TURKISH STREET TYPES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5424, 15 August 1878, Page 3

TURKISH STREET TYPES.

(From the Loudon Graphic.) It ia a truism to say that nowhere else in Europe can we encounter such a variety of costume and figures as in Constantinople, much as old residents complain that in the last few decades it has been terribly Europeanised. We speak, of course, of Constantinople in ordinary times, not when each street is choked with fugitives from a pitiless war. The useful personage, whoso back, bent crescent - shape from constant loads, will carry up the steepest lane in Galata, with the aid of straps over brow and breast, a burden for which in England wo should send a horse and cart, is an old member of the confraternity of Hammals or porters, Armenian, probably by descent, water drinkers, and vegetarian almost beyond doubt. Not many hours should wo have been in Peru before meeting the cavass of the Russian Embassy—a sorb of office messenger, interpreter, and private policeman, rolled into one—the cavass, whose terrible moustache is the life-long envy of the cavassea of all the other missions. The street seller of those hard, fiat gingerbread cakes, which seem to possess a mysterious attraction for the sweettoothed Oriental; the barber, so dexterously removing with the most primitive ofj'razora, the superfluous hairs from the brow and skull of the true believer; the Turkish lady, whose yashmak is no longer a disguise, butthe thinnest of veils, adding, in fact, an additional charm to faces, whose regular features and dark eyes are often coupled with an unhealthy pallor, will meet ua again and again on our way to the bazaars. Not every day shall w© encounter in the street the stately couple who come next—the one the Patriarch of the Greek Church, the spiritual head, not of 200,000 Greeks alone of the Fanar and the suburbs, but of all Greeks within the Ottoman domains, a Pontiff who claims equality with Popes, and whose various dresses, white satined, particolored, violet-hued, clasped with diamonds and fringed foot-deop with gold embroidery, as ho aits enthroned in the Groat Church of the Patriarchate, would furnish whole chapters for a book of ecclesiastical millinery ; the other the Patriarch of the Armenian Rite—not the United Armenians, whoso squabbles with Mgr. Hnssoun amused Rome during the Ecumenical Council, but the true Mouophysites, in fenlal phrase, of Western Asia—a magnate, too, but of a lower rank, holding from the Catholicusof Etchmiad/Jn and liable to be deposed, or confirmed in it anew at the end of every three years. Islam supplies another type of monk in the person of a member of the Convent of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari—a body much resembling the Twirling Brotherhood in the zeal with which they metaphorically shako off from them the dust of this wicked world, and prove the strength of devotion by expenditure of muscular force. La-i-lah-il-la-lnh —the Moslem profession of faith—begins

the chant (after the customary prayer and recitative of the first Sura), as bending forward, raising themselves up and bending backward, bowing to right, erect again, bowing to left, they time with ever-quickening speed the six movements to the six syllables till distinct utterance becomes impossible; ‘‘and only,” says Murray, “the one syllable howl of lah can be heard toward the conclusion of the ceremony.” The Turkish bath presents features of a more familiar type. We append the description given by a French writer only three-and-twenty years ago. “ The stranger,” said he, “should beware of an entertainment, which might more truly be called a martyrdom ; we mean the Turkish bath. They take him and stretch him on a marble slab ; they dislocate his joints ; they torture, they strangle him. He is frozen, hammered, torn by pincers a whole hour, and then he is told that he has had a bath. They are sparing of the water ; the sufferer is bathed in his own sweat. Yet, they look so grave you cannot suspect there is any trick. So you] pay, and go with auger iu your heart, and plunge, Leander-like, into the Bosphorus to cure yourself by a Greek bath of your Turkish one.”