第 58 页

The Major’s wrist, hand, and fingers were now completely covered in blood from the wound he had suffered to his left forearm during the skirmish. In later years, the various Muslim notables, guards, and municipal clerks, and indeed the Christians present on the balcony that day, would be forced to speak—some sincerely, others with feigned enthusiasm—about the way the Major’s blood had seeped into the flag. In the 1930s and 1940s, when the idea of Mingherianness came to be perceived and firmly established as “a question of blood,” this detail would be remembered as one of the most dramatic moments of the island’s “freedom struggle,” and many would argue that the thing which had spurred Mingherians into action was the sight of the blood of the founder of the state pouring out of his wrist, over his fingers, and onto the flag, before dripping down to the square and the earth below.

This was the blood of the noble Mingherian people, who had migrated to the island thousands of years ago from south of the Aral Sea, and possessed a special, inimitable language of their own. The Major’s hand and wrist were soaked in red, and when he put the flag down for a moment, Doctor Nuri took the opportunity to roll his sleeve up, and examine his wound. On his visits to field hospitals in the farthest reaches of the Empire, the doctor had seen plenty of soldiers and officers come back wounded from the front, and helped to treat them too. With a few skillful gestures, he exposed the Major’s still bleeding wound, and determined that the situation was perilous.

It has been suggested that in that moment the Doctor and Prince Consort’s intent was to subdue and silence the Major. This is not true. From a medical perspective, Doctor Nuri had to intervene, and had to do so immediately. For as we will see over the next few pages, the Major’s injury could well have proven fatal. By leading him away from the balcony, Doctor Nuri might have temporarily severed the heavily bleeding Major from the rest of the day’s political developments, but he was also able to give him some initial treatment to stem the loss of blood.

When the Major was taken inside, there was a stir among the small crowd of curious observers gathered in the square below. “Hooray for the Major!” cried a couple of fez-clad onlookers—foolish, inattentive types who had dismissed the gunshots, and assumed everything was unfolding just as Sami Pasha had planned. But from the sound of gunfire and the silence that had followed it, most people had realized, even before the Major had emerged to deliver his speech and wave the flag, that something extraordinary was going on. Some had been genuinely moved by the sight of the glorious flag billowing “proudly and delicately” over the assembled crowd.

To this day we do not know who it was who chose in that moment to shout:

“À bas Abdul Hamid!”—“Down with Abdul Hamid!”

Sami Pasha and everyone else on the balcony made their disapproval of such insolence clear. The voice had come from somewhere underneath the balcony, near the entrance to the Governor’s Residence, but the Muslim leaders, the soldiers, and the gendarmes nearby pretended not to hear it, while the consular clerks and journalists standing close to the entrance did not reveal who had shouted. The fact that we still have no conclusive information on the subject leads us to wonder whether this provocation had even been uttered at all. In any event, the chance to express their distaste of this disrespectful, impertinent outburst against Abdul Hamid went some way toward alleviating Sami Pasha and the rest of the balcony’s shared fear of “how furious the Sultan would be.” Everything about Sami Pasha’s demeanor seemed to say, “Someone shut that man up!”

The message from the balcony to the journalists and to the Sultan’s spies was this: “We are not doing anything against Istanbul or the Sultan.” (This would not last long.) Most of them still believed that despite the attempted raid and the Major’s immoderate conduct, the Governor had so far succeeded in carrying out the meeting as he had intended to. As historians, we know how common it is for those who have initiated the world’s great upheavals, revolutions, and devastations to have done so while fearing the consequences of their own actions, and convincing themselves that they have set out to do the exact opposite of what they will end up achieving.

This was precisely the attitude which guided Sami Pasha’s actions from the moment the Major stepped away from the balcony. Addressing the crowd before him (which was not even a tenth of the size he had imagined it would be), he announced that in order for quarantine measures to work, entrance to mosques and churches would be temporarily forbidden. There would be no need for calls to prayer or bell ringing either. After all the blood that had been spilled in the skirmish earlier that day, and with the smell of gunpowder and the whimpers of the wounded still hanging in the air, he did not feel like launching immediately into the flowery, elaborately worded oration he had prepared. He proceeded to add that, henceforth, the only people who would be given access to monasteries and lodges would be those who already lived there. As soon as these announcements were concluded, clerks from the State Hall would be dispatched to these places to identify and enumerate their residents, and nobody else would be allowed in. The Governor Pasha regarded the work of these census clerks as the most delicate aspect of the new ban on places of worship and had thus devoted significant attention to the matter, working feverishly with the registry clerk to draw up detailed instructions for the municipal staff to follow. He set great store by these instructions, which he now began to read out from a piece of paper. This in turn led to him finally reciting the speech he had so meticulously prepared.

