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When Sheikh Hamdullah and his felt-hatted regent Nimetullah Effendi took power after Commander Kâmil’s death, one of their aims had been to catch and quell the island’s Greek nationalist insurgents. As no one on the island had kept track of these rebels’ activities as closely as Mazhar Effendi had (originally as a department head under Governor Sami Pasha, and later as deputy to the President), they decided to make use of his experience. So Mazhar Effendi, who had just been given a life sentence, was let go from the dungeons and sent home to serve the rest of his term beside his wife and children. Soon his spies began to visit him at home. It was thanks to Mazhar Effendi, whom they had first jailed and subsequently released, that Nimetullah Effendi’s government was able to find out more about the Greek guerrillas coming to the island on smugglers’ boats, and learn that the Greek consul, the haberdasher Fedonos, and the jeweler Maximos had been donating money to their cause. Following these efforts, Mazhar Effendi’s archives—the newspaper clippings he had assiduously collected over the years, all the letters he had received from his informants (he would always pay more for written intelligence than he did for oral evidence) and filed in their own separate categories, as well as hundreds of telegrams—were moved from their former location in the old State Hall and current Ministerial Headquarters to Mazhar Effendi’s home. What turned this ordinary stone-built house down the street from Zofiri’s bakery into a veritable intelligence center were the countless folders Mazhar Effendi had compiled in accordance with his own singular and unconventional filing methods, focusing on Mingherian separatists while the island was governed by the Ottomans, before switching to Ottoman, Turkish, and Greek nationalists. In later years, Mazhar Effendi’s stone-built house would become the headquarters of the MIA (the Mingherian Intelligence Agency), before finally being turned into a museum.

Mazhar Effendi was confident that just like previous governments, any new government would also wish to avail itself of his knowledge, his services, and his spies. So when he learned that Sheikh Hamdullah was about to die, he began sending letters out to consuls and quarantine doctors to discuss what could be done to save the island. Once he received confirmation of the sheikh’s death (well in advance of the firing of the garrison cannon to announce the new head of state), he believed it was only a matter of time before the members of the current government—or more precisely the committee that was ruling the island at the time—resigned their posts and were replaced by people willing to bring quarantine rules back. Unable to sit at home with his thoughts for a moment longer, Mazhar Effendi had all but sprinted to the Ministerial Headquarters so that he could observe or perhaps even “involve” himself in the latest developments. Some have suggested that he might have been looking for an opportunity to sneak into his beloved archive room, while others claim he aspired to the post of Chief Minister. Right outside the entrance to the State Hall, he ran into Health Minister Doctor Nikos, and immediately began to talk of “the wretched state of the island” and the “incompetent fools” who had caused all this, adding that he was personally ready to “take on the challenge” and do “whatever it took” to stop the outbreak.

Faced once again with this outwardly unremarkable government official who had served under the late Sami Pasha, Doctor Nuri was reminded of all the horrors of the past few weeks.

“Were we locked up in the Castle prison at the same time?” he asked, seeking to establish a degree of comradeship.

“They sent me home five days after Governor Sami Pasha’s execution!” Mazhar Effendi replied. “But it is you and the quarantine doctors that I should like to serve—not them. The Mingherian nation can only be saved through quarantine now.”

“Then you must join the Quarantine Committee—or rather, the Council of Ministers!” said Doctor Nuri, correcting himself.

“But I am still a prisoner. Technically, I am forbidden from leaving my house!” said Mazhar Effendi with a humble smile. He had always been adept at playing the lovable victim.

“The Queen shall soon declare a wide-ranging amnesty,” said Doctor Nuri. “We would welcome your thoughts on whose release would be most conducive to the successful restoration of quarantine measures, most helpful in defeating the outbreak, and most beneficial to the people of Mingheria. Don’t forget to add yourself to the list too!”

Rather than enumerating the new ministers’ names and all the quarantine provisions they agreed to introduce, we shall begin with their decision to bring in an all-day curfew, a decree so momentous that it made every other measure seem inconsequential. Though Doctor Nikos and Doctor Nuri had already separately come to the conclusion that a curfew of this sort was the only possible solution, they had also assumed that it would be simply too difficult to impose, and had refrained from mentioning the subject until the new Minister of Scrutinia, Mazhar Effendi, brought it up.

“If we were to announce quarantine measures today and start boarding up houses and cordoning streets, nobody would pay us any heed,” said Doctor Nuri. “There is no trust or respect left in the state and its soldiers. People have lost all hope in the outbreak being stopped, and feel they can only rely on themselves for survival.”

“You are very pessimistic!” said Doctor Nikos, pronouncing the word in a French accent. “If that is the case, they won’t respect a curfew either.”

“They might,” said Mazhar Effendi. “If they do not, that will be the end of the state of Mingheria. We would have anarchy on our hands!”

“Either the Ottomans would return, or Greece would invade,” said Doctor Nikos.

“No. If the state collapses, it will definitely be the British who take over,” said Doctor Nuri.

“There can be no nation without a state,” said Mazhar Effendi. “Eventually the island would go back to being slave and colony to some other great power. There is no alternative but to arm the Arab soldiers and tell them to shoot anyone who ventures outside. If the curfew does not take hold, that will be the end of us all. I was thinking about this in prison too.”

“Your former master Sami Pasha was hanged for having soldiers shoot people under the pretext of quarantine rules!” said Doctor Nikos. “We wouldn’t want to end up the same way.”

“What else can we do? We have neither the time nor the men to go knocking on every door in search of the sick, nor can we hope for volunteers. There are so many deaths and so many people hiding that we would never be able to keep up anyway … With everyone fighting for their lives, would people even listen if we announced quarantine measures and told them not to walk in pairs?”

So the leaders of the new government agreed to introduce a curfew. As it would take some time to ready the Arab division in the garrison, they decided not to rush.

Most historians are not aware of the desperation which had taken hold that day among the people whose actions were steering the fate of the Mingherian state and nation, and no nationalist historian today would be willing to hear about the agitation underlying the new government’s rulings. Yet we would argue that if it hadn’t been for that desperation, and the level of resolve required for them to consider turning their soldiers’ guns against their own people, it would have been impossible to get anyone to obey quarantine rules again twenty-five days after they had been lifted. Although it took another two days before the curfew and other quarantine regulations were announced to the public through printed posters, town criers, and wagons sent around to spread the news, this time the delay was down to an excess of caution rather than any negligence.

In the meantime, one of the island’s two Turkish-language dailies and the state’s semiofficial gazette, the Arkata Times, reported that the Queen had declared an amnesty. As well as thieves, rapists, and murderers, numerous other prisoners were also set free—including Greek nationalists who had been locked up in the Castle dungeons under Sheikh Hamdullah’s rule, Ottoman spies, members of the Quarantine Regiment, opponents of the government, people who’d been caught trying to flee the island, travel agents who’d sold too many tickets, and every kind of fanatic and troublemaker, all in an atmosphere of widespread jubilation. The convicts released under this amnesty would carry the plague that had scythed through the prison dormitories all the way back to their homes and families. But the opposite could also be true. When a soldier of the Quarantine Regiment who had resigned himself to rotting away in a damp Castle cell for the rest of his life had suddenly been released, he had run all the way back to his house in the Tatlısu neighborhood with tears of joy in his eyes, only to find that his mother and father and two of his children had died, and that his wife and surviving son had run away. All this he discovered from talking to the people who seemed to have settled into his house in his absence.

These men who had come from the northwestern seaside village of Kefeli and taken over his house now assumed a menacing air, and told the former Quarantine Regiment soldier—who was already feeling rather buffeted by this onslaught of bad news—that they lived here now, that it wouldn’t be fair for him to live on his own in a house like this at a time when everyone was looking for somewhere to shelter, and that he would be better off going away to look for his hapless wife and child.

By then these kinds of transgressions had become commonplace. Had the man whose house had been taken over not been a member of the Quarantine Regiment, and not known he had someone in government—the Minister of Scrutinia—he could turn to for support, he would never have been able to rectify the injustice he had suffered, and his uncertainty over whether to go in search of his wife and son or stay and exact revenge on the thugs who had broken into his home would have probably driven him mad. During those nights of plague, this state of constant misery and indecision would often seep into people’s dreams, and this too—along with the headaches, the stinging buboes, and the fear of death—would turn sleep into a veritable ordeal. The Minister of Scrutinia avenged the quarantine soldier by sending guards to his home in Tatlısu, whereupon the family of trespassers was removed from the property and became the first people in twenty-five days to be thrown to the Castle’s isolation area as potential plague carriers. The isolation facility, whose courtyards and cramped and interwoven quarters anyone who stepped foot in instantly knew they would never forget until the day they died, had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected in readiness for the new arrivals.

