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A topic that was mentioned in each of the three letters from those two years was Princess Pakize’s determination to read her way through her sister’s lists of “Abdul Hamid’s favorite” crime stories and novels (starting with the Sherlock Holmes mysteries), which she would borrow from the English library in Hong Kong. In her 1908 letter to Hatice, she did not tell her sister why she was doing this (it was to see if she could understand how Doctor Ilias’s killer had thought to conceal the pharmacies and herbalists he had bought the poison from) quite as openly as she had spoken to Doctor Nuri about it. This reticence was probably due to how close Hatice had grown to their uncle Abdul Hamid, who had not only forgiven her, but also made sure she was invited to palace functions—as if to indicate to society at large that his niece had been entirely blameless in the scandal. After the death of their father, Princess Pakize might have sought to take advantage of Hatice’s rapport with the Sultan, but not once did she write to her sister to ask if she could mediate on her own and her husband’s behalf to help clear them of the charge of treason. Perhaps she did not think Hatice was close enough to Abdul Hamid to demand such a thing; another possibility is that she did not feel she could trust Abdul Hamid even if he did “forgive” her, and that welcoming such a pardon would be a betrayal of her father’s memory.

Princess Pakize heard about Abdul Hamid’s restoration of the constitution, the reconvening of the Chamber of Deputies, the Thirty-First of March Incident, and the Action Army landing from Thessaloniki to depose her uncle (Abdul Hamid) and replace him with her younger uncle Reşat, all from the English newspapers she read in Hong Kong. Neither Princess Pakize nor her husband had the slightest difficulty in picturing the angry, organized mobs streaming out of Istanbul mosques to butcher freedom-loving, reformist, and westernized writers on the streets; the artillery and machine-gun battles between the Action Army from Thessaloniki and the soldiers stationed in the Maçka Barracks near the Imperial Bacteriology Institute and in the barracks near Taksim Square; the three ringleaders of the rebellious “Sharia fanatics” dressed in white execution gowns and hanged from modern three-legged gallows in the always busy Eminönü Square, where they would be left to swing in the breeze for three days as an example to the whole of Istanbul; and the chants of “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with the addition of “justice”—ringing in the air.

The introduction of new freedoms, the removal of Abdul Hamid, and the amnesty for political prisoners had made the idea of “returning to Istanbul” seem once more like a reasonable proposition. If they were to go back to Istanbul, would they be in trouble for what had happened in Mingheria? In those days the officials of the swiftly unraveling and severely indebted Ottoman Empire were operating in a state of such uncertainty that a friend Doctor Nuri had sent letters and telegrams to in search of an answer to this very question, and indeed to find out what might be happening behind the scenes, had in turn heard from his own friend at the Ministry of Justice that perhaps the most suitable course of action was for the pair to return “without saying anything to anyone”—for these kinds of cautious inquiries were often seen by registry clerks and department heads as opportunities to extract prodigious bribes, or interpreted as the misguided actions of guilty malefactors foolishly alerting the authorities to their imminent arrival.

But the idea of returning to Istanbul unprepared—and quite out of the blue—did not sit well with either of them. Of course Princess Pakize owned property in the city (including her mansion on the shore of the Bosphorus), and Doctor Nuri had his marriage allowance and his government salary waiting for him in the treasury coffers, as well as other sources of revenue, but on the other hand, the idea that they had committed “treason” may well have etched itself into their enemies’ minds. They could claim their rightful assets whenever they chose to return to Istanbul. But in the meantime, Doctor Nuri’s uncommon abilities had secured him a considerable income both from the British colonial administration in Hong Kong, and from his work with local hospitals as a consultant on quarantine measures. Besides, the thought of getting on a ship with their three-year-old daughter and their surly, irascible one-year-old son for a journey that might last for several weeks (they might even have to quarantine at some point!) was more than they could face.

Princess Pakize might not have said as much in any of her letters, but my intuition also tells me this: she loved her husband, their rowdy children, and the life they led in their home, which smelled permanently of food, steam, and soiled nappies. Had she been in Istanbul, she would have ended up the same as everyone else around her, standing in a corner like a faded rose, and living a seemingly more glamorous but ultimately less vibrant life. Princess Pakize had realized long ago that her husband was not like the other princes and royal consorts who would be satisfied with attending receptions for the rest of his life (going to those parties that were arranged to raise money for charities and public health institutions). In truth they were both content with the sheltered “bourgeois existence” they conducted in Hong Kong, far from everyone else and with servants attending to their needs, and even though Istanbul had been “liberated,” and Abdul Hamid removed from the throne, they did not feel safe enough to return.

In the eleven short letters she sent to her sister during the five years between 1909 and 1913, Princess Pakize always wrote about the same things, telling her sister that all was well with her and the children in Hong Kong, that her husband was working very hard, and that she was busy doing housework and reading novels. From the questions she asked in her letters, we can surmise that Princess Pakize was not aware of what was happening in Istanbul and in Arkaz.

We shall therefore look to other sources for a brief overview of some of the events that took place in Istanbul and Arkaz during those five years.

The story of the last ten years of the Ottoman Empire is also the story of the vertiginous rate at which it lost all the territories, the countries, and the islands that had been shown on the map of the Empire hanging in the Aziziye’s main cabin.

In the days after the fall of Abdul Hamid, the word most commonly heard in Istanbul was “freedom.” The moment all these new “freedoms” were introduced, the first thing Princess Pakize’s sister Hatice did was to pay a sizable sum in “compensation” to separate from the man her uncle had arranged for her to marry (and who had been drawing up all those lists of the murder mysteries Abdul Hamid had read at his sister-in-law Princess Pakize’s request). Fifty years later, the conservative commentator Nahit Sırrı Örik would pen a series of columns in the magazine History World on the subject of Murad V’s son and daughters (excluding Princess Pakize) in which he would imply—based on the various rumors that had been floating around the palace at the time, and which Örik had heard from his father—that the “freedom” they had all been waiting for had done Murad V’s children not much good at all.

Nahit Sırrı Örik writes that when Prince Mehmet Selahattin, the eldest of the siblings, finally found freedom after spending twenty-eight years imprisoned in the same palace, he wandered around the streets, ferries, docks, and bridges of Istanbul for days, introducing himself to everyone he met—including young Örik himself, who was thirteen at the time. The Prince’s main preoccupation was how he might go about writing and producing a stage play on the subject of the injustices his deposed father had suffered. Örik, who was rather partial to malicious gossip, would argue instead that the half-mad but exceptionally clever and cultured prince planned to approach Sultan Reşat to claim the “arrears” of revenue owed to his late father Murad V without giving his sisters their rightful share, but that even his half-witted uncle Reşat wouldn’t take him seriously.

The new era of “freedom” was most evident in the wealth and breadth of books, newspapers, and magazines that came to be published in this period. This was how the people of Istanbul first discovered that some of the French novels they had bought and read while they had all still been living in the age of “despotism” had actually been translated at Abdul Hamid’s behest. It was around this time that the note “translated for Abdul Hamid” began to appear in certain books, a practice which became more widely adopted after the foundation of the Turkish Republic.

In our view, there are three explanations for the question—an important one for our book too—of why these novels were still being published in their censored versions “even in the age of freedom”: (1) laziness; (2) the fact that many of those old translators had stopped working in the intervening years, and their draft translation had gone missing; (3) and that the same kinds of topics which had so displeased Abdul Hamid, such as any criticisms of Islam and the Turks, were equally irksome to those who came to power after the nation’s “liberation” from absolutism. We should also note that the custom of gunning journalists and writers down on the street with the tacit backing of the state—a tradition that has now persisted for more than a hundred years—was first born under the new regime of “freedom.”

The collapse of the Empire was hastened by the Italians, who, having made a deal with the British and French, declared war on the Ottomans in 1911 in order to take Libya. (Though in truth, the new Ottoman government would have been just as willing as Abdul Hamid’s to take their flag down and hand Libya over to Italy without a fight!) As part of their military strategy, the Italian navy—which must have been seven or eight times stronger than the Ottoman fleet—invaded more than twenty Ottoman islands of various shapes and sizes, including Rhodes. Due to the way the Turks administered these territories, of all the islands in the Dodecanese (what the Ottomans called the Twelve Islands), it was the Ottoman division stationed in Rhodes that put up the greatest resistance against the invaders. In Mingheria, meanwhile, the astute President Mazhar played his cards right and managed—without fighting a single battle—to secure a new treaty for the island guaranteeing its independence.

The Rumelian Greeks, who constituted the vast majority of the population on all of the islands Italy had occupied, did not object to their new situation, for it seemed preferable to be governed by the Italians rather than the crumbling Ottoman state, which had failed to establish law and order and still continued, even years after the Tanzimat-era reforms, to find all kinds of pretexts to impose higher taxes on its Christian subjects (such as the levy collected from non-Muslims wishing to avoid compulsory military service). As it was too far out in the east, the tiny island of Kastellorizo had not been invaded, but its 98 percent Greek population drew up a petition inviting the Italian navy to the island, and declaring their wish to become part of Italy.

The war, which was the first in history to feature aerial bombardments, ended in a swift victory for the Kingdom of Italy. The parties then signed the Treaty of Ouchy, which ceded Libya to the Italians. As for the Mediterranean islands which remained under Italian occupation, perhaps they could be handed back to the Ottomans after the Balkan Wars. For in the meantime, having realized that the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, and witnessed how easily its armies were being defeated, the Balkan nations—having first agreed with one another on who would be entitled to which land—had declared war on the Ottomans. In other words, Greece and the Ottoman Empire were at war once more. The Ottoman state had emerged from the Italo-Turkish War (known in Turkish history books as the Tripolitanian War) with yet another defeat, and its bureaucratic cadres were so sure that they were going to lose the Balkan Wars too that it seemed likely the Ottoman islands would all end up joining Greece. That being the case, perhaps it was better for these islands to remain in Italian hands for the time being—on the understanding that they would eventually be returned to the Ottomans. So the Ottomans withdrew from Libya, and hinted at the Italians that they could keep their soldiers stationed on the islands of the Dodecanese.

Around the same time, in September 1912, President Mazhar signed a “secret” treaty with Italy known as the Chania Accord. Over the course of his thirty-one-year rule, the President would use prisons, labor camps, and other similar methods to subjugate the island’s liberals, its pro-Turkish and pro-Greek factions, and various other dissenting voices, and he would also put together a powerful army. Twice a year he would stand on the balcony of the Ministerial Headquarters—the former Governor’s Residence and State Hall—and salute each and every one of this army’s soldiers, no matter how long it took. Photographs, paintings, and sculptures of the Commander and Zeynep adorned every corner of the island, from lottery tickets to banknotes, from shoeboxes to the labels on alcoholic drinks, from dried-fig cartons to bus stops.

Aboard the Mingherian navy’s only warship, which was taking him to Crete to sign the treaty the British had also facilitated, President Mazhar was telling everyone around him that after eleven years the nation’s independence was finally going to be recognized by the rest of the world … His second-in-command, Hadid, had worked long and hard to persuade people—especially those “authentic” Mingherians who spoke Mingherian at home—to accept the conditions of this treaty.

In October 1912, Italy formally recognized Mingheria’s independence. In practice this was a kind of semi-independence, as an Italian flag now also billowed beside the flag of Mingheria hanging from the old State Hall. President Mazhar’s job now was to silence those Mingherian nationalists who objected to the presence of the Italian flag, but this was not a particularly substantial contingent. Most people were simply relieved that the Ottomans were not going to send their warships to bomb the island.

With the Balkan Wars also ending in defeat, the Union and Progress Party staged a coup to overthrow the government that had lost the war. There are many aspects of this incident, known colloquially as the Raid on the Sublime Porte, which are reminiscent of the history of Mingheria and its so-called era of quarantine governments. Soldiers and party henchmen attacked a government meeting in broad daylight, shot one of the ministers dead, and forced the government to resign. The “hero of freedom” Enver Bey, the main organizer of this coup, quickly rose to the rank of Pasha, and married Sultan Abdulmejid’s granddaughter Princess Naciye.

Five months later, Mahmut Şevket Pasha, Commander of the Action Army and the man whom the plotters of the coup against Abdul Hamid had appointed as the head of the new government, was shot and killed in Istanbul’s Divanyolu Street while waiting in traffic in his cabriolet. The bullet-ridden car, which was completely unarmored, is displayed today in the Military Museum in Istanbul’s Harbiye district, as are the guns used by the assassins, who were all caught and hanged, and the novelist and history enthusiast Orhan Pamuk has told me of how he would obsessively visit the exhibit once a week during a period in the 1980s when he lived in a house in Nişantaşı at five minutes’ walking distance from the museum.