Whenever citizens of Stamboul tire of their town, or when their town tires of them, they leave or are sent to the Princes’ Isles, that suburban archipelago in the Marmara. That is to say, the Princes’ Isles are favoured both as pleasure-resorts and places of exile. How touching it is that Stamboullus, worn out by their rough, dirty and noisy town, and disgusted with its corrupt and perverse ways, still cannot bear to be too far away from it even when they are banished or on vacation. Observe them in one of the seaside cafés on the isles, as they sit there silent, sad and bored, looking out across the Marmara to Stamboul. Then watch them brighten up and begin to chatter gaily as the ferry arrives which will take them back to town. Observe, too, that morose and solitary character who remains at the corner table after all the rest have gone, never ceasing his gazing across the sea. The head-waiter will tell you the story of this distinguished gentleman and of how he was exiled to this island because of his crimes and intrigues in Stamboul. His crimes must have been great and his intrigues profound, for his exile is most cruel, to be banished to an isle within sight of his beloved city. But then, perhaps next year the exile will be back in town and his enemies will be packed off to the same island where he is now, perhaps to occupy the same corner table. Citizens of Stamboul have thus for centuries been travelling to and from the Princes’ Isles.

Evliya Efendi made several voyages to the Princes’ Isles, and has left us this lively description of one of his excursions there, the very first of his many journeys outside of Stamboul: ‘All the passengers were in high spirits, and some of them implored the Lord’s assistance by singing spiritual songs. Some musicians encouraged me to sing along with them, and several of the boatmen accompanied us on their instruments, with such effect that the eyes of the listeners watered with delight. Amidst these amusements we came to the Princes’ Isles.’ The journey today by the island ferry is usually more prosaic, but on Sunday afternoons groups of young people enliven the voyage by singing to the accompaniment of a saz or a guitar, evoking a joyous holiday mood reminiscent of that which Evliya Efendi describes.

The most beautiful of all the isles is Büyükada, the Great Island, the last one at which the ferry calls. Büyükada, as its name implies, is the largest of the isles and is also the most populous. But great, like all superlatives, is a relative term, for Büyükada is but two and one-half miles long and less than a mile wide. Islands, like planets, are worlds unto themselves and define the scale of dimensions for their exiled inhabitants.

Among Stamboullus of an older generation Büyükada is still known as Prinkipo, the Isle of the Prince, a name which was first given to it in the early centuries of Byzantium. Prinkipo has always been the most regal of the isles; its views and vistas are more sweeping and dramatic than elsewhere in the archipelago, its flora more cultivated and exuberant, its villas more elegant and their tenants more fashionable and sophisticated, its hotels grander, its cafés and restaurants more exclusive and expensive, its exiles more numerous, more illustrious and more mysterious. But Prinkipo has faded in the past generation, since the eclipse of the imperial capital on its sunset horizon. Many of the old villas are now abandoned and their windows boarded up, the grand hotels are beginning to sag a bit and seem barely able to support the corpulent pensioners who doze on their tilting balconies, and the exiles of Prinkipo have been there so long that their crimes have been forgotten in Stamboul. But one does not notice this in spring, which calls here far earlier than in Stamboul. The first harbingers of this early equinox are the flights of storks which soar up the meridians in early March across the southern horizon, to congregate for a night on İsa Tepesi, the Hill of Christos, before flying off to their summer quarters above the Golden Horn. As soon as these heraldic birds pass over Prinkipo, some primeval signal seems given to the earth, for it erupts in blossoms and the island is transformed. The hills of Christos and St George are covered with wild flowers and adorned with flowering fruit-trees. The gardens of the old villas are set ablaze with blossoming bougainvillaea and judas trees, whose fallen petals purple the marble streets of the town. The night air becomes heavy with jasmine and honeysuckle, and under the waxing April moon the old grand hotels are seen to be festooned with heavy clusters of wistaria, whose faded lavender seems the proper adornment for those broken-down dowagers, returning to life for another season. This vernal signal also resurrects the surviving aristocrats of Prinkipo, who now pry loose the rotten boards from the windows of their ruined konaks, where mildewed curtains ruffle in the first hesitant zephyrs of the meltem. The island ferries soon resume their fair-weather schedules and begin to carry out to the islands pale Stamboullus, who stagger ashore like consumptive cripples on the quay of paradise, half-dead from a winter’s purgatory in town. It is then that the moribund exiles shake the mothballs from their shiny suits and prepare to occupy their corner tables in the seaside cafés. There they will resume their eternal gazing across the Marmara to Stamboul, ceasing only to scrutinise those newly arrived off the ferry. Perhaps, one day, a retired member of the secret-police will debark and stop to chat about long-dead spies, or an old enemy will sit down to talk of past conspiracies over a glass of tea. Or, more likely, the lonely exile will just purchase the morning paper to learn the latest football score – anything to lighten the boredom which is the only cloud above this lovely island, just twelve miles from Stamboul by sea.