Yet neither the people on the balcony nor those gathered in the square were able to listen to Sami Pasha’s speech properly—both because the old governor’s voice wasn’t strong enough, and because everyone was too busy talking to one another and trying to understand what was going on. There was nothing incongruous about the cries of “Long live the Sultan!” rising from the more elderly audience members and a few Abdul Hamid enthusiasts among the crowd, for there was not a single word in Sami Pasha’s carefully constructed oration that could be interpreted as being against Istanbul and the Sultan.

As Sami Pasha delivered his speech, the Chief Scrutineer instructed Vanyas to photograph the scene inside the Outbreak Room. Behind its green door, this room was fairly small, and the injured, dying bandits had ended up falling on top of one another, their blood mixing and their corpses becoming entangled. Desks had been overturned, coffee tables knocked down, lamps upended, and glass shattered, and every surface was covered in holes, but the epidemiology map on the wall remained in place. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the bullets had fixed it even more firmly onto the wall.

Three days later, these photographs with the map of Mingheria in the background and bloodied corpses in the foreground would fall into the hands of the Athenian press, and would be published in the newspaper Efimeris with the headline “Abdul Hamid’s Counterrevolutionaries Defeated in Mingheria!”

The daily Acropolis, meanwhile, would caption their photograph of the blood-soaked bodies on the floor as follows: “The new governor and the guerrillas deployed by Abdul Hamid to quell the Mingherian Revolution meet their terrible fate!”

The publication of these images and news reports in the Greek and European press effectively signified that there could be no stopping the forces of revolution and independence on the island now, and no way back for Abdul Hamid to consider. The government in Istanbul could not even hope that after they’d removed the Ottoman flag and handed power over to someone else, they might eventually get Mingheria back through other means.

It has been suggested that Sami Pasha must have given the photographs to the Greek press himself, and that his purpose in doing so was to show the Muslims and Christians on the island who were wary of independence and terrified of how Abdul Hamid might retaliate that the point of no return had long since passed. We do not share this view. Just as Sami Pasha had not planned any of the Major’s actions that day, he also sought throughout to calm things down rather than inflame the situation any further. But even if those photographs had never been published, the Pasha knew that Abdul Hamid would still consider him responsible for the new governor’s death as soon as he heard about it, and that he would be blamed even more for having ignored the order dismissing him from his post. Before the quarantine speeches on the balcony had even concluded, Sami Pasha had already understood that not only was there no way back to Istanbul for him now, but no life anywhere else within the borders of the Ottoman state either.

As the Pasha had planned, the balcony ceremony ended with the various community leaders, religious figures, politicians, and doctors all praying together and in accordance with their own faith for quarantine to succeed and for God to banish the plague from Mingheria. The photographs that captured this scene—symbolic of that feeling of secular fellowship so typical of the island (and that we have always defended)—would sadly come to be misrepresented in later years as depicting “the founders of the state of Mingheria praying for the state to thrive long into the future, and bring happiness and serenity to all.”

Once the balcony ceremony was over, the curious, fearful guests went back inside, pausing every now and then to look at the corpses that the municipal guards and caretakers had begun to remove. Even Archbishop Constantinos Effendi, head of the Greek Orthodox congregation, couldn’t contain himself, and before heading out of the main entrance, he walked toward the Outbreak Room and stood there for a while with his crucifix in his hand, staring at the bloodied corpses and at the new governor with his bloodstained face and the bullet hole in his forehead, until someone eventually had to drag him out of the room. As Sami Pasha walked the bishops and the sheikhs and his other esteemed guests to the staircase, he thanked them all for their support of the quarantine effort. He saw them off with hopeful platitudes, as if everything had gone according to plan, there had been no raid at all, and no one had been killed.

Doctor Nuri was by the door to the Governor’s Office, where he was working to stem the Major’s bleeding. He was being helped by the elderly gossipmonger Doctor Tassos, one of the delegates of the Quarantine Committee.

