Islam had deep roots in the Ottoman Empire. The Koran provided a common worldview for everyday life, on the basis of which the natives interpreted both their personal and social experience. Religion also had the pragmatic role of constructing the daily work cycle of Tuna Vilayet. The inhabitants scheduled their day by the cry of the ' immaun' from the mosque. The prayer call served to determine what time it was, thus making time acquire a religious rather than a secular meaning.
Christianity and Islam vary in what they teach about the importance or insignificance of time and the substance of temporality and eternity. These are concepts inseparably bound up with the ideas of life and death and the ceremonies accompanying giving birth and dying. The Ottoman traditions concerning the latter obviously impressed Barkley very much for he gives detailed information about Turkish funerals. His interest in graveyards is maybe due to his 'climate of opinion': Victorian England seemed to be preoccupied with funerals, cemeteries and corpses. Another reason was surely the irritating fact that burial grounds were all around the settlements. This either brought delays in the working plan when the line had to avoid them, or cost Barkley time and nerves to get a permission to build the railway straight through.
* * *
Hullo! What' s up now? Something out of the common, for here come a lot of Turks actually hurrying! Has the end of the world come? Yes, it had come to one of the party. (Barkley, Danube, 87.)
This is the beginning of an interesting and, as one notices, ironic chapter of Barkley' s book, describing a Turkish funeral. To the amazement of the Englishman, it was when somebody' s time expired and there was no help for him any more that the people around him hastened. This was due to the Ottoman beliefs: they thought that the evil spirits had complete power to torment the dead from the moment he breathed his last breath until the earth covered him. ' So, like good Osmanlis, they are making it as short as they can.' (Barkley, Danube, 87.) -- is Barkley's ironic commentary. He could not accept that so little care was taken of the person who had passed away. It looked for him as if the male relatives and friends, for only they were allowed to be at the burial, did not show enough respect:
On they go at a trot carrying the rough coffin […]. Without a moment' s delay the body is deposited at the bottom [of the shallow grave], some rough boards placed over the hole, and the earth piled on the top. […] The Mollah says a few words from the Koran, and then the entire party squat round, smoke their pipes, and have a friendly chat. (Barkley, Danube, 87.)
Barkley was told once that 'if there was one thing good Osmanlis respected more than another, it was the sanctity of the graves of their dead' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 304.). But the picture the Englishman paints has nothing to do with the nineteenth-century tradition of presenting graveyards as picturesque in their greenness and order. It is an anti-aesthetic, creepy picture he presents:
Of all foul spots on earth, a Turkish burial ground, if near a populous town, is the foulest. Long before the body has returned to dust, the frail boards are decayed, and down they go with their burden of earth, leaving the ends of the planks sticking out; between these are spaces leading down to the body, which the hungry, wolfish dogs soon enlarge, and, returning to the surface with their human feast, gorge till they are sleepy, when they retire to the now untenanted grave and there take their ease. (Barkley, Danube, 88.)
A dilapidated graveyard was unthinkable in Barkley's understanding. He was shocked that droves of cattle wandered across the English burial ground on their way to pasture. A request for a stone wall to be built around it was immediately sent to the Foreign Office, drawings and an estimate of the cost enclosed. To honour the dead properly meant to take care of their repose. The letter had the immediate attention of those in power, and Barkley was asked to undertake the work at once. Building the graveyard wall became Barkley's first undertaking at Varna.
In England, the Victorian deathbed was associated with strict conventions, which were followed with great accuracy. One of them was the presence of a comforter, usually a woman, who ministered to the dying. This patient figure, who looked to the spiritual as well as to the physical needs of the sick person, was often described as ' angelic' . Life was taking its ordinary course during the construction of the line. Barkley explains that he had to act as a parson and bury the thirteen Englishmen who died during his stay in Bulgaria. The figure of the comforter was inevitably present at such cases in the person of a Scottish navvy, who ' would sit with them [the dying] for hours reading the Bible in a sing-song voice, and in a hard matter-of-fact way,' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 170.) obviously in the manner prescribed in the popular book by Priscilla Maurice, Prayers for the Sick and Dying(1853) ['very slowly, very distinctly, and with pauses between; longer or shorter, according to the state of the person' (Wheeler, 31.)]. His image, however, was anything but angelic. He was a threatening figure, especially for those who still did not have the need to use his services. ' Scotty' , as the men called him, had the duty to provide for the widow and children of the deceased by gathering money from the other navvies. The best method for that, as Barkley describes it, was threatening his fellow workers that he would not take care of the procedure when their turn came -- a menace that had an immediate effect on his victims.
The fear of not being taken care of properly shows how important it was for the English to have a proper funeral. It was a significant stage of the human existence. The concept of dying decently not only included Scotty and his Bible but also an elm coffin and black clothes for the funeral. Important details included being put deeply into the ground and the carefully finishing off of the grave. The English navvies strictly followed the curious custom of putting coins onto the eyes of the dead. The use of English pennies was considered appropriate. ' Piastres would have been rejected with horror' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 171.).
An explanation for the significance of such ceremonies could be that in nineteenth-century England, religious time was opposed to profane time -- time as decay, time as death. The sacred or ' supramundane' orientation towards time makes death a transitional phase instead of an ending. One way humans attempted to become part of this sacred time was by reproducing the activities of their ancestors. Sacred time meant the collapse of the past and future into an eternal now, so that the heroics of one' s ancestors and their descendants were forever part of the present. To repeat the rituals of one' s ancestors accurately therefore meant participating in sacred time.
Barkley, Henry C., Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years
in Bulgaria
(London: Murray, 1877).
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants. London: Murray, 1877.
Wheeler, Michael, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Last modified 2001