, as we see her some eight hundred yards away, is a slope sunburnt or green according to the time of year but always discreetly overlooked by farther heights of blue, a slope sharp enough, not too high, admirably broken by valleys and points and one perfect little bay for which I sometimes think I would give all the rest of the Bosphorus, a slope beaded irregularly along the bottom with red-roofed summer valîs, variegated with gardens and hamlets and nestling patches of wood, and feathered along the top with cypresses and stone-pines in quite an Italian manner. For my part, I fail to see why any one should ever have desired to leave so delectable a continent, particularly at a period when the hospitality of our village must have been more scant than it is now. But history has recorded many a migration to our side of the strait. Here Xenophon crossed with the remnant of his ten thousand. Here Darius sat upon a throne of rock and watched Persia swarm after him against the Scythians. Here, too, the great emperor Heraclius, returning to Constantinople after his triumphs in the East, caused a pontoon bridge to be railed high with woven branches in order to screen from his eyes the water he dreaded more than blood. And here Sultan Mehmed II opened the campaign which ended in the fall of the Roman Empire.

The castle he built in 1452, the summer before he took Constantinople, is what gives our village its character and its name. Roumeli Hissar means Roman, Greek, European, or western castle, distinguishing us from the opposite village of Andolou Hissar, where stand the ruins of the earlier fortress of Baïezid the Thunderbolt. To see the two round towers of Roumeli Hissar facing each other across a ravine, the polygonal keep at the water’s edge, the crenelated walls and turrets irregularly enclosing the steep triangle between them, you would never guess that they sprang up in about the time of a New York apartment-house. Yet that they did so is better attested than the legend that their arrangement reproduces the Arabic letters of their builder’s name. Having demanded permission of the Greek emperor to put up a hunting-lodge on the Bosphorus, the Conqueror proceeded to employ an army of masons, in addition to his own troops, with orders to destroy any buildings they found convenient to use for material. So it is that the shafts and capitals of columns, the pieces of statues, the fragments of decorative brick and marble, that give so interesting a variety of detail to the structure are a last dim suggestion of the ancient aspects of the village. One of its Byzantine names was that of the Asomaton, the Bodiless Angels, to whom a monastery in the place was dedicated, while earlier still a temple of Hermes had existed there. In three months the hunting-lodge was ready for occupancy, and the Sultan called it Cut-Throat Castle, a play on the Turkish word which means both throat and strait. It put the Bosphorus at his mercy, as a Venetian galley that went to the bottom under a big stone cannon-ball was the first to testify—though the Genoese commanded the mouth of the Black Sea from another pair of castles. But in spite of their hasty construction the walls have withstood the decay and the earthquakes of nearly five hundred years. Will as much be said of existing New York apartment-houses in the twenty-fifth century?

Powerful as the fortress was in its day, and interesting as it remains as a monument to the energy and resource of its builder, it never played a great part in the martial history of the Turks. The Bosphorus was not then the important highway it is now. After the capture of Constantinople the castle degenerated into a garrison of Janissaries and a state prison of less importance than the Seven Towers. Not a few passages of romance, however, attach to that diminished period. More than one European diplomat spent a season of repose within the walls of Cut-Throat Castle, in days when international law was less finical on such points than it since has grown. And it formed a residence less agreeable than the present country embassies, if we may judge from the account that has come down to us of one such villeggiatura. This was written by a young Bohemian attaché who spent two years of the sixteenth century in enforced retirement at Roumeli Hissar. His name, Wenceslas Wratislaw, with those of other prisoners, may still be seen in the stone of a little chamber high in the north tower. In the same tower, commanding a magnificent view, the Conqueror lived while preparing his great siege. Whether this, or the angular tower by the water, or some other donjon of the Bosphorus was the Black Tower which has so unsavoury a name in Turkish annals I have never quite made up my mind.

