CHAPTER VII THE FESTIVITIES

Recking nothing of State affairs, the Turks, from the highest to the lowest, rejoice as they have not rejoiced for many a long year. The scene is the plain outside the walls. There, in the part farthest from the city, the Grand Signor, the Grand Vizir, the Mufti, and all the great pashas have pitched their sumptuous pavilions. Opposite, in the part towards the city, stand poles and frames for the illuminations. The space between lies open for the sports. Every day about noon there is an entertainment of the craftsmen and tradesmen, not only of Adrianople but also of Constantinople, all of whom have been invited for the sake of the presents they have to make. Each guild comes out of the city in procession, with some pageant representing its particular occupation, and passes before the Sultan, who sits on a lofty platform, upon a richly-wrought quilt, under an awning of cloth of gold stretched between two tall elms.

At this time the Hunter is in his prime: a lean, long-visaged, sparsely-bearded man of thirty-five, with a skin tanned to a shiny brown, a “beetled” nose, and sparkling black eyes—not disagreeable to look at, though generally accounted almost as ugly as his son.[97] He sits with unsmiling gravity, and about him stand eight or ten handsome youths continually fanning him by turns. Day after day he takes up that position to receive the offerings of his subjects—according to rigidly fixed scale: from him who has much, much being expected; and woe betide him whose performance disappoints expectation! Thus, the shoe-makers present shoes adorned with precious stones; the bakers and butchers velvet cushions and rich Persian stuffs; the jewellers a garden with begemmed nightingales perched on silver trees; the farriers horse-shoes of silver; and so on. As Mr. North gazes upon this great idol of human worship, to which so much gold is offered up every day, his mind whirls: “What a world of riches must be gathered from such a vast concourse of people! I say no more....”[98]

The gifts delivered, all the givers retire to their appointed places, where they are regaled liberally with mountains of boiled rice and oceans of cold water.

After the meal, those who have children of a suitable age bring them to the Grand Signor, and he bestows upon each some garments and a pension of three aspers (about 2d.) a day for life—quite a competence for a Turkish artisan of the period. In addition, there is no dearth of Christian converts to Islam appearing to be circumcised with the others.

SULTAN MAHOMET THE FOURTH, EMPEROR OF THE TURKS.
From an Engraving by F. H. van den Hove.

To face p. 106.

To the solemnities of the day succeed, after about an hour’s respite, the jollities of the night. They are ushered in by public prayers held just as the dusk begins to overcast the plain. From every minaret in the city and every pavilion in the encampment outside, the muezzins lift their sonorous voices. For a few minutes the message floats, with a strangely touching sweetness, through the deepening twilight: a chorus of aerial criers calling upon each other to worship the Creator of all things. Suddenly the chants die away; and then the whole multitude from the Grand Signor to the meanest of his slaves, wherever each happens to be, single or in groups, begin their prostrations: kneeling, sitting back on their heels, rising, bowing, kneeling again, and again, and again, in perfect silence and with the regularity of a perfectly drilled army on parade. Who, having once witnessed, can ever forget the sight, so simple and so sublime?

Devotions ended, the music bands strike up: trumpets, hautboys, great drums, little kettle-drums, brass platters. At the signal, a broad glare is seen to appear from the Grand Signor’s stables—a troop of link-men march forth, with lighted grates in their hands: onward they come chanting; and soon the plain is ablaze with myriads of lamps arranged in various patterns in the frames prepared for the purpose. By their light the sports go on: wrestling-matches, athletic feats, acrobatic performances, conjuring tricks, puppet shows, dances of young men disguised as women (like the ancient Romans, the Turks believed that no man danced unless he was drunk or mad), and theatrical exhibitions—farces amusing, obscene, or insipid, according to the spectator’s point of view. These pastimes go on with all alacrity till about midnight, and conclude with a display of fireworks, which does credit to the ingenuity of the two renegades—a Venetian and a Dutchman—responsible for them.

There are monstrous giants, many-headed and stuffed with rockets, which burst out of their eyes, nostrils, and ears, fly writhing and hissing up into the night air, leaving a trail of sparks in their wake, and then break into a rain of stars. There are artificial trees with all manner of explosive fruit fastened to their boughs. There are fountains gushing forth jets of fire. There are hobby-horses which, taking fire, run up and down and encounter one another most bravely. There are hanging galleys most dexterously contrived: each with a crew of two or three men who manage the guns and fireworks on board, and pull the vessels backwards and forwards to imitate sea-fights against Christian corsairs. There are huge castles of pasteboard: one of them, the biggest of the lot, representing the Castle of Candia. After an infinitude of rockets discharged from its battlements, it catches fire at last and burns in a most realistic manner, till the whole fabric collapses in one vast heap of flames and smoke. Besides these and countless other pyrotechnic devices, there is one that thrills the spectators with more dread than delight: iron tubes, much like the chambers of petards, but far larger and longer, fixed into the ground, which vomit up a continuous stream of fire at least sixty feet high, with a roar that makes the very earth tremble.

