第 90 页

By now Princess Pakize knew that she would not be able to return to Istanbul until her uncle had forgiven her. But as she wrote to her sister some time later, there was one crucial difference between them: when Abdul Hamid had first met Princess Hatice, his own much-loved firstborn daughter Princess Ulviye had just died (accidentally setting herself on fire while playing with matches—a new invention at the time), and as he had not yet taken the throne, he had consoled himself by playing with his older brother’s newborn daughter Hatice. But since Princess Pakize had been born after her father’s confinement to the Çırağan Palace, her uncle Abdul Hamid had not known her as a child, and never even once sat her on his lap and played with her as he had done with Hatice.

Princess Pakize heard of her father’s death in August 1904 from her sister. She spent many mournful months thereafter remembering her father’s scent, how he would sit and read his books, the look of concentration on his face when he played the piano, and his musical compositions. If grief was one reason why Princess Pakize sent her sister fewer letters over the course of the next two years (“Istanbul is not the same Istanbul without our dear father,” she had written on one occasion), the other was the arrival of her daughter Melike (my grandmother) in 1906, which kept her extremely busy. We have therefore based our forthcoming account of the following years largely on archival evidence and memoirs, rather than on her correspondence.

But first I would like to spend a few words on poor Murad V’s funeral.

There is probably no episode more piteous in this book than the funeral of Princess Pakize’s father, who died after twenty-eight years spent living in captivity. Given that he is one of my ancestors (my great-grandmother’s father), I would like to speak now not as an objective historian, but as a sentimental novelist. Murad V’s luckless life and his ephemeral and unsuccessful reign had caused a thirty-two-year delay in the introduction of the various constitutional, westernizing, emancipatory, and parliamentarianist reforms that Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen had sought to introduce in order to secure the survival of the Ottoman state and empire, so that by the time these new freedoms were finally adopted, it was far too late, and the damage had long since been done. Murad’s reformist father Abdulmejid had hoped to make him the Crown Prince, skipping Murad’s uncle Abdülaziz in the line of succession, and had always nurtured high hopes for this “hapless” son of his, teaching him French and having the Italian pashas Lombardi and Guatelli give him music lessons. But as recounted by a harem lady whose recollections we have relied upon, Murad Effendi was struck at the age of fourteen by an illness which would leave his mind and memory permanently affected, and although he eventually recovered, its effects would still resurface from time to time.

The Neapolitan doctor Capoleone, who had come to treat the patient (and establish some fresh political ties too), recommended wine and cognac, and set up a “cellarette” in the young prince’s mansion in Kurbağalıdere. Murad Effendi would end up drinking for the rest of his life. The dinners and musical entertainments he hosted in this Kurbağalıdere residence were attended by freedom-loving constitutionalist and parliamentarianist poets, journalists, and writers like Ibrahim Şinasi, Ziya Pasha, and Namık Kemal. In London, where he had momentarily feared that he had been poisoned, he had “befriended” Prince Edward, and when the British heir to the throne invited him to kiss Queen Victoria’s hand when they next met, Murad had done so without fear of what his uncle might say. The young prince wrote letters pledging cooperation to Napoleon III and other notable figures he had met during this trip to Europe. He believed that the “nations” of Europe had vanquished their kings, and those kings had taken a step back. Ottoman sultans should do the same. But when he suddenly became sultan himself, those same things that would later also make his brother Abdul Hamid so anxious—conspiracies, attempted coups, and the memory of the assassination of their uncle Abdülaziz—had driven Murad mad. As a result, the government’s bureaucrats had decided unanimously that he should be deposed. In the Yıldız Palace, where Abdul Hamid had initially confined him, Murad had leaped fully clothed into a pond. Another time, he had tried to flee by jumping out of a window. For years afterward, he would try to persuade his doctors that he had regained his sanity, and seek ways to take back the throne, but these ambitions and his attempts to escape would only serve to tighten the conditions of his twenty-eight-year captivity. Lords and pashas sent from the Yıldız Palace would barge into his bedroom at night, torch in hand, and once they had made sure he was exactly where he was supposed to be, they would bow before the former sultan and admit just as they were leaving that they’d hurried over to check he was still there after Abdul Hamid had received reports that Murad V had been sighted in Beyoğlu. Seeing danger everywhere, the deposed sultan was constantly changing the location of his bedroom. But bearing in mind that he was surrounded at all times by sixty or seventy enslaved concubines striving for his attention, we who live in our modern world—as Henry James wrote—cannot realistically be expected to understand him, let alone feel sorry for him. His diabetes had worsened in his final years, and he had been worn out by his daughter Hatice’s scandalous romantic entanglements—which he still couldn’t quite believe—as well as by the intermediaries Abdul Hamid would constantly send over to ask, “How should I punish your daughter?” (He never did punish her.) Upon Abdul Hamid’s orders, the former sultan’s death was announced with a small statement in the newspapers. The people of Istanbul who had gathered on Galata Bridge and at Sirkeci Station to attend the funeral were not allowed to approach the New Mosque. The former sultan’s body was transported from the Çırağan in the steamboat Nahit and hastily buried next to his mother, whom he had visited every morning to pay his respects and talk about politics, and who had always called him “my lion!” With so many rumors going around that Murad V wasn’t dead at all, but that he was going to be disinterred immediately after the burial, smuggled out to Europe, and put back on the throne, Abdul Hamid—who had already told all his ministers to attend the funeral—had also sent his own “personal” aide to the ceremony. This aide “whose name would forever live in infamy” had boldly stepped up to the corpse, dug his finger into its hair, and pulled as hard as he could, only letting go when he had made sure that the old sultan was definitely dead.

