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Sami Pasha had understood by now that, in the circumstances, independence was both a historic imperative and the only possible outcome, so he was not affected by the indecision that some of his municipal clerks and bureaucrats were experiencing. On the other hand, a few historians have suggested in their articles on the “loss” of Mingheria that Sami Pasha might still have been hoping that things would unfold as they had when Abdul Hamid had handed Egypt and Cyprus over to the British twenty years ago but kept the Ottoman flag flying there as a symbol of its presence and of the possibility of a return—and that he was therefore still very much the Sultan’s man.

The point all historians agree on is that Commander Kâmil really had been on the verge of death that night. As there is no medical certificate detailing the precise nature of the wound the founder of the Mingherian state suffered on that day of such national, dramatic significance, there have been many extravagant and conflicting reports on the subject. The most reliable account, in our view, is the one Princess Pakize received from her husband, and which we shall therefore relay here: the bullet had hit the Major’s left forearm, and caused serious damage there. Doctor Nuri and Doctor Tassos—who had both rushed to his aid—had concentrated at first on stemming the copious bleeding. They had both immediately realized that the courageous commander risked hemorrhaging to death. As one of them pressed his hand upon the wound, the other wrapped a rough cloth tightly above the Major’s elbow, and secured it with a knot.

Once the bleeding had stopped, the Major was carried away from the scene in a state of semiconsciousness. Doctor Nuri thought the quickest and most suitable place to start treating him would be in the State Hall guesthouse, and he had a room readied for this purpose. Princess Pakize covered her head with a shawl and retreated to a small room in the back. The Major was helped onto a European-style couch right by the entrance, of the kind the Sultan sometimes sat and read his novels on. The capacious guesthouse room was about to be invaded by prying onlookers when the Doctor and Prince Consort pulled the door shut.

The recumbent, semiconscious Major would occasionally prise his eyes open to watch what was happening around him, and even ask a few questions. (He’d already asked about Sami Pasha, for example.) But Doctor Nuri wouldn’t even let him speak, and had forbidden anyone from asking him anything. The Commander’s face was wan, his eyes were closed. The doctors were relieved when the bleeding finally stopped.

The first quarter of the 1900s was, comparatively speaking, a particularly brutal time in human history, during which people shot more bullets at one another than ever before or since. This was a result of the simultaneous discovery and rapid spread of automatic machine guns and of patriotic nationalism—whose adherents were willing to run straight into the line of fire. What happened that day was quite different from the many accounts we have read in the medical handbooks from that period, but although Commander Kâmil had only been hit by a stray bullet to his left forearm, it must have pierced an artery, for he had lost a huge amount of blood anyway.

It wasn’t yet dark outside when Princess Pakize emerged from the room in the back of the guesthouse where she had been hiding to come and watch what was going on. Although she had no inkling of his plans to establish a new state, she thought there was something romantic in the sight of the founder of the Mingherian nation covered in blood and lying on the couch in his Ottoman uniform, his medals, his badges, and with the flag right beside him. She was aware that several people had been killed inside the Outbreak Room. The smell of gunpowder was everywhere. She wished she could show this heroic soldier who had guarded her and her husband the same solicitude with which Doctor Nuri was treating him now, but she was not sure how to do that. At Princess Pakize’s suggestion, it was decided that the Major’s wife Zeynep and his mother should be informed of the situation and invited to come to the State Hall.

Zeynep arrived just as the cloth around Commander Kâmil’s upper arm was being tied up again, having been loosened for a time to prevent gangrene in his hand. When Zeynep saw her husband lying there, pale and half conscious, she let out a soft wail and fell to her knees, wrapping her arms around him. Everyone else stepped back, and suddenly Princess Pakize was able to see them both from a mere six or seven feet away—a moment she would remember forever.

According to Princess Pakize, who had spent her whole life in royal palaces, the most powerful evidence of the love between a man and a woman was not just in the positive, sympathetic emotions they shared, but in the depth and sincerity of those feelings too. It seemed to her that this was precisely the nature of the Major and Zeynep’s bond. Clearly Zeynep had realized in those first forty-five days of their marriage that she simply could not live without Major Kâmil. Readers interested in reading Princess Pakize’s full description of this scene between the founder of the nation and his wife—a text which will one day undoubtedly be taught in schoolbooks—will be able to do so once we have released her correspondence, which will follow the publication of this novel.

