Various - The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844

In 1837 I was a resident in Galata, one of the faubourgs of Constantinople, sufficiently near the scenes of death caused by the ravages of the plague to be thoroughly acquainted with them, and yet to be separated from the Turkish part of the population of that immense city. It is not material to the present sketch to dwell upon the subject of my previous life, or the causes which had induced me to visit the capital of the East at such a period of mortality; and I will therefore only add, that circumstances of a peculiarly painful nature obliged me to locate myself in Galata, where there were none to sympathize in my feelings, or any one with whom I could even exchange more than a word of conversation. I saw none but the widowed owner of the house in which I had a chamber, her daughter Aleukâ, and Petraki, her little son.

While the epidemic raged, we four endeavored to keep up a rigid quarantine. Each recommended to the other the strictest observance of our mutual agreement not to receive any thing from without doors, except the necessaries of life; and whenever we left the house, which was to be as seldom as possible, not to come in contact with any one. Whenever I went out I invariably wore an oil-cloth cloak, and by the aid of my cane prevented the dogs of the streets, which are there so numerous, from rubbing against me. If I visited any one, which I seldom did, I always sat on a bench or chair to prevent conveying or receiving contagion; and before even entering the house, I always underwent the preparation of being smoked in a box, which during the prevalence of the plague is placed near its entrance for that purpose. These boxes were some eight feet high by three square, the platform on which the feet rested elevated about a foot above the earth, so as to admit under it a dish containing the ingredients of the prophylactic, and a hole in the door to let the face out during the smoking of the clothes and body. We procured our daily supply of provisions from a Bak-kal , a retail grocer, whose shop was directly under our front window; an itinerant Ekmekjer , or bread-man, brought our bread to the door; our vegetables were procured from a gardener close by, and our water we drew from a cistern under the house: in fine, our food was either smoked or saturated before we touched it, and every possible precaution observed to cut our little family off from the dreadful scourge, ‘the pestilence which walketh in darkness and the destruction which wasteth at noon day.’ The mother and daughter throughout the day spun silk, knitted woolen suits, or embroidered kerchiefs for head dresses, called in Romaic fakiolee , and even to a late hour of the night they frequently continued the same employment, until the plague prevented the sale of their handiwork, and their materials were all used up. All day long they would sit upon the sofa of their little apartment, facing the street, and while their hands toiled for a subsistence, the widow’s daughter hummed a plaintive air, or occasionally broke the silence by conversing with her mother. The son was yet too young to be of assistance to his desolate mother and sister, and except when he said his letters to them, spent the day in idleness. As to my own employment, the dull period of time passed with them was a blank in my existence; and yet, such is the influence of past penury and pain, that I now recall them with pleasure.

The weather was generally very warm, and south-west breezes over the sea of Marmora prevailed. From our highest windows we could observe sluggish seamen lounging on the decks of their vessels in the port, afraid to land amid the pestilence. Here and there a vessel strove against the current of the Bosphorus to gain an anchorage; or would slowly float down that stream into the open sea, on its way to healthier and happier Europe. The starving dogs at nightfall would howl dismally, bewailing the loss of the benevolent hands from which they usually received their food; the gulls and cormorants floated languidly over our dwelling, overpowered by the heat; and the dead silence, which in the afternoon and evenings prevailed, made a most melancholy and affecting impression on my mind.

The plague that summer, (I may limit the period to three months,) carried off more than fifty thousand persons. For some time the mortality amounted to a thousand per diem . The number of corpses which passed the limited range of my window daily increased; and after witnessing the spectacle for some time, I always insensibly avoided the sight of the dead, and felt a cold shudder run over my frame whenever the voice of the priest accompanying the corpses struck my ear. So dreadful is the malady, so surely contagious, and so mortal, that so soon as attacked, the unfortunate being is deserted by relatives and friends, and when dead, two or four porters beside a priest were generally the only persons who attended the body to the grave. When the deceased is a Mussulman, he is more frequently attended during his illness, and after death to his tomb, than if a Christian. With the former, the plague is a visitation of Providence, from which it is both useless and a sin to escape, while with the latter not only is it deemed necessary to provide for one’s own life, but even to do so at the sacrifice of the dearest friend. Often I noticed a dead body tied on a plank which a single porter carried on his back; at other times the object would be concealed within a bag, and then the grave was a ditch common to all, into which the porter would shake off his load and return for another. No priest or Imam there presided over the funeral scene; few or none were the prayers that were said over the remains: he who but a short week before had been proud of his strength or condition, or she who in the same short space of time previous excelled in beauty and grace, there lay confounded in one neglected, unhonored, and putrefying mass. The air became impregnated with the effluvia; the houses around the Turkish cemeteries, which are mostly in the heart of the city, where the dead are interred, but some three feet beneath the surface, were soon deserted, their owners dead. The ever-green cypress trees under whose umbrageous quiet the beautiful children once played, now moaned over their little graves; and in fine, every one in the deserted city walked with measured steps, apprehensive of threatening death: awe and consternation filled the minds of all.

The Sultan’s own household was not free from the scourge. By some means it found access to his servants and carried off about fifty of them. Their bodies were cast into the Bosphorus, and the Sultan fled to another palace. The ministers of the Sublime Porte suffered severely in their families; their wives and slaves died off in numbers; and even the minister of foreign affairs is said to have taken it and narrowly escaped. Few survived when once attacked, and the chances of recovery were scarcely worth calculating. And yet among the Mussulmans little or no precaution was taken; for although by a government order all the principal offices were provided with fumigatory boxes, they were seldom used. The Mussulman Sheiks declared that the contagion came from Heaven, and could only be averted by Almighty power. Yet it was a well-known fact that cleanliness of habits went far toward preserving against the disease; and frequent change of apparel, with ordinary precautions, sufficed to preserve many who otherwise would doubtless have taken it.

But I think the reader will be able, from the preceding sketch, to form some idea of the nature and extent of the mortality of the plague in 1837. While it raged, every feeling approaching to a similarity with what is known to denote an attack, excites apprehension. A pimple, through the medium of the imagination, is transformed into a horrid