On the third Friday of July 1905, a large bomb placed inside a car which had been parked near the route Abdul Hamid always took during his public appearances for Friday prayers at the Yıldız Palace exploded with a bang that was heard all over Istanbul, and even as far as Üsküdar. The Sultan had just slowed down to talk to the Ottoman Empire’s chief Islamic scholar, the Shaykh al-Islam, who had asked him a question, and with his passage thus delayed, he escaped the explosion unscathed. The metal shrapnel flung out in the conflagration killed twenty-six people, and wounded many more, including several diplomats and the curious crowds who would come every Friday to look at the Sultan. The driver of the car containing the bomb and shrapnel was also killed in the explosion.

Within a week, Abdul Hamid’s policemen and torturers had discovered that the assassination plot was the work of revolutionary Armenian separatists who had been preparing explosives in France and Bulgaria for quite some time. The torturing investigators had also swiftly identified the adventurous Belgian anarchist Edward Joris, who had been hiding the bombs in his house. This romantic anarchist who had worked on the main street in Beyoğlu in the first-ever Singer shop, and had devised successful sales strategies that had brought the sewing machine to the Ottoman Empire’s remotest mountain villages, was thus sentenced to death, but the Belgian king put so much pressure on Abdul Hamid that the execution was never carried out. After two years in prison, Joris was pardoned by Abdul Hamid and returned to Europe as the Sultan’s spy.

While composing these closing pages of our book, we have often been seized by the impression that many of the defining political developments that took place in the Ottoman Empire after 1901 carried the traces and influences of the Mingherian Revolution. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to get so carried away by the rich history of our little island that we have begun to see Mingheria wherever we look.

Once the British, French, and Russian ships that had been surrounding the island had sailed away, and with no other nation formally recognizing the Mingherian state, Abdul Hamid could have followed the example of the British in Alexandria and sent the warship Mahmudiye to bomb the garrison, the Ministerial Headquarters, and the whole of Arkaz, yet he did not do this. On paper, Mingheria was still an Ottoman province, and before any foreign nation—such as the French, say—could think of landing their troops on the island, they would need to make a pact with the British first, and be willing to risk an armed conflict with the Ottoman Empire. Nor did Abdul Hamid, or indeed the Ottoman fleet, have any great desire to bombard the island, send soldiers in, and install a new governor. Any resistance the Ottoman navy and army might encounter in Mingheria could easily become a pretext (just as the plague had been) for the Great Powers to invade the island or for the British to take over as they had done in Cyprus, all in the name of protecting the island’s Christian population.

