John Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, Vol. 1 (of 2)

To go back a moment. All day the great ship lay in the middle of the Golden Horn, while perhaps more than a hundred thousand Turks shot round her in their little caiques, looking up from the surface of the water to her lofty deck: and in Pera, wherever I went, perhaps because I was an American, the only thing I heard of was the American ship. Proud of the admiration excited so far from home by this noble specimen of the skill of an American citizen, I unburden myself of a long-smothered subject of complaint against my country. I cry out with a loud voice for reform , not in the hackneyed sense of petty politicians, but by a liberal and enlarged expenditure of public money; by increasing the outfits and salaries of our foreign ambassadors and ministers. We claim to be rich, free from debt, and abundant in resources, and yet every American abroad is struck with a feeling of mortification at the inability of his representative to take that position in social life to which the character of his country entitles him. We may talk of republican simplicity as we will, but there are certain usages of society and certain appendages of rank which, though they may be unmeaning and worthless, are sanctioned, if not by the wisdom, at least by the practice of all civilized countries. We have committed a fatal error since the time when Franklin appeared at the court of France in a plain citizen's dress; everywhere our representative conforms to the etiquette of the court to which he is accredited, and it is too late to go back and begin anew; and now, unless our representative is rich and willing to expend his own fortune for the honour of the nation, he is obliged to withdraw from the circles and position in which he has a right and ought to move, or to move in them on an inferior footing, under an acknowledgment of inability to appear as an equal.

And again: our whole consular system is radically wrong, disreputable, and injurious to our character and interests. While other nations consider the support of their consuls a part of the expenses of their government, we suffer ourselves to be represented by merchants, whose pecuniary interests are mixed up with all the local and political questions that affect the place and who are under a strong inducement to make their office subservient to their commercial relations. I make no imputations against any of them. I could not if I would, for I do not know an American merchant holding the office who is not a respectable man; but the representative of our country ought to be the representative of our country only; removed from any distracting or conflicting interests, standing like a watchman to protect the honour of his nation and the rights of her citizens. And more than this, all over the Mediterranean there are ports where commerce presents no inducements to the American merchant, and there the office falls into the hands of the natives; and at this day the American arms are blazoned on the doors, and the American flag is waving over the houses, of Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Arabs, and all the mongrel population of that inland sea; and in the ports under the dominion of Turkey particularly, the office is coveted as a means of protecting the holder against the liabilities to his own government, and of revenue by selling that protection to others. I will not mention them by name, for I bear them no ill will personally, and I have received kindness from most of the petty vagabonds who live under the folds of the American flag; but the consuls at Gendoa and Algiers are a disgrace to the American name. Congress has lately turned its attention to this subject, and will, before long, I hope, effect a complete change in the character of our consular department, and give it the respectability which it wants; the only remedy is by following the example of other nations, in fixing salaries to the office, and forbidding the holders to engage in trade. Besides the leading inducements to this change, there is a secondary consideration, which, in my eyes, is not without its value, in that it would furnish a valuable school of instruction for our young men. The offices would be sought by such. A thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a year would maintain them respectably, in most of the ports of the Mediterranean, and young men resident in those places, living upon salaries, and not obliged to engage in commerce, would employ their leisure hours in acquiring the language of the country, in communicating with the interior, and among them would return upon us an accumulation of knowledge far more than repaying us for all the expense of supporting them abroad.

Doubtless the reader expects other things in Constantinople; but all things are changing. The day has gone by when the Christian could not cross the threshold of a mosque and live. Even the sacred mosque of St. Sophia, the ancient Christian church, so long closed against the Christians' feet, now, upon great occasions, again opens its doors to the descendants of its Christian builders. One of these great occasions happened while I was there. The sultan gave a firman to the French ambassador, under which all the European residents and travellers visited it. Unfortunately, I was unwell, and could not go out that day, and was obliged afterward to content myself with walking around its walls, with uplifted eyes and a heavy heart, admiring the glittering crescent and thinking of the prostrate cross.