When he returned to the meeting hall and saw the consuls waiting for him there, a sense of exultation and assurance took hold of Sami Pasha. He could feel the power of the old governor Sami Pasha coursing through him, the man who had always been in control of everything around him. He was the island’s sole ruler now, and he could see it in the consuls’ eyes.

“Know this, gentlemen: nothing in Mingheria will be the way it was before!” said Sami Pasha, addressing the consuls in a stern, condescending tone he would not have used under ordinary circumstances. “Anyone involved in backing this nefarious attempt on the life and property of the people of Mingheria will be punished,” he continued. “It is clear that these vermin took advantage of consular privileges to walk right through the front door. From this moment on, any authorizations we have issued for consuls to enter the State Hall shall be revoked. All other consular privileges shall be subject to review. Whichever consul is behind this attack shall absolutely be punished. The Minister of Foreign Affairs will provide you with further information in due course.”

Though no one had the chance to request any clarification, all the consuls and journalists clearly heard Sami Pasha announce that a duty that would have previously been performed by the Chief Intelligence Secretary was to be carried out by a new “Minister of Foreign Affairs.” Clearly “Governor” Sami Pasha too must be backing the Major’s words and supporting the notion of a separate state.

“Mingheria belongs to the Mingherians,” said the Major in that same moment. But he was too fatigued and in too much pain to say anything else, so he fell silent and leaned back on the pillow someone had placed behind him.

The Major’s strained, stuttering gestures, and the way he seemed to be angrily muttering to himself, were likened by some observers to the behavior of a plague victim. These people were realists who thought that antagonizing Istanbul would inevitably lead to catastrophe. They wanted to believe that the Major had “gone mad,” in the way plague patients sometimes did.

At the Doctor and Prince Consort’s initiative, Major Kâmil was carried away through the crowd in the meeting hall on people’s hands and shoulders. There is an exquisite oil painting of this scene, made in 1927 by Alexandros Satsos. This magnificent work is held in the private collection of an alcoholic Texan oil baron, so unfortunately the people of the island are not familiar with the original, and only know it through rough black-and-white reproductions published in newspapers and magazines. We find this depiction of the founder of the Mingherian state and hero of its freedom struggle—holding his gun and the flag, his supine form imbued with an almost feminine fragility, his eyes noticeably closed, his skin pale—to be a wonderfully fitting evocation of the moment. But the consensus among most historians of Mingheria is that Major Kâmil was soon back on his feet and pushing the revolution forward.

As everyone made their way toward the door, Sami Pasha briefly crossed paths with the French consul, and decided to display his renewed sense of confidence specifically for Monsieur Andon’s benefit.

“You will have to give up this habit of telegraphing your embassy in Istanbul to complain about me every time you are caught abusing your position. Though I suppose you’ve had to give it up already, thanks to our commander.” (He was referring to the Major and his Telegraph Raid, as he made clear by glancing at the door through which the Major was currently being carried out.)

This was the second time Governor Sami Pasha had referred to the founder of the state of Mingheria, the man our readers have come to know as Major Kâmil as Commander Kâmil, the title that Mingherians have gratefully and exultantly called him by for one hundred and sixteen years. We too shall refer to him as “Commander” from now on, though occasionally as “Major” too so that our readers do not forget.

CHAPTER 54

In his diplomatic memoirs Europe and Asia, the retired ambassador and inveterate dandy Sait Nedim Bey framed the fact that the Sublime Porte had to read French and British newspapers to find out it had lost the island of Mingheria as a classic example of the utter incompetence of the Ottoman bureaucracy during the declining years of the Empire. We do not agree with this observation. With telegraph lines down, and their network of spies hindered by the plague and by a naval blockade, it was only natural that Abdul Hamid and the Empire’s bureaucrats in Istanbul should not have news from the island. As the consuls hadn’t been able to send out their usual reports, the British and French ambassadors in Istanbul were not aware of the situation either. In any case, after the declaration of freedom and independence (two exalted principles which would henceforth almost always be mentioned together) in the State Hall Square, the consuls had all but fled the building, and knowing that Sami Pasha would seek to punish them somehow, they had decided not to open their shops and travel agencies for a while, and gone straight to their homes to wait and see what would happen.