In this fashion the circumcision festival goes on from May 11th till May 25th, with little variation, the same things being done over and over again. It culminates in a stupendous cavalcade in which all the grandees with their guards take part and of which the young Prince himself, blazing with jewels, forms the central figure: “an ugly, il-favour’d, and (I guesse) very ill-natured chit” of about twelve, with a low forehead, a short flat nose embellished by a little lump at the end, and ears the size of which even his turban cannot hide.[99] He is mounted on a splendid horse, smothered from head to tail under precious metals and stones, led by two richly clad officers of the Janissaries, one on each side, and fanned by two others with large fans of bustards’ feathers. The press is immense: men and women of every degree throng the lanes through which the procession passes; yet the order is perfect, and the silence almost uncanny.

After an interval of two weeks begin the wedding celebrations and continue from June 10th till June 25th: the same old sports, the same old dances, the same old plays and pyrotechnic displays over again; punctuated by similar processions to and from the Seraglio, with drum-beating and pipe-blowing enough to sing in one’s ears for a lifetime. First there is the procession of the bridegroom’s presents to the bride—strings of mules loaded with sweet-meats and sugar-works made up in all sorts of fantastic shapes: elephants, camels, lions—so fashioned that there is no breach of the commandment which forbids Moslems to counterfeit the likeness of any living thing; then rows of men loaded with vests of silk, cloth, velvet, and cloth of gold; then open baskets exhibiting jewels worth half-a-million dollars. Next comes a counter-procession of the bride’s dowry: including a dozen coachfuls of female slaves and three dozen black eunuchs. Lastly, the world beholds the carrying of the bride to the bridegroom’s house. She is conveyed hidden in a closely-latticed, gold-plated coach drawn by six plentifully plumed and bejewelled white horses, and escorted by troops of black eunuchs, some of whom scatter handfuls of aspers among the rabble. The pageant is headed by hundreds of slaves carrying pyramidal candelabra as tall as the masts of ships (Naculs)—perhaps emblems of phallic significance; and it closes with scores of music-makers perched upon camels, whose gruntings and gurglings contribute a vocal note to the instrumental din.

Such, by all first-hand accounts, pruned and trimmed into legibility, were these famous entertainments—a medley of grandeur and grotesqueness which could hardly have been matched outside Turkey. Sir John had postponed his journey in order to witness this grandeur. But, having received no invitation (only envoys from tributary States had that expensive honour) he felt compelled by his dignity to hold aloof, and never saw anything. The other Englishmen, however, were not so punctilious. They mixed with the mob which, on foot or on horseback, filled the plain and was kept in disorder by a body of policemen armed with oil-smeared sheep-skins. Wherever they saw the crowd pressing most, they rushed to disperse it by laying about them with their skins. To save their holiday garments from greasy defilement, the crowd surged this way and that, in terrible confusion, those on foot treading on each other’s heels, those on horseback being flung by their stampeding steeds one over another in a hundred different directions. “There never was such a dance of brave horses seen as at that place,” declares our Treasurer; adding, with an engaging candour, “to tell you the truth, I had small joy in this diversion; and, however we endeavoured all that was possible to procure horses that were temperate, yet I could not help making one in the dance, and that not without much hazard, which not a little retrench’d my enjoyments, till I found out the way to leave my horse at a good distance from me.”[100]

Our Chaplain had to pay much more dearly for his insatiable curiosity: “My horse snorted and trembled, so I suspected no good, yet I was resolved to stay and see all. Just as the fireworkes began, he and many other horses by ran mad and rising up fell on his hams, then, trembling, on his side; [he] fairly layd [me] along [the ground] and ran away as if the Divel had drove him. I was getting up, but seeing many, many mad Jades coming, I fell flat on my face, and committed the event to God.” Thus the Rev. John lay prostrate on the broad Thracian plain that dreadful night, while crazy stallions with cocked ears and flying manes dashed about, snorting, squealing, thundering this way and that. The reverend gentleman listened to the drumming of their hoofs with a horror which his dislike of death rendered agonising. His terror grew as the sound of those irresponsible, irreverent hoofs drew nearer. He heard the frantic animals as they went by, rocking, leaping, plunging, slipping, recovering themselves within the ever-narrowing circle of which he formed the unhappy centre. Their iron shoes rang in his ears—an odious knell. He could do nothing but crouch, stupefied, against the Thracian plain. He had just enough initiative left to pray to God that He might save a future Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, from a premature demolition under infidel hoofs. Never before, and never after, did the Rev. John Covel feel so paralysed or so pious. But God did not forsake him: “His name be ever praised! for though I dare sware at least 100 horse and people came over me, I got not the least harm imaginable in the world.”[101]

