第 92 页

In autumn 1913, a high-ranking functionary of the British government in Hong Kong made an appointment to meet with Doctor Nuri in Tung Wah Hospital. Doctor Nuri had assumed he would be discussing Hong Kong’s sewage and quarantine troubles with the green-eyed and fair-haired colonial official, but instead found himself debating the outcome of the Balkan Wars, which he had read about in the local newspapers.

The Ottoman Empire had now lost every last one of the territories it had held in the Balkans for the past four hundred years. The Albanians too had staged a nationalist uprising. Albania’s independence movement had been less concerned with fighting Abdul Hamid and the Ottomans than with the need to repel the Great Powers who would seek to take over when the Ottomans were gone. Eventually the foreign nations consented to the foundation of an “independent” Albanian state which they themselves would govern. (There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Ottoman Empire was finished, but the question now was how the territories it had left behind should be distributed among all the other nations, big and small.) It was decided that Albania would be ruled by a delegation to which six countries would each send a representative, and the head of state would be a prince selected by the Great Powers.

“Everyone wants their own prince to rule Albania,” said the British official, a note of exasperation in his manner. There were even some Albanians who thought the best protection they would ever get was from the British, and hoped Queen Victoria’s son Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Governor-General of Canada, might come to rule them. The Germans had someone from the Hohenzollern dynasty in mind. A Romanian prince had also surfaced, as well as a pasha from the Egyptian Khedivate who was using forged documents to claim Albanian ancestry.

By now Doctor Nuri had sensed where the conversation was heading, but he still put on a solemn look and asked why he was being told of all these developments.

The official gave him some more information. The Ottoman Minister of Foreign Affairs Gabriel Noradunkyan had told the British that considering the population of Albania was 80 percent Muslim, the monarch chosen for the country should probably be an Ottoman prince. The princes who were near the front of the line of succession and still hoped they might become Ottoman sultans one day had rejected the Union and Progress Party’s offer of the Albanian throne. But even the idle, witless princes who were nowhere near inheriting the Ottoman throne (including Abdul Hamid’s beloved son and composer Prince Burhanettin Effendi, whom we spoke of at the start of our novel) had turned their noses up at the prospect of being crowned prince of Albania, most probably because all the other princes had also said no. The next candidates to be considered for the role were prominent Ottoman pashas of Albanian origins. The green-eyed colonial official paused for a moment, before noting that the United Kingdom did not have much of a vested interest in Albania. But if the chosen sovereign was to be a distinguished Muslim who was worthy of this charming new nation, and someone the West approved of, the British government might perhaps suggest that Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri be offered the position, rather than some mediocre princeling. Should this proposal be accepted, it would also solve the Albanian principate’s problems with infectious diseases.

Doctor Nuri reiterated the same point he had made to Consul George in Mingheria twelve years before, noting just as earnestly as he had back then that a sultan’s daughter—in other words a female descendant of the ruling dynasty—could never wield any political authority in a Muslim country.

The British official replied that Princess Pakize’s reign as queen of Mingheria had been successful, and that the foreign office of the United Kingdom had no doubt she would win the affections of the Albanian people.

“We had a very special reason to do what we did in Mingheria …,” said the Prince Consort. “We wanted to enforce quarantine measures against the plague.”

The high-ranking British functionary clarified that he was not making the Doctor and Princess Pakize a formal offer anyway, and that for the British government to officially be able to make such a proposal, Doctor Nuri and Princess Pakize must first indicate that they were interested in going to Albania to begin with.

The last letter Princess Pakize ever wrote to her sister, and which is included in the correspondence we have inherited, discussed this very topic, so we shall now devote some time to examining its mood and tone. The letter clearly tells us that Princess Pakize took the offer seriously, and discussed it at length—and only partly in jest—with her husband and their children at the dinner table. But what did Hatice think? In our view, Princess Pakize meant this question less as a boast, and more as an attempt to find out “what Istanbul might say” if something like this came to pass. In this last letter, Princess Pakize also noted that she did not speak Albanian, and did not wish to make the same mistake she had made in Mingheria. Even so, she did still wonder what it might be like, and even made time to visit the library one day to consult the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which had only just arrived from New York, where she read in the first of two brief entries devoted to the country that Albania was not an island, that its terrain was mountainous, and that—according to the ancient Greek geographer and historian Strabo—its people were tall, tough, and honest, and (in the second entry) that the nation was part of the “Empire of the Turks.” Her daughter Melike, who was seven at the time, later recalled how her mother would joke with her about becoming an Albanian princess, all while dealing with the housework and complaining about the laziness of her maid. In any event, before they could make a decision, they learned from the newspapers that a German prince (Wilhelm of Wied) had been appointed as Albania’s new head of state. (He would be toppled six months later following a Muslim uprising and coup.) So they did not get to indulge for too long in this diverting fantasy.

