Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor: Series One and Series Two in one VolumeWalsh, R. (Robert)
History
Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor: Series One and Series Two in one Volume
Walsh, R. (Robert)
Istanbul (Turkey) -- History; Istanbul (Turkey) -- Pictorial works
It is here the Emirs reside, who are supposed to be the descendants
of Fatimah, the daughter of Mahomet. They are endued by the Prophet
with the faculty of healing all diseases by praying, breathing, and
touching, but particularly erysipelas and eruptive distempers. They are
allowed by the Porte a tahim, or a certain quantity of provisions for
their maintenance, on the condition of dispensing their gift of the
healing art to the people; and the patient is enjoined to give them
for every cure a fee of five paras, something less than a farthing.
They are distinguished by green turbans and a tebsib, or “chaplet of
beads,” on which they count their prayers for the recovery of their
patients. Their mode of cure is simple. They are found standing in the
streets; and when a diseased man distinguishes the green turban among
the crowd, he approaches with reverence. The emir lays his thumb on the
side of his nose, breathes upon his forehead, utters a short prayer,
and the cure is effected in five minutes. A belief in the efficacy of
touch and prayer, in healing disease, is universal among the Christian
and Jewish, as well as the Islam population of Constantinople, and
constantly resorted to.
The Fanal, or celebrated Greek quarter, now succeeds. It is so
called from a “phanar,” or light-house, which illumined the gate,
and was assigned exclusively to the Christians, on the capture of
Constantinople. Here is the residence of the patriarch, and here the
venerable head of the Oriental church was hanged over his own gate-way,
when the Greek insurrection commenced in the province, and hence his
lifeless body was dragged through filth and mud with gratuitous insult
by the Jews, and cast into the water. Here also is the metropolitan
church, conferred by Mahomet II. on the Christians, when the Moslem
took possession of Santa Sophia. Among the reliques which confer
interest and
value to this edifice, is the actual pillar to which our Saviour was
bound when he was scourged, and the chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl,
from which Chrysostom, with “the golden mouth,” delivered those
eloquent homilies, which have been handed down to us in fourteen folio
volumes. Here reside the seven princes of the Greek nation, which
formerly filled the office of hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, once
the proud and the powerful, but now steeped in misery and humiliation.
The streets of this celebrated district are dark and dirty; the houses,
mean and neglected. During the tempest of the revolution they were
entirely sacked by the Turkish mob, the property of their inhabitants
confiscated by the government, the princely population strangled
or exiled; and the Fanariots, once composing a noble and opulent
community of 40,000 persons, are now confined to half the number, and
that half reduced to the most abject poverty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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