Addicts put on a show with snakes and bears

 

68a

 

67b

This scene depicts a bizarre performance put on by "addicts" and their confederates the same day. In (67b) the sultan, grand vizier, and their retinues appear essentially as they are in (65b) except that the magician has been replaced by a small group of musicians and performers, the leader of which is bowing before the grand vizier. All of them seem completely oblivious to the collocation of nightmarish images that Levni has assembled for us in (68a), the description of whose events is better left to Vehbi:

Adhering to the compelling order that must be obeyed, a group of addicts, a regiment of wretches who carried their souls in their pockets, drew up four to a line before the glorious sultan and then began competing with one another to see who could stagger about the most grotesquely. In front of the sultan they sat down as if in a parley and permission was granted to them to act out a scene from the coffee-houses of Süleymaniye before the sovereign as great as Solomon. Some of them sang exuberantly, uttering the words:

Opium is the most precious comestible on the table of life
It is fitting that it be worth life itself.
For someone who can obtain but meager joy
Opium is the water of life itself.

While others embellished upon the couplet:

"Oh Vehbi! See what the coffeehouse-keeper has done:
He has served us coffee as insipid as dishwater as if we were imbeciles!

And declaimed:

Oh cupbearer! Serve coffee such that
My lips should think it water from a well in Paradise.

Turning their minds to tobacco, they uttered spark-spewing sighs. One of them recited:

If you want to get higher than the Ninth Heaven
Chase your opium with two cups of coffee.

As he did, another, with his own head bent forward like a ripe poppy-head and his tongue hanging out like a smoke-enveloped flame of spent gunpowder, struck up an air singing:

The finest feast among friends who are kindred spirits
Is two cups of coffee and a pipe of pungent tobacco.

And as he sang, he accompanied himself on the trumpet of his nose with a noise resembling the buzzing of a bee. His sidekick meanwhile in the exuberance of opium’s merriment scratched himself continuously with the nails of a mangy hand while spouting forth intoxicated poetry:

Could the strength of a junkie like me ever be sufficient to grapple with fate?
But with the black champion I can wrestle it down.

Just at this point, bright new coins, supplied by the grand vizier, were suddenly scattered over them like the falling petals of almond-tree blossoms by the hand of the Armorer Boşnak Selim Agha, a man whose own addiction was to spectacle. And suddenly the field was transformed into a flower garden adorned with gold and silver adornments. Just as each one of them, sticking out their beaks like pecking chickens, was on the point of gobbling up the gold with the greediness of a goat, the sergeants set off the firecrackers, the retorts of which threw them each and every one into consternation like a canary who has spotted a hawk.

To "calm" these misfortunates down it is ordered that they be served coffee. But just as it is being offered, more firecrackers are set off and this time bears, apes, and snakes are set upon them as well. Another shower of coins from the grand vizier causes them to regroup so that the show can go on. Now a snake-handler dressed up as a dope-dealer comes onto the field. The opium-addicts flock around the basket he’s carrying, supposing that it contains opium. They open it and discover it to be full of snakes, which causes them to run about in a panic again. Another round of coins brings them back however but now the snake-handler begins performing his act with his snakes and the ruckus begins all over again. At length the show draws to a close.

Compared with this free-for-all, the two sackers leading the procession of boys to be circumcised in the background look positively dignified.

Notes

1. Addicts: A word of caution is in order. The word translated as "addict" here is tiryakî, a word applied in Ottoman times to someone who was a habitual user of opium but also to those who consumed alcohol, tobacco, and even coffee. "Freak" (in its more modern senses) might be a more apt translation. The performance is certainly freakish.

2. Süleymaniye: There is still a district, located between the mosque’s outer courtyard of the Süleymaniye mosque and the second and third medreses on the Golden Horn (south) side of the complex that is called “Tirkyakiler Çarşısı”--"Market of the Tiryakis". "Süleyman" is of course the Turkish form of the name "Solomon".

3. Coffee: The coffee referred to here is the powerful Turkish infusion of powdered coffee served in a demitasse.

4. Black champion: Opium.

5. Boşnak: Bosnian.

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