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The angry pilgrims overpowered the two soldiers that had been sent to guard them and threw them overboard. When one of the soldiers—who, just like the pilgrims themselves (and indeed like most of the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim-majority population), didn’t know how to swim—drowned in the sea, Governor Sami Pasha and the Commander of the island’s garrison embarked on a disproportionately harsh reprisal.

Meanwhile the younger pilgrims had managed to pull up the anchor, but instead of grounding itself on the rocks, the run-down barge was swept farther out to sea and swayed about in the water like a drunk. After half a day at the mercy of the currents, the pilgrim ship finally crashed into another rocky cove farther west. With their barge now grounded and leaking water, the tired pilgrims were not easily able to gather their bundles and their gifts and flee back to their villages. Had they managed to do so, perhaps the whole incident could still have been forgotten, even if a soldier had been killed. But instead the pilgrims remained amassed in the barge full of increasingly foul-smelling corpses, struggled against the waves, and were unable to collect their seemingly indispensable parcels, gifts, and bottles of cholera-infested holy Zamzam water to get away from the scene of the shipwreck.

The troop of gendarmes sent by Governor Sami Pasha to follow the pilgrim ship from the shore positioned themselves some way behind the rocks and on top of the nearest cliff, and their commander instructed the pilgrims to surrender, respect quarantine regulations, remain on board the ship, and refrain from coming ashore.

We cannot say with any certainty today whether these warnings were heard. The pilgrims seemed to have been swept with an all-consuming dread: they understood that they were going to be quarantined again, and they knew that this time they would definitely die. In their mind, quarantine was a diabolical European invention designed to punish and kill perfectly healthy pilgrims and take all their money.

In the end, some of the pilgrims who still had a little strength and wherewithal left realized that if they stayed on the besieged ship they would not survive, so they staged a breakout attempt.

As these pilgrims scampered among the rocks and tried to climb up the goat tracks, the soldiers panicked and began firing. Their shooting was frenzied, as if they were fighting off enemy troops come to invade Mingheria. Some were thinking of their colleagues who had been thrown into the sea to die. It was at least ten minutes before they calmed down and set their weapons aside. Many pilgrims were hit. Some had been shot in the back. But others had headed straight for the Ottoman soldiers shooting at them on their own island, like patriotic soldiers running toward machine-gun fire.

Governor Sami Pasha banned the press from reporting or even indirectly addressing these events, and so to date we still do not have accurate information on the number of pilgrims who were shot and killed that day, and how many eventually made it back to their villages.

Following his role in this historic event, the Governor Pasha was never able to shake off the condemnation, contempt, and reputation for cruelty that it brought him. He had expected Abdul Hamid to discipline him in some way, but it was instead the elderly garrison Commander and his soldiers who were punished and sent into exile. Sami Pasha dreamed a few times of a figure with a white beard who was trying to talk to him—to ask him “Where’s your conscience, mighty Governor?”—but the man in the dream never managed to speak. When people criticized him to his face, the Governor Pasha argued that sending the army in against the pilgrims to protect the island from cholera had been the right decision, adding that there was no room in his conscience to sympathize with miscreants who had seen fit to hijack a vessel of the state and to kill a soldier, but also pointing out every time that the order to shoot at the pilgrims had not come from him, and that it had been a mistake to be ascribed to the inexperience of the troops involved.

Governor Sami Pasha soon decided that his best defense would be to wait for the whole incident to be forgotten. He was therefore particularly vigilant about ensuring that news of the event did not make it into any newspapers, and for a time his efforts were successful. During this period the Governor could often be heard expounding on the idea that those who died on the hajj were to be considered “martyrs,” as indeed the laws of Islam stipulated, and that there was no higher honor than this. When the dead pilgrims’ families came to Arkaz to request financial compensation, he would receive them in his office, touch upon the “special place in heaven reserved for those who have tasted the elixir of martyrdom,” and assure them that he would do everything in his power to ensure they were successful in their demands, but that they must not speak to the Greek journalists and sensationalize the matter.

