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Historians of Mingheria have offered differing explanations for why the Governor Pasha did not adopt the kinds of measures that would have placated Istanbul and the European nations and put a stop to the activities of nighttime people smugglers. In our view this was his way of saying: “If you don’t give me soldiers from the garrison, then I can’t chase smugglers from the coves and rocky beaches in the north.” But Princess Pakize’s letters also tell us that during this period the Governor Pasha was dragged with astonishing speed into the struggle for profit and dominance that had erupted between the island’s boat crews. The Governor Pasha had temporarily cowed the consuls who ran the travel companies by raiding their offices under the pretext that they had sold too many ferry tickets. But it was those same travel companies and the boat foremen we mentioned near the start of our history who were now smuggling people off the island from the northern coves. The Governor had them all taken to court for breaking passport and travel regulations.

Some wealthy families who had initially underestimated both the outbreak and quarantine restrictions, and never made their minds up to flee, had now finally decided (perhaps because their cooks and servants had either died or run away) that they should probably leave the island after all. The Governor knew from his informants’ reports that the boat crews were charging these people exorbitant sums. Once they reached the ships that were waiting in open waters to smuggle them away, these desperate passengers, already running for their lives, would then have to pay again for a “ticket.” These ships usually belonged to small Greek and Italian companies, and half the cost of this ticket would have been paid in advance through the travel agencies on Istanbul Street. When the Governor found out about all this, he began to think that at least this time he should help the Muslim boatmen as much as he could.

That the Governor, in his wish to support Muslims, had either broken or planned to break the quarantine he himself had established was a fact officially recorded by the clerks of the Mingherian municipal government, which may explain why it has caught the attention of so many archive-loving historians. The other reason why this story has generated so much interest is, of course, that it embodies the intrinsic dilemma faced by the Ottoman bureaucracy. If a governor pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat whose priority was supposed to be the welfare of the nation as a whole, chose, in these types of situations, to side with his Muslim subjects and put their interests first, it would be harder for him to carry out any modernizing reforms, and to employ modern methods and techniques in governing his province. But if that same governor pasha earnestly embraced modern European methods and reforms, the Empire’s Christian bourgeoisie—already growing thanks to increased freedom, equality, and access to technological developments—would be much better equipped to take advantage of any new opportunities, and as the nation became ever more Europeanized, its Muslim population would lose its ascendancy.

With growing numbers of people fleeing the island at night on boats heading toward the West and to Crete, the European nations, worried that the outbreak might spread, began to look for remedies of their own. Eventually the French and the British, who were the most concerned of all, and had experience with epidemics through the large Muslim populations that lived in their colonial possessions, realized that rather than catching smugglers’ boats one at a time and having them quarantine in some remote location, it would make more sense to surround the whole island with warships. Even as the matter was still in discussion with the Sublime Porte, the British sent their battleship HMS Prince George and the French their ironclad Amiral Baudin to the Levant, their presence in the waters around Mingheria serving as a form of psychological preparation.

It was at this point that the British ambassador in Istanbul suggested that an Ottoman warship should also join the cordon around the island. We can see from the archives and letters of the foreign affairs office that Abdul Hamid initially sought to delay this decision and to propagate the idea that “the outbreak is neither serious nor worthy of note.” But in the wake of all the episodes of people smuggling, the raid on the ferry companies’ offices, and the arrest of the island’s Greek boatmen, the Sultan finally succumbed to international pressures.

The news that the Ottoman navy’s Mahmudiye would supposedly sail out on Thursday, the sixth of June, to join the Great Powers in their efforts to stop the boats that carried people fleeing the plague was communicated to the Governor Pasha the day before through his bureaucrat friends in Istanbul. Although the Pasha didn’t believe it could be true, he still felt profoundly mortified. Their quarantine had not succeeded, they had failed to stem the outbreak, they couldn’t even stop people from fleeing with the disease and carrying it to the West, and now the whole world was upset. The Pasha felt guilty for being “the sick man of Europe.” It had always enraged him when people used that expression. But now, faced with the Governor’s incompetence, even the Sultan had felt he had no choice but to join the Europeans and deploy the Mahmudiye against the island, as if his own people were the enemy.

