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But this administrative vacuum also left the enterprising thugs of Dormitory Three with responsibilities they had not anticipated. The Castle was in their hands now. Would they set the other inmates free? Any governor, Ottoman or otherwise, would be at a loss to know what to do about a swarm of newly liberated criminals roaming the streets. Sami Pasha’s guards didn’t seem to be around either. There was also some talk among the rioting prisoners of going to the hospital to retrieve their comrades who had been sent there with the plague. Meanwhile the prisoners in those dormitories whose doors had remained locked were howling like madmen, shouting “Let us out!” and shaking the metal bars of their cells. There was a new smell of rust, mold, and smoke in the air.

By morning, all the cellblocks had been emptied. The Castle’s spacious grounds became a kind of playground for liberated prisoners. Some joyfully hugged and congratulated one another. Others had already left the Castle and walked out into the city. The plague seemed to have been forgotten. There were no quarantine soldiers or policemen around. It might be said that the structures of the state, already considerably weakened by the death of the Commander’s wife in the Splendid Palace, had now definitively collapsed.

In her final moments—just like her father the prison guard before her—Zeynep had seemed to recover a little, and this had given everyone hope. Seeing the color come back to his wife’s cheeks, the Commander had ignored every precaution and sat next to her, feeling the baby in her womb. He’d embraced her and told her that everything would be fine, that the quarantine would work. If she looked out of the window toward the sea and into that special Mingherian blue, she would know just how beautiful life could be.

As Zeynep lay dying, tormented with pain, drifting in and out of consciousness or raving incoherently, her husband Kâmil was right by her side.

It was decided that there would be no ceremony for Zeynep’s funeral, and that her body would be washed in lime and buried the next morning. Commander Kâmil could not stop looking at the expression of surprise on his dead wife’s ashen face, and felt an immeasurable guilt. He sat by his wife and held her cooling hand, and did not move until Hadid dragged him away.

Everyone agreed that the fact the Commander’s wife had died of plague should remain a secret. Accordingly, she was buried without any religious ritual, in a fresh grave dug especially for her in the New Muslim Cemetery. Apart from the usual funeral hearse, the gravediggers, and a few seagulls and crows, only the Commander was present at the burial. To avoid drawing attention, he had dressed like a villager, with loose trousers, a wide sash, thick cowhide shoes, and an old-fashioned fez on his head.

We might conclude that the Commander, reeling from the loss of his wife and unborn child, had found comfort in daydreams, picturing himself as an archetypal Mingherian villager, and Zeynep as the village girl heroine of a “pastoral” Mingherian fairy tale. It still awes and amazes us today to think that amid all the momentous events which took place on that twenty-seventh of July 1901, the Commander was able to reimagine his grievous loss as a piece of Mingherian mythology.

That day, in the same well-meaning and heartfelt nationalistic vein, the Commander supplied two journalists—one Greek and the other Turkish—with a statement about Zeynep. This “interview,” which would later be published in the Neo Nisi and the Arkata Times, dated his first meeting with Zeynep all the way back to their childhood. (In truth there had been a fourteen-year age gap between them.) Zeynep had been a very bright and very determined little girl who would insist, despite her teachers’ objections, on speaking the traditional Mingherian language at school and with her friends. The bond between Zeynep and Kâmil had been formed then. Whenever they felt the urge to talk in Mingherian, they would seek each other out, and when they spoke, the colors of their souls would be revealed in all their mysterious lyricism. It was on Zeynep’s sweet little face that the Commander had first begun to witness the true grace of the Mingherian language, and he had immediately started thinking of what could be done to liberate it, and shield it from the assault of French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish.

Every Mingherian citizen today would be able to recite these words almost entirely from memory, and we too share the view that they constitute the most poetic expression there has ever been of the spirit of Mingherian nationalism and of the Mingherian Revolution, as articulated by the very man who stood at their heart and source. It is perhaps somewhat surprising that the Commander should have been able to dictate a text like this on such a difficult day, and right before his wife’s funeral too. Some have suggested that the Commander’s deputy, Mazhar Effendi, and various literary figures on the island must have secretly put their pens and quills to work to shape the statement into its final form. The winners of the National Anthem Poetry Competition, to be announced six months later, would also take inspiration from this foundational text.

