On the Shores of the Mediterranean (24 page)

‘The museums have too many ikons like this,’ he said, ‘and much, much better. They’re not really interested in anything later than the fifteenth century any more.’

I also talked with a rug and carpet dealer who has premises in the Street of the Prayer Hats. On the way there another dealer offered me ‘Fifty Years Credit’.

‘You want information, or you want shopping? I can give you information; but shopping is shopping,’ said the carpet dealer who was young.

‘Information.’

‘Kilims are good at the moment. Italians like wery faded, old-looking kilims. This can be done with chemicals here, in Istanbul; but they do it better in London. English like faded, but less faded than Italians. Americans like wigorous colours. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re new, providing they’re wegetable not chemical dyes. You can find wegetable dye kilims ninety years old as fresh as when they were made because the owners kept them in boxes.

‘For me there are three sorts of customers. Summer customers who come and go in two weeks maximum. They don’t get good bargains because all the guides and travel agencies tell them they must pay half price of what we ask and no more. If we tell them real price they don’t believe us. They never learn nothing about rugs and carpets because they don’t believe nothing we tell them.

‘Then there are what I call domestic foreigners. They are here in Istanbul for three, four years and want to learn. We never see
them in summer, only winter. We give them a good price and they spend, say, about £60–70 [$84–98] a month. Then there are locals. Locals we treat the same.

‘I don’t like Germans, but Germans and French like to spend money and don’t waste time trying to make stupid bargains.

‘The most difficult are Americans. Last summer two Americans came, husband and wife. They said they were painters. They wanted to see kilims and from two o’clock until five I showed them kilims, all my stock – big stock. You can see how big. They didn’t like any of them, and were rude about them, and I was tired because in summer the air in the Bazaar is wery bad.

‘Then I showed them an awful, damaged one, a real rubbish, not worth nothing, to throw away. They asked the price, as they had done all the others, and I told them this one wasn’t for amateurs, but for professionals who really know, and the lady said, “I never bargain. I offer you $2000 for it. Is that OK or not OK? Just tell me!” So I said it was OK.’

Finally, I visited a couple of jewellers at the lower end of Kalpakçilar Caddesi, the principal street of the Bazaar, who sold what one of them described on his trade card as ‘Antiker und Moderner Schmuck’. Of the 147 shops in this street 77 belonged to jewellers.

The first jeweller weighed a thin gold chain for me with lots of clanking. Chains are popular because you are not paying for a lot of work. All gold objects must have an official hallmark.

‘Is this your best price?’ I asked him. ‘Twenty-seven thousand lira?’

‘Listen, Sir, this is 18-carat; 14-carat and the links go black. If you think this expensive I give you better price.’

‘What is your best price?’

‘Twenty-two thousand lira, because you are English and not American. That is my best price.’

The second shop had better stuff. Mr Ferit, I think his name was, showed me a really beautiful bracelet woven from very fine gold wire by a Greek woman who works at Trabzon on the shore of the Black Sea. Apart from the clasp, which was rough, it was good enough for Cartier or Boucheron or Van Cleef and Arpels. As I wasn’t buying I told him so.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Ferit. ‘You know how much this costs? 120,000 Turkish lira, that’s about £400 [$560]. You know how much time it takes for this woman to make this bracelet? One and a half months. You think it is cheap price? You are right. And why? Because if customers find shop next door selling cheaper they will go there. That’s business, isn’t it?’

The parts of the Bazaar I like best because they are the least changed are those lonely reaches in the northern part, rarely visited by tourists because the shops there only sell skins and plastic foam. By 6.15 p.m. on a cold night such as this one most of them were already closed. In the remainder the shutters were crashing down and some of the street lights were already extinguished. Now the
bekjis
, the night watchmen, fifty of them, and the cats were taking over, dozens of them, and the last
hamal
went past, practically airborne under an almost weightless load of foam. Then, with the last shutter down, it was so quiet you could hear the sirens on the ships and ferry boats in the Bosphorus moaning and whistling at one another, just as one could up in the now long-abandoned harem at Topkapi.

The
harem – any other paled into insignificance – was the Imperial Harem at the Yeni Saray, otherwise Topkapi Saray,
¹
the New or Cannon Gate Palace, known to foreigners for centuries as the Grand Seraglio, which had remained unused for the purpose for which it was built since 1853, when the last sultan to maintain a harem there had moved to the Dolmabahçe Palace further up the Bosphorus.

What is a harem? What is a seraglio? The best description, the easiest to assimilate, is that written by N. M. Penzer, the author of
The
arēm
, published in 1936, of which what follows is a précis.

arēm
is derived from the Arabic
arām
, ‘that which is unlawful’, as opposed to
alal
, that which is lawful’. The correct word in Turkish for the women’s part of a house is
arēmlik,
arēm
strictly being the occupants. The part of the house where guests are received is the
selāmlik
, but this is never shortened, as
selām
alone simply means ‘salutation’ or greeting.

Relations with European powers gave rise to the coining of a word that would embrace not only the
arēmlik
and the
selāmlik
but the royal palace as a whole, which became known as the Grand Serail or Seraglio, seraglio being derived from the Italian
serraglio
, ‘a cage for wild animals’, and was adopted owing to its chance similarity with the Persian words
sarā
and
sarāi
, ‘a building’ and particularly ‘a palace’; and this name for it was accepted both by Europeans and Turks.