In her enthusiasm, Princess Pakize also said a few words with which she expressed her support—knowingly or otherwise—for those working to wrest the island of Mingheria away from Ottoman control:

“Bravo, Commander!” she said. “You have proven yourself to truly belong to this island.”

“Mingheria belongs to the Mingherians,” the Commander replied, struggling to speak.

Princess Pakize was also there when Commander Kâmil was put into the armored landau and taken to the garrison, where it was deemed he would be safest. The State Hall clerks had flocked to the landau as it waited outside the door. Despite the horrors of the armed skirmish they had just witnessed, this glimpse of salvation and the thought that they might actually survive had filled them all with hope.

The evening of the day the revolution was carried out and freedom and independence first declared on the island was captured by the artist Tacettin in a painting now famous throughout the island, and which shows the State Hall’s armored landau advancing in the middle of the night through the city’s empty streets. In this remarkable painting, there is no one sitting in the coachman’s seat of the armored landau, for just one day after independence was declared, the plague had struck that part of the city where all the coachmen usually gathered, and quickly spread to them all. Coachman Zekeriya had not been present at the time, so he had been spared, but after four of Arkaz’s beloved contingent of courteous, elderly veteran coachmen all died on the same day, no one could even get hold of a carriage anymore. Affected by the deaths of their coachmen, the people of the island had imagined the landau without a driver that night, and it was this mood that the painter Tacettin had captured.

The day freedom and independence were declared, sixteen people died of plague in Arkaz. This was a little lower than the daily average. Seven of the deaths had occurred in Kofunya and Eyoklima. As the armored landau carrying the Commander to the garrison went down a narrow street between those two neighborhoods, a group of mourners who had come to offer their condolences at a house where a father and his daughter had just died watched as the torches burning on the carriage seemed to illuminate the entire neighborhood.

The shadows of all the ordinary people, the sick, the thieves, and the sinister roamers out on the streets stretched like phantoms upon the walls. Some people claimed they saw the city’s plague-ridden, blood-spewing rats, its djinns, and the man who smeared plague-infested fluid on drinking taps all recoil from the light shining from the flag attached to the landau’s flagpole. The news of the island’s declaration of freedom and independence had given everyone hope.

The next day the old governor Sami Pasha was back in his office, but despite all the pressure upon him and all the questions people kept asking, he refrained from taking any drastic decisions. He spent most of his time standing on the balcony or having the remaining traces of the previous day’s battle cleaned up from the meeting hall next door.

Later, Sami Pasha received a visit from the journalist Manolis. “Given that we have our freedom now, we shall assume the press to be free too!” the journalist boldly proclaimed, but Sami Pasha stalled.

“The press is free in free Mingheria,” he said. “But in this historic, momentous time for this nation, I would advise you against publishing whatever may cross your mind without checking with us first. Your words, composed with nothing but enthusiasm and the purest of intentions, could easily be exploited by our enemies, by these hoodlums and guerrillas”—he continued, pointing at the Outbreak Room—“and turned against the cause of freedom and independence. We will announce a new government shortly, and new quarantine regulations with it!”

Sami Pasha personally arranged for the wounded attackers (starting with Ramiz) to be sent to prison as soon as they were discharged from hospital. The new governor’s entourage had escaped with minor wounds, but although they had requested a meeting with the Pasha, he had put Deputy Hadi and all the rest of them in a boat and had them sent back to the quarantine facility in the Maiden’s Tower, rejecting their request to attend the fallen governor Ibrahim Hakkı Pasha’s funeral simply because it was easier to do so.

On that first day, Sami Pasha was mostly busy dealing with the small, lesser-known Asr-ı Saadet lodge (named after the “Golden Age” of Islam during which the Prophet Muhammad was alive) and its disciples, the so-called Golden Agers. They were a withdrawn and somewhat-impecunious lot. They did not meddle in politics or commerce, and had no relations or associations with any other group. They had decided entirely of their own volition to defy the ban on worshipping in mosques, and were prepared to fight for this if they had to. It was really only a small group that frequented this lodge, and their sheikh, Sajid Effendi, who lived in Tatlısu, was half mad.

