Nights of Plague

Nobel Prize laureate and celebrated Turkish author Orhan Pamuk contributes to the genre of contemporary pandemic fiction with his historical novel, Nights of Plague. Originally written in Turkish, it received an English translation by Ekin Oklap and was published in the US and the UK in 2022. Nights of Plague documents the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901 on the fictional island of Mingheria, a part of the Ottoman Empire, and its consequent revolutionary movement as a governor and bodyguard originally working for the Empire defy the orders of the Sultan and declare the island independent. Narrating the story in retrospect is Mina Mingher, a scholar of “Mingherianization,” a cultural and political movement to replace Ottoman and Greek influences with local traditions, and the great-granddaughter of the Ottoman Princess Pakize who became the island nation’s first queen. She pieces together a historiographical record of Mingheria using the letters and memoirs from the princess and other characters, over a century after their conception.

The coincidence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the publication of this book invites readers to draw parallels between modern infection control measures and attempts to control the spread of plague in early 20th century Mingheria. In the story, Bonkowski Pasha, the Chief Inspector of Public Health sent by the Ottoman Empire to address the plague in Mingheria, imposes an unpopular quarantine order and a series of hygiene guidelines on the island’s residents. Some measures are ineffective, Mina remarks, such as spraying disinfectant into the air, and residents flaunt the quarantine order en masse by gathering at night, resulting in a rising death toll. Pamuk mentions in an interview that the Mingherians’ unwillingness to cooperate with potentially disruptive quarantine measures, which are based on scientific principles for disease prevention, reflect the distrust and opposition to modernity during a time when science and epidemiology was not common knowledge. “He wants to impose quarantine, which is not something desirable: ‘Don’t go there. Don’t eat this. Close this here, or just get out of your house, or I’m going to burn your house down.’ Of course, no one will like you,” he says.

Despite the spatial and temporal distance from the COVID-19 pandemic that raged on around the world in 2022, Nights of Plague echoes the tension between health authorities and the public, and the struggle to balance public health and personal autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries struggled to enforce full public compliance to COVID-19 preventative measures, most notably mask wearing, which is proven to protect from airborne transmission, and vaccination, one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of the virus by strengthening people’s immunity to the virus. A major cause for noncompliance was the rejection or distrust in official scientific narratives of epidemiology, not unlike the attitude held by Mingherians towards the hygiene guidelines imposed on them. Many still doubted the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, or that the virus itself is a threat or even exists. With rapid advancements in medical technology and expanding the scope of science education, the situation from Nights of Plague leads modern readers to reflect on the factors that continue to turn people away from science and measures that save lives within a deadly pandemic.