The building of what was eventually to become one of the more complex and labyrinthine of royal palaces was begun by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1459, six years after he had captured the city. He chose for it what must be one of the most magnificent situations for a palace anywhere, the First Hill of the Seven Hills of the city which are now so difficult for the visitor to identify, on the promontory which stretches out from what must have always been a rather un-European shore of Europe into the Bosphorus and which shelters the inlet known as the Golden Horn from the winds off the Sea of Marmara. Previously it had been the site of the acropolis of what was originally the ancient city of Byzantium. Mehmed enclosed it within a wall three miles long and successive sultans continued to add to the palace, demolish parts of it and build them again to a different pattern, a process
that was still continuing when the last sultan to live in it finally abandoned it nearly 400 years after its foundation.

Of this great palace, which housed between two and five thousand people, the harem was only a part, although a very important one, for the Grand Seraglio was not only the imperial residence of the sultan, but also the Sublime Porte, the High Gate, in Turkish the Bab-i-Humayun, the Imperial Gate, regarded, figuratively, as the seat of government and the administrative centre of the Ottoman world, on which the heads of those who had been decapitated in the Court of the Janissaries, the first court of the palace, were displayed in niches, that is if they were considered sufficiently important to warrant such a display.

The real centre of government was in the second courtyard, the Court of the Divan, beyond the Bab-el-Selām, the Gate of Salutation, in which the Chief Executioner, who was also the Head Gardener, the
Bostanji-bashi
, resided, where there was a fountain in which he could wash the blood from his sword and his hands. There, until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it was at the height of its greatness, the sultan, the grand vizier, a handful of viziers, the lord of the admiralty, a couple of military judges and a few secretaries and accountants, meeting four times a week, ran an empire which extended from the Atlas mountains to the Caucasus and from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf from the Kubbealti, the Hall of the Divan, two domed, now rather bleak rooms, each only thirty feet square, with a grilled window high up in one of its walls. And it is strange that it was Suleiman the Magnificent (who ruled from 1520 to 1566), himself so able a ruler, who made the decision that in future the sultan should not be present at these deliberations in the Kubbealti. In doing so he initiated what was known as the
Kadinlar Sultanati
, the Reign of Women, and from then onwards successive sultans, if they could be bothered to do so, would look down and listen unseen through the grilled window from the
interior of the harem, but have no direct influence on affairs of state, which meant that only too often they became little more than puppets. Failing the sultan, the sultan validé, the queen-mother, who from now on assumed a position of disproportionate importance, or if they were ambitious for themselves and their offspring the
Kadinefendis
, favourite sultanas who had borne the sultan a son, might listen in to the proceedings being conducted below.

The Seraglio also housed the Military School of State. In it between five and eight hundred specially selected Christian boys who had been enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam were trained as
Iç-oghlans
, ‘Inside Youths’, for what was known as the Inner Service, in which they acted either as pages within the palace (but not of course within the harem), or in the higher services of the sultan. The
Iç-oghlans
formed only a small part of the intake of young Christians – Austrians, Hungarians, Russians, Greeks, Italians, Bosnians, Bohemians, Germans, Swiss, Georgians, Circassians, Armenians and Persians. The rest either became
Spahioghlans
, recruits to the sultan’s personal cavalry, or
Ajem-oghlans
, aspirants to the Outer Service, most of whom were engaged in manual work,
Baltajilers
, Halberdiers, or else were recruited into the Janissaries, the
corps d’élite
of the Turkish standing army, which was entirely composed of apostatized Christians. No Turks were ever admitted to any of these services.

Also in the Seraglio were two treasuries, numerous libraries, more than a dozen mosques. There was also the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, the Hirkai Serif Dairesi, still one of the most venerated places in the Muslim world. And there were ten enormous kitchens, each of which provided for a different hierarchy of persons from the sultan downwards, which together still form the largest single building in the entire seraglio. And there were bakeries, laundries, stables, baths and waterworks and, a world within a world, there was the harem itself.

What life was really like in the Imperial Harem will never be known, because it
was
the Imperial Harem and the penalty for anyone who showed undue curiosity about it, even to the extent of pointing a telescope in its direction, could be death. In
Voyage au Levant
, published in Paris in 1725, a French traveller, Corneille Le Bruyn, wrote of an unfortunate Venetian interpreter, a Signor Grellot, who, in about 1680, was hanged from his window, which overlooked the gardens of the Grand Seraglio, for daring to gaze at Sultan Mehmed IV and his ladies through a telescope. Almost everything that has been written about it is either hearsay or conjecture, based on what had been learned about other more modest, more domestic, less sternly administered, slightly more accessible harems. Or they are the fleeting impressions gained by male artisans, clock regulators and such, or those entering in the guise of their assistants, while a black eunuch rushed them through some bit of the harem to the place where they were to perform their mundane tasks at a time when the flesh and blood occupants had either been temporarily evacuated from these particular corridors or rooms or else were down at the Summer Harem at Seraglio Point, or up at the Old Palace, the Edirne Saray, on an island in the River Tunca at Edirne in northern Thrace, which Murad II began to build in 1450, three years before the fall of Constantinople, and was destroyed in 1877 without trace. Their somewhat sparse observations – no fault of theirs – are what one might expect from a plumber’s mate en route through Buckingham Palace to clear an obstructed drain while the royal family and the court are at Sandringham. What a pity it is that some literate laundress or female dressmaker, the sort of people who were allowed inside, or even a black or white eunuch, left no record of what they saw.