From All The Year Round. TURKISH SHOPS AND SHOPKEEPERS. I AM not going just yet to pronounce a talismanic text of the Koran as an "Open, Sesame!" and then plunge, boldly and adventurously, out of the fiery sun into the dim vaults of the Constantinople bazaars; I am merely going to stroll through the narrow, steep streets of the Sick Man's city, SHOP PING. to tell his beads, and curse the infidels all over the world. A Turkish shopkeeper's goods never project into the road; he has no outside counter, like our vendors of old books; he has no old clothes and regimentals fluttering obtrusively in a bankrupt, suicide way at his outer doors. His little quiet shop is flush with the roadside wall, and, sell he mouthpieces of pipes, clogs for the bath-room, or fez caps, they are all kept inside the little bin of a shop, on the floor of which, and at the entrance of which, sits the Turk, the master, with his red slippers before him. the striped silks, the sandal-wood beads, the aloes wood, the hippopotamus-hide whips, the spongy bath towels, or whatever it may be you want. I am not about to say that London walking is dull walking, when to me, well as I know, ,and much as I love the pure green country, Fleet street is always fairy-land, and Regent street enchanted ground; but still, I think, Tired of travellers' generalities, and really English shops are not to be compared to wishing to paint truly, brightly, and minutely those of Stamboul, in their power of afford- what I see, I yet know scarcely how to coning pleasure and amusement to the itinerant vey a thorough impression of Turkish shops. traveller and poetical or artistic vagabond- Whether I will or not, I must do it partly by izer, for reasons I will disclose anon. Lon- negatives. They are not enormous cleareddon shops, particularly your cork-leg shop, out ground floors of dwelling houses, as in your glass-eye shop, your Christmas toy shop, London, but rather, cobbler-like, one-storied your seal engraver's shop, furnish pretty ma- covered stalls, where lurks a turbaned quiet terial to the thoughtful humorist (and who man, aided by a black-eyed Greek, or fat can be a real humorist without being thought-brown Armenian boy, who, to prevent the ful); but then you have to blunt your nose good phlegmatic man using his legs, get down against glass, already opaquely steamed with from shelves, or from the inner vaulted bin, youthful breath, or to sneak about doorways, at the imminent risk of being suspected as a swell mobsman, or a cracksman, whereas in the Orient shops, all is open air life. The shops have the lids off; they are pies without crust. The goods are laid out on sloping slabs, such as our English fishmongers use to display their ichthyological specimens upon; they are small bulkheads, or, more generally, narrow open stalls, without doors or windows, and with limited platform counters, upon which robed and turbaned Turks sit, as if they had been acting stories from the Arabian Nights in private theatricals the night before, and had not yet had time to change their clothes. Those grave and reverend seigniors are always to be seen sitting crosslegged, generally smoking (Ali Baba or Mustapha), and half dozing, taking a quiet, unhurried, kind, and contemplative view of life. Donkeys may pass and bump against the door-posts, thieves may run by (as I have seen them), pursued by angry soldiers with drawn and flashing sabres, the Sick Man himself may ride past, sad, and hopeless, and felonfaced, with the ambassadors he is so sick of -mortally sick of-at his elbows, still, nothing moves our friend in the decent, unruffled mushroom button of a white or green turban. If a Job's messenger were to come in and say that his thirty-third wife was dead, or that fire from Allah had burnt down his villa at Buyukdere, the most Mustapha would do would be to fill his pipe rather quicker than usual, and puffing a little faster than usual, You could, I found, hardly imagine a man going to cheat you who was in no hurry to get down his gold striped cloths, who requested you to tuck up your legs on his counter, who sent out for lemonade or sherbet, or called for pipes and coffee. I used always to think, when I coiled myself up to buy some small trifle (a little red pipe bowl, or a pair of slippers, starred with seed pearl), that Mustapha treated me more like some bearded Arabian merchant who had come to spend a month with him, than a "loafing" infidel, who was in a burning hurry, and