The effect of the golden tress that I had assisted to weave was very beautiful, binding as it did the rich dark hair of the bride upon her fair young brow, and then falling to her feet; and her whole costume would have been eminently graceful, had she not been sinking under the heat and weight of the eternal cachemire. The nuptial crowns which I have mentioned are about a foot in height, and shaped like a beehive; when they were removed from the heads of the young couple, they were carefully enveloped in a handkerchief of colored gauze, and borne away to be hung up in the chapel of the bridegroom’s house; where they will remain until the death of either of the parties, when the deceased is crowned for the second and last time, in the open coffin in which he is borne to the grave.
The Greeks make almost as much toilette for a funeral as for a marriage. Where the deceased is young and pretty, she is decked out in her gayest apparel, and not unfrequently has her eyebrows stained, and a quantity of rouge spread over her cheeks, to cheat death for a few brief hours of his lividness; her gloved hands are carefully displayed; she is tricked out in jewels; and this frightful mockery is rendered still more revolting by the fact that she is thus paraded through the streets, followed by her female relatives, who weep, and shriek, and bewail themselves with a transient violence truly national. At the grave-side all the finery is stripped from the stiffened corpse: the friends carry it away; a cover is placed over the coffin; and the poor remains, that were only a few instants previously so lavishly adorned, are consigned to the earth of which they are so soon to form a part.
The Fèz Manufactory—Singular Scene—A Turk at Prayers—Pretty Girls—Progress of Turkish Industry—Mustapha Effendi—Process of Manufactures—Omer Effendi and the Arabs—Avanis Aga, the Armenian—The Fraud Discovered—The Imperial Apartments—Departure for the Seraï-Bournou—The Outer Court—The Orta Kapoussi—The Pestle and Mortar of the Ulémas—The Garden of Delight—The Column of Theodosius—Arrival of the Sultan—Ancient Greek Inscriptions—Confused Inscription—The Diamond—Memories of Sultan Selim.
No traveller should leave Constantinople without paying a visit to the Fèz Manufactory of Eyoub, where all the caps for the Sultan’s armies are now made. The building, which is entirely modern, and admirably adapted to its purpose, stands in the port, near the palace of Azmè Sultane, on the site of an ancient Imperial residence. It is under the control of Omer Lufti Effendi, late Governor of Smyrna, a man of known probity and talent:[10] and its immediate superintendence has been intrusted to Mustapha Effendi; whose ready courtesy to strangers enables European travellers to form an accurate idea of the state and progress of the establishment.