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Updated: September 25, 2025
I was asked by Count Tolstoy, the aide-de-camp, and also by Treloar, if I would see the General, and accordingly did so, boarding a caique at Galata, and being rowed to his yacht "Luculle." First I saw the Baroness Wrangel, a bright, bird-like lady, trim and neat and cheerful, speaking English like one of us. Baron Wrangel is a tall, gaunt, and very remarkable-looking personage.
With what a rebound of high spirits on my part it is quite impossible to say t I thought I had never seen so beautiful a morning, and indeed the scene, apart from all considerations of mood, was very charming. The receding hill of Galata, with its bowers of green, its mosques and minarets and palaces, lay steeped in the early sunrise, and looked as lovely as a dream.
Sophia, Stamboul, the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge, the heights of Pera, Dolmabagtche, Yildiz slowly unfold, revealing new beauties, new mysteries, with each revolution of the steamer's screw, I have declared that in all the world there is no city so lovely as this capital of the Caliphs.
The Mediterranean was patrolled from end to end by air-ships and dynamite cruisers, and aërial scouts marked every movement of the victorious Sultan until it became absolutely certain that his objective point was Scutari. Meanwhile, two millions of men had been concentrated between Galata and Constantinople, while another million occupied the northern shore of the Dardanelles.
The churches, notably Sancta Sophia, were more than usually crowded with women; that was all, for the gates not only remained open, but traffic went in and out of them unhindered out even to the Turkish camp, the Byzantines actually competing with their neighbors of Galata in the furnishment of supplies.
By midnight the settlements and farmhouses of the up-country were abandoned; almost the entire district from Galata to Fanar on the Black Sea was reduced to ashes. The Greek Emperor had no longer a frontier or a province all that remained to him was his capital.
On Galata Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where there had been an eddying current of turbans and tarbooshes, bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the belated few.
The glorious hills with their towns and villages, the number of palaces, gardens, kiosks, and mosques, Chalcedon, the Prince's Islands, the Golden Horn, the continual bustle on the sea, the immense fleet, besides the numerous ships of other nations, the crowds of people in Pera, Galata, and Topana all unite to form a panorama of singular beauty.
To furnish himself with competent instructors, he made arrangements for a normal school among the Greeks of Galata, a central place in which many children were begging for instruction, and he was evidently encouraged by the smiles of heaven upon his labors.
We were up early, eager for sight-seeing, and little boats soon carried us to the custom house pier on the Galata side. Open carriages drawn by wiry Turkish horses and driven by Turkish drivers were there in readiness to carry us across the Golden Horn to explore the sights of Stamboul.
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