had only a sovereign or two to spend. But when that venerable and majestic Turk, sitting with his red slippers before him, began to ask me exactly two hundred times the worth of that pipe and those slippers, my respect for the trading instincts of the patriarchal old bearded humbug increased tremendously, though I knew he longed to spit in my coffee, and to football my unshorn head up and down the knubbly street. But I cannot describe Turkish shops and enable readers to decide what age of civilization they belong to, unless I also describe the streets that lead to them and from them, that face them, that back them, that bring them customers, that lame the said customers they take away. In like manner, as the nineteenth century Turk is one and the same city. with the Turk of the seventeenth century, so mountain defiles, after an inundation, or a are the Stamboul streets of 1860 much what landslip avalanche of shingle; a continuous the Stamboul streets must have been in 1660. stream of ox-carts, water-carriers and oil-carDrive the Turk back to-morrow to his Asian riers, ass drivers, bread sellers, carriages with tent, and he would be as fit for it as ever he Turkish ladies, pashas and their mounted was. Turn him out to-morrow from the city retinue, pack-horses, children, and Circassian he stole from Christianity, and you will find loungers. Then, on every vacant spot, strew the same streets that you would have found praying dervishes, sleeping, couchant, or ramwhen Busbequius or Grelot visited Turkey-pant wild dogs, melon-stalls and beggars, no better, no worse. In fact, tramp a Mos- throw up above a ball of solid fire and call it lem in Paris boots till corns spring out all the sun, and you have some small idea of over them, pinch his brown fists in Jouvin's the delight of walking in the Dying Man's white kid gloves, squeeze him in invisible green Yorkshire cloth, scent him, eye-glass But let us stroll down this street, where him, grease him, uniform him as you like, the planes toss their green jagged leaves over the Turk will still remain the unimprovable those gratings, and through which I see the Chinaman of the world, his religion a dan- stone turbans of tombstones, with, below, gerous lie, his polygamy detestable, every blue-and-gilt verses from the Koran; and let country he governs a dunghill or a desert. I us get to this slovenly, downhill lane, leading longed to tell Mustapha so, when he used to towards the bazaars. In it we shall find nearly sit stolid and divinely contemptuous if I came every class of Turkish trade. Those Armein a hurry for some tufted Broussa bath tow- nian porters, with their knots and ropes on els, upon which I know he would have bowed their backs, seem smilingly to promise as and wished me peace, believing that I was much, when they offer to carry home the complimenting him in my own tongue. I English sultan's purchases for him; and as never could have been angry, however, with for that, I believe they would carry home a Mustapha, unless he had actually struck me house on their back, if it only had handles. or called me "dog," because, however cheating he is, he is such a gentleman, with his mildness and his courtesy; he never does any thing ludicrous, or gauche, or intrusive, or fussy, or vulgar; he is never pert, never pompous, but looks like Abraham and Jonah, and Isaac and Jacob, and King Solomon, all in one. He seems to be incapable of fret or worry, and when he dies it will be, I am sure, without a struggle, for he was never fully awake yet. 'Way there!"—what a howl of "Guardia ! Guard-diah!" Just as I am stopping for a cup of water at a gilded fountain, I am driven into a mastie shop by eight Armenian porters, four behind and four in front, who are staggering up-hill with a gigantic steelbound bale, considerably larger than a chest of drawers, out of which ooze some yellow webs of silk; the load vibrates on two enormous lance-wood poles, thin at the ends and thick in the middle. Now, for a moment, these brawny men stop to rest the burden, and wipe their brown, rugged, beaded foreHonor the sturdy industry of the one, not even the Sultan himself, who pass howling out a rapid caution, through weeping funeral or laughing wedding procession, marching soldiers, any thing, any one; and who, for a few pence, unapplauded, perform the labors of Hercules in the Sick Man's city. As to the streets that lead to other shops than Mustapha's. In the first place, they are as narrow as Shoe