We do not know for sure why Princess Pakize never wrote to her sister Hatice again. For whatever reason, she must have stopped trusting Hatice, who had meanwhile married again and was living with her new husband in her old waterside mansion, giving birth to two children in quick succession. It is also possible that one or two of Princess Pakize’s letters, which were already less than frequent, might have been lost before they could reach Princess Hatice.

When the First World War (known in Istanbul as the General War) broke out one year later, the couple found themselves living with two small children in the enemy territory of Hong Kong. We assume that after ten years there, they must have obtained British passports. The British administration had made all the necessary arrangements for their esteemed Ottoman guests to feel as safe and comfortable as possible.

Princess Pakize, Doctor Nuri, and their children remained in Hong Kong throughout the war, cut off from their connections at the Istanbul court. Whether they were prisoners of the British, or of their own fears and guilty thoughts, we cannot know, but at any rate, with Istanbul occupied by foreign powers after the Armistice of Mudros, they did not wish to risk being perceived as collaborating with the British. (That was how Princess Pakize’s second-oldest sister Princess Fehime had come to be seen by the people of Istanbul after she had started throwing parties at her Bosphorus mansion for the officers of the occupying British army.) But the notion of collecting the allowances they must have accumulated, and of reclaiming their waterside home in Ortaköy—the thought, in other words, of returning to Istanbul—was always on their mind.

In November 1918, the warships of the allied British, French, Italian, and Greek forces who had won the First World War entered Istanbul and dropped anchor right in front of the royal palaces on the Bosphorus. Having thus surrendered Istanbul itself, the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire—which had been steadily shrinking with each nation and every island it gave away—had finally come to an end. HMS Centurion, the British navy’s colossal dreadnought, moored across from the Çırağan Palace where Princess Pakize had spent her whole life. I would often wonder (when I read Turkish high-school textbooks) if it was only a coincidence that in all the photographs from those trying times for Istanbul’s Muslim population, the sky is always veiled with black clouds. With the Great Powers’ warships anchored outside his window, the last Ottoman sultan (Mehmed VI) was now a prisoner in his own palace, just as his brother Murad V had been. When Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) chased the Greek troops out of western Anatolia, the last sultan boarded a British warship and fled his palace and Istanbul.

In March 1924—after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in Ankara in October 1923, and the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate a few months later—the Ottoman royal family was banished from the country. In just three days, one hundred and fifty-six people who had been close to the throne and right at the top of that rarefied palace world Princess Pakize used to inhabit were plucked out of their lives in Istanbul and put on trains taking them into exile in some unknown destination in the West. These one hundred and fifty-six top-tier members of the Ottoman dynasty were also told they must immediately sell off any property and assets they might have in Turkey and were barred from entering Turkish borders, even in transit. As Princess Pakize and the Prince Consort were part of this group of one hundred and fifty-six notables too, they now found themselves stripped of their Turkish citizenship and with no chance of returning to Istanbul. Now that they had been banned from crossing the border to Turkey, it was unclear when the Ottoman royals would ever be able to return.

Princess Hatice, who had divorced from her second husband too during the last year of the war, did not join the rest of the Ottoman royal family in France. She took her two children and her sister’s letters and moved to Beirut. For many years, she lived on the alimony she received from her second husband. When he got in trouble with the law for smuggling historical artifacts, the alimony payments stopped, but although Hatice and her two children spent several difficult, penniless years in Beirut, for some reason she never contacted Princess Pakize again.

