On the Shores of the Mediterranean (25 page)

One more educated writer and traveller, Aubry de La Motraye, described by his French biographers as a ‘veracious traveller but a superficial observer’, who spent nearly fifteen years in
Constantinople, from 1699 to 1714, persuaded one of the French or Swiss clockmakers who had a monopoly of clock adjustment in the Grand Seraglio, to take him into the harem in the guise of an assistant, ‘dressed after the
Turkish
manner’, while the occupants were elsewhere, which can scarcely have fooled even the most gormless of black eunuchs, and the record of what he saw is pretty limited, also.

In the middle of the Hall, directly under the
Cupola
, was an Artificial fountain, the Bason of which was of the precious Green Marble, which seem’d to me to be either Serpentine or Jasper; it did not play on account of the Womens being absent … They had also little
Sofa’s
, which had some Pieces of painted Callico flung over them to preserve them from dust, &cc. Upon these
Sofa’s
the Ladies sit to breathe the fresh Air, and recreate their Eyes thro’ the Lattice. After the Clock in the Hall (The Throne Room Within) was put in order, the Eunuch made us pass by several little Chambers with Doors shut, like the Cells of Monks or Nuns, as far as I cou’d judge by one that another Eunuch open’d, which was the only one I saw, and by the Outside of the others …

NB In comparing the Chambers of the
Grand Seignior’s
Women to the Cells of Nuns, we must except the Richness of the Furniture, as well as the Use they are put to; the difference of which is easy enough to be imagin’d without Explication.
²

There was a foot of snow in the outer courts, and more drifting down into it when we set off on a Tuesday, when the whole palace is closed to the public, with an old, rather shaky, distinctly grumpy custodian armed with several large bunches of keys, whom the director of Topkapi had kindly deputed for this purpose, to explore
those parts of the Winter Harem still not shown to anyone without special permission, permission which is not easy to obtain.

The principal way into the Winter Harem, one that was never used by the sultan, is the Araba Kapisi, the Carriage Gate, a very modest affair through which the more fortunate odalisques were taken for an airing in the
arrhubas
, the spooky-looking canopied carriages with oval windows, drawn by hennaed oxen. It leads in to the Dolapli Kubbe, the Domed Anteroom lined with cupboards, in which tradesmen used to deposit goods that were to be conveyed into the harem.

To the left of this gate is another, which the custodian now opened up for us, that leads to a pavilion as idiosyncratic as the occupants for whom it was built some four hundred years ago.

This extraordinary body of men, the
Zülüfli Baltajilers
, the Halberdiers-with-Tresses, were recruited from the ranks of the
Ajem-oghlans
, and they all slept together in the room to which the custodian now took us, a galleried dormitory, the roof of which is supported by wooden pillars, painted bright red. Beneath their dormitory is a sort of clubroom lined with tall cupboards with drawers beneath them in which each Halberdier kept his own coffee-making apparatus. In the middle of this room there is a
mangal
, a charcoal brazier, used for heating a room, which like the rest of the harem was now as cold as the tomb. Beneath this room there is what was a prison.

The
Zülüfli Baltajilers
acted as guards and porters and were latterly unmutilated, although at one period they were recruited from the ranks of the White Eunuchs, most of whom were themselves imported from the Caucasus, or India, or were Hungarians, Slavonians or Germans who had been made prisoner. The White Eunuchs’ sphere of influence was not in the harem, where the Black Eunuchs held sway, but in the
selāmlik
, those parts of the palace beyond the harem in which outsiders
were received. Only the
Zülüfli Baltajilers
had regular access to the harem. Once a month, wearing their extraordinary uniforms, a feature of which was an immensely high collar which allowed them to see nothing to left or right, and each wearing a pair of
zülüf
, wool tresses on either side of their faces wrapped around gilded wire, an arrangement that made it practically impossible for them to see anything at all, they were marched into the harem between a double file of Black Eunuchs, bowed down under a huge weight of firewood from a store round the corner which held five hundred shiploads.

