* * * * * There is rivalry between the gardens of the upper, the middle, and the lower Bosphorus with regard to their advantages of position. The upper Bosphorus is the most desirable from the European point of view. This preference is fairly well established, for Lady Mary Montagu wrote letters from Belgrade Forest two hundred years ago, and about the same time a summer colony composed of Europeans and of the great Phanariote families began to gather at Büyük Dereh and Therapia. In much earlier times, however, the Byzantine emperors built villas at Therapia, and the very name of the place indicates the antiquity of its repute as a place of resort. The name has come down in the story of Jason and the Argo, who sailed between these shores in the dawn of legend. When those early voyagers returned from Colchis with Medea, that formidable passenger threw out poison on the Thracian shore; whence the name Pharmakia, changed by the euphemism of the Greeks to Therapia, or Healing. There are reasons, to be sure, why it is better to look at Therapia than to be in it. The view it commands is the bleakest on the Bosphorus, and the prevailing north wind of midsummer, the _meltem_, which keeps the strait much cooler than you would imagine from its latitude, sometimes gets on one’s nerves. Nevertheless Therapia is a centre for an extraordinary variety of pleasant excursions, there are delicious gardens in the clefts of its hills, and from May till October the embassies impart to it such gaiety as the somewhat meagre social resources of Constantinople afford. I shall be surprised if the proximity of Belgrade Forest and the magnificent beach of Kilios on the Black Sea, to say nothing of the various other resources of the Bosphorus and the Marmora, do not some day make Therapia much more famous as a summer resort. [Illustration: In the garden of Ressam Halil Pasha]