HAVING procured a firman, we devoted a day to the old Seraglio and some of the principal mosques of Stamboul. After an occupation of fifteen centuries as a royal residence, the Seraglio has been disused for nearly forty years, and fire, neglect, and decay have done their work on it, so that it is but a melancholy reminiscence of its former splendor. It occupies the ancient site of Byzantium, upon the Point, and is enclosed by a crumbling wall three miles in circuit. No royal seat in the world has a more lovely situation. Upon the summit of the promontory, half concealed in cypresses, is the cluster of buildings, of all ages and degrees of cheapness, in which are the imperial apartments and offices; on the slopes towards the sea are gardens, terraces, kiosks, and fountains.
We climbed up the hill on the side towards Pera, through a shabby field, that had almost the appearance, of a city dumping-ground, and through a neglected grove of cypresses, where some deer were feeding, and came round to the main entrance, a big, ugly pavilion with eight openings over the arched porte,—the gate which is known the world over as the Sublime Porte. Through this we passed into a large court, and thence to the small one into which the Sultan only is permitted to ride on horseback. In the centre of this is a fountain where formerly pashas foreordained to lose their heads lost them. On the right, a low range of buildings covered with domes but no chimneys, are the royal kitchens; there are nine of them,—one for the Sultan, one for the chief sultanas, and so on down to the one devoted to the cooking of the food for the servants. Hundreds of beasts, hecatombs, were slaughtered daily and cooked here to feed the vast household. From this court open the doors into the halls and divans and various apartments; one of them, leading into the interior, is called the Gate of Felicity; in the old times that could only be called a gate of felicity which let a person out of this spider's parlor. In none of these rooms is there anything specially attractive; cheap magnificence in decay is only melancholy.
We were better pleased in the gardens, where we looked upon Galata and Pera, upon the Golden Horn and the long bridges streaming with their picturesque processions, upon the Bosphorus and its palaces, and thousands of sails, steamers, and ca飍ues, and the shining heights of Scutari. Overhanging the slope is the kiosk or summer palace of Sultan Moorad, a Saracenic octagonal structure, the interior walls lined with Persian tiles, the ceilings painted in red arabesques and gilded in mosaics, the gates of bronze inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a most charming building, said to be in imitation of a kiosk of Bagdad. In it we saw the Sultan's private library, a hundred or two volumes in a glass case, that had no appearance of having been read either by the Sultan or his wife.
The apartment in the Seraglio which is the object of curiosity and desire is the treasure-room. I suppose it is the richest in the world in gems; it is certainly a most wearisome place, and gave me a contempt for earthly treasure. In the centre stands a Persian throne,—a chair upon a board platform, and both incrusted with rubies, pearls, emeralds, diamonds; there are toilet-tables covered to the feet with diamonds, pipe-stems glistening with huge diamonds, old armor thickly set with precious stones, saddle-cloths and stirrups stiff with diamonds and emeralds, robes embroidered with pearls. Nothing is so cheap as wealth lavished in this manner; at first we were dazzled by the flashing display, but after a time these heaps of gems seemed as common in our eyes as pebbles in the street. I did not even covet an emerald as large as my fist, nor a sword-hilt in which were fifteen diamonds, each as large as the end of my thumb, nor a carpet sown with pearls, some of which were of the size of pigeon's eggs, nor aigrettes which were blazing with internal fires, nor chairs of state, clocks and vases, the whole surfaces of which were on fire with jewels. I have seen an old oaken table, carved in the fifteenth century, which gave me more pleasure than one of lapis lazuli, which is exhibited as the most costly article in this collection; though it is inlaid with precious stones, and the pillars that support the mirror are set with diamonds, and the legs and claws are a mass of diamonds, rubies, carbuncles, emeralds, topazes, etc., and huge diamond pendants ornament it, and the deep fringe in front is altogether of diamonds. This is but a barbarous, ostentatious, and tasteless use of the beautiful, and I suppose gives one an idea of the inartistic magnificence of the Oriental courts in centuries gone by.
This treasure-house has, I presume, nothing that belonged to the Byzantine emperors before the Moslem conquest, some of whom exceeded in their magnificence any of the Osmanli sultans. Arcadius, the first Eastern emperor after the division of the Roman world, rivalled, in the appointments of his palace (which stood upon this spot) and in his dress, the magnificence of the Persian monarchs; and perhaps the luxurious califs of Bagdad at a later day did not equal his splendor. His robes were of purple, a color reserved exclusively for his sacred person, and of silk, embroidered with gold dragons; his diadem was of gold set with gems of inestimable worth; his throne was massy gold, and when he went abroad he rode in a chariot of solid, pure gold, drawn by two milk-white mules shining in harness and trappings of gold.
No spot on earth has been the scene of such luxury, cruelty, treachery, murder, infidelity of women, and rapacity of men, as this site of the old palace; and the long record of the Christian emperors—the occasionally interrupted anarchy and usurpation of a thousand years—loses nothing in these respects in comparison with the Turkish occupation, although the world shudders at the unrevealed secrets of the Seraglio. At least we may suppose that nobody's conscience was violated if a pretty woman was occasionally dropped into the Bosphorus, and there was the authority of custom for the strangling of all the children of the sisters of the Sultan, so that the succession might not be embarrassed. In this court is the cage, a room accessible only by a window, where the royal children were shut up to keep them from conspiracy against the throne; and there Sultan Abdul Aziz spent some years of his life.
