Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [97]
MARY CABLE has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and Horizon, where this piece appeared in 1959.
TRAVELERS WHO arrive in Istanbul by sea have a good view of the Grand Seraglio: a huddle of low, unprepossessing gray buildings built on a bluff at the point where the Bosporus and the Golden Horn meet the Sea of Marmara. Nearby, and outbidding it for attention, are the six spectacular minarets of the Blue Mosque and the great dome and minarets of Hagia Sophia—the ornaments of the Istanbul sky line and the great attractions for sight-seers. A tourist who asks about the low gray buildings will be told that they are the Topkapı Museum; with luck, he will also learn that until 1851 this was the Sultans’ residence, a palace known to Europeans as the Grand Seraglio. But the chances are that a tourist of no more than average inquisitiveness will never learn that this palace was once more splendid than Versailles, more bloody than the Kremlin, and, though in Europe, as mysterious to Europeans as the Imperial Palace in Peking. Its extraordinary history shaped millions of lives, from the Arabian peninsula halfway across Europe and the Mediterranean, and took place among brainwashed slaves behind an iron curtain that remained drawn from shortly after the conquest of Constantinople, in 1453, to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Marmara side of Seraglio Point, a steep, four hundred-foot ascent, was once guarded by a sea wall built of Byzantine rubble, but the wall is tumbled down now to make way for the railway to Bulgaria, and gypsies and beggars live in the ruins. The other side of the point slopes down to the Golden Horn, which is now a raffish dock area, but in the days of the Sultans was beautiful with palaces and gardens. The unadorned stone buildings of the palace, clustered and sprawled together without aesthetic consideration, suggest a military camp; the tented armies of the Seljuk Sultans must have camped like this as they swept across Anatolia from the Asiatic steppes. To modern visitors the whole palace, inside and out, seems drab and rattletrap, and it is hard to understand how the seventeenth-century French traveler Michel Baudier could have reported, “the baths, halls and galleries of this place surpass in their Magnificence the force of the imagination.” Few travelers from the West in those days ever got inside the palace, and fewer still got out again—trespassers anywhere on the premises were beheaded, while trespassers in the harem were skinned alive and their skins tacked to the harem gate. But those who saw it agreed with Baudier: the place was dumbfoundingly splendid.
“Now come with me,” said a French ambassador to the court of Süleiman, “and cast your eye over the immense crowd of turbaned heads, wrapped in countless folds of the whitest silk, and bright raiment of every kind and hue, and everywhere the brilliance of gold, silver, purple, silk and satin.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who passed that way in 1717 when her husband was a British envoy, wrote that the royal gardeners were so gaily dressed that “at a distance they appeared like a parterre of tulips.” Entertained at dinner by a wife of the Sultan, Lady Mary observed among the trinkets her hostess was wearing “200 emeralds, every one as large as a halfcrown piece,” and four strings of pearls “every one as large as the Duchess of Marlborough’s.” The knives were of gold set with diamonds and the tablecloth and napkins were embroidered with silk and gold.
The significant point about the Turkish court seems to be that its dazzle was not created by architecture, which had no particular appeal to a race so recently out of tents in Central Asia, but by the portable grandeur inside the buildings. The silks have worn out, the gold and jewels have been nearly all dispersed, and the Grand Seraglio, where three centuries of extraordinary drama were enacted, comes down