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It was around this time that the Queen and her husband the Chief Minister began to drop in on ordinary Mingherians living in the capital’s more distant, isolated neighborhoods to deliver gifts and parcels of food. These visits were a continuation of the couple’s previous outings in the landau. But the Queen’s clerks would identify the chosen house in advance. They would make sure the family who lived there were true supporters of the Queen, and that they respected quarantine regulations. The Queen and the Chief Minister never went inside. The Queen, wearing modest but European-style clothes, would enter the garden and announce that she had brought gifts for the children. The family would not go outside, but they would greet their visitors from the window. Usually the Queen would leave the gifts in the garden without saying a word, and wave at the people upstairs like a little girl.

Contrary to what dissenters and jealous detractors claimed, it is fair to say that these house visits proved effective, and gave people confidence. An old man in the Taşçılar neighborhood responded to his visitors’ words of reassurance by asking when the ferries would start running again. Meanwhile, Grocer Mihail had deliberately locked himself in by nailing his front door shut from the inside. So far his food had regularly been delivered to him in a basket left outside his window. But he hadn’t been able to get ahold of any for the last three days, what with all the changing rules. Might the Chief Minister be able to intervene in some manner? One day, Coachman Zekeriya took them in the landau to the home of the late Governor Sami Pasha’s mistress Marika. They left her some biscuits and cheese while she stood weeping at her window. They also visited the Commander’s grieving mother and later assigned a clerk to record her tales of the great savior’s boyhood for a book to be entitled Kâmil’s Childhood. On a separate trip to the Castle-Moat neighborhood, supporters of the Queen slipped through their backyards and flouted every rule in existence to come within touching distance of their queen, prompting Doctor Nikos to frankly remark to Doctor Nuri that these visits might be compromising proper adherence to quarantine regulations. In response the Queen had reminded them all that the death rate was falling by the day, and rightly pointed out that her neighborhood visits were actually encouraging Mingherians to follow quarantine rules.

The Queen summoned Arkaz’s most renowned female dressmaker, Freckled Eleni, to the guesthouse, studied the fabric samples and sketches the woman had brought with her, and allowed her measurements to be taken for three new dresses in the European fashion (though still altogether demure). Just like a European queen, Princess Pakize also had Vanyas photograph her in “profile”—alone and with her husband—for a series of stamps that the new Post Minister had suggested should be issued to mark her coronation. Noticing straightaway how much the Queen had enjoyed these portraits, the Minister of Scrutinia arranged for an initial set of twenty-four copies to be framed and hung in various government departments—such as recruitment offices, the land registry, and charitable public trusts—as well as any banks that were still open. During one of her carriage rides with her husband, the Queen noticed one of these photographs hanging in the large, empty entrance hall of the Ottoman Bank (soon to become the Bank of Mingheria), and later wrote to her sister of how glad their father would have been if he had seen it.

Many people petitioned their local representatives to have the Queen and her husband’s landau come to their neighborhoods. For soon the rumor had begun to spread that the plague never struck in those homes where the Queen had visited and dropped off presents and provisions.

CHAPTER 76

From Friday, the thirteenth of September, onward, the fall in the daily death toll became even more pronounced, and a feeling of optimism began to establish itself upon the island. What exactly had caused the outbreak to slow, and its severity to diminish? This is a question that historians have always dwelt on, for the organization of quarantine measures was the reason the eternal state of Mingheria came into being.

In our view, the willingness to have soldiers shoot people in order to enforce the rules, Sheikh Hamdullah’s death by the plague, and the fact that between fifty and sixty people had been dying every day, were all factors which ultimately led to the success of the new quarantine measures. There are also some natural and medical factors we do not have definitive information on—such as the disappearance of the rats or a possible reduction in the virulence of the plague microbe—which may also have contributed to this happy ending. But here we will focus specifically on the results of the quarantine effort.

