"Often, while gazing at Constantinople from the bridge of the Sultan Valideh, I would be confronted by the question, 'What is to become of this city in one or two centuries...? ' Alas! there is but little doubt that the great holocaust of beauty at the hands of civilization will have been already accomplished. I can see that Constantinople of the future, that Oriental London, rearing itself in mournful and forbidding majesty upon the ruins of the most radiant city of the world. Her hills will be levelled, her woods and groves cut down, her many-colored houses razed to the ground; the horizon will be shut in on all sides by long rows of palatial dwellings, factories, and workshops, broken here and there by huge business-houses and pointed spires; long, straight streets will divide Stambul into ten thousand square blocks like a checker-board; telegraph-wires will interlace like some monster spider-web above the roofs of the noisy city; across the bridge of the Sultan Valideh will pour a black torrent of stiff hats and caps; the mysterious retreats of the Seraglio will become a zoological garden, the Castle of the Seven Towers a penitentiary, the Hebdomon Palace a museum of natural history; everything will be solid, geometrical, useful, gray, hideous...
"Often, while gazing at Constantinople from the bridge of the Sultan Valideh, I would be confronted by the question, 'What is to become of this city in one or two centuries...? ' Alas! there is but little doubt that the great holocaust of beauty at the hands of civilization will have been already accomplished. I can see that Constantinople of the future, that Oriental London, rearing itself in mournful and forbidding majesty upon the ruins of the most radiant city of the world. Her hills will be levelled, her woods and groves cut down, her many-colored houses razed to the ground; the horizon will be shut in on all sides by long rows of palatial dwellings, factories, and workshops, broken here and there by huge business-houses and pointed spires; long, straight streets will divide Stambul into ten thousand square blocks like a checker-board; telegraph-wires will interlace like some monster spider-web above the roofs of the noisy city; across the bridge of the Sultan Valideh will pour a black torrent of stiff hats and caps; the mysterious retreats of the Seraglio will become a zoological garden, the Castle of the Seven Towers a penitentiary, the Hebdomon Palace a museum of natural history; everything will be solid, geometrical, useful, gray, hideous...
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