After this miraculous escape, our Chaplain hastened to attach himself to the Ambassador of Ragusa, “a lusty, gallant fellow,” who, as the representative of a tributary State, had the privilege of participating in the celebrations and making presents. Under this minor Excellency’s wing, he was able to go everywhere, to stare at everybody, to pry into everything, to glut himself on pomp, without the least danger. They had always a Janissary or two who looked after them and treated them to sherbet. Thus attended, they strutted about as they liked, sat on quilts, and lolled on cushions near the Grand Vizir’s own tent—nay, several times the Rev. John found himself near to the Grand Signor himself: once he actually stood within five yards of his Majesty, all the time his Majesty prayed! How eagerly he noted everything, how glibly he gossiped afterwards to his companions, how keenly he enjoyed their envy! And the friends at home—those poor untravelled Fellows in Cambridge: think of their wonder and awe as they perused his immense, discursive epistles from Adrianople—messages from fairyland, sent to reveal to them the existence of a strange, wondrous world, beyond the humdrum of their drab academic routine. The Rev. John could hear himself quoted in every Combination Room as one versed in all the secrets of the mysterious East. Verily our Chaplain had much to praise God for.

How did the Turks view the intrusion of these unbidden and inquisitive unbelievers? Covel speaks with rapture of the “strange prodigious civility all Franks found everywhere at these festivals.” The Turks, he says, “took the greatest pride that we should see and (at least seem to) admire everything.” He gives examples from his own experience. He had been taken twenty times to see the sights, while the Turks themselves were being “huncht away.” He had been many times “very, very near the G. Signor himself (sometimes ½ an hour together, as long as I pleased), with my hat and in my hair, both which they hate as the Divel.” He had walked right through the city, once or twice, “al alone,” in the midst of great Moslem multitudes, and “never met the least affront in the world, but rather extraordinary kindnesse.”[102] No one who knows Covel’s writings can doubt that he believed what he said. Only he failed to make allowance for the privileged position he occupied in Turkish eyes, first, as the guest of their Ragusan guest, and, secondly, as a priest; the Turks had unbounded respect for all religious ministers quite irrespective of their creed. North’s evidence, as always, is less uncritical. The Turks, he tells us, incurious themselves, did not suffer curiosity in others gladly, and were “apt to beat a man that pretends to it. They look upon those idlenesses and impertinences (as at best they account them) with a sinister eye; and always suspect mischief at the bottom, though they do not discern it.”[103] In other words, strangers were tolerated as long as they did not make themselves conspicuous. Once our Treasurer had the misfortune to draw attention to himself; and never forgot the result.

The occasion was an acrobatic performance of extraordinary interest: a rope-dancer sliding down from a lofty tower. North, for whom feats of skill possessed a peculiar fascination, thought to time him by his watch. As he stood counting the seconds, the rope broke, and down came the dancer. He heard the Turks around him asking one another how the accident had happened; then he heard some one say that he believed “that fellow,” pointing to our Treasurer, was the cause of it: he had seen him hold something in his hand and mutter over it. North, well acquainted with the Turkish fear of witchcraft, and also with the summary methods of Turkish mobs, did not wait to hear more, but slank away as fast as he could. That was the only way: the Frank who did not like being beaten should slink away from an excited Turkish crowd. With many of our merchants this habit of slinking endured after their return home: the sight of a mere church beadle made them think of a Turkish chaoush.[104] Modern tourists who fill their books with scornful comments on the servile attitude of Greeks and Armenians towards the Turk would do well to remember their own ancestors.

While all this went on, what was Sir John doing?

It would argue a profound misconception of Sir John’s character to suppose that, because he had been told that no business could be transacted until the feasts were over, he kept quiet. Much otherwise was the fact. His Dragomans, at his behest, seized every opportunity to come to speech with either the Kehayah or the Rais Effendi and to worry these worthies away from thoughts of mirth and sprightliness. The Ambassador himself paid several visits to the Kehayah in person. To quote his own words: “I attempt all wayes I can thinke of, that since I could not have Audience till the Feasts were done, in the mean time my Capitulations may goe forward.”[105]

We will look into these activities and try to set them forth as briefly as we can.