To-day the castle has outlived even that period of usefulness. The true cut-throats skulk in the bare hills at the mouth of the Black Sea, while the ambassadors—with the single exception, it is true, of our own—pass their summers in pleasant villas presented to them by different Sultans. As for the towers, they survive only to add their picturesqueness to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, to flaunt ivy and even sizable trees from their battlements, and to afford a habitation to bats and carrion-crows. The last vestige of military uses clinging to them is the pseudo-classic guard-house that crouches under the waterside keep. The walls at least subserve the purpose, however, of sheltering a quarter of our village. One of our thoroughfares enters the double gate by the north tower, descends a breakneck alley of steps lattice-bordered and hung with vine, pauses between a fountain, a ruined mosque, and a monstrous mulberry-tree, and finally emerges upon the quay by a low arch that was once the boat entrance to the sea tower. There is to a prying foreigner some inheritance of other days in the inhabitants of this hanging suburb. They are all of the ruling race and there is about them something intrenched and aloof. The very dogs seem to belong to an older, a less tolerant, dispensation. The Constantinople street dog, notwithstanding the reputation that literature has attempted to fasten upon him, is in general the mildest of God’s creatures. But the dog of Cut-Throat Castle is quite another character. He is a distinct reactionary, lifting up his voice against the first sign of innovation. It may be that generations of surrounding walls have engendered in him the responsibilities of a private dog. At all events he resents intrusion by day, and by night is capable of the most obstinate resistance thereto.

Another memento of that older time is to be seen in the cemetery lying under the castle wall to the south. It is, perhaps, the oldest Mohammedan burying-ground in Constantinople, or at least on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It certainly is the most romantic, with its jutting rocks, its ragged black cypresses, its round tower and crenelated wall, overhanging a blue so fancifully cut by Asiatic hills. It has, too, a spicy odour quite its own, an odour compounded of thyme, of resinous woods, of sea-salt, and I know not what aroma of antiquity. But its most precious characteristic is the grave informality it shares with other Mohammedan cemeteries. There is nothing about it to remind one of conventional mourning—no alignment of tombs, no rectilinear laying out of walks, no trim landscape gardening. It lies unwalled to the world, the gravestones scattered as irregularly on the steep hillside as the cyclamens that blossom there in February. Many of them have the same brightness of colour. The tall narrow slabs are often painted, with the decorative Arabic lettering, or some quaint floral design, picked out in gold. It is another expression of the philosophy of the guard-house soldiers who so often lounge along the water, of the boy who plays his pipe under a cypress while the village goats nibble among the graves, of the veiled women who preen their silks among the rocks on summer afternoons. The whole place is interfused with that intimacy of life and death, the sense of which makes the Asiatic so much more mature than the European. The one takes the world as he finds it, while the other must childishly beat his head against stone walls. It is the source of the strength and of the weakness of the two stocks.

We also love to congregate, or in Empedoclean moods to muse alone, about another old cemetery. There, on top of the steep slope behind the castle, you will often see a row of women, like love-birds contemplating the universe, or a grave family picnic. There too, especially on moonlight nights, you will not seldom hear voices uplifted in the passionate minor which has so compelling a charm for those who know it of old, accompanied perhaps by an oboe and the strangely broken rhythm of two little drums. It is the true music for a hilltop that is called the Place of Martyrs. The victims of the first skirmish that took place during the building of the castle lie there, under a file of oaks and cypresses. At the north end of the ridge a few broken grey stones are scattered among tufts of scrub-oak that soon give way to the rounded bareness of the hillside. At the other end newer and more honourable graves, protected by railings, attend a tekkeh of Bektash dervishes. This establishment was founded by a companion of the Conqueror. Mohammed gave him, as the story goes, all the land he could see from the top of the hill. The present sheikh is a descendant of the founder, but I do not believe he inherited all the land he can see. The view from the Place of Martyrs is one of the finest on the Bosphorus. I am not of the company of certain travellers in the matter of that famous strait. I have seen hills with greater nobility of outline and waters of a more satisfying blue. But when one has made all due reservations in the interest of one’s private allegiances the fact remains that the Bosphorus is a charming piece of water enclosed between charmingly moulded hills. It bends below you like a narrow lake as you see it from the Place of Martyrs. The northern sea is invisible; but southward the tops of islands look over the heights of Scutari, and the Marmora glimmers to the feet of a ghostly range that sometimes pretends not to be there.

Nothing could be more abrupt than the contrast between the slopes facing each other across the busy waterway, with all their picturesque detail of garden, roof, and minaret, and the plateau of which the Bosphorus is nothing but a crooked blue crack. From the Place of Martyrs it rolls desolately away to the west, almost without a house or a tree to break its monotony. Gullies cut it here and there. Patches of scrub-oak darken its surface. Sheep move slowly across it, looking in the distance like maggots in a texture of homespun. Otherwise you would never suppose that life existed there. As you watch the sun set across those great empty fields it is incredible that somewhere beyond them tilled lands and swarming cities are. Your impression is not of mere wildness, however. Two abandoned stone windmills on a far-off hill give the note of the impression. Such silence is the silence that follows upon the beating of many drums. You may sit upon that hilltop in evening light and drink melancholy like an intoxication, musing upon all the change and indifference of the world. Yet life lingers there still—life that neither indifference nor change, nor time nor ruin nor death can ever quite stamp out. Threads of water creep through some of the dry gullies, swelling after rain into noisy brooks. Above them hang patches of cultivation, dominated by the general brownness and bareness, but productive of excellent strawberries in the spring. That, too, is one of the times when the brown brightens for a little to green, while June colours whole tracts of hillside with butcher’s-broom and the wild rose. And then I have said nothing of heather, of crocuses, of violets, of I know not how many flowers scattered along certain lonely lanes. On the edge of the village these are paved like streets and pleasantly arched with bay-trees. In the bottoms of the ravines, also, they have in their season quite a sylvan air. They lead to stony trails in the open where you may meet a soldier, an Albanian shepherd, or a peasant in gay jacket and baggy blue trousers, wandering from nowhere to nowhere.

But I wander too far from our village, from that larger part of it which the exigencies of space must long ago have pushed northward out of the castle close into the underlying valley. There are those who deprecate our streets, their many steps, the manner of their paving, the irresoluteness with which they proceed to their destined ends, and the desultoriness of their illumination at night. I, however, am partial to a Gothic irregularity, and I applaud the law which admonishes us not to go abroad two hours after sunset without a lantern. We do not take the admonition too seriously, but there are chances enough of breaking our necks on moonless nights to maintain a market among us for paper lanterns. These, with the candles flaring in front of sacred tombs and the casual window lamplight so pleasingly criss-crossed by lattices, make Whistler nocturnes for us that they may never know who dwell in the glare of electricity.

If I find anything to deprecate it is the tendency gaining ground among us to depart from the ways of our fathers in the matter of domestic architecture. The jig-saw and the paint pot begin to exercise their fatal fascination upon us who were so long content with simple lines and the colour of weathered wood. But the pert gables of the day are still outnumbered by square old many-windowed houses with low-pitched roofs of red tiles and corbelled upper stories inherited from the Byzantines. Under the eaves you will often see a decorative text from the Koran, framed like a picture, which insures the protection of heaven better than premium or policy. No house is too small to have a garden, walled as a garden should be, and doing more for the outsider by its green suggestions of withdrawal than by any complete revelation of its charms. Few of these pleasances do not enjoy some view of the Bosphorus. I know one such, containing a Byzantine capital that makes the cedar of Lebanon above it throw as secular a shade as you please, so cunningly laid out at length on the hillside that the Bosphorus is a mere ornamental water of a lower terrace. This Grand Canal of Constantinople enters bodily into certain thrice enviable yalîs on the water’s edge. Their windows overhang the sea, or are separated from it merely by a narrow causeway. And each contains its own marble basin for boats, communicating with the open by a water-gate or by a canal or tunnel through the quay.

Distinctively Turkish as the flavour of our village is, we yet resemble the city and the empire to which we are tributary in the variety of our population. Of Greeks there are few. It was perhaps natural for them to flee the first stronghold of their conquerors on this side of the Bosphorus—if they ever inhabited it in any number. An Armenian quarter, however, scrambles up the north side of the valley. You can recognise the houses by their lack of lattices, and the priest by the high conical crown of his hat. There are also Albanians, Croats, Jews, Macedonians, and Montenegrins among us, in addition to nothing less exotic than a small Anglo-American colony. It dwells on the upper fringe of habitation, the American part of it being connected, principally, with the college founded by a Mr. Robert of New York.