lane, yes, even that Re-heads. gent street of Constantinople which leads to honest Armenian hammals, who stop for no St. Sophia, or the Piccadilly that branches on to the Hippodrome, is a mere rough path; and Stamboul being, like Rome, a city of seven hills, half its lanes are five times as steep as Holborn hill, London. They have no smooth slabs of side pavement, no kerbs, no lamps, no names, no guarding side-posts. They are covered with what is merely a jolt- Attentive to trade interests, as well as to ing mass of boulder stones thrown down loose the rights of hospitality, the Turk in the shop as when uncarted, or if sound trottoir for a where I have taken refuge, points to the few yards, in another step or two, ground heaps of mastic upon his counter, and I buy into holes or crushed into something like a a little to chew, because I have heard that stonemasons' yard, or a pebbly sea-beach Turkish ladies spend the greater part of their bristly with geological specimens. If a bar- lives in this harmless, but unintellectual oc ricade had just been pulled down, and not cupation. Mastic resembles gum Arabic; it yet levelled, so would it look; if it were the is crystally cracked, yellow in color, like a street of a mountain village, so would it be. pale flawed topaz, and has no taste at all to As in the days of Adam, and before Mac-mention. It produces no effect, opiate or adam was thought of, so are the streets still. To ladies impossible, to men terrible, imagine, plus, these torrent beds of streets, otherwise, and for all I could see, I might as well have spent my time sucking a little pebble, as school boys do when they are going to run a race, and want to improve their" wind." It lasted me about half an hour, till I got to the square of Bajazet. At the end of that time, I got alarmed, and taking it out of my mouth and looking at it, I found it changed to a sodden opaque lump of a dull white color, which tasted like chewed india-rubber; so I flipped it at a street dog in disgust, and the street dog swallowed it immediately, as he would have done, no doubt, had I thrown him a shoeing-horn or a pair of old braces. My Turk now wanted me to buy some henna powder for the ladies of my hareem, but I declined, upon which he clapped his hands, as if to call a negro boy, and in bounded a bushy white cat that he had died a rose pink to prove the excellence of his drugs; but even this did not induce me to buy any thing, for a clog-shop next door then allured me, and I stopped to see the apprentices with short adzes cleaving the wood, with which they fashioned the wooden sole, and the stilted supports of the "chopines," on which the Turkish ladies clatter across the cold marble floor of their fountain-sprinkled bath-rooms into the inner cells, where they disappear in a cloud of hot steam, from which merry laughing and splashing of water is heard at intervals. This is quite a West end shop for Turkey, and they sell all kinds of bath clogs here, from the plain wooden to the rich polished pairs, that are lozenged and starred with mother of pearl, in a style fit for Zobeide herself. How quiet and industrious the workmen are! twice as vigorous as Spaniards, and patiently enjoying the labor, with scarcely even an eye for passing scenes in the street. No plate-glass here, no varnished brackets, no pattern dwarf-boot, or skeleton bone foot; nothing but chips and shavings, and split, split, hammer, hammer; a man at work behind, with some curious glue, is inserting the patterns of pearl into the wooden slabs cleverly enough. ones, jasmin saplings from Albania. They are about five feet long, and form the real chibouk that the Turk loves when it is finished off with a small red tea-cup of a bowl, and this bowl is crammed with the choicest tobacco of Salonica. But what are those colored coils, like variegated eels, that twine and curl on the floor - for this is not a serpent charmer's? Those, innocent Frank, making a Guy of thyself with that bandaging of white muslin around thy wide-awake, are the tubes of narghilés, that the Turks love even more than the chibouk to smoke, because it is handier for small rooms, and does not require an orbit of five feet to cach puffer. Look opposite at that coffee-shop, which is the Turkish tavern: see those four men. They are mere poor men, but they come in to lunch off a farthing cup of coffee, without milk or sugar, and a puff of a narghile. How dignified they sit, till the globular bottles with