EXPLORING CONSTANTINOPLE WITH EDMONDO DE AMICIS
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Oct 1 2013
1 October 2013 /TERRY RICHARDSON, Ä°STANBUL
When the Italian journalist and travel writer Edmondo De Amicis
steamed excitedly toward a mist-shrouded Constantinople in 1875,
he was under no illusions about the sheer magnitude of the literary
task that lay before him.
“Who could dare to describe Constantinople?” he noted in the opening
pages of his travel classic “Constantinopoli.” In other words, how
could a humble scrivener such as Amicis possibly capture, in mere
words, the essence of a city whose superb setting, exotic architecture
and heady Eastern atmosphere had so intoxicated countless visitors
before him — and challenged the abilities of some of the world’s
most erudite writers.
First impressions — superb, sublime!
Yet, inevitably, the passionate Amicis dared to try. As his ship
ploughed through the Sea of Marmara toward the entrance to the
Bosporus, the feverishly excited Italian gripped the ship’s rail and
watched with delight as the old city slowly sloughed off the ghostly
veil enveloping it, revealing tantalizing glimpses of the Blue Mosque,
Suleymaniye and the other great Ottoman imperial mosques rising from
the green hills of the historic peninsula, a panoply of “enormous
domes and minarets, packed and mingled like a grove of gigantic palm
trees without branches.”
A “weightless-seeming” Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofya) “rose up from the
summit of a hill and rounded gloriously into the air, in the midst of
four slender and lofty minarets, whose silvery points glittered in
the first rays of the sun” while across the strait in Asia, Scutari
(Uskudar) revealed itself as “a town made of ten thousand little purple
and yellow houses, of ten thousand lush green gardens, of a hundred
mosques as white as snow.” Rounding Seraglio Point (Saray Burnu), he
saw Galata, “a hill of many-coloured houses and, one above the other,
a lofty city crowned with minarets, cupolas and cypresses.”
Amicis saved his most laudatory prose for the scene that unfurled as
the ship nosed its way into the curved dagger of water that is the
Golden Horn. With the old city and its fabled skyline of mosques and
minarets stretching ahead of him into the misty distance on the south
bank of the waterway, the plush embassies of Pera crowning the hill
dominating its northern shores, he wrote breathlessly: “And here is
the city of Constantinople. Endless, sublime, superb! The glory of
creation and of the human race!”
Amicis certainly cannot be accused of understatement, and if he were
alive today it’s tempting to think of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism
and Culture gainfully employing the poetic Italian to promote the
city of Ä°stanbul to the world. Amicis was, however, far more than
a panegyrist for a city about which he had “read a hundred books,”
and of which he believed, before his visit, that “all the world thinks
is the most beautiful place on earth.”
A more considered view — city in transformation Viewed from his perch
in Pera’s Hotel Byzantium, the mysterious early morning dispersed by
a powerful sun, the city spread out beneath him revealed itself in
a different light. “The Constantinople of light and beauty has given
place to a monstrous city, scattered about over an infinity of hills
and valleys; it is a labyrinth of human anthills, cemeteries, ruins
and solitary places; a confusion of civilisation and barbarity.” Yet
worse, it was “really only the skeleton of a great city — the walls
[i.e., the old city] … the rest is an enormous agglomeration of
shacks, an interminable Asiatic encampment swarming with peoples of
every race and religion.”
Amicis was, naturally, a product of his time. Subject to the pernicious
influences of Orientalism, he could be as patronizing as any of his
contemporaries about the civilization, culture and faith of the peoples
he traveled among. Yet few Ä°stanbulites today will fail to be amazed
by how his description of the city some 138 years ago mirrors its
condition today. “It is a great city in the process of transformation,
composed of ancient cities that are in decay, new cities which emerged
yesterday, and other cities now being born; everything is in confusion;
on every side can be seen the vestiges of gigantic works, mountains
bored through, hills cut down, entire districts levelled to the ground,
great streets laid out; an immense mass of debris and remains of
conflagrations upon ground forever tormented by the hand of man.”
People-watching on the Galata Bridge If the Constantinople of Amicis’
day was every bit as chaotic and fast-changing as Ä°stanbul is today,
so too was the Galata Bridge the best place to people-watch — or,
as he put it, “To see the population of Constantinople, it’s a good
idea to go upon the floating bridge.”
There, he advises the visitor to “choose a small portion of the
bridge and fix your eyes on that alone, otherwise in the attempt to
see everything one ends up seeing nothing.”
