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Fifty years after the Mingherian Revolution, the question of how they might “take advantage” of that lapse was one that my parents would always talk and argue about every time my father came to the island. These early arguments, which I was far too young to make sense of at the time, eventually turned into full-blown marital fights, and caused me so much distress that I paid no attention to “those properties” until I was at least thirty years old. Today I sometimes wish I hadn’t taken any interest in these family assets after I turned thirty either—for it meant that those who could not comprehend my heartfelt passion for Mingherian history and culture, or the strength of my love for the island, soon began to claim that the real reason I kept visiting Arkaz was to try and claim ownership of that land.

Having resolved not to bring personal polemic into this book, I must now speak of what has been one of my life’s greatest woes. In the twenty-one years between 1984 and 2005, I was forbidden from entering Mingheria. The Mingherian embassy in London would not renew the Mingherian passport I was “automatically” entitled to by birth. That same London embassy rejected the visa application I made with my British passport, which I held thanks to my father, and the Mingherian embassy in Paris rejected the application I made there with the French passport I held through my mother’s citizenship. For twenty-one years, the impossibility of seeing the island and breathing its air, of spending summers on its beaches with my husband and our children, of strolling through the backstreets of Arkaz, and, of course, of using the Mingherian state archives for my research would be a source of crushing anguish and heartache. A few friends who were well versed in these matters, and had connections in the Mingherian secret service, suggested that I was being punished for the book I’d written, for having put my signature on public statements protesting the military regime that ruled the island in the 1980s, for my criticism of the policy of locking intellectuals, leftists, and religious sectarians up in the Castle prison, and for publishing several articles (deemed to be derogatory of the Mingherian people) on the subject of the historic dungeons of the Castle of Mingheria. But those who were familiar enough with the intricacies of the deep state to know that it did not begin and end with the secret police told me quite candidly that the real reason for my banishment had to do with my great-grandmother’s inheritance—meaning, in other words, that it was all a question of money and land.

I had known many foreign scholars of Ottoman history who had spent years patiently sifting through the Ottoman archives to research the massacres of the Empire’s Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish populations and other similarly unpleasant topics, or had proven that some of those nationalistic campaigns of the past had not really unfolded in quite the way they had previously been described, and I had seen how distraught they would become when the permits which had allowed them to work in the archives in Istanbul were suddenly and mysteriously revoked. But although I had witnessed so many of my brave and honorable colleagues being ruthlessly punished by the Turkish state for their honesty, I still felt lonely and guilty when the same punishment was inflicted on me by the Mingherian state for twenty years.

By 2008, when Mingheria was declared a candidate for membership of the European Union, it had become harder for the state to silence its opponents—not just moderates like me, but those far-more-vociferous dissenters it had jailed, the leftist militants, and anyone who had ever objected to the criminal seizure of the assets of local Greek and Turkish charitable trusts. Once I was finally able to procure a new Mingherian passport—thanks to several letters of complaint I sent to the European Union, and the intercession of some of the more “liberal” Mingherian government ministers whose families we were acquainted with (in my country, a favor from an influential friend has always offered far-greater protection than any notion of human rights ever could)—I got on the first plane to Arkaz, but the moment I walked out of Commander Kâmil Airport, I realized that every step I took was going to be watched by the secret police. After 2005, when I started writing the introduction which would later turn into this book, I would stay at my friends’ houses and in hotels in Mingheria, and constantly find that my suitcases and other possessions had been searched while I was out. What upset me most of all were not even the overt references to my supposedly being a “spy” for Turkey or the United Kingdom (the latter because of my father) that kept appearing in the newspapers of a country which aspired to join the European Union, but the fact that whenever we got together on the island in the summer, it would only take a glass of Arkazian wine before those same Mingherian friends whom I would host whenever they came to London, Paris, or Boston (where I taught as a professor) started repeating those very same accusations, and making crass jokes on the subject.

At an academic conference, I had been complaining about the primitive, mean-spirited jokes my Mingherian friends had been making at my expense when a Dutch professor of Middle Eastern and “Levantine” history whom I had always admired replied with this sardonic remark: “How terribly unjust! If your friends knew you well enough, they would see that you are the staunchest Mingherian nationalist there is.”