Nevertheless, the Pasha was determined to teach them a lesson, and thus show everyone the unswerving will of the new regime. Before the Golden Agers could make the first move, he sent a group of his own most trusted guards to the small Asr-ı Saadet lodge. The mood at the lodge was angry and defiant (the Governor’s men had assumed the disciples would be meek and peaceable, and that they might have to be goaded into action), and initially, the Governor’s team was turned away on some pretext. When they realized someone must have tipped the Governor off about their plans to conduct prayers at the mosque, the Golden Agers became even more enraged. Before even a day had passed from when “Commander” Kâmil had declared the Free State of Mingheria, the first clash between the new state and the people of the island had already taken place. The Asr-ı Saadet’s band of idlers, shirkers, and devout believers went at Sami Pasha’s guards with bats and firewood.

The Governor’s men fought back for a short while before retreating. The bravest and brawniest of the guards, Swarthy Kadir, suffered a cut on his eyebrow, and another guard was almost knocked out. Sami Pasha had to wait until the afternoon before he was able to call upon the Quarantine Regiment for reinforcements and mount a renewed attack. Some historians have pointed to this slowness and lack of means as an indication of the true extent of the “authority” and helplessness of the newly founded state.

Before the sun set that evening, Sami Pasha took his armored carriage to the garrison. Commander Kâmil—with Zeynep by his side—was lying on a couch in the guesthouse there, and when he saw the Pasha, he made as if to sit up, but then lay back down immediately. The Commander had already rallied somewhat, the color had come back to his cheeks, and his expression had softened. He had removed his Ottoman badges and medals but had kept his military uniform on. It gave his presence a handsome, impressive, poetic quality. We should like to note here that in that moment our hero was haloed by that special light which always falls upon people when they are about to step onto the stage of history. Zeynep and her brothers, the doctors, the clerks, and everyone else now left the garrison guesthouse. Sami Pasha closed the door. The two men spent exactly thirty minutes alone inside that room. (Doctor Tassos had asked the Pasha not to spend more than half an hour with the injured commander, so as not to wear him out.)

It has often been claimed that during those thirty minutes, these two men—the Commander and the last Ottoman governor—would discuss and determine the shape of the island’s future for fifty years to come. Until the day of their not-too-distant deaths, neither the Major nor the former governor Sami Pasha would ever speak a word to anyone else about what they had said to each other inside that room. Nevertheless, there have been countless articles produced on this subject.

As Sami Pasha’s landau left the garrison, Sergeant Sadri fired the first of twenty-five blank shells announcing the independence of the island of Mingheria. The sun had just set. A light that existed nowhere else, colored somewhere between purple and pink, had appeared on the horizon, and two rows of clouds—one red, the other orange—were merging with another bank of shadowy, darkening clouds above them.

On his ride back to the soon-to-be-renamed Governor’s Residence, with the cannon firing in the background, Sami Pasha knew that the only way he would be able to soothe the turbulence in his soul was by talking to Marika about it, but as he had already decided that he was not going to reveal any state secrets until at least the next day, he did not go to see her after all. As the cannon continued its salute, he gazed out of the window of his office in the State Hall and tried to see the city in the dark.

The booming of the cannon left the whole of Arkaz shuddering with a fearsome roar that only seemed to get louder every time it echoed on the rocky cliffs. Years later, when people whose childhood in Arkaz had coincided with the outbreak of plague were asked what had scared them the most, many of them would recall—often smiling as they did so—the sound of these blank shells. For at first almost everyone on the island had assumed that these must be the warships firing their guns, and that the Great Powers must have decided to attack.

But as the shells were being fired one at a time, and at lengthy, regular intervals, people soon realized this must be something else altogether. It took nearly two hours for the single cannon to fire its twenty-five shells. Afterward, the city and the port returned to that preternatural hush that had prevailed ever since the mosques and churches had been closed, and church bells and calls to prayer silenced.