As the Arab soldiers might not suffice, Mazhar Effendi decided, with Doctor Nuri’s approval, to mobilize the Quarantine Regiment once more. Some of these soldiers had been taken to court during the Sheikh Hamdullah Era and found guilty of beating innocent people up, indiscriminately sending uninfected individuals into isolation, causing death, and abusing their power to decide who should be put in quarantine by taking bribes. The courts had not sentenced all of the accused soldiers, managing by and large to differentiate between the guilty and the innocent. One of the latter group was the ever-popular Hamdi Baba. Upon his acquittal, he had immediately returned to his ancestral home in a village surrounded by rocks and cypress trees two hours from Arkaz. At first Hamdi Baba didn’t want to return to Arkaz to take charge of the Quarantine Regiment again. Too many quarantine soldiers had been unnecessarily strict, behaved improperly, and lost their people’s trust. But then Mazhar Effendi suggested that he could recruit a new Quarantine Regiment under the same name, and eventually managed—with a combination of flattery and the promise of a badge (the Pakize Medal)—to reassure the Sergeant and win him over.

There were numerous differences in aims and methods between the first and second Quarantine Regiments, but this was also the same glorious army that the Mingherian Major and Commander had come all the way from Istanbul to lead, back in the days of Ottoman rule, and which had been instrumental in the foundation of the state of Mingheria. Before the curfew came into effect, Mazhar Effendi assigned the Quarantine Regiment a larger and more central building in the garrison. One hundred and sixteen years later, that same building continues to operate as the Headquarters of the Mingherian Armed Forces.

After the official announcement of quarantine and before the curfew began, the people of Arkaz thronged to the city’s makeshift street markets and to those shops that were still open for a few hours every day, paying large sums of money to take home whatever goods were left. As they hardly left their houses anymore, many people had already stocked up on food before, but with the outbreak showing no signs of ending, they had begun to run out of supplies.

The next day, as declared, the total curfew began, with no exceptions allowed under any circumstances. That morning, before the sun had even risen, the detachment of nervous but stern Arab soldiers from Damascus were accompanied by approximately forty soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment.

Although he had allowed the Turkish-speaking officers who’d been sent to the garrison from the army headquarters to return to Istanbul, the Major had kept the Arab division on the island as a potential bargaining chip for diplomatic negotiations, but he had never involved them in Mingheria’s day-to-day political disputes. Throughout his twenty-four-day reign, Sheikh Hamdullah had paid four visits to the garrison, the first of which we have previously recounted. During this time, he had not only delighted in the pleasures of reading the Koran and conversing in Arabic, but also taken the opportunity to remove the existing garrison Commander from his post and replace him with an illiterate young Mingherian officer who had been frequenting the Halifiye lodge for many years, and whom the sheikh had now promoted to the rank of Pasha.

We would argue that the people’s compliance with the quarantine measures that had been brought back after a twenty-seven-day interval, and more important with the strict curfew that had also been introduced, represents a turning point in our story. Like all sensible commentators, we too would attribute this success primarily to the high death rate on the island (a total of one hundred and thirty-seven people were known to have died in the three days before the curfew) and the terror and hopelessness that everyone was experiencing. The second reason was the absence of an influential sheikh to encourage “flippancy”—as the late Sami Pasha would have termed it—and disdain toward quarantine measures, and the fact that events had shown Sheikh Hamdullah to be just as vulnerable to the plague as anyone else, with his death teaching all the “fatalists,” scornful skeptics, and the perennial doubters whom Europeans would call “cynics” a valuable lesson. Those who favored the use of force, on the other hand, believed that the true reason for the success of the curfew was that the Arab soldiers and the Quarantine Regiment were willing to shoot anyone who happened to step outside, including women, children, and the elderly.