DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.12665#0269
REVERENCE FOR THE GRAVE. 253
before the gates were closed, to be sitting on a fa-
vourite tombstone near St. Stephen's Gate. The
great Turkish burying-ground is outside the wall,
near this gate ; and regularly, on a fine afternoon,
towards sunset, the whole Turkish population, in
all their gay and striking costumes, might be seen
wandering among the tombs. Few things strike a
traveller in the East more than this, and few are to
us more inexplicable. We seldom go into a
graveyard except to pay the last offices to a de-
parted friend, and for years afterward we never find
ourselves in the same place again, without a shade
of melancholy coming over us. Not so in the
East; to-day they bury a friend, to-morrow they
plant flowers over his grave, and the next day, and
the next, they tend and water them, and once a
week, regularly, they sit by the grave. On every
holyday it is a religious duty to go there ; and
as often as they walk out for health or pleas-
ure, they habitually turn their footsteps to the bu*
rial-ground. To them the grave is not clothed
with the same terrors. It is not so dark and
gloomy as to us. They are firmer believers than
we are, though, as we think, in a false and fatal
creed; and to them there is a light beyond the
grave, which we of a better faith can seldom see.
It was a beautiful picture to behold the graveyard
thronged with Turkish women, in their long white
veils. It would, perhaps, be too poetical to look
upon them all as mourners. Perhaps, indeed, it
would not be too much to say that, of the immense
¥3, "
before the gates were closed, to be sitting on a fa-
vourite tombstone near St. Stephen's Gate. The
great Turkish burying-ground is outside the wall,
near this gate ; and regularly, on a fine afternoon,
towards sunset, the whole Turkish population, in
all their gay and striking costumes, might be seen
wandering among the tombs. Few things strike a
traveller in the East more than this, and few are to
us more inexplicable. We seldom go into a
graveyard except to pay the last offices to a de-
parted friend, and for years afterward we never find
ourselves in the same place again, without a shade
of melancholy coming over us. Not so in the
East; to-day they bury a friend, to-morrow they
plant flowers over his grave, and the next day, and
the next, they tend and water them, and once a
week, regularly, they sit by the grave. On every
holyday it is a religious duty to go there ; and
as often as they walk out for health or pleas-
ure, they habitually turn their footsteps to the bu*
rial-ground. To them the grave is not clothed
with the same terrors. It is not so dark and
gloomy as to us. They are firmer believers than
we are, though, as we think, in a false and fatal
creed; and to them there is a light beyond the
grave, which we of a better faith can seldom see.
It was a beautiful picture to behold the graveyard
thronged with Turkish women, in their long white
veils. It would, perhaps, be too poetical to look
upon them all as mourners. Perhaps, indeed, it
would not be too much to say that, of the immense
¥3, "