The statement also contained various reflections on the similarity of sound between the Mingherian words for water, God, and self, and on the shadows cast by the mysterious connections that link objects to their meanings. Painted seven years later, Alexandros Satsos’s oil painting of the Commander praying alone at the New Muslim Cemetery as his wife was being buried, is at least as well known among Mingherians today as the poetic interview we have just discussed. The eminent painter’s greatest skill was his unique ability in capturing the Commander’s inner dilemmas.

The painting shows the Commander as a heroic figure staring brokenheartedly into the fresh grave of his pregnant wife (with crows perching in the distant background) while also exercising every fiber of his will in the knowledge that he must be strong, resilient, and calm for the sake of his nation’s future. The painting, whose dominant hue is a misty yellow, captivates us with its atmosphere too. Traces of blue flames rising from the city and from the incineration pit add to the drama of the scene. But the most affecting element of it all is the sense of “homeland” and belonging evoked by the sight of Mingheria’s hills, plains, and rugged peaks stretching far away into the distance.

CHAPTER 64

The rulers of the new Mingherian state had mostly been busy dealing with lofty questions around the teaching of Mingherian in primary schools, the history of Mingheria, and Mingherian names and fairy tales. Concentrating on their personal preoccupations, they seemed to have withdrawn from the world, and could neither understand nor grasp the severity of what was happening in the city. Another reason for this was that many government officials, spies, municipal clerks, and soldiers had stopped reporting for work or kept finding excuses to abscond. Two soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment had been attacked by a group of so-called sectarian youths while patrolling the streets of Turunçlar, and although one of them had managed to run away, the other had been viciously beaten, suffering permanent damage to his ruptured eye. The incident had both alarmed the Quarantine Regiment and left them eager for vengeance. Sami Pasha was therefore reluctant to let them roam around the city too freely.

The moment that would truly change the course of history was when the prisoners who’d taken control of the Castle gave the matter some thought and decided that they would open the metal gate of the isolation facility—the only area within the Castle grounds that they had not yet unlocked. As a result of this incredible event, nearly three hundred confirmed or suspected plague patients were set free.

What were the prisoners thinking as the isolation area emptied out? Had they acted under the simple, primitively anarchic logic that since they’d let everyone else go, they might as well “set this lot free” as well? Or had they thought, “Serves them right,” knowing that if they let these potentially infected people loose, the whole city would be paralyzed and the plague would spread faster than ever before? We may never know (though there have been plenty of theories in this regard). Perhaps they too believed what the quarantine officials all secretly believed, which was that quarantine was a serious but ineffective and perhaps even futile exercise. (But in any case, the people in the isolation facility had been put there for no good reason. Freeing them was a righteous deed!)

The rioters might have broken the lock on the isolation facility, but they never bothered to tell the people inside, “You’re free.” They were afraid to go in and risk catching the plague, and no one seemed willing to take on the responsibility, so it was a while before anyone inside realized they could just walk out if they wished to. The Castle’s isolation area therefore emptied much more slowly than the cellblocks had. But the news that it had been breached the morning after the prison riot moved much faster and had spread across Arkaz within half a day. Of course this scandal would never have occurred if the guards and quarantine officials hadn’t all fled!

The emptying of the prison and the isolation facility—and thus, effectively, of the whole Castle—changed the atmosphere inside the city completely. It became entirely commonplace to run into people who had broken out of isolation, walked through the Castle-Moat neighborhood, and gone back to their homes. Their fellow citizens might wish them well when they crossed paths on the street, just as they did with the newly escaped prisoners, but they were afraid of them too. Neither the government’s guards nor its quarantine officials were doing anything to round them up.