These latest developments in the political and military landscape felt so overwhelming that the Governor Pasha couldn’t quite believe or think about them, just as he couldn’t believe or think about the plague. Later that afternoon, after watching a court usher who had been walking along the first-floor corridor with no sign of anything out of the ordinary suddenly drop dead as if the angel of death had tapped him on the shoulder, the Governor Pasha retired to his office and sat at his desk, staring motionlessly out of the window for a long time.

But soon he was interrupted by the latest reports from his spies on the island. As expected, Ramiz had not stayed put after his release, but found sanctuary in the villages where the ringleaders of the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny lived. After the events of the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny, the father and son who’d led the revolt had moved from their home village of Nebiler—which the army kept finding excuses to punish—to the neighboring village of Çifteler, thus hoping to evade a new tax that had been levied upon them. Their new home had established its own guerrilla army to fight nationalist militants from Greece. It was a traditionalist and conservative village, and after the Pilgrim Ship Affair, its inhabitants had become stricter and more truculent, recruiting their own militias to rival the Greek guerrillas. Just as Greek gangs raided Muslim villages, so these Muslim guerrillas raided Greek settlements, occasionally going as far as to kill people and sack their property. The Governor Pasha regarded these gangs as a kind of civilian army that could be mobilized against the Greek guerrillas when needed, so most of the time he turned a blind eye to their activities (as he did with the outlaw Memo, for instance). But sometimes—egged on by hardened criminals who were not from the area—these Muslim guerrillas would take things too far, setting Greek villages on fire and prompting admonitory telegrams from Istanbul, whereupon the Governor Pasha, aided by garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha, would intervene to fend them off.

The Governor Pasha already knew that over the past two years Ramiz had sometimes taken shelter in these Muslim guerrillas’ villages, sent financial aid to the militias, and even supported the foundation of a small religious lodge there. When he found out that Ramiz, accompanied by his followers from these villages and by various other thrill-seeking rogues, had not only returned to Arkaz in the middle of the night, but had also brazenly gone back to his house in the Çite neighborhood and taken his men with him, the Governor, encouraged by the Chief Scrutineer, arranged what would prove to be a fruitless raid upon the property that same evening. As Ramiz’s empty home, looked after by a butler and a servant, was being searched, the Governor had ordered the confiscation of as many suspicious objects, papers, and documents—as well as books and newspapers, if any—as his men could find. Though no quarantine-related crime had been committed, the Quarantine Regiment also participated in this raid.

The anger that the Quarantine Regiment and the island’s Mingherian-speaking population had been feeling toward Abdul Hamid and the authorities’ failing quarantine measures had now also begun to fan the flames of Mingherian nationalism. For the time being, the Governor and the Chief Scrutineer limited themselves to recording and keeping track of this burgeoning nationalism. The Ottoman bureaucracy’s principal enemy was of course the nationalism of the Christian populations (Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Armenian), but as they watched the Empire fall apart before their eyes, these bureaucrats had also started monitoring the first stirrings of nationalism among those Muslim populations who weren’t Turks (such as Arabs, Kurds, and Albanians). (We should note that back then, the word “nationalism” was not as commonly used as other expressions like “the national question.”) According to the Governor, the most important thing was that the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment (whether they spoke Turkish or Mingherian) must all be Muslims. As Muslims, they would be able to better understand people’s concerns. The Doctor and Prince Consort was not quite so optimistic, though when he heard about how diligently the brothers Majid and Hadid—whom the Major had recruited—were working at the incineration pit, he wondered if there might be some merit to the Governor’s policy after all.

CHAPTER 39

The idea of digging a pit where they could burn rat corpses and any objects infected with the plague microbe had come from Bonkowski Pasha, who had suggested it to the Governor the day he’d arrived on the island. In his view, having contaminated woolens, bed frames, linen clothes, wicker furnishings, mattresses, and any other items that needed to be destroyed gathered together and incinerated—as used to be the custom long ago—in a place where everyone could see and take note would also serve to educate the populace on the importance of quarantine and cleanliness. The use of incineration pits had also been recommended in the treatise that Bonkowski Pasha had prepared for Abdul Hamid on the plague from the East.

