The pasha’s oriental greeting was very much to our liking. I went to have a look at the seraskir. At the entrance to his tent I met his favorite page, a dark-eyed boy of about fourteen, in rich Arnaut dress. The seraskir, a gray-haired old man of the most ordinary appearance, sat in deep dejection. Around him was a crowd of our officers. On coming out of his tent, I saw a young man, half-naked, in a sheepskin hat, with a club in his hand and a wineskin on his shoulder. He was shouting at the top of his lungs. They told me that this was my brother, the dervish, who had come to greet the victors. We had trouble driving him away.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arzrum. Asiatic luxury. The climate. A cemetery. Satirical verses. The palace of the seraskir. A Turkish pasha’s harem. The plague. The death of Burtsov. Leaving Arzrum. The return trip. A Russian journal.
Arzrum (incorrectly called Arzerum, Erzrum, Erzron) was founded around the year 415, in the time of Theodosius the Second,63 and was called Theodosiopolis. No historical memories are connected with his name. I knew only this about it, that here, by the testimony of Hajji-Baba, a Persian ambassador, in satisfaction for some offense, was presented with calf’s ears instead of human ones.64
Arzrum is considered the main city of Asiatic Turkey. Its inhabitants are reckoned at 100,000, but the number seems greatly exaggerated. Its houses are of stone, the roofs are covered with turf, which gives the city a very odd appearance if you look at it from above.
The main overland trade between Europe and the East is carried on through Arzrum. But few goods are on sale there; they are not displayed, something Tournefort also observed, who writes that in Arzrum a sick man may die from the impossibility of obtaining a spoonful of rhubarb, while whole sacks of it are to be found in the city.65
I know of no expression more meaningless than the words “Asiatic luxury.” This saying probably originated in the time of the Crusades, when poor knights, having left the bare walls and oaken chairs of their castles, saw for the first time red couches, multicolored rugs, and daggers with flashy gems on their hilts. Nowadays we might say “Asiatic poverty,” “Asiatic swinishness,” and so on, but luxury is, of course, proper to Europe. In Arzrum you cannot buy for any amount of money what can be found in a grocer’s shop in any little country town of Pskov province.
The Arzrum climate is harsh. The city is built in a hollow that is over 7,000 feet above sea level. The surrounding mountains are covered with snow for a great part of the year. The land is treeless but fertile. It is irrigated by many springs and crisscrossed everywhere with aqueducts. Arzrum is famous for its water. The Euphrates flows two miles from the city. But there are a great many fountains everywhere. Beside each of them hangs a tin dipper on a chain, and the good Muslims drink and cannot praise it enough. Timber is supplied from Sagan-loo.
In the Arzrum arsenal we found a great many old weapons, helmets, cuirasses, swords, rusting there probably since the time of Godfrey.66 The mosques are low and dark. Outside the city there is a cemetery. The tombstones usually consist of posts adorned with stone turbans. The tombs of two or three pashas are distinguished by a greater fancifulness, but there is nothing refined about them: no taste, no thought…One traveler writes that of all Asiatic cities, in Arzrum alone did he find a clock tower, and it was broken.
The innovations undertaken by the sultan have not yet penetrated to Arzrum. The troops still wear their picturesque eastern garb. Between Arzrum and Constantinople there is rivalry, as there is between Kazan and Moscow. Here is the beginning of a satirical poem composed by the janissary Amin-Oglu.67
Stambul is praised now by the giaours,
But tomorrow with an iron heel,
Like a sleeping snake, they’ll crush it,
And off they’ll ride—and leave it so.
Stambul dozes in the face of trouble.
Stambul has renounced the prophet;
There the truth of the ancient East
By the cunning West is clouded.
Stambul for the sweets of vice
Betrays both sabre and devotion.
Stambul forgets the battle’s sweat
And drinks wine at the hour of prayer.
There has died the faith’s pure fire,
In graveyards there the women walk,
They send old crones out to the crossroads
And to the harems bring back men,
While the bribed eunuch lies there sleeping.
Not so is Arzrum in the mountains,
Our Arzrum of the many roads;
We sleep not in shameful luxury,
We dip no disobedient cup
In the wine of depravity, noise, and fire.
We fast: and from the streams of sober
Holy water we quench our thirst;
In multitudes both swift and dauntless
Our horsemen into battle fly;
Our harems are inaccessible,
Our eunuchs incorrupt and stern,
And our women sit there peacefully.
I lived in the seraskir’s palace, in the rooms where the harem used to be. For a whole day I wandered through countless passages, from room to room, from roof to roof, from stairway to stairway. The palace seemed to have been looted; the seraskir, intending to flee, took with him all that he could. The couches were stripped, the rugs removed. When I strolled around the town, the Turks beckoned to me and showed me their tongues. (They take every Frank for a doctor.) I was tired of it and ready to pay them back in kind. My evenings I spent with the intelligent and amiable Sukhorukov; the similarity of our pursuits brought us together. He told me of his literary intentions, his historical research, once embarked upon with such zeal and success. The limited nature of his wishes and expectations is truly touching. It will be a pity if they are not realized.68
The seraskir’s palace was a picture of perpetual animation: where the sullen pasha had silently smoked amidst his wives and dishonorable boys, his vanquisher received reports of his generals’ victories, gave out pashaliks, discussed new novels. The pasha of Mush came to Count Paskevich to ask for his nephew’s post. Walking through the palace, the imposing Turk stopped in one of the rooms, uttered a few words with animation, and then fell to brooding: in that very room his father had been beheaded at the command of the seraskir. There you have real Eastern impressions! The famous Bey-bulat, the terror of the Caucasus,69 came to Arzrum with the headmen of two Circassian villages that had revolted during the last wars. They dined with Count Paskevich. Bey-bulat is a man of about thirty-five, short and broad-shouldered. He does not speak Russian, or pretends not to. I was glad of his arrival in Arzrum: he had already been my guarantee of a safe passage through the mountains and Kabarda.
Osman Pasha, taken prisoner in Arzrum and sent to Tiflis together with the seraskir, asked Count Paskevich for the safekeeping of the harem he was leaving in Arzrum. During the first few days this was forgotten. One day at dinner, talking about the calm of the Muslim town, occupied by 10,000 troops and in which not one of the inhabitants had made a single complaint about soldierly violence, the count remembered Osman Pasha’s harem and told Mr. Abramovich70 to go to the pasha’s house and ask his wives if they were content and there had been no offense against them. I asked leave to accompany Mr. A. We set out. Mr. A. took along as an interpreter a Russian officer who had a curious story. At the age of eighteen he had been taken prisoner by the Persians. They had castrated him, and for more than twenty years he had served as a eunuch in the harem of one of the shah’s sons. He told of his misfortune and his life in Persia with touching simple-heartedness. With respect to physiology, his testimony was precious.