Those who were infected and visibly sick when they left the isolation facility did not tend to be well received when they returned to their own homes. Some were devastated to discover upon their arrival that their families had dispersed, their loved ones had died, and their houses had been taken over by strangers. A few would get caught in arguments and squabbles with these new arrivals or with their own relatives who’d let them into the family home. Others would not even be allowed to come inside, lest they should bring illness and plague with them too. A judicious uncle might perhaps tell them that they ought to go back to the Castle and stay there until they had completed their mandatory period of isolation. Those who had predicted that they would be subjected to this kind of treatment, and thought they might not even find the daily bowl of soup and piece of bread they could at least rely on here, had decided not to leave the isolation facility at all. These people had immediately taken over the best beds and spaces vacated by their former neighbors. But it would not be entirely accurate either to suggest that they had stayed put for the sake of a little soup and bread—for over the last week, the amount of flour made available to the bakeries, and the loaves of bread distributed across the city and the isolation area, had fallen to half their usual quantity.

As some commentators have noted, this was a time of anarchy, dereliction, and governmental failure, and this aura of uncertainty kept growing and spreading at pace. Less than a month after the foundation of the new state, the streets were swarming with hardened criminals, rapists, murderers, and plague-infested prisoners, as well as those who were suspected of having caught the disease.

This last category was composed of those who had been put into isolation unfairly. People had indeed been known to be banished to the Castle for insolence against the Quarantine Regiment, for failing to do as they were told, and for flagrant disregard of quarantine regulations. There was no medical justification for their confinement. They should probably have been sent to prison instead, but the authorities knew that isolation could be a harsher and more persuasive punishment, and the Quarantine Regiment thought it was important to be as strict as possible and make an example of those louts who kept ignoring restrictions for no reason. But now that same group were determined to exact revenge on the Quarantine Regiment, whose actions had caused many previously healthy people to catch the plague. Objecting not only to the Quarantine Regiment, but to quarantine rules, doctors, and isolation measures in general, these people liked to claim that it was the doctors, the Christians, and the quarantine officials who’d brought the disease to the island in the first place. Sami Pasha knew it was impossible to gather this growing crowd together and force them back into the isolation facility.

It did not take long for the runaways from the isolation facility to notice that there was a power vacuum in Arkaz. The people who had already been scared to leave their homes after the plague, the revolution, and the public executions had now stopped going out entirely, deterred by the sight of bandits and plague carriers who’d escaped from the prison and the isolation facility freely roaming the streets. Following Sami Pasha’s warning, the Quarantine Regiment was also nowhere to be seen.

One reason why the hotheads who had escaped isolation were able to gain a degree of acceptance in the city was that they were seen as providing some form of protection for shopkeepers and homeowners against the perpetrators of the prison riot and the others who’d escaped with them. Some of the former inmates who’d managed to flee the Castle prison and dungeons in the wake of the riot had already set their sights on certain houses they liked in the city, and were planning to break in, or at least find some corner or back garden to settle into. These criminals were emboldened by the absence of any policemen or soldiers around to maintain law and order. A group of the more ignorant, brazen, and ruthless among them had descended upon the docks in search of a boat that could take them to Smyrna, and here they had clashed with the Quarantine Regiment and with some of the former inmates of the isolation facility. The first serious skirmish had occurred at the foot of Donkey’s Bane Hill between a pair of escaped prisoners and the owner of a grocery store which sold figs, walnuts, cheese, and other goods sourced from the villages. One prisoner had been wolfing down the figs on display while another had slipped a piece of cheese into his knapsack, when the grocer and his family staged a counterattack. They could tell that these two were ordinary criminals, rather than plague-infested fugitives from the isolation area, so they were not afraid. The grocer had been joined by one of his brothers and a few friends, all of whom had just spent five days in isolation after being “unfairly” identified as being infected, and had now excitedly come together to celebrate their newfound freedom; they got involved in the fight too. Five minutes and several swings of clubs and sticks later, this clash between escaped prisoners and furious isolation runaways was already over, but it quickly gave rise to the rumor that the “infected” could be relied upon to guard shopkeepers from vicious criminals.