CONSTANTINOPLE OLD AND NEW
Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror
From the portrait by Gentile Bellini in the Layard Collection
Photograph by Alinari Brothers, Florence
CONSTANTINOPLE
OLD AND NEW
BY
H. G. DWIGHT
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1915
Copyright, 1915, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1915
A number of years ago it happened to the writer ofthis book to live in Venice. He accordingly read, asevery good English-speaking Venetian does, Mr. Howells’s“Venetian Life.” And after the first heat of hisadmiration he ingenuously said to himself: “I knowConstantinople quite as well as Mr. Howells knewVenice. Why shouldn’t I write a ‘Constantinople Life’?”He neglected to consider the fact that dozens of otherpeople knew Venice even better than Mr. Howells, perhaps,but could never have written “Venetian Life.”Nevertheless, he took himself and his project seriously.He went back, in the course of time, to Constantinople,with no other intent than to produce his imitation ofMr. Howells. And the reader will doubtless smile atthe remoteness of resemblance between that perfectlittle book and this big one.
Aside, however, from the primary difference betweentwo pens, circumstances further intervened to deflectthis book from its original aspiration. As the writermade acquaintance with his predecessors in the field,he was struck by the fact that Constantinople, in comparisonwith Venice and I know not how many othercities, and particularly that Turkish Constantinople, hasbeen wonderfully little “exploited”—at least in ourgeneration and by users of our language. He thereforeturned much of his attention to its commoner aspects—whichMr. Howells in Venice felt, very happily, underno obligation to do. Then the present writer found[viii]himself more and more irritated by the patronising orcontemptuous tone of the West toward the East, and hemade it rather a point—since in art one may choose apoint of view—to dwell on the picturesque and admirableside of Constantinople. And soon after his returnthere took place the revolution of 1908, whosevarious c