How Mingherians responded to the infectious plague in 1901 isn’t altogether different from our response to the Covid-19. They too hid their patients in fear of stigma and isolation, selfishly hoarded commodities, and used the disease as a political and religious weapon.
Set on an imaginary island at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, “Nights of Plague,” by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, is a chronicle of an epidemic, a murder mystery and a winking literary game.