We went from the treasure-room to the ancient and large Church of St. Irene, which is now the arsenal of the Seraglio, and become, one might say, a church militant. The nave and aisles are stacked with arms, the walls, the holy apse, the pillars, are cased in guns, swords, pistols, and armor, arranged in fanciful patterns, and with an ingenuity I have seen nowhere else. Here are preserved battle-flags and famous trophies, an armlet of Tamerlane, a sword of Scanderbeg, and other pieces of cold, pliant steel that have a reputation for many murders. There is no way so sure to universal celebrity as wholesale murder. Adjoining the arsenal is a museum of Greek and Roman antiquities of the city, all in Turkish disorder; the Cyprus Collections, sent by General di Cesnola, are flung upon shelves or lie in heaps unarranged, and most of the cases containing them had not been opened. Near this is an interesting museum of Turkish costumes for the past five hundred years,—rows on rows of ghastly wax figures clad in the garments of the dead. All of them are ugly, many of them are comical in their exaggeration. The costumes of the Janizaries attract most attention, perhaps from the dislike with which we regard those cruel mercenaries, who deposed and decapitated sultans at their will, and partly because many of the dresses seem more fit for harlequins or eunuchs of the harem than for soldiers.
When the Church of Santa Sophia, the House of Divine Wisdom, was finished, and Justinian entered it, accompanied only by the patriarch, and ran from the porticos to the pulpit with outstretched arms, crying, "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" it was doubtless the most magnificently decorated temple that had ever stood upon the earth. The exterior was as far removed in simple grandeur as it was in time from the still matchless Doric temples of Athens and of P鎠tum, or from the ornate and lordly piles of Ba'albek; but the interior surpassed in splendor almost the conception of man. The pagan temples of antiquity had been despoiled, the quarries of the known world had been ransacked for marbles of various hues and textures to enrich it; and the gold, the silver, the precious stones, employed in its decoration, surpassed in measure the barbaric ostentation of the Temple at Jerusalem. Among its forest of columns, one recognized the starred syenite from the First Cataract of the Nile; the white marble of Phrygia, striped with rose; the green of Laconia, and the blue of Libya; the black Celtic, white-veined, and the white Bosphorus, black-veined; polished shafts which had supported the roof of the Temple of the Delian Apollo, others which had beheld the worship of Diana at Ephesus and of Pallas Athene on the Acropolis, and, yet more ancient, those that had served in the mysterious edifices of Osiris and Isis; while, more conspicuous and beautiful than all, were the eight columns of porphyry, which, transported by Aurelian from the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis to Home, the pious Marina had received as her dowry and dedicated to the most magnificent building ever reared to the worship of the True God, and fitly dominating the shores of Europe and Asia.
One reads of doors of cedar, amber, and ivory; of hundreds of sacred vessels of pure gold, of exquisitely wrought golden candelabra, and crosses of an hundred pounds' weight each; of a score of books of the Evangelists, the gold covers of which weighed twenty pounds; of golden lilies and golden trumpets; of forty-two thousand chalice-cloths embroidered with pearls and jewels; and of the great altar, for which gold was too cheap a material, a mass of the most precious and costly stones imbedded in gold and silver. We may recall also the arches and the clear spaces of the walls inlaid with marbles and covered with brilliant mosaics. It was Justinian's wish to pave the floor with plates of gold, but, restrained by the fear of the avarice of his successors, he laid it in variegated marbles, which run in waving lines, imitating the flowing of rivers from the four corners to the vestibules. But the wonder of the edifice was the dome, one hundred and seven feet in span, hanging in the air one hundred and eighty feet above the pavement. The aerial lightness of its position is increased by the two half-domes of equal span and the nine cupolas which surround it.
More than one volume has been exclusively devoted to a description of the Mosque of St. Sophia, and less than a volume would not suffice. But the traveller will not see the ancient glories. If he expects anything approaching the exterior richness and grandeur of the cathedrals of Europe, or the colossal proportions of St. Peter's at Rome, or the inexhaustible wealth of the interior of St. Mark's at Venice, he will be disappointed. The area of St. Peter's exceeds that of the grand Piazza of St. Mark, while St. Sophia is only two hundred and thirty-five feet broad by three hundred and fifty feet long; and while the Church of St. Mark has been accumulating spoils of plunder and of piety for centuries, the Church of the Divine Wisdom has been ransacked by repeated pillages and reduced to the puritan plainness of the Moslem worship.
Exceedingly impressive, however, is the first view of the interior; we stood silent with wonder and delight in the presence of the noble columns, the bold soaring arches, the dome in the sky. The temple is flooded with light, perhaps it is too bright; the old mosaics and paintings must have softened it; and we found very offensive the Arabic inscriptions on the four great arches, written in characters ten yards long. They are the names of companions of the Prophet, but they look like sign-boards. Another disagreeable impression is produced by the position of the Mihrab, or prayer-niche; as this must be in the direction of Mecca, it is placed at one side of the apse, and everything in the mosque is forced to conform to it. Thus everything is askew; the pulpits are set at hateful angles, and the stripes of the rugs on the floor all run diagonally across. When one attempts to walk from the entrance, pulled one way by the architectural plan, and the other by the religious diversion of it............