Nothing in the entire harem, apart from the Kafes, the Prison of the Princes, is more weird and redolent of horror than the three-storeyed quarters of the Black Eunuchs,
³
the Karagalar Tasligi, beyond the Anteroom of the Cupboards, more like a deep ditch than a human habitation; its only ornaments are a great gaping fireplace on the ground floor, the drum used in Ramadan to announce the beginning and end of the hours of fast and the sticks with which newcomers were beaten on the soles of the feet as a form of initiation, for all the world as if they were new boys at some expensive school. It was apparently not enough that these wretches had had their parts swept off with a single stroke of the razor, either here in Constantinople or else in Africa for example, far up the Nile where, near Assiut, in the early part of the nineteenth century, two Coptic Christian monks had what amounted to a monopoly of this business, castrating about a hundred and fifty young Negro boys a year, after which, as a post-operative treatment, they buried them up to their haunches in warm manure. No wonder the Black Eunuchs were cruel, arrogant, jealous and petulant. At least the White Eunuchs, who administered the harem
in its early years before being supplanted by the Black Eunuchs, were asked if they wished the operation to be performed before submitting to it.

Here, too, in the Courtyard of the Eunuchs, is, or was until recently, the tiny, conical sentry box manned by one of the palace dwarfs when the sultan passed by.

Among the few unmutilated men allowed to enter the harem were musicians (although the Chief Musician, and probably the others also, had to wear the curls of chastity, the
Hoca
), the Princes’ Tutor, and the Chief Physician, who was so particularly suspect that he too was only allowed into the harem between two files of Black Eunuchs. (The only parts of his patients’ anatomies he was allowed to inspect were their hands.)

Even cucumbers and other vegetables of inflammatory shape and size were cut into slices before being allowed in, for fear of misuse. In this harem nothing was left to chance; and it is therefore not surprising that those odalisques who were not occupying the sultan’s bed, and might never do so, sometimes took an interest in one another.

The harem was unimaginably cold. No wonder old engravings show women swathed in furs huddled round the
mangals
that, together with the big, open fireplaces with their tall, exquisite chimneypieces of bronze and marble and gypsum, were the only means of heating it. With our aged custodian, who like ourselves was positively trembling with cold, we travelled through endless corridors and courtyards and sets of rooms, each one an individual labyrinth, built on what are at least six different levels, on the side of what is a quite steep hill, the result of more than twenty sultans adding to and subtracting from what Mehmed the Conqueror originally built, tearing down whole suites of rooms constructed by their predecessors to gratify some whim and building new ones to house their favourites. Because of this it was quite easy, as we
found, to ascend some gaily-painted staircase which was on the verge of collapse and bang one’s head on a ceiling that was now, due to some subsequent rebuilding scheme, within three inches of the floor.

Some rooms had seals on the doors because they contained treasures, or had large, rusty padlocks for which our guide could find no keys, or else found that he had brought the wrong ones. A list had been drawn up in Turkish of what he was to attempt to show us and the only way of communicating with him was by pointing to it. There were some quarters for which it proved impossible to find the entrance, let alone a key, such as those of the
Cariyeler Dairesi
, the rank-and-file of the harem women, which lay somewhere on the side of the hill above the hospital.