the tubes coiled round them, are brought, the tobacco burning red above on its little cup of charcoal. See, only a dozen puffs, and a pure water from the fountain yonder is polluted in the bottles to a lemonade color by the smoke it softens, and its bubble and gurgle is soothing to listen to! Miles of that tubing, red, green, blue, and crimson, are made annually in Constantinople. See how nattily the men bind the tubes with fine wire, to make them at once flexible and endurable. A Roman alderman once wished he had a throat three yards along. The Turkish epicure of smoke has realized the wish by making his pinch of tobacco go further than any one else's. Now, having bought ten yards of narghilé tube, with a fringed end, do you want an amber mouthpiece for your chibouk ? Old Turks think they make the smoke bitter and harsh, and therefore prefer the plain cherry-wood pur et simple, sucking the smoke through it, and not putting the pipe between their lips at all; but tastes differ. Here is the shop. Cases on the counter; A pipe-shop next. One Nubian and three within them, rows of mouthpieces, looking like young Turks, with a patriarch watching sucked barley sugar, golden and transparent. them, while he does the finer work himself. The amber is of all shades of yellow, from One turban and three scarlet fezes, all cross-opaque lemon to burnt saffron. Some of those legged, and the Nubian holding his work be- more shiny ones are only glass, the dearer tween his bare feet, for his toes are handier ones have little fillets of diamonds round their than many men's fingers. Good-natured, necks, and are worth a purse full of piastres. like all his race, a chronic grin of unctuous Then there are dull green ones for cheap content is on his face. A worse specimen of pipes, and meerschaum cigaret holders for a slave for platform and inflammatory pur- the cursed Frank, who had better take care poses could not be found. The shop is not he is not made a fool of, for greasy Turkish much bigger than six cobblers' stalls thrown bank-notes are all alike, except for the numinto one, and the wall at the back is lined cral, which it requirs practice to read; and with pipe-stems, that rest against it like so then there are old and new notes, and bad many javelins. They are surely old Arab gold Medjids, and heaven knows what cheatspear-shafts, pierced for new and more peace-ings, in this scorpions' nest of foreign rogues ful purposes. The dark-red ones are cherry and schemers. Do you want rosaries? Here stems from Asia Minor; the rough light-brown are talismans made of chips of red cornelian, and aloes wood for incense. But here a ruder shop, not matted nor cushioned, arrests us. Plain beaten earth floor, rude counter. It looks more like a deserted blacksmith's shop than any thing else. It belongs to a maker of vermicelli. The owner, ghostly white in face, is brushing a huge tin tray round and round. The brush must be of wire, or be grooved or toothed, for I see the caked material under which the fire is, is drawn and cut into tubed threads, and he draws it out as it dries, like so much carded flax, dexterously indeed. I see that he knows when it is done by its threads snapping and springing up, crisp and loose, from the tin shield. Goodnatured people that the Turks are! He smiles and nods to me, quite pleased at the interest, the wandering, spying out Giaour takes in his performance. Now, moving on, I get into a strata of edibles, for here, at a window, lolls an immense hide full of white cheese, looking like stale cream cheese, become dry and powdery. It comes from Odessa, I am told, or is made of buffalo's milk, and is brought by camels from the interior of Anatolia, for butter and milk are all but unknown in Turkey. At the next stall are dried devil-fish, looking horrible with their hundred leathery arms; but here, where sword-fish were once a favorite dish, and the people are very poor, what can one expect? Who shall say the Turks are bigoted and intolerant, when here, next door to a baker's, is a shop with coarse Greek prints, representing Botzaris, the Greek hero, putting to death heaps of Turks, and here are tons of illustrations, in which the Turk is always getting the worst of it. There was a time when to even delineate a human being was death in Turkey, but now It was hard times for the bakers twenty years ago, when you could hardly be a week in Constantinople without seeing one of the tribe groaning with a nail through his