Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
[4] The names of the various districts of Constantinople, sometimes
rather indiscriminately used in travellers' narratives, are apt
to puzzle those readers unfamiliar with the divisions of the
city. The following note puts its distribution clearly before
them:--"_Stamboul_ may be termed Constantinople proper, inhabited by
the Turks, and containing the Seraglio, chief mosques, great public
offices, bazaars, and places of Government and general business.
It is the most ancient and most important part, _par excellence_.
_Galata_ is the Wapping of the city: here we find dirty shops for
ships' stores; merchants' counting-houses, and tipsy sailors.
_Tophanné_ is so called from the large gun-factory close at hand.
Both these suburbs are situated at the base of a very steep hill; the
upper part of which is _Pera_, the district allotted to the Franks,
or foreigners, and containing the palaces of the ambassadors, the
hotels, the European shops, and the most motley population under the
sun. _Scutari_ is to Stamboul as Birkenhead to Liverpool, and is in
Asia. It is important in its way, as being the starting-place of all
the caravans going inland. There are some other districts of less
interest to the average tourist."--_A Month at Constantinople_, p. 46.
At Constantinople, as at Smyrna, Mr Smith visited the slave
market. There is a volume in the word, and we all know the sort of
phantasmagoria it summons up for the benefit of English ladies and
gentlemen, as they sit at home at ease, dandling their fancies by
the chimney corner. Exeter Hall and the picture shops have made
slave-markets of their own, compared to which the reality is a tame
and spiritless affair. We are all familiar, at a proper distance,
with that group of young ladies, more or less nude, and of every
tint--from the pale Georgian to the sable Ethiop--huddled together
in great alarm and the most graceful attitudes, whilst a shawled
and jewelled Turk scans their perfections with licentious eye, and
counts gold into the palm of a truculent dealer in human flesh.
None of us but have been painfully affected by representations,
both printed and pictorial, of whips and manacles, fettered hands
and striped shoulders, kneeling negroes and barbarous taskmasters,
whereby tender-hearted gentlemen are moved to unbutton their pockets,
and philanthropical ladies of excitable nerve, overlooking the
misery that is often close to their doors, are set sewing flannels
for remote blacks. We have all seen this sort of thing, and have
been interested and touched accordingly. But Mr Smith, in the most
unfeeling manner, robs us of our illusions, so far, at least, as
Smyrna or Constantinople are concerned. In the slave-market at
the latter place--where blacks only are exposed, the Circassian
and Georgian beauties being secluded in the dealers' houses--he
arrived at the conclusion that the creatures he saw wrapped in their
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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