But no traveller can leave Constantinople without having seen the interior of a mosque; and accordingly, under the guidance of Mustapha, the janisary of the British consul, I visited the mosque of Sultan Suliman, next in point of beauty to that of St. Sophia, though far inferior in historical interest. At an early hour we crossed the Golden Horn to old Stamboul; threaded our way through its narrow and intricate streets to an eminence near the seraskier pacha's tower; entered by a fine gateway into a large courtyard, more than a thousand feet square, handsomely paved and ornamented with noble trees, and enclosed by a high wall; passed a marble fountain of clear and abundant water, where, one after another, the faithful stopped to make their ablutions; entered a large colonnade, consisting of granite and marble pillars of every form and style, the plunder of ancient temples, worked in without much regard to architectural fitness, yet, on the whole, producing a fine effect; pulled off our shoes at the door, and, with naked feet and noiseless step, crossed the sacred threshold of the mosque. Silently we moved among the kneeling figures of the faithful scattered about in different parts of the mosque and engaged in prayer; paused for a moment under the beautiful dome sustained by four columns from the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; leaned against a marble pillar which may have supported, two thousand years ago, the praying figure of a worshipper of the great goddess; gazed at the thousand small lamps suspended from the lofty ceiling, each by a separate cord, and with a devout feeling left the mosque.

Mosque of Sultan Suliman.

In the rear, almost concealed from view by a thick grove of trees, shrubs, and flowers, is a circular building about forty feet in diameter, containing the tomb of Suliman, the founder of the mosque, his brother, his favourite wife Roxala, and two other wives. The monuments are in the form of sarcophagi, with pyramidal tops, covered with rich Cashmere shawls, having each at the head a large white turban, and enclosed by a railing covered with mother-of-pearl. The great beauty of the sepulchral chamber is its dome, which is highly ornamented, and sparkles with brilliants. In one corner is a plan of Mecca, the holy temple, and tomb of the Prophet.

In the afternoon I went for the last time to the Armenian burying-ground. In the East the graveyards are the general promenades, the places of rendezvous, and the lounging-places; and in Constantinople the Armenian burying-ground is the most beautiful, and the favourite. Situated in the suburbs of Pera, overlooking the Bosphorus, shaded by noble palm-trees, almost regularly toward evening I found myself sitting upon the same tombstone, looking upon the silvery water at my feet, studded with palaces, flashing and glittering with caiques from the golden palace of the sultan to the seraglio point, and then turned to the animated groups thronging the burying-ground; the Armenian in his flowing robes, the dashing Greek, the stiff and out-of-place-looking Frank; Turks in their gay and bright costume, glittering arms, and solemn beards, enjoying the superlative of existence in dozing over their pipe; and women in long white veils, apart under some delightful shade, in little picnic parties, eating ices and confectionary. Here and there, toward the outskirts, was the araba, the only wheeled carriage known among the Turks, with a long low body, highly carved and gilded, drawn by oxen fancifully trimmed with ribands, and filled with soft cushions, on which the Turkish and Armenian ladies almost buried themselves. Instead of the cypress, the burying-ground is shaded by noble plane-trees; and the tombstones, instead of being upright, are all flat, having at the head a couple of little niches scooped out to hold water, with the beautiful idea to induce birds to come there and drink and sing among the trees. Their tombstones, too, have another mark, which, in a country where men are apt to forget who their fathers were, would exclude them even from that place where all mortal distinctions are laid low, viz., a mark indicating the profession or occupation of the deceased; as, a pair of shears to mark the grave of a tailor; a razor that of a barber; and on many of them was another mark indicating the manner of death, the bowstring, or some other mark, showing that the stone covered a victim of Turkish cruelty. But all these things are well known; nothing has escaped the prying eyes of curious travellers; and I merely state, for my own credit's sake, that I followed the steps of those who had gone before me, visited the Sweet Waters, Scutary, and Belgrade, the reservoirs, aqueducts, and ruins of the palace of Constantine, and saw the dancing dervishes; rowed up the Bosphorus to Buyukdere, lunched under the tree where Godfrey encamped with his gallant crusaders, and looked out upon the Black Sea from the top of the Giant's Mountain.