The grey stone buildings stand on a splendid terrace above the south tower of the castle, visible from afar. And they always make me sorry that such a chance was lost for some rare person equal to the opportunity, who should have combined a knowledge of modern educational requirements with a feeling for the simple broad-eaved houses of the country and their picturesque corbels. However, there the grey stone buildings stand, ugly and foreign, but solid and sufficient, an object of suspicion to some, to others an example of the strange vicissitudes of the world, whereby above a promontory sacred once to Hermes, later to Byzantine saints, and again to Mohammed, there should fly to-day the flag of a country so distant as our own. The condition on which the flag flies is not the least picturesque of these incongruities. The proprietors from whom the first land was obtained were the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and in conformity with the law governing such property the college bound itself to pay them, in addition to the price of purchase, a yearly tribute of some fourteen dollars.

I might speak of other public institutions flourishing in our midst: of the primary school by the water where you hear the children studying aloud while they rock back and forth over the Koran; of the Sünbüllü dervishes farther down the quay, to whom laden wood boats throw out a few sticks as they tow up the five-mile current; of the howling dervishes, and the clever ruse by which they obtained their building; of our three mosques—to say nothing of the imam’s mother of the smallest of them, an active yet beneficent public institution in herself, who, when the American college dug foundations for a wall round a slope long beloved by the Turkish ladies, threw her ample person most literally into the breach and could only be persuaded to retire therefrom by the Ministry of Public Works. Nor should I pass over our village green, which was once a cemetery, but which is now a common meeting-place for those of us who are happy enough to live about it. Some of us spend most of our time there, in the company of our wives, our children, our horses, our donkeys, and our hens. Most notable among the habitués—at least to an alien eye—is a lady of African descent, espoused to a meek Caucasian water-carrier and the mother of an infinite chocolate-and-cream progeny. Her ardent disposition is reported to have led her through many vicissitudes, matrimonial and otherwise. On one occasion it led her to scratch out the eyes of another habituée of the green, over some matter of mulberries. It is a proof of the reasonableness of justice among us that when condemned to a brief term of imprisonment she first succeeded in postponing the execution of the sentence, I believe through some expectation of presenting the happy water-carrier with a new chocolate-cream, and then in causing her term to be subdivided, alternately languishing in dungeons and enjoying the society of her family until she had paid the full penalty of the law.

A larger, the true centre of our municipal life, is the charshî, or market-place. Very notable, to the mind of one admirer, is ours among market-places. My admiration is always divided between that crooked street of it, darkened by jutting upper stories that sometimes actually jump across it, wherein are situate the principal shops, the minor cafés, a fountain or two, and the public bath, and that adjoining portion of it which lies open to the sea. The latter certainly offers the most facilities for the enjoyment of life. Indeed, one end of it is chiefly given up to a Company for the Promotion of Happiness—if one may so translate its Turkish name—whose English steamers carry us to town, seven miles away, or to the upper Bosphorus, as quickly, as regularly, and as comfortably as any company I know. It also does much to promote the happiness of those who do not travel, through the sociable employees of its wharf and by affording a picturesque va et vient at almost any hour of the day. I fear, however, that it does less to promote the happiness of the boatmen who await custom at the adjacent wooden quay. They wait in those trim little skiffs, so much neater than anything of the sort we see for hire at home, which have almost superseded caïques because they hold more passengers with greater comfort. And to one who observes how much of the time they do wait, and how modestly they are remunerated for their occasional excursions, it is a miracle how they contrive to live. There is no fixed tariff. If you know the ropes you pay two and a half piastres, some twelve cents, to be rowed across the Bosphorus or to the next village. For ten they will take you almost anywhere. But they eke out their incomes by fishing. We are famous for our lobsters at Roumeli Hissar.

The boatmen, and others with them, often prefer to wait in certain agreeable resorts along that same wooden platform. The first of these is the café of the Armenian, whose corner rakes the Company for the Promotion of Happiness. He profits thereby not a little, for when we wish to take a steamer we do not always trouble ourselves to look up the time-table beforehand. The Armenian is also a barber, and in his low-ceiled room of many windows you may hear, to the accompaniment of banging backgammon boards, the choicest of conversation. The only thing I have against him is that I have to pay twice as much for my coffee as a customer who wears a girdle and a fez.

A few doors away dwell the Albanians. You may know them by the gay stockings, red embroidered with gold, which they wear outside the tight white trousers of their country. Theirs is the dispensary of ice-cream in summer and of mahalibi in winter—the latter being a kind of corn-starch pudding sprinkled with sugar and rose-water. These comestibles, of which their people have a practical monopoly, they also peddle about the streets. But it is better to partake of them in their shop, surrounded by lithographic royalties and battle scenes of 1870; and best of all in front of it, sitting comfortably in a rush-bottomed chair while the never-ending diorama of the Bosphorus rolls by.

In suggestive proximity to this establishment is a Greek drug store. It might be Venetian, so impregnate is it with the sound and light of water. For situation, however, I never saw its equal in Venice. It has, indeed—especially when late sunlight warms the opposite shore—so perfect a view, the platform in front of it is so favourite a resort, the legend “La Science est Longue, mais la Vie Courte” curls with such levity about a painted Hippocrates within, that the place rather gives you the impression of an operatic drug store. The polyglot youth in charge of it stands at the door exactly as if he were waiting for the chorus on the stage outside to give him his cue; and you cannot help asking yourself whether there be anything in the porcelain jars about him.

I have spoken with unbridled admiration of our market-place and its two main branches. How shall I now speak admiringly enough of the square with which they both communicate and which unites in itself the richness of their charms? It is not a square in any geometric sense. It is a broad stone quay of irregular width, tree-shaded, awning-hung, festooned with vines and fish-nets, adorned of a flat-topped fountain whose benches are a superior place of contemplation, bordered by a quaintly broken architecture of shops, cafés, and dwellings, and watched upon by a high white minaret. It is not subject to the intermittent bustle of the Company for the Promotion of Happiness, but it carries on its own more deliberate and more picturesque activities. Here commerce goes forward, both settled and itinerant, with loud and leisurely bargaining. Here the kantarji exercises his function of weighing the freights unloaded by the picture-book boats at the quay. The headquarters of one of them is here, in a deep arch over the water. This is the bazaar caïque, that goes early in the morning to the Golden Horn for the transport of such freight and passengers as do not care to patronise the more expensive Company for the Promotion of Happiness—a huge row-boat with an incurving beak and a high stern, to pull whose oars the rowers drop from their feet to their backs. And here is also the headquarters of the hamals, most indispensable of men. These are Asiatic peasants who combine with many others the offices of carts and carters in flatter towns. They carry our furniture and fuel from the water on their backs. They chop our wood, to saw it being what they refuse. They keep guard of our houses when we go away. They patrol our streets at night, knocking the hour with their clubs on the pavement and rousing us with blood-curdling yells if so much as a hen-coop burn down at the Islands twenty miles away. They likewise act as town criers; and during the holy month of Ramazan they beat us up with drums early enough in the morning to be through breakfast by the time you can tell a black hair from a white. They are a strong, a faithful, even—if you choose to expend a little sentiment upon them—a pathetic race, living in exile without wife or child, sending money home as they earn it, going to their “countries” only at long intervals, and settling there when they are too old to work for their guild.

Altogether a man might spend his days in that square and be the better for it. As a matter of fact, a surprising number of us find it possible to do so, sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes or water-pipes, and watching life slip by on the strong blue current of the Bosphorus. And as I sit there too, treated always with a charming courtliness yet somehow made to feel the vanity of thanking God that I am not as other gyaours are, I often ask myself how these things may be. In other parts of the world people enjoy no such leisure unless they have rents or an indifference as to going to destruction. In Roumeli Hissar we neither go to destruction nor have rents. The case may be connected with the theory that all inhabitants of Constantinople are guests of its ruler. We are not subject to military duty, we are exempt from certain burdens of taxation, and other inducements are offered those of the true faith to settle in the City of the Sultans. I have no means of knowing how persuasive these may be, but it is astonishing how overwhelming a proportion of the less skilled labour of the place is performed by outsiders—witness the Greek shopkeepers of our village, the Albanian sweet vendors, and the hamals. The case at all events is not without its charm. We may not accomplish great things in the world. We may not perform memorable services for state or humanity. We may not create works that shall carry our names down the generations. But we live. We enjoy the sun, we taste each other’s society, and we are little troubled for the morrow. Could life be more?