All epidemics are different, only people remain the same

The new novel by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has been on sale since yesterday in bookstores in his homeland, published by YapiKrediYayinlari.

According to the author, "Nights of the Plague" were created during the past four years and talk about the epidemic of 1901, the time of the bubonic plague, the so-called third plague pandemic, which claimed millions of lives in Asia.

"Thanks to 'Nights of the Plague', the novel I'm writing, journalists and people around me have been constantly asking me questions about past epidemics for the past two months. I am often asked if there are similarities between the corona virus pandemic and plague and cholera epidemics in the past. There is, and a lot of it. But similar microbes and viruses are not the reason that the epidemics described in history and literature resemble each other, the essence, in my opinion, is that we, people, always behave the same", wrote Pamuk in the essay entitled "What can novels about major pandemics" for the "New York Times" in April 2020 in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic.

Denial is the first most important thing that is repeated in all epidemics and pandemics, according to the Turkish writer.

"And the first rule, it seems, is that states and local governments never react on time. In order to deny the epidemic at the beginning, words and numbers are manipulated at first. In "The Year of the Plague", the most educational work about the plague and human behavior, Daniel Defoe writes that after the outbreak of the epidemic in 1664, the dismayed London authorities, in order to show a lower number of deaths from the infection, ordered that some other, fictional diseases be registered as cause of death in certain neighborhoods. Alessandro Manzoni, on the other hand, in his 'Betrothed', perhaps the most realistic novel about the plague of Milan from 1630, takes the side of the angry population and writes that, despite all the prefect's warnings, no one dealt with the danger, moreover, that a prince did not want to cancels his birthday celebrations. "Manconi states the reasons for the rapid spread of the infection with a wisdom that calls to mind the current situation: the insufficiency of prohibitions and orders, the laziness in their implementation and the indifference of the population," Pamuk wrote at the time.