In our view, there are two reasons why Princess Pakize and her family decided a couple of years later to leave Hong Kong behind and move to France. The first is that they identified and indeed sympathized with those one hundred and fifty-six Ottoman royals who had been banished abroad, and the five or six hundred lesser members of the dynasty who had joined them in voluntary exile. The other reason is that they hoped one of the exiled princelings might make a suitable match for their daughter Melike (my grandmother).

Princess Pakize’s correspondence does not touch upon these matters, and I shall keep my account of the family’s life after their move from Hong Kong to France in the summer of 1926 fairly brief (as it has no bearing on the history of Mingheria anyway). My grandmother’s father, the Doctor and “Prince Consort” Nuri, found work in a hospital in Marseille, where he would later set up his own clinic too. This kept the family at a safe distance from the rest of the Ottoman dynasty—who had settled in and around Nice—and from any gossip. They were also able to avoid the spies of the Turkish consulate in Nice, which had been established solely to keep track of the exiled Ottoman princes and princesses and find out if they became politically active. My grandmother Melike was married to a prince descended from Abdul Hamid’s bloodline, and very far removed from the throne.

My mother, born in 1928, was the only child born of that dull, joyless marriage. To escape the confrontational, liquor-soaked family home, this sultan’s great-granddaughter did what most Ottoman princesses used to do, and after the end of the Second World War, at the age of eighteen, she entered into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man of Muslim origins. My father, who lived in London, was the son of a wealthy Arab (Iraqi) merchant and a Scottish mother. His hope was that having an Ottoman princess for a bride would impress the London “high” society he was trying to break into. Six months into their arranged marriage, for which she had received a multitude of gifts and jewelry, my mother returned from London to her parents’ home in Marseille. Sometime later, my father followed her to Marseille and persuaded her to come back to London with him.

During these tempestuous years, my mother began to develop a “fascination”—or what she would later call a “great fondness”—for Mingheria. As a little girl, she had listened to her grandmother Princess Pakize describe the island as if it were some fairy-tale realm, and talk in half-wistful, half-teasing tones of when she used to be its queen, but to my mother’s mother—my grandmother Melike—Mingheria had never been a subject of any particular interest. In my grandmother’s mind, her most notable ancestor was never her mother but her grandfather, the Ottoman sultan Murad V, descendant of a six-hundred-year dynasty. My grandmother Melike also used to say that if only she could have left her husband, she would have gone back to Istanbul after 1952. Women in her position had been allowed to return to Turkey after that date.

My mother’s “Mingherian fascination” was also encouraged by her longing to distance herself from the Ottoman exiles in Nice and from my father’s “Middle Eastern” coterie in London, and live with her husband in a private world of their own. Another reason was that in 1947, Mingheria’s independence was made official and formally recognized by the United Nations, with newspapers’ society pages and children’s supplements devoting ample room to the story of one of the world’s smallest independent states. My own Mingherian “nationalism” was also influenced by these charming reports.

After the end of Ottoman rule in Mingheria, the Ottoman flag hanging from the old State Hall had been replaced from 1901 to 1912 by the Mingherian flag; from 1912 to 1943 by the Mingherian and Italian flags; from 1943 to 1945 by the German flag; from 1945 to 1947 by the British flag; and after 1947 by the same Mingherian flag originally designed by the painter Osgan Kalemciyan. (Together with more than two thousand other Armenian intellectuals living in Istanbul, our painter was taken from his home one night in April 1915—ostensibly as an emergency wartime measure ordered by Grand Vizier and “hero of freedom” Talaat Pasha—and never seen or heard from again.)

But the many different flags flying over the island did not bring about much variety in the way people led their day-to-day lives, nor any cultural transformations, because throughout the half century between 1901 and 1952, President Mazhar (1901–32), President Hadid (1932–43), and every other so-called president, half president, and governor that followed would all pursue—in collaboration with the Italians and the Germans—the same policy of Mingherianization, forbidding the teaching of the island’s Ottoman and Greek history, sending a number of brave Turkish and Rumelian dissenters to labor camps, and Mingherianizing every aspect of life. We have examined this period in further detail—and at great personal cost—in our book Mingherianization and Its Consequences, which was banned from the island for twenty years, and later had several passages censored.