With him we saw one of the sets of rooms used by the
Kadinefendis
, the four favourites who had each given birth to a male heir, in which their rotting beds, shrouded in impenetrable curtains of cobwebs, were more evocative of the past, in this nightmare state of ruin, than if they had been restored. Next we inspected the suites of the Chief Laundress, the Harem Mistress and the Chief Nurse, which had balconies with a view over the rooftops to the Bosphorus on which the royal babies were given an airing, and we saw what was said to be the hospital, which was very large and built round a hidden courtyard, and the laundry, one of the few places in the entire harem, being at the bottom of the hill, where what must have been miles of washing could be hung out to dry without affecting the aesthetic sensibilities of some member of the upper echelons. We saw the Gate of the Dead, the Meyyit Kapisi, by which bodies were removed from the harem, beyond the room in the hospital in which they were laid out. There was a separate gate, in the Wall of the Second Court of the Selāmlik, the palace outside the harem, through which the dead were taken away for burial, but it is now blocked up; and
we saw the Way of the Shawls, a melancholy, grass-grown passage, open to the sky, more like a moat than anything else, which runs down to a gate of the same name. This was the way by which the sultan used to set off on horseback, riding over the beautiful shawls with which it had been lined, which were then distributed amongst the most favoured women, on his way to the Girding of the Sword, the equivalent of his coronation at the mosque at Eyup, at the head of the Golden Horn. High above this passage is the Meskane, the Conservatory of Selim III where he enjoyed playing the
ney
, a sort of flute, and where he composed songs which are still sung to this day.

At the opposite end of the harem, a hundred yards or so away at the far end of the Altinyol, the Golden Road which traverses it from one end to the other, is the gate through which the sultan used to pass out of the harem on his way to the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Just before it is what is called the Place of Consultation of the Jinn (what one distinguished American female professor, Dr Barnette Miller, author of one of the two best books in the English language on the harem, called the ‘Place Where the Fairies Deliberate’). Above it, cantilevered out above the Golden Road, is a set of eight rooms, in one of which a
gözde
, a girl who had caught the eye of the sultan, suitably embellished and with her pubic hairs removed, waited for the signal to enter the imperial bedchamber in whatever part of the harem it might happen to be at that particular moment in history. Then she would kiss the imperial coverlet before working her way up under it from the bottom end of the bed by this well-blazed route into the Imperial Presence. No Turkish woman, so far as is known, ever had this honour. Their place was taken by thousands upon thousands of Circassians from beyond the Caucasus, Georgians and Armenians, a fewer number of Western Europeans, although Rumanians were very active, and possibly one French Créole from Martinique
– Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, who is said to have both become
kadinefendi
and Sultan Validé. Many of them fought for the honour of being enslaved and ravished.

This act of burrowing was not simply a demonstration of male chauvinism. Any man who subsequently married a
kadinefendi
of a deceased sultan, which he could do once she had been retired from the harem to the Old Palace, the Eski Saray, built by Mehmed II, the Conqueror, on one of the other seven hills of the city, the one on which the University now stands, however elevated in rank he might be, also had to reach the summit in this fashion.

Some of these rooms had enormous gilded nineteenth-century beds in them, huge mirrors and other equally out-of-scale furniture for what are really bed-sitters with little gilded balconies above them to which there could have been no means of access unless each
gözde
was issued with a ladder. Another room, on the ground floor, had a secret staircase of incredible steepness, up which the
gözde
was required to climb, which linked it with the strange and isolated apartments of Abd ul-Hamid I, who reigned from 1774 to 1788 and was so terrified of being stalked and strangled with the silken bowstring, which was the customary method of disposing of unwanted royalty – what would seem to most people a perfectly natural reaction to living in this harem – that he had the walls lined with mirrors.

Also on the ground floor, at the junction of the Golden Way and the Meeting Place of the Jinn, are the apartments of the
haseki
. If a
gözde
was called more than once to the sultan’s bed she might become an
ikbal
. If as an
ikbal
, she gave birth to a child, she became a
haseki
.

Above these rooms, reached by the same staircase that leads to the apartments of the
gözdeler
, is the Kafes, the Cage, a dozen or so rooms on two storeys – there may be more – hidden away in perpetual shadow, those overlooking the Courtyard of the
Girls-in-the-Eye with heavy iron grilles over the windows. The only other window in the Kafes is in a room on the upper storey which gives a view of the sky and of part of the roof of the harem. The only reasonably comprehensive view of the outside of the harem is from the Tower of Justice which rises above the Hall of the Divan, a remarkable panorama of leaded roofs, chimneys masquerading as miniature minarets, domes and small, claustrophobically-barred windows. Beyond can be seen the Selāmlik, the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn.