770 
TURKISH EXECUTIONS. 
is rather handsome, and may be regarded as peculiar to this side 
of the Bosphorus. 
At three o’clock we arrived at Chorlou. This was a place of 
more consequence, before the dispute between the late Sultan 
Selim and his pashas of these districts, at which time the town 
received considerable injury. These Turkish nobles were not 
only hostile to the new plan of organizing the troops, but so 
notoriously in league with the formidable banditti of the country, 
(to which mode of life the peasantry rather addicted themselves, 
than to seek subsistence by quiet cultivation of its soil,) it was 
impossible to travel in that direction without an escort nearly 
equal to a little army. Hence, indeed, they had good reason to 
be alarmed at an innovation likely to hold their undisciplined, 
though desperate people, in any degree of subjection. Adrian- 
ople took part with the insurgents ; but being reduced by the 
Turkish commander of the Nizam-i-Gedid, he brought into the 
town, about fourteen hundred of the rebellious freebooters, whom, 
as a great stretch of mercy, he allowed to live till the fast of 
Ramazan. In fact, till he had leisure to be present at their deaths; 
for immediately on the commencement of its days of abstinence 
and prayer, the word was given, and he witnessed the horrid scene 
from the open side of his saloon, where from forty to fifty of the un¬ 
fortunate wretches met their fate each day. These executions were 
performed by two men only; and the condemned being drawn 
up in a line were mowed down regularly as they stood, from its 
one end to the other, till the scymetars of the executioners met 
in the middle. Mustapha told me, he knew one of those men, 
who had declared to him, that nothing could equal his fatigue 
after the whole was completed ; seven hundred having fallen by 
his arm in the course of the thirty days. 