In the early days of the outbreak of plague, the body of any Muslim who died in Arkaz would be washed in the mortuary of the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque by a tall, wiry man who was known as the barber. First the barber—who was not a barber at all—would carefully clean the corpse as the rules dictated, wiping its lips, nostrils, and navel with a cloth wrapped tightly around his finger. Then he would wash the body with soap made from olives grown on the island, and copious amounts of water. The old lady who performed the same rituals for female corpses would add a handful of delicate, fragrant rose petals to the water if you gave her a small tip. As Doctor Nikos had regularly sent spray-pump operators to disinfect the mortuary, these corpse washers had managed to avoid being infected when the plague first began to spread. In fact, as they sought to keep up with the increasing demand for their services, they had brought in assistants and apprentices to help them, and begun to wash bodies more hastily and with less care.

Doctor Nuri had gained some experience of these matters from cholera outbreaks in the Hejaz, where there would often be arguments between local Arabs wanting to bury their dead, and the French, Greek, and Turkish doctors representing the Ottoman Empire, and just as he had done then, here too he had initially chosen not to address the issue directly. Rather than letting the debate get out of hand and generate endless discussions on Islamic ritual and quarantine policies, it was much better to slip the corpse washers a little cash to persuade them to perform the rites in a much-more-casual and perfunctory manner than they normally would. The barber and the other corpse washers were already aware of the mortal danger they were in, and having long since given up on cleaning the bodies in accordance with traditional methods, they had sped the process up considerably.

For some time thereafter, the washing of corpses came to consist of little more than pouring boiled water over the victim’s body, with the corpse washers hardly even touching the frighteningly grotesque and sometimes already reeking corpses they were given—covered in vomit, phlegm, and buboes. The naked corpses would then be laid out in the mosque’s inner courtyard (often frequented by stray cats) to dry under the sun on washing stands or on the floor, and shortly after that, they would be wrapped in shrouds. Within two weeks from the start of quarantine, the practice of enshrouding corpses had also been abandoned. This development had come as the number of unclaimed corpses found on the street had continued to increase, and the dead had begun to be buried as soon as they had been disinfected with lime.

Yet in spite of all this and of regular disinfection operations, the death of an apprentice at the mortuary (who may have caught the plague back in his neighborhood) during the final days of Ottoman rule upon the island, followed soon after the declaration of independence by the death of the barber (whom the whole of Arkaz knew), prompted the Commander and Doctor Nuri to ban corpse washing altogether. But instead of making an official announcement of this decision, the government had simply locked the mortuary doors shut, leading to all sorts of arguments and objections and to the protests of those who were not willing to renounce their customs and believed that if their loved ones were buried without being washed properly first, they would carry all their sins into the afterlife.

After Nimetullah Effendi became the Chief Minister and the Quarantine Committee was dismissed, Muslim corpses were no longer allowed to be buried until they had been bathed by corpse washers who had performed their own ablutions too, and carried out all the rites and recited all the prayers that the funeral rituals prescribed. According to our estimations, this decision alone caused the deaths of more than twenty corpse washers. Within a week into the Sheikh Hamdullah Era, it became clear that when no precautions were taken and corpses continued to be washed in full accordance with religious precepts, the disease spread much faster, and after three corpse washers became infected, the others—who couldn’t keep up with the work anyway—all ran away.

Knowing how important this issue was to Sheikh Hamdullah, Nimetullah Effendi enlisted the help of local mayors and religious functionaries to bring in “volunteers” from the island’s other cities to work as corpse washers in Arkaz. More than half of these volunteers—some of whom had embraced the task in a genuine spirit of piety, brotherhood, and self-sacrifice—would go on to catch the plague and die. With the whole island soon realizing how dangerous it was to wash corpses in the traditional way, it became increasingly difficult to find willing “volunteers” for the task, and after two of the three soldiers that Sheikh Hamdullah’s government had brought in from the garrison to help also died, the authorities tried to keep up with the increasing demand for corpse-washing services by using prisoners the police had snatched from the streets of their villages, or otherwise deemed to be suspicious, as the new mortuary “volunteers.” A murderer and a rapist who had been caught and locked up after the prison riot, and could not recite a single prayer between them, had thus also ended up working as corpse washers for a time, before they too had died of the plague.

