TURKISH HORRORS.

Evening Star, Issue 4247, 6 October 1876, Page 4

TURKISH HORRORS.

On the same evening of the revolt detachments of infantry patrolled the streets of Stamboul, and after midnight, when the ordinary population was in bid, suddenly pounced down upon several assemblies of Softas, wno, under the preience of devotion, were busy plotting in the smaller mosques of the Mussulman quarters. There does not seem to have been any resistance offered, and if there were any spectators of the raid they have made no sign ; but it is certain that 150 gentlemen in long tunics and white turbans were quietly taken on board a couple of transports lying ready in the Golden Horn, where they were joined by sixty persons of the Circassian persuasion. One of the officers of the troops on duty, from whom the tale has reached me, declares that there were no remonstrances made, no questions at all asked. The poor wretches appear to have accepted their fate with the utmost stoicism, as the tugs steamed down to the Sea of Marmora, where one after the other, 210 men were dropped into the water, and sent by this short sea passage to the Paradise of Mohammed, with a 32-pound shot fastened to their feet. Now all this is perfectly well known to every resident q| Constantinople, and that something unusual was about to take place was so patent to the foreign representatives that, on this same evening, several hundred armed Croats, Montenegrins and Greek sailors patrolled the streets of Bayukdiri from sunset till sunrise, scaring the peaceable inhabitants out of their minds by a demonstration for which there was no earthly necessity, but which, strangely enough, coincided with a telegram in the Parisian papers next morning to the effect that Constantinople was in revolution, that the garrison had mutinied, and that the Ministers had been arrested and put to death—all of which was a Stock Exchange manoeuvre backed up by Russia and Greece, whose policy it is to spread alarming reports, in order, if possible, to have a pretext for occupying the harbor with the Black Sea fleet before the British ironclads can steam up there from the more distant Dardanelles. The wholesale destruction of the Softas and Tcherkesses cannot, of course, be justified according to the standard of civilised Christendom, but its effects there have been most excellent. But the Softas are utterly cowed, and are showing the greatest anxiety to go home to their families, for which the Porte gives them every facility by granting free passports and free tickets by rail and steamer. The danger to Christians living in the Capital had thus been conjured away ; but it is to be feared that these fanatics will vent their disappointed spleen upon the unfortunate Rayahs in those provincial localities where there are no foreign consuls to demand an investigation of their atrocities,—Constantinople correspondent.