President Mazhar’s policy of maintaining good relations with nearby states, including the Ottomans, was influential in the preservation of the island’s “independence” after the lifting of the blockade. Also significant were the “reforms” with which he transformed the Quarantine Regiment into a modern army. Two years of compulsory military service were introduced, and within four years, the regiment numbered twenty-five hundred new recruits. Formed of people who spoke Mingherian at home, as well as Greeks and Muslims who had proven their loyalty to the new state, this army’s spiritual foundations rested on the vivid, poetic Mingherian nationalism espoused by the Commander and spread with great creativity across the island by Mazhar Effendi.

The twenty-eighth of June, the date when the Commander stood on the State Hall balcony and started the Mingherian Revolution, was chosen as Independence Day (and declared a public holiday). The yearly celebrations would begin with the Quarantine Regiment parading from the garrison to Mingheria Square with traditional postmen’s flat caps on their heads and mailbags over their shoulders, singing “The Commander Is Here!” and some of Mingheria’s other newly composed marches. For an hour, the entire Mingherian army would file past the balcony where President Mazhar would sit (on a well-concealed, tall-legged chair) and watch their progress. This would be followed by a much-enjoyed and highly anticipated display from high-school students (described with great relish by Western newspapers too), and anthropologists today agree that their performances were a vital component not just of Independence Day celebrations but of a sense of Mingherian identity too.

The performance would begin with one hundred twenty-nine high schoolers walking out into the square, each carrying a big white sign made of cloth and embroidered with a word spelled out in large Mingherian letters. These were the same one hundred twenty-nine Mingherian words the father of the nation, the immortal Commander Kâmil, had spoken in his room in the Hotel Splendid during the last two hours of his life, as recorded by the clerk who was with him at the time. As soon as the high-school girls and boys, all wearing their school uniforms, had taken up their positions in the square, there would be a round of applause, quickly followed by an expectant silence. What marvelous sentences would the students compose, and which of the Commander’s wondrous final words, those phrases he had uttered (“My Mingheria is my paradise and your soul”; “Mingheria belongs to the Mingherians”; “My heart is in Mingheria always!”) like lines of poetry descended from God, would they remind their audience of this year? As they strode around the square, switching places and forming new sentences with the words they carried, the young students would be cheered on by the spectators, and the President, sitting on the balcony with his wife, would watch them with tears in his eyes. Meanwhile, around two hundred people (one hundred and fifty Greeks, and sixty Muslims) who had regrettably not quite embraced this nationalist, republican spirit and remained stubbornly attached to Greece or to the Ottoman Empire, had been placed in an educational camp near the town of Andin. Others had decided they would prefer to work on the construction of roads and bridges rather than face the education camp. President Mazhar had imposed heavy taxes on those wealthy residents (mostly Greeks) who, having fled to Athens and Smyrna after the revolution, had yet to return, while the rich who had stayed on the island themselves but kept defying the government by banking their money in Athens or Smyrna had been forced for a time to work on roadbuilding projects—until the publication of several articles about “forced labor in Mingheria!” in the Greek and European press led to this particular policy being abandoned.

During this time, in one of life’s strange symmetries, Arthur Conan Doyle—creator of Sherlock Holmes—had just got married again and come to honeymoon in Egypt, the Greek islands, and Istanbul, where many of the events in our book have taken place. In Istanbul, Abdul Hamid presented him with a badge of the Order of Mecidiye, while his wife was given a less prestigious award. The British admiral Henry Woods (also known as Woods Pasha), who served for a time as the Sultan’s aide-de-camp, would later write in his memoirs that he had witnessed the medal ceremony during which the Sultan finally met the great writer he so deeply admired, but this was not true. When he found out about Doyle’s interest in visiting the Yıldız Palace, and how insistent the writer had been in this request, the Sultan had begun to worry that his palace might become the setting for the next Sherlock Holmes novel, and although he would award the visitors their badges anyway, he had canceled the ceremony at the last minute, using the holy month of Ramadan as his excuse.

During the days of plague, Princess Pakize would often compose as many as three or four long letters a week, but in 1907 Princess Pakize wrote from Hong Kong to her sister Hatice just twice, and only once in 1908, the year her second child Süleyman was born. She had a maid at home, and an English-speaking male servant to run her errands, but with two sickly children to look after, her ties with the world outside her home had all but severed. In one of her letters she wrote that Doctor Nuri would go on inspections to distant neighborhoods sometimes, but that the pace of the outbreak in Hong Kong had slowed, and there were far fewer people dying now than there had been three or four years ago.