The hecatomb of the mortuary “volunteers” has rightly been identified by historians and politicians as a demonstration of the excesses and absurdities of the period during which Sheikh Hamdullah and the Halifiye sect ruled over the island. During his brief tenure as Chief Minister, Regent Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat would also forcibly “appoint” a number of volunteers from sects that were hostile to the Halifiye lodge, or that the sheikh considered to be “heretics,” to work as corpse washers. According to some historians, the fact that these people would go on to catch the plague and die like most other corpse washers before them was not a result of any kind of ignorance or fanciful thinking, but should be considered instead as the outcome of an act of outright malevolence, and a calculated massacre.

But in our view the true massacre took place when all of these “volunteer” corpse washers started spreading the disease across the city and the rest of the island. Returning to their lodges to sleep after a day spent washing dead plague victims, these men would soon pass the disease on to their fellow disciples. For a while, the death rate in neighborhoods with a high concentration of religious sects and in those lodges which had been partly converted into hospitals rose exponentially, yet nobody dared speak of the perfectly evident reasons for this increase.

In truth, many sect disciples, including those who didn’t believe in microbes and quarantine, were aware in some corner of their minds of the tragic situation they faced, yet for some mysterious reason, they continued to wash corpses with unwavering adherence to the rules. The historian of Mingherian public health Nuran Şimşek has found data to demonstrate that some corpse washers, particularly those from the Rifai sect, must have reinfected their lodge and the patients who were recovering in the improvised “hospital” in its gardens. Sheikh Hamdullah probably caught the microbe that killed him from one of these faithful, pious corpse washers too, for just a few steps away from the modest single-room residence in the grounds of the Halifiye lodge where the sheikh himself lived (and which did not at all resemble the home of a head of state), there was a small stone-built construction where three of these corpse washers—two of them young, the other old and overweight—came to sleep every night.

By the end of the twenty-four days of Sheikh Hamdullah and Nimetullah Effendi’s rule, the state of “plague anarchy” that had taken over the lodge gardens, empty land, burned-down lots, and city streets was such that it would be impossible to determine today who was spreading the disease, and where. Already the high number of deaths and the general atmosphere of hopelessness had pushed many young sect devotees to leave their lodges and flee Arkaz for the mountains and fields outside of the city, where they foraged for figs and walnuts to survive.

Chief Minister Doctor Nuri’s order to ban corpse washing on the island as soon as he took power, and have the cemeteries and anywhere else the corpse cart went liberally doused with Lysol, were both determining factors in the slowing of the outbreak. In our view, resuming the disinfection of corpses with lime must also have contributed to this outcome.

Though the fact was never publicly announced, the people of Arkaz could sense that the outbreak was subsiding. A feeling of optimism was beginning to suffuse the city, though restrictions continued to be obeyed, and there wasn’t much activity on the streets. By the twenty-fourth of September, the number of deaths had fallen to twenty. No one was more ecstatic about this figure than Doctor Nuri himself. The Chief Minister summoned the British consul George Bey to his office.

Like all the other consuls, Monsieur George had also kept to himself under the previous government, worried about possible attacks from the lodges or that he might be accused of being a foreign spy. But as Doctor Nuri knew, George Bey was one of the people regularly consulted by the committee of notables who had been at the forefront of political developments on the island in the wake of Sheikh Hamdullah’s death and Nimetullah Effendi’s departure from the position of Chief Minister.

The British consul diplomatically congratulated Doctor Nuri on his new role as Chief Minister. But as had always been the case whenever he had found himself in these kinds of situations after the foundation of the new state, there was something in his manner which he would have termed “ironic,” and which we would describe as “teasing.” On the other hand, his demeanor also made it clear that he took the new government utterly seriously.

Minister of Scrutinia Mazhar Effendi was in attendance too. Just then, the Queen had also entered the shadows of the Chief Minister’s office. For a moment, it was as if the spirit of the late Sami Pasha were wandering among them, and they all felt a strange surge of guilt. They seemed to be on the verge of mentioning him, but instead they kept quiet. The Ottoman maps and Abdul Hamid’s seal had been taken off the walls and been replaced by a flag of Mingheria and a portrait of Commander Kâmil. Several landscapes of Mingheria and of Istanbul that Sami Pasha had hanged on the walls, various Ottoman-era edicts, and a photograph of Istanbul’s Üsküdar Square remained in place in their original frames.