>From his “small portion,” Amicis watched in awe as a variegated
cross section of the world’s most cosmopolitan city paraded by:
“Turkish porters bending under enormous burdens … a Greek gentleman
followed by his dragoman in an embroidered hat … a crowd of Persians
in pyramid-shaped hats of Astrakhan fur … a Catholic priest … a
confused throng of Greeks, Turks and Armenians … a fat eunuch on
horseback … an Albanian in his white petticoat and with a pistol
in his belt … a Bedouin wrapped in a white mantle … the Tartar
dressed in his sheepskins.” From Jewish women in traditional garb
to a Sister of Charity from a Pera hospital and a “negress” from
Cairo to a European ambassador, there were many more denizens of,
and visitors to, this great city crossing the bridge linking the old
city with the European quarter on the north side of the Golden Horn.
The pervasiveness of Western dress may have rendered the scenes on the
Galata Bridge a little less colorful today, though they are scarcely
less cosmopolitan, even if the assorted races, nationalities and faiths
are harder to tell from each other than they were in Ottoman times. For
at the time of Amicis’ visit the different millets (nationalities) of
the Ottoman Empire still wore distinguishing footwear — the Greeks
turquoise shoes, the Armenians red, the Jews black. But although
the various communities who made up the populace of the city may
have been quite separate from each other in many ways, they had,
according to Amicis, one thing at least in common: They were all out
“to cheat you.” The innocent abroad was then, as now, always prey to
the more unscrupulous elements of the host society and Amicis soon
found himself fleeced by, among others, Armenian barbers, Jewish
shoeblacks, Greek coffee sellers and Turkish caique rowers.
>From the Galata Tower to Gezi Park In the company of his friend
Junk, Amicis explored Constantinople largely on foot — still the
best way for the visitor to get to grips with this most fascinating
of cities. One of the first city landmarks he made for was the
Galata Tower, then serving as a lookout for fires, writing, “It is
a monument crowned with Genoese glory, and no Italian can look upon
it without proudly remembering that small band of merchants, sailors
and soldiers … who for centuries held the banner of their republic
aloft and negotiated on equal terms with the emperors of the East.”
The district he was staying in, Pera (today’s Beyoglu), he described
as “the ‘West End’ of the European colony; the centre of pleasure and
elegance.” Amicis’ Pera was “bordered with English and French hotels,
elegant cafes, glittering shops, [and] theatres” where “there are
dandies from Greece, Italy and France … and shady characters of
every nationality,” and “the Muslim feels himself to be in a foreign
country.” The district retains its hedonistic air today, and despite
the precipitous decline in its Christian Armenian and Greek minority
population since the formation of the Turkish Republic, it remains
a vibrantly cosmopolitan neighborhood.
Having wandered up the Grand Rue De Pera (today’s Ä°stiklal Caddesi),
Amicis and Junk found themselves among first Muslim and then Christian
cemeteries, in an area that is now Taksim Square. Amicis also commented
on seeing here “the enormous artillery barracks built by Halil Pasha,
a solid rectangular edifice in the Moorish style of the late Turkish
architecture.” The barracks described by Amicis were demolished in
1939-40 to make way for Gezi Park, though controversial plans by
the current government to rebuild them as a shopping mall now seem
unlikely to go ahead.
Turkish coffee and the call to prayer Having explored the quarters
around what is now Taksim, NiÅ~_antaÅ~_ı and Tatavla (today’s
KurtuluÅ~_), the intrepid Amicis and Junk ventured down to the
districts bordering the northern shore of the Golden Horn.
Unlike the districts they’d previously explored, KasımpaÅ~_a was
firmly Muslim, and they sat admiring the splendid views over to the
old city from a “mean little place” of a cafe, where they “sipped the
fourth or fifth of those twelve daily cups of coffee which everyone
in Constantinople needs to take, whether he wants it or not.”
In nearby PiyalepaÅ~_a, Amicis watched with fascination a
muezzin appear on the “terrace of the minaret” and make the call
to prayer. Moved, he wrote, “No tolling bell has ever touched my
heart like this; and on that day I understood for the first time why
Mohammad, calling the faithful to prayer, had preferred the human
voice to the trumpet of the Israelites, or the tocsin [bell] of the
early Christians.”
In the second part of this feature we’ll cross the Golden Horn
with Amicis to explore the Spice Bazaar, the Grand Bazaar and Hagia
Sophia, walk the mighty land walls of Theodosius and learn Amicis’
less-than-complimentary views on Turkish cuisine
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-327842-exploring-constantinople-with-edmondo-de-amicis.html