ear, fastening him to his own shop door. That was the time when women were drowned in sacks in broad daylight, and when the sight of a rebel pasha's head, brought in in triumph, has taken away the appetite of many an Eng'lishman breakfasting with a Turkish minister. But there he (the baker) is now, floury, ghostly, and serious as ever, groping in that black cave of an oven at the back of his shop, or twisting rings of bread with all the unction of a feeder of mankind and a well-paid philanthropist. The fez shops are very numerous in the Sick Man's city, for turbans decrease, though slowly. They are of a deep crimson, and have at the top a little red stalk, to which the heavy blue tassel is tied, and which always, to prevent entanglement, is kept in stock with a sort of ornament of paper cut into a lace pattern round it. The blocks, too, for fezes to be kept on, are sold in dis tinct shops. You see them round as cheeses ranged in front of a Turk, who watches them as if expecting them to grow. Sometimes you could hardly help thinking they were pork-pies, were it not for the barelegged boy in the background, who, pushing the block with the flexible sole of his foot, keeps it even upon the lathe. Stationers and booksellers hardly show at all in Stamboul but in the bazaar, and there in a very limited way, and in a way, too, that makes the Englishman wish they were away altogether. The tailor, too, does not figure largely, though you see Turks busy in their shops sewing at quilted gowns and coverlids stuffed with down; and you seldom pass down a street without seeing a man with a bow, such as the Saracen of Snowhill could scarce ly have drawn, bowing cotton, with the twang and flutter peculiar to that occupation, the slave behind half buried in flock, or emerging from a swansdown sea of loose white feathers. The jewellers (frequently Jews) are chiefly in the bazaars, both for safety and convenience. There they sit, sorting great heaps of seed pearl, like so much rice, squinting through lumps of emerald, or weighing filigree ear rings, with veiled ladies looking on, and black duennas in yellow boots in waiting; but still there are also a few outsiders who sell coarse European watches with unseemly French cases, and large bossy silver cases for rosewater, or some such frivolous use, shaped like huge melons, and crusted with patterning, much watched over by the Turkish police, who, in blue tunics, red fezes, and white trousers, sneak about rather ingloriously, sav ing for the ornamented hostler at their belt, in which their pistols lurk. It is not possible to go up a Turkish street, if it contain any shops, without also finding among them a furniture shop, where Chineselooking stools and large chests are sold, their whole surface diced over with squares of mother-of-pearl, frequently dry and loose with extreme age. They are now, we believe, rather out of fashion in the palaces on the Bosphorus. But these are the first-rate streets in the lower alleys. Round the gates of the Golden Horn side of the city, down by the timber stores and the fish-market, the shops are mere workshops, and alternate with mere sheds, and with rooms full to the very door with shining millet or sesame, which looks like caraway seed; with charcoal stores, and fruitstands where little green peaches are sold, the true Turk preferring raw fruit to ripe. In these lower Thames-street sort of neigh borhoods-in winter knee-deep in mud, and in summer almost impassible for traffic, to What did they do before coffee, on which they now seem to live, sipping it all day, hot, and black, and thick, tossing off grounds and all. What is this shop, larger, wealthier, and more European-looking than its fellows, into which are now entering those three whiteveiled, nun-like Turkish ladies, who drew up their rich silks of violet and canary color quite above their yellow shapeless boots? They go in and sit down like so many chil wards the Greek quarter especially-you are sure to find a comb-shop, a little place about as large as four parrots' cages, where an old ragged Turk and a dirty boy are at work, straightening crooked bullocks' horns by heat, sawing them into slices, chopping them thinner and thinner, and cutting out the coarse teeth. The workman, powdered with yellow horn dust, perhaps stops now and then to drink from the red earth jug that is by his side, or deals with a mahabiji, or street sweetseller, for that delicious sort of rice blanc-dren, on the low