Festivals which celebrate events in a course of history

On every side there is the pressure of a dominant Oriental society and polity, with its theocratic government, autocracy, the creed of Islam, polygamy, slavery, eunuchs, secluded and veiled womanhood, men in long robes and turbans, sluggishness, repose, the speech of Central Asia softened by the accents of Persia and Arabia, minarets, domes surmounted by the Crescent, graceful but strange salutations, festivals which celebrate events in a course of history not your own, and express joys which have never gladdened your souL And mingling, but not blended, with this world of Asiatic thought and sentiment and manner, is a European world, partly native, partly foreign, with ideas of freedom, science, education, bustle, various languages, railroads, tramways, ladies in the latest Parisian fashions, church bells, the banner of the Cross, newspapers and periodicals from every European and American capital, knitting scattered children to the life of their fatherland. The members of the foreign communities in the City of the Sultan do not forget the lands of their birth, or of their race and allegiance. Though circumstances have carried them far from their native shores and skies, physical separation does not sever them from the spirit of their peoples.

Turkish policeman dares enter

Nay, as if to make patriotic sentiment more easy, foreigners are placed under the peculiar arrangements embodied in what are termed the Capitulations, whereby, in virtue of old treaties, they enjoy the privilege of living to a great extent under the laws of their respective countries, with little interference on the part of the Ottoman Government When your house is your castle, in the sense that no Turkish policeman dares enter it without the authorization of your Consulate or Embassy, when legal differences between yourself and your fellow countrymen are submitted to judges, and argued by barristers, bred in the law which rules in your own land, when your church and school can be what they are at home, and when you can forward your letters, not only to foreign countries but even to some parts of the Turkish Empire, with a stamp bearing the badge of your own Government, it is natural that European residents in Constantinople should be able to preserve their special character, both after living here for many years, and also from generation to generation.

A Mohammedan polity is opposed to the assimilation of strangers, unless the aliens become converts to Islam. Whatever process of assimilation goes on in Constantinople appears in the slow changes of the East towards some likeness to the West Otherwise, the European world is as present to the view as the Asiatic, and together they spread a wide vista before the mind.