Once the incident had begun to fade from memory, Governor Sami Pasha quietly launched the second phase of his plan: he sent gendarmes to the villages to arrest the ten pilgrims he deemed to have been the ringleaders of the mutiny, locked them up in the Castle dungeons, and told them, in a surge of brutal, despotic excess, that they would be punished for the death of the drowned soldier and for commandeering the ship. The Governor also rejected the demands for compensation put forward by the dead pilgrims’ families.

The resentments these events generated began to fuel a religiously inflected resistance against the Governor, based in Çifteler and Nebiler villages, where most of the pilgrims had come from. These villages and the Terkapçılar lodge backed Memo and his band of guerrillas, who had been sowing terror for the past two years through the Greek villages in the north of the island. Many suspected that behind this lodge was Sheikh Hamdullah himself, head of the Halifiye sect, the island’s most powerful.

To add to the Governor’s woes, the whole affair—which had driven a wedge between the Muslim government and the people of the island—was periodically picked at by journalists aligned with the Greek nationalist cause. For instance, the Governor Pasha had given an interview to a Greek newspaper he was on good terms with, the Neo Nisi, during which he had spoken of some pilgrims who had funded the construction of a drinking fountain in their village and had then been berated for referring to them as “impoverished hajjis.” Ordinarily nobody would have taken much notice of this expression. But the Greek journalist Manolis had gone on to write a polemical piece in his newspaper arguing that the pilgrims weren’t poor at all and that, on the contrary, the island’s wealthy Muslims had been following the latest fashion by selling off their possessions to embark on the hajj, with many falling sick and dying on the journey. Considering how undereducated the island’s Muslim population was when compared with the Orthodox community, would it not be more sensible for the wealthy rural Muslim families to band together and raise funds to set up a secondary school to serve their community, or at the very least repair the broken minarets of their neighborhood mosques, rather than frittering their riches away in faraway deserts and on British ships?

The Governor agreed with the principle that put schools before mosques, but even so, as he’d read the article Sami Pasha had felt like he might choke with rage.

He had partly been annoyed by Manolis’s condescending tone in referring to the Muslim community, but the main reason for his anger was that while he had been waiting expectantly for this matter of the “Pilgrim Ship Mutiny” to be forgotten, here was yet another Greek journalist rehashing it all.

CHAPTER 16

Early in the morning on the day the Quarantine Committee was due to meet, Doctor Nuri arrived at the Hamidiye Hospital to find a Muslim family standing at the door arguing with a clerk he recognized from the Governor’s Office, and thanks to the Prince Consort’s intervention, the patient—a farrier—was given a newly vacated bed in an overcrowded ward.

Over the past three days, the number of patients turning up at the hospitals had doubled. In the “Cause of Death” column where doctors used to write “diphtheria” or “whooping cough,” they were now noting down the word “plague.”

On the second floor, the additional beds that had been brought from the military barracks two weeks ago were already nearly full. Doctor Ilias and the island’s only Muslim doctor, Ferit Bey, were rushing from one cot to the next, draining patients’ buboes and dressing their wounds.

A young man who recognized Doctor Nuri called him over to his mother’s bedside. But the fever-ravaged, sweat-drenched, delirious old woman didn’t even register the doctor’s presence. Doctor Nuri opened the nearest window, wondering—as most doctors who worked with plague patients did—whether it would do any good. In their heroic efforts to alleviate their patients’ suffering, some doctors would come into very close contact with the sick.

In every ward there was a corner where the sanitizing solution was kept, and the doctors, who regularly washed their fingers and hands with these substances, would often meet there and talk among themselves. On one such occasion Doctor Ferit gestured at a container full of vinegar and told Doctor Nuri with a faint smile: “I know it doesn’t really work, but I still use it anyway!” He added that the young doctor from Thessaloniki, Alexandros, had developed a fever the night before and started shivering, so Doctor Ferit had sent him home and urged him not to come in if he still had a high temperature in the morning.

At the Theodoropoulos Hospital Doctor Nuri had seen young Doctor Alexandros’s selfless devotion to his patients, and how fearlessly close he would get to them when he treated them. “Doctors and janitors know how to deal with cholera, but not how to protect themselves from the plague,” said Doctor Ilias. “A plague patient might cough in your face at any moment and infect you too. It is imperative that we give doctors strict instructions on this matter.”

