The road toward Buyukdere

The afternoon of the Levantine brings out carriages full of ladies and gentlemen, and sends them spinning over the hills toward the Sweet Waters of Europe, or far up the road toward Buyukdere. The reputation of Constantinople for its bodge podge of races is justified by study of the types seen in any gathering of the ladies of the European colony. There is the long-featured, fair-haired English woman, who clings to the London cut of her dress, notwithstanding its power to attract the astonished eyes of all other nations; there is the stout and crimson German woman, with her fondness for startling buttons; there is the slight and smiling French woman, serene in the midst of a colour scheme harmoniously worked out to the tips of her dainty shoes. There is the Italian woman, black of hair and brilliant of eye, who loves to introduce into her neat dress discords of gold chains, and a hat al-ways too ambitious. There is the buxom brunette of an Armenian, with full lips and too full a nose, and there is the Greek, most celebrated of all the southern peoples for features that are irregular, a voice that is mellow, and eyes that have a special glaze upon them for concealing thought behind a crystal promise of frankness.

Greek from Athens

If there is a woman in all the crowd less liable than any other to find acceptance as a type of beauty in feature or in complexion, for some mysterious reason that woman is sure to be a Greek from Athens. But next to her is the Levantine, who is colourless in her complexion and composite in her features, who assures you that she is English, or French, or Italian, but who knows no environment save that of Pera, although she can talk to you in French or English or Italian or Greek or Turkish, and in either language shows by her accent that it is not quite her own. She too will never venture in her conversation outside of the safe limits of the Levantine quadrilateral, devised to avoid giving offence to unknown and incomputable susceptibilities guided istanbul tour.

The principle of assuming the existence of difficulties unknown and unknowable in a medley of races, limits the character of the social life of Pera. This life is like that in a house where visitors unacquainted with each other have been brought together and must be amused by such devices as the hostess commands. It is marked by a frenzied pursuit of amusements known to be found in every country. One cannot give a dinner party without having it followed by a ball, and preferably a ball in costume or in masque, and as the Turk bent on a tour of exploration among the curiosities of Pera, discovers that Pera ladies, are ogled by lines of young men as they come out of the church of Santa Maria, or gently carried to the ball in Sedan chairs through the narrow streets, he fancies that in this tenderness toward woman he has seen the source of the peculiar power of the European to push his affairs, to succeed in business, and to live in what seems like limitless luxury. Perhaps he has.