four-legged rush-bottomed mange he sells-yellow all through, powdered with white sugar, and eaten with a brass spoon of delightfully antique shape; or, he is discussing a shovelful of burnt chesnuts; or, a head of maze boiled to a flowery pulp, eaten with a ring of bread, and washed down with a draught from the nearest fountain; or he is stopping, the patriarch master being away, to listen to the strains of an itinerant Nubian, who stands under a mosque wall yonder, with a curious banjo slung round his black neck, the handle a big knotted reed, the body large as a groom's sieve and of the same shape. Some black female servants are near, also listening, and I can tell from what African province they are by the scars of the three gashes that, as they think, adorn their left checks. Close to where they stand, perhaps, is a shop full of fleas and pigeons, the latter always hustling about and cooing, and evidently on sale. stools, so full of mirth and mischief, that they agitate and distress and delight the quiet Turkish sweetmeat-seller and his black servant, who is steeping little oval shelly pistachio nuts in a tin of melting sugar and oil. The walls of the shop are hung with long walking-sticks (cudgels, shall I say?) of that precious and fragrant sweetmeat known in hareems as "rahat li koum," or "lumps of delight," which is a glutinous sort of jelly of a pale lemon or rose color, floured with sugar, and knotted and veined with the whitest and curdiest of almonds. It is a delicious, paradisaical, gluey, business, and horribly indigestible. Those fair English friends of mine who nibble at a fowl, and sip hesitatingly at a jelly, wishing to be thought mere fragile angels who drink the essence of flowers and live upon invalid spoonfuls of the most refined delicacies, might derive benefit from seeing Zobeide, Scheherazade, and the fair Persian wives of that renowned pasha, Dowdy Pasha, consume yards—yes, positively yards-of those sweetmeat walking-sticks, washing down the bane of digestion with plentiful draughts of red-currant sherbet, raspberry sherbet, and fresh-made lemonade duly iced. But shall I forget the tobacco shops that are incessant, that are everywhere; upon the hills and down by the water, round St. Sophia and close even to the Sublime Porte itself? In England, I have always from a boy envied two tradesmen, the one the cabinet-maker, the other the ivory-turner; the one, dealing with such a dainty material; the other, so dexter- Then, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, ous and refined in its manipulations. In forgetful of this morning's handfuls of rice Turkey I always longed to be either a jewel- and fowl, and long greasy shreds torn with ler or a tobacco merchant, the one with a their own fair fingers from a lamb roasted stock so portable and costly, the other with a whole, how they fall to on piles of sweetcakes, trade so much patronized yet requiring so lit- ending with a few spadefuls of comfits, laughing tle apparatus. The tailor fags his eyes out, and talking all the time, and making light of but the tobacco merchant buys his skinfuls the whole affair! I wish I could here burst of tobacco, or his leathern bagfuls of the Sy- forth with some scraps of Hafiz or Ferdusi, rian jibili, the patient hammal throws it down and tell how warm and dark their antelope in his shop, he buys a tobacco-cutter, a pair eyes were, and how the lucid tinge of a sumof scales, a brass tiara of a tray to pile the mer daybreak lit their cheeks. But, to tell show samples up in, and there he sits and truth, Zobeide was a whale of a woman, and smokes till a purchaser come. No heart-break-was ruddled, not merely painted, with rouge; ing change, no docks to trudge to, no any the fair Persian had Indian ink eyebrows, thing. Nothing but to drag up brimming joining architecturally over her nose; and handfuls of the saffron thread and to sell it by Scheherazade was white as a wall with smears the oke, trebling the price, of course, to an of paint that marred her once pretty nose and accursed Frank. What did the Turks do (I often thought) before smoking was invented? Did they play at chess, cut off Christians' heads perpetually, or murder their wives like Bluebeard, that vulgar type of the Turk? dimpling mouth. As soon as they were trotted off in their little pea-green and gilt carriage, guardian negress and all, I went into the shop, about which I had all this time been loafingly prowling, and called, clapping my |