In modern times Prinkipo has been more popular as a place of exile than the other islands of the archipelago. After all, it is more regal and more comfortable, and an exile there can be sure to enjoy the company of more fashionable and influential people, many of them exiles themselves, who can help him plot his way back into power. Old-timers in Prinkipo still recall two of the most fascinating exiles of a generation past, both of them foreigners. One was Leon Trotsky, who was held here as a virtual prisoner for four years after he left Russia. Trotsky lived during those years in a house not far from the ferry-landing, and there began to write his History of the Russian Revolution. The house in which he lived had once belonged to Arab İzzet Pasha, the head of Abdül Hamit’s secret police, who himself had been exiled from Prinkipo after the Sultan’s downfall. The second exile from that period was of quite a different type, if indeed his stay on Prinkipo can be termed an exile at all. This was Msgr Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, later to become Pope John XXIII, who lived there during the years when he was Papal Nuncio in Istanbul. Clerical gossip has it that Roncalli was sent off there by his enemies in the Curia, who wanted that formidable personage as far away from Rome as possible. But Roncalli made the best of his exile and became a familiar and extremely popular figure in town. He is still remembered with affection on Prinkipo, and the townspeople there point out his house with pride. My dear friend Aliye Berger remembers him well, for her father’s konak stood just beside the Nuncio’s mansion. Aliye recalls that her bedroom window overlooked Roncali’s garden, and that on summer evenings she would look down and see the huge figure of the Nuncio stalking through the flower beds, reciting his daily office in loud and eloquent Latin, while behind him followed a fat little friar playing upon a violin.

Not far from the Nuncio’s Palace there resides another exile from the past (if indeed she is still alive at the time I write these lines). This venerable lady is the last known survivor of the harem of Sultan Abdül Hamit II, having come to Prinkipo in 1908 when the Sultan was deposed. Through all the years since then she has lived alone in a tiny house on a back street in Prinkipo. She is known only to her immediate neighbours, who see her through the curtains in her living-room perhaps only once or twice during the course of a year. Only the very oldest people on the street can remember ever having met her, many years before, but even then, they recall, her features were occulted by a heavy veil. She is known to her neighbours only as Saraylı Hanım, the Lady of the Palace.

Some of the exiles on Prinkipo found even the little island town too public and sought solitude in the wooded hills of the interior. Both of the island’s hills are still crowned with monasteries, where in medieval times a succession of royal exiles ended their years as monks and nuns, including several emperors and empresses of Byzantium. Today the monasteries and their churches are falling into ruins, sheltering now only one or two old monks and a few poor Greek families. The flaking plaster of the old buildings has faded into pale shades of rose and pink and the tiled roofs are overgrown with grass and wild flowers, making them the most picturesque beauty-spots on the isles – the royal exiles indeed chose felicitous hostels for their penitential years.

High on the eastern slope of Christos one sees the former residence of still another exile of former times, the Castle of Dr Hinteriyan. A castle it is indeed, complete with crenellated battlements, watchtowers, slitted turrets, barbicans, and a moat crossed by a drawbridge. But when one approaches to take a closer look one finds that the castle is a fantastic fake, constructed entirely of flimsy, unpainted wood, now rotting and falling to pieces, with yellowed newspapers flapping in its shattered windows, birds flitting through holes in its warped and rickety walls, the moat dry and filled with junk and debris. There is a rustic café in what was once the estate of the castle, and there I learned from the café owner the tale of this mad exile and his crazy castle. I was told that this medieval-looking monstrosity was built late in the last century by a certain Dr Hinteriyan, an Armenian dentist who retired here on Prinkipo after fleeing from various scandals in Stamboul. The café owner himself was only a boy at the time of Dr Hinteriyan’s death, but he remembered his father telling him tales about this incredible dentist and the strange goings-on in the wooden castle during his last years. The old dentist, it seems, had fallen victim to that same mania which had seized Cervantes’ hero four centuries before, for he believed himself to be a chivalrous knight errant. Consequently he built himself this medieval castle, but in wood, since time and money were short, although imagination long. And as his faithful servant, for all chivalrous knights must have a faithful servant, he hired a simple-minded Armenian fisherman named Hagop. The dentist then dressed himself and his man in medieval costumes purchased from a theatrical supply-house and set himself up as a knight in his wooden castle, ready to challenge all comers and to succour distressed damsels. But comers never came to the wooden castle, certainly not distressed damsels, and so the dentist spent all of his time carousing in the great hall, flinging empty bottles through the castle windows into the moat, while poor Hagop stood his post before the castle gate in his second-hand armour, armed with his tin sword and cardboard shield, faithfully calling off the hours of his watch and proclaiming that all was well along the walls. And so the dentist spent his last years on Prinkipo, an alcoholic knight errant in the wrong century.

I thanked the café owner for his tale and left, going back to take one last look at the wooden castle. I stood before the castle gate and observed that the moat was still filled with empty bottles, whose outdated labels commemorated the thirst of a generation past, and then I found a rusted helmet beside the ruined drawbridge. This brought the whole crazy scene back to life again, and provoked me to shout up to the castle windows. ‘All is well along the walls!’ I called, hoping thus to calm the ghost of that mad dentist, still haunting the creaking halls of his fake castle, still attended by the addled shade of poor Hagop.

There have been many exiles on Prinkipo besides these, but most of them have by now been long forgotten, and, in fact, the whole institution of island exile is fast going out of style. Nevertheless, there is still one old-fashioned exile in residence there. I met him one afternoon outside Villa Rıfat, which itself stands on the site of a medieval nunnery where several empresses of Byzantium were confined in their latter years, and where we ourselves are often exiled on weekends. At first I thought that this white-bearded character was an old dervish, as he trudged along the road lugging two large sacks, wearing a tattered turban on his grizzled head, garbed in a threadbare coat and shod in home-made sandals. I greeted him in Turkish and was flabbergasted when he responded in excellent but somewhat quaint English, with just the hint of an Austrian accent. I fell into step with him and soon learned the story of this last of the Prinkipo exiles. His name, he told me, was Franz Fischer, and some forty years ago he had been Professor of Microbiology at the University of Istanbul. But when the Second World War began he fled from civilisation in disgust and built himself a little shack on the uninhabited eastern end of Prinkipo, where he had lived ever since. As we walked along, various islanders greeted him as Kaya Baba, his Turkish name, and he stopped here and there to trade and sell the eggs he was carrying in one of his sacks; the other sack, he explained, contained feed for the flock of chickens and pigeons which were his only companions. By now we had become fast friends; he apologised for his poor English, which was quite perfect in pronunciation, though interspersed here and there with phrases in German, French, Latin and Turkish, saying that I was the first foreigner he had spoken to in the thirty-four years of his self-imposed exile from the world. And then he invited me to accompany him to his home, which proved to be nothing more than a chickencoop which he shared with his birds and fowl. Through all the years of his exile, he said, the only thing he had missed was the opportunity to converse now and then with someone like myself, who could appreciate his poetry and philosophy. Whereupon he brought out from his chicken-coop two parcels wrapped in old newspapers and plastic; they contained the two tomes which he had been working on all of his life, both of them neatly printed in pencil in his own hand. The first volume was his Aethergeist, the Spirit of the Aether, a work of world philosophy and pantheistic theology which he proceeded to explain to me at length, ranting like an Old Testament prophet, his bright blue eyes blazing with the fanaticism of a God-intoxicated preacher. ‘My philosophy is the only true one in the world, because for thirty-four years my thought has been uncontaminated by contact with the falsehoods of other books or minds!’ he shouted, disturbing his pigeons so that they flew away in a flapping covey, setting his hens cackling and his cocks crowing. Whereupon he chuckled, showing me