Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910

Chapter Seven: From Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express, 1910

95 u chapter seven From Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express, 1910 Lizzie and her party traveled in 1910 on the famed Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.The Orient Express,the“pearl of the Orient,”was the epitome of great trains with exquisite wood paneling, fine china, immaculate linens, and Lalique crystal. Its first run was in 1883 from Gare de l’Est in Paris. By 1910 its fame had spread. On this trip Lizzie was in the company of her young nieces Anne Wickham Sinkler and Laura Stevens. Family legend had it that Anne had fallen in love with a young country doctor, William Kershaw Fishburne. Anne’s mother, Anne Wickham Porcher Sinkler, did not approve of the young, impoverished doctor and so arranged with her sister-in-law that Anne be taken out of the country for five months, hoping to distract her attentions. The grand plan did not work. It is said that Anne returned to the United States and fell off the train at Branchville , South Carolina, into the arms of Kershaw Fishburne. They were married on April 14, 1910. Turkey in 1910 was an exotic, Muslim country with close ties to Germany . Lizzie traveled in style. The foursome stayed in the fashionable suburb of Pera. It was in this more modern setting that the European governments built their new embassies and consulates. Pera Galata was the district to the north, across the Golden Horn from the old city of Constantinople . The Pera Palace Hotel had been constructed by the Orient Express line in 1892 expressly to host visitors arriving on the Orient Express train from Paris and Venice. The hotel had exquisite views over the Golden Horn and was a stately six stories. The Golden Horn was a small gulf separating the ancient city of Constantinople from suburbs to the north. Two small 96 Tales from the Grand Tour rivers fed this gulf, one of which, the Kagithane, was nicknamed the Sweet Waters of Europe. The term“Golden”was appropriate because of the glow from the gardens and palaces of the sultans and great Ottoman families who resided along the banks of this small gulf. The Pera Palace overlooked this gulf. Its public rooms were deeply carpeted in Persian rugs. Lizzie’s party had spacious rooms in this grand old hotel. Lizzie made good use of her extensive and well placed connections. Ambassador John G.A. Leishman was a native of Pittsburgh and a wealthy industrialist. He was a friend of Eck and Lizzie, and made arrangements for them to see the jewels in the Sultan’s treasury, located in the Imperial Treasury in the Third Court of the Topkapi Sarayi.Ambassador Leishman had purchased Palazzo Corpi, a magnificent building which was to become the U. S. embassy in 1907. Another notable acquaintance was Herman V. Hilprecht, one of the outstanding Assyriologists. Hilprecht lived between his native Germany and the United States. He was an important figure in the expansion of Semitic studies in the United States to include Akkadian and Sumerian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia. Lizzie and Eck knew Hilprecht because he was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in 1886. He had begun as a lecturer in Egyptology but assumed a professorship of Assyriology and comparative Semitic philology. He had done extensive excavations at Nippur , a Sumerian city that had been occupied for three millennia.1 Dr. Hilprecht shepherded Lizzie’s party through the museum in the several parts of the Sultan’s former seraglio (harem palace). The sultans had moved in 1853 from the seraglio, called the Topkapi Palace, to a modern palace on the Bosphorus, called the Dolmabahce Palace. The Museum of Oriental Antiquities, which Lizzie’s party visited, housed the antiquities and treasures from all over Anatolia and the Middle Eastern dominions of the Ottoman Empire including ancient Mesopotamia. It was part of the Topkapi complex, the original palace of the Sultans. Lizzie’s party also visited the Dolmabahce Palace during their stay at the small town of Tarabya on the Bosphorus. Lizzie, Carrie, Eck, Laura, and Anne had the pleasure of seeing Turkey at a time when it still held much of the flavor of the old East. 1. Benjamin R. Foster,“Herman Vollrath Hilprecht,”in American National Biography , ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 10 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10: 825–27. “There’s Nothing Calm...