The assassination of Bonkowski Pasha had caused operations for this kind of incineration pit to be deferred. But as the Major’s “Quarantine Regiment” successfully evacuated more and more people from their homes, the beds, quilts, kilims, and all kinds of other objects the soldiers confiscated began to accumulate in vast heaps. It was dangerous to burn these filthy and infected items inside the wooden homes themselves. It would also be difficult to destroy everything in the city’s old courtyards, which the fear of plague had emptied out entirely. The owners of the confiscated items would have preferred for their belongings to be thoroughly disinfected with Lysol and stored away (to be returned to them someday), but there was neither the time nor the space to do that. Anything that wasn’t immediately incinerated would probably end up being sold to junk dealers anyway. So upon the Doctor and Prince Consort’s advice to the Quarantine Master and the Governor, the municipal government’s men began to use two currently unutilized pits situated in the hills just behind the city on a stretch of flat land between the New Cemetery and the back edge of the Upper Turunçlar neighborhood. The single drawback to this location was that it could only be reached through a long, uphill road that twisted and turned its way through the backstreets of the Old Market and the neighborhood of Arpara, where the Major’s family home was situated.

The Governor had the first fire set one day in the late afternoon. This fire, which took place a whole twenty days after quarantine was initially declared, was watched with great interest by a large and enraptured audience. Expanding in enormous, bright red waves, pulsating with radiant yellow fireballs, and painting its surroundings in purple and dark blue hues, this pit fire—fed perhaps by the kerosene that was poured onto it—burned well into the night, and was observed not only from within the city itself, but from across the rest of the island too. Over the next few days, the same pit was regularly used to destroy people’s clothing, their beds, and many other objects, and for as long as the outbreak lasted, the appearance of black smoke clouds during the daytime became a source of distress for the people of Mingheria. The black plumes made them feel that the angel of death was nearby, that they were at God’s mercy, and even (for whatever reason) that they were alone. As Princess Pakize notes in her letters, these were the same emotions people also felt every time they saw the belongings of the dead and any items that didn’t conform to quarantine regulations being gathered from all over the city and taken with relentless regularity up the hill to the pit.

Zeynep’s brothers Majid and Hadid had devoted themselves fully to their tasks in the New Muslim Cemetery behind the Turunçlar neighborhood. But not even in Mecca, where foreign observers and Christian doctors weren’t allowed to enter, had the disinfection of corpses with lime before burial—one of the cardinal rules of plague quarantines—caused as much trouble as it would initially do on the island of Mingheria. Quarantine Master Nikos’s explanation for this phenomenon was that there had not been a serious outbreak of disease on the island for a long time and that, regrettably, people hadn’t yet fully grasped the importance of quarantine measures. Even the genial warmth of the universally popular quarantine sergeant Hamdi Baba hadn’t been enough to solve the problem, for the harrowing particulars of the matter had ultimately repulsed and exhausted him too. But once the brothers Majid and Hadid began, upon the Governor’s suggestion, to take shifts at the New Cemetery, a number of uncomfortable issues—not only the need to cover the faces of female corpses when they were being disinfected and to ensure that neither their intimate regions nor their naked bodies were ever glimpsed (or if they were glimpsed, that it was not for too long) but also the suggestion that it was improper for the lime to be “shoveled in” so roughly, and the importance of making sure none of this substance should find its way into a corpse’s open eyes, its mouth, or its nostrils—were quickly resolved before they could get out of hand and turn into serious political incidents.

The horse cart that was used to carry infected items to the incineration pit had previously belonged to the garrison, and had been gifted to the municipality. As this old, broad wagon covered in tin carried its load up the winding road that led to the incineration pit, it was often attacked by pickpockets and thieves, as well as all sorts of troublemakers and fools. These people’s purpose was mostly to steal any old kilims, mattresses, bedsheets, and clothes they could grab, either for their own use, or to hand them out to others, or to sell them to those junk dealers who were still operating in secret. Though their numbers had declined from the first days of the outbreak, there were still many people who were stubbornly using the belongings of the dead despite all the times the Quarantine Authority had warned them against it. There was, in this misguided behavior, a sort of challenge to the state, to westernization, to modern medical science, and to the international community, a kind of defiance and disdain, and even an element of senselessness.