BEAUTIES OF THE BOSPHORUS. 89
PLATE: PALACE OF BELISARIUS.
It was he also, who, fearful lest any daring vessel might escape through the rocky barrier during his transient and infrequent slumber, created that swift and dangerous reaction of the tide midway of the channel, well known as the "Devil's current;" while he is likewise accused of devouring drowning mariners, conjuring up tempests, and of having tinged the waters of the Black Sea by performing his ablutions in its polluted bosom!
Such is the legend of the Jouchi-Daghi, and such the glorious scene spread out beneath it.
THE PALACE OF BELISARIUS.
"To what base uses may we come at last!" SHAKESPEARE.
THE ruin known by the name of the Palace of Belisarius, is situated at an angle of the city walls; and, according to the authority of the learned Constantius, Archbishop of Senai, and Ex-Patriarch of Constantinople, (still in exile for his work on the Antiquities of Byzantium,) it was one of the Imperial residences of the first Constantine; and he asserts, that it owes its present designation to the fact of its being placed in a quarter of the city called Balata, a corruption of Balati, or the Gate of Palace, which has gradually grown, from the hasty and undigested impressions of the Frank travellers, into the Palace of Belisarius. There are the remains of a lofty and handsome gate-way, and the disposition of the masonry is highly extolled by architects; but to the mere tourist, the ruined Palace of Constantine, reft of its old-world associations, is possessed of little interst; and that little is absolutely negatived by the price which he is compelled to pay for a visit to its neighbourhood. To all oriental travellers it will be sufficient to state that the building has been given to the Jews as a pauper-hospital, for them to understand at once that it is almost unapproachable, being the head-quarters of filth, and the hotbed of pestilence, where every sense is pained by scents and sights calculated to inspire dread and disgust.
Masses of the fallen masonry cumber the foundations of the ruin, and every niche is alive with its noisome tenant; here it is a sallow and fleshless crone, whose lean and shrivelled hands can with difficulty disengage themselves from the filthy rags which are wrapped about her, in order to stretch themselves suplicatingly towards the stranger;