Around the Black Sea: Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania
William Eleroy Curtis
9781465656162
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There are several lines of steamers on the Black Sea, sailing under the Turkish, Greek, Russian, German, French, Austrian, and Italian flags. The steamers of the North German Lloyd Company, which sail from Genoa and Naples, through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are best, but they visit only the ports on the northern coast. The Austrian Lloyd steamers, which come from Trieste, are second best, and we were fortunate in obtaining cabins on the Euterpe, which is old-fashioned, but comfortable. The captain is an Italian of Trieste, who speaks English well, as do two of the under officers; the steward is thoughtful and attentive and the cook is beyond criticism. The passengers were a perfect babel, representing all the races and speaking all the tongues of the East, with several Europeans mixed in, each wearing his own peculiar costume. There were Turks of all kinds and all classes and all ages wearing fezzes of red felt; there were Persians, wearing fezzes of black lamb’s-wool; Albanians with fezzes of white felt, and Jews with turbans and long robes, such as they used to wear in the days of the Scriptures. We had several Turkish army officers to amuse us, and one big, blue-eyed general, who looked like a philanthropist, but is said to be a fiend of a fighter. There were English, German, and French tourists and rug buyers on their way to Persia and Turkestan; a very fat Austrian woman who was going to visit her son, consul at Batoum, and several Russians who had been visiting Paris and the Riviera and were on their way back to their homes in the Caucasus. We had five different kinds of clergymen—Mohammedan mullahs, wearing long robes and red fezzes with white turbans wound around them, Greek and Armenian priests, who are difficult to distinguish, and three Capuchin monks. One of them was a venerable old gentleman with a patriarchal beard, and one was a mere boy who smoked cigarettes incessantly—and a cigarette does not fit in well with the hood and robe of a monk. The Capuchins have several monasteries in Asia Minor, and maintain schools and do parish work in several of the cities along the coast, where there are communities of Roman Catholics. There were several Armenians in frock suits of broadcloth, low-cut vests, and snowy shirt bosoms, like those affected by lawyers in Mississippi and Arkansas, and one howling dervish. He did not look a bit as you would expect, but was a jaunty fellow in a fancy shirt of black cotton with white spots, without a collar, and an ordinary sack suit of gray European clothes over which he wore his distinctive coat of camel’s hair with wide sleeves and facings and trimmings of broad black braid, and on his shaven head a fez of gray wool with a wide band of black around it. He carried a dainty cane and whirled it around in his fingers like a dandy when he promenaded the deck. He was a presumptuous young dervish, for he endeavoured to enjoy the privileges of first-class passengers on a third-class ticket, which the deck steward would not permit. And when he did not go back to his proper place, after being told to do so, he was rudely elbowed down the stairs. It was not a respectful way to treat a saint in embryo, which howling dervishes are supposed to be, but I suppose the deck steward had his orders, and perhaps he was accustomed to dealing with such men. Most of the Turks in the first-class cabin did not come to the table, because they will not eat Christian food for fear that lard or some other extract of the despised pig was used in its preparation. They took their meals in their state-rooms, with their wives and children, where they made their own coffee over spirit lamps and drank water from red earthen jugs which they had filled at the sacred fountains before leaving Constantinople.