There was still time before the Quarantine Committee convened, so they crossed the city in the armored landau toward the Theodoropoulos Hospital in the Ora neighborhood, speaking not a word to each other but realizing, from the number of people they saw milling about in dumbfounded silence and from the apprehensive expressions on everyone’s faces, that there must have been more cases and more deaths in these backstreets than they had previously thought. The fear of death was slowly taking over the city, but the kind of panic that the two doctors had seen during really serious outbreaks seemed not to have erupted here yet. Zofiri’s bakery, famous for its almond biscuits and rose-flavored pastries, was empty. But elsewhere, restaurant owner Dimosteni was sitting on Barber Panagiotis’s wicker chair for his usual morning shave.

The diners, shops, and coffeehouses on Hamidiye Avenue and Square all seemed to be open. They saw a black-haired little boy sobbing to himself in a garden down a side alley on the way to the square, and a little farther along there was a group of women on a condolence visit sitting down with their arms around one another.

Both doctors were dismayed to see the size of the crowd outside the entrance to the Theodoropoulos Hospital. It was clear to them now that the outbreak had already spread much deeper than they had thought, on top of which the assassination of Bonkowski Pasha and the fact that the Sultan had immediately sent someone new to run quarantine operations meant that there was now a kind of collective certainty around the idea that this disease really was the plague.

Doctor Nuri also observed that the hospital’s wards were disorganized, chaotic, and full of new patients. The patients he had seen here two days ago—the old man who slept all day, the tired porter who worked in the docks—were already dead and buried. A Greek woman who had recently been admitted was accompanied by two other women and a man.

“We can no longer let relatives and visitors into the hospitals!” said Doctor Nuri.

Doctor Mihailis summoned every doctor in the hospital to an empty room in the basement, where Doctor Nuri explained that many doctors had died in China as a result of patients making unexpected movements, sneezing, vomiting, or spitting while they were being examined or while their buboes were being drained.

He also told a story he had heard from a British doctor at the Venice Conference: in Bombay, a dying plague patient who had been misdiagnosed with diphtheria had started coughing during a final phase of “delirium,” and droplets of his saliva had reached a nearby nurse’s eyes. The nurse’s eyes had immediately and generously been cleaned with diphtheria antitoxin, but within thirty hours the nurse had fallen ill anyway and died four days later in the throes of a similar delirium.

The doctors now began to debate the significance of those thirty hours: Should that be considered the length of time between the moment the microbe entered the body and the onset of symptoms like tiredness, shivers, headaches, fever, and vomiting? Doctor Ilias noted that in Smyrna, the duration of this interval had depended on the patient and explained that both those spreading the disease and those being infected would not be aware of it, and so the outbreak would grow, undetected, at a rapidly accelerating rate. Very soon, all over the city, people would begin to die, just like the rats had done before them.

“This is the situation we are in, unfortunately!” said Doctor Nikos.

Once again, Doctor Nuri thought, the Quarantine Master was bemoaning the island’s lackluster response to the epidemic, though this time his criticism was aimed not just at the Governor and at the authorities in Istanbul but at his fellow doctors too.

“At this point we must shut everything down—markets, shops, and all the rest,” said Doctor Ilias.

“Any isolation measures we introduce now would be entirely appropriate,” said Doctor Nuri. “But the microbe has already been spreading, so even if people start following the rules immediately, they will still fall ill and die in their homes. And when that happens, they will argue that the bans are futile.”

“That is a very pessimistic prognosis,” said Doctor Ilias.

Everyone then started talking at the same time. Readers of Princess Pakize’s letters will realize that quarantine operations began in earnest that morning in the basement of the Theodoropoulos Greek hospital. All the doctors agreed that it was necessary to call upon Istanbul to send fresh supplies and reinforcements—all the better if they were Muslim doctors, of course.

By then it had become clear that the disease had spread widely, with some streets, particularly in the Vavla and Germe neighborhoods, so infected that it would be difficult to slow the outbreak there, and with these facts in mind one of the doctors asked Doctor Ilias what Bonkowski Pasha would have done in this situation.