I regret today that I was not able to give that Orientalist professor—who no doubt thought he was being funny—the response he deserved. But I will indulge in a quick digression now to remind him and my Mingherian friends, as well as all of my readers too, of this important fact: in the twenty-first century, with the era of traditional empires and colonies long since behind us, the word “nationalist” has become a label almost always employed to lend prestige to the behavior of people who tend to agree with everything their government says, have no other aim but to curry favor with those in power, and lack the courage to stand up to authority. But in the age of our revered “Major” Kâmil, “nationalism” was a noble term, reserved for those brave, heroic patriots who rose up in revolt against their colonizers and ran headfirst, flags aloft, toward the invaders’ relentless machine guns.

A further consequence of my being banished from the island for twenty-odd years was that just as they were about to reach the age when they might start talking, my two wonderful, strapping boys were barred from spending any time on the island, so that—far from becoming fluent in Mingherian—they never learned a single word of this magical language. Every time I insisted that they should “learn their mother tongue,” or tried reproachfully to teach them some Mingherian myself, they would remind me that nobody else in our family (except for my mother and I) knew any Mingherian, not even the Queen, and that even I only ever spoke to their grandmother in Turkish, pointing out with knowing smiles that their mother tongue was actually English, if not Turkish. My sons’ teasing and occasional mockery of my attachment to Mingheria, and—as I also explained to the lawyer—their father’s persistent refusal to take my side, would eventually lead to my marriage ending in divorce.

While we are on the subject of nationalism and language, I will also touch upon another of my life’s saddest days. When a 2012 UEFA European Football Championship qualifying match played in Istanbul between Mingheria—whose population hadn’t yet reached half a million—and Turkey ended with a (perhaps) dubious penalty kick which handed Mingheria a last-minute 1–0 victory and knocked Turkey out of the competition, that sensation I’d always had of being divided between my beloved Turkish and my beloved Mingherian transformed into a veritable agony. Furious supporters rampaged through Istanbul breaking the windows of Mingherian restaurants, Mingherian bakeries (which sold the same kind of biscuits that had killed Doctor Ilias), and any other stores which had “Mingheria” in their names, damaging their displays, looting their stock, and occasionally even setting fire to their premises. For the rest of that week, I avoided the journalists and hid myself away, deciding—as I am doing now—that the best course of action was to forget about it all.

While preparing Princess Pakize’s letters for publication, I have often wondered what all those people who were living in Arkaz in 1901, trying to dodge the deadly threats of plague and political violence, would think if they could see the Arkaz my mother and I knew in the 1950s. I expect they would have been gladdened by the sight of the Commander’s spectacular mausoleum—finally completed in 1933—which we respectfully acknowledged every time our hired carriage crossed Commander Kâmil Bridge (formerly known as Hamidiye Bridge), as by the statues of the Commander and the Commander with Zeynep, which had been placed in each of the city’s five most important locations, and by the flags of Mingheria, which we could always see wherever we looked. They would probably also have been impressed by the new jetty—made out of Mingherian stone—where even the bigger ships could now dock, the tall and sturdy new breakwater in the harbor, the Zeynep-Kâmil Hospital and all its modern equipment, the enormous Broadcasting House, constructed in the style of traditional wooden Mingherian homes but using concrete and Mingherian stone instead, all the buildings of the Commander Kâmil University, the small and charming Arkaz Opera House, and the Mingherian Archaeological Museum. But I suspect they would have been somewhat alarmed by the tall apartment blocks that had appeared on Commander Kâmil Boulevard and on the hills that overlooked the sea, by the Mingherian Park Hotel, which resembled a giant white concrete box, and by the enormous blue and pink neon signs spelling out the names of hotels and rosewater brands from the top of the tallest roofs so that they could be seen from approaching passenger ferries.

Completed long after the Mingherian Revolution, the much-delayed clock tower originally commissioned to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Abdul Hamid’s accession to the throne had ended up with no clock at all, but carried instead the statue of the Goddess Mina (which had almost been named the Marble Zeynep due to its striking resemblance to the Commander’s wife) retrieved by the archaeologist Selim Sahir, and shortly after the Italian occupation, people had begun to call it the Memorial of Mingheria—the name still used for it today.

In the 1950s, as we sat on the phaeton taking us home, Commander Kâmil’s monumental mausoleum would hover to our left like a tangible presence dominating the city from above, though my mother and I would never talk about him—not on the carriage itself, nor when we got home. But in the Kâmil-Zeynep Primary School—which I began to attend in 1956, and which also happened to be on the carriage’s route—the Commander was constantly mentioned, and his image was in every classroom, hanging on the walls and printed in our textbooks.

Before I’d even started primary school, I had already memorized the one hundred twenty-nine Mingherian words the Commander had specifically emphasized, and all the sentences that could be composed with them. This meant that in the first grade, I very quickly learned how to pronounce the letters of the Mingherian alphabet—and consequently how to read as well. By the end of that first school year, and with some help from the pocket dictionary my mother had bought me, I had learned another two hundred and fifty Mingherian words, none of which I had ever heard from the other children on the beach or from Rina. Meanwhile, more than half of my classmates were still busy trying to work their way through the alphabet.

In autumn of 1957, when I got to second grade, the teacher realized that my vocabulary—particularly in Mingherian—was far more advanced than everyone else’s, so she made me sit at the front and let me spend the day leafing through my pocket dictionary (a more comprehensive one had yet to be written). When the school inspector came in unannounced one morning for her customary yearly visit, the teacher called me to the blackboard and asked me about all the new words I had learned. I recited some of the oldest Mingherian words I knew and explained what they meant: “darkness,” “gazelle,” “icy mountain,” “spout,” “shoe,” and “futile.” I suspect there were some words whose meanings were obscure even to the teacher and the lady inspector with the bleached blonde hair.

Yet when the inspector asked me to make a sentence with some of those words, I was struck dumb. All I could picture was the excitement of those high-school students who would run around during Independence Day celebrations and stand side by side in the square to form different sentences. Feeling mortified, I looked up at the photographs of Commander Kâmil and Zeynep hanging above the blackboard. How young and beautiful they were! They had spoken this language in that unlit kitchen and had thus rescued both the language and the nation from oblivion. I was ashamed of myself, and grateful to them for saving the Mingherian people.

But unfortunately I still couldn’t think in Mingherian, and I would always dream in Turkish. (That is also why I wrote this book in Turkish.) When she saw that I had begun to stammer, the inspector turned to the teacher and said, “Why don’t you try?” But although the teacher did begin a sentence in Mingherian, she couldn’t seem to complete it, and soon fell silent. She glanced at the inspector in the hopes she might finish the sentence for her, but the inspector struggled too, and couldn’t do it either.

Undeterred by this hiccup, the inspector began to ask me questions. “Who was the second president of Mingheria?” “Sheikh Hamdullah!” “What was the first word Zeynep and Kâmil remembered in the kitchen?” “Akva—‘water’!” “When was the declaration of freedom and independence?” “On the twenty-eighth of June 1901.” “Who made the painting of the armored landau traveling through the empty streets that night?” “The artist Tacettin. But it was the people of Mingheria who pictured it first!” The inspector was so moved by this answer that she called me over and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “My dear girl,” she said, her voice full of emotion, “if our Great Commander Kâmil and Zeynep could see you now, they would be so gratified and so proud of you, and they would know that the Mingherian language and the Mingherian people live on.” (There was no intention of being dismissive in the way she had referred to Zeynep; in the 1950s, Mingherians would always call the Commander’s wife by her name alone, as if she were the heroine of some mythical tale.)

The lady inspector had been gazing at the photographs of the Commander and his wife which hung in every classroom in Mingheria. When she turned to look at me, she said: “Queen Pakize would have been proud of this little Mingherian too!”

I realized then that just like the majority of the island, the inspector thought my grandmother’s mother, Queen Pakize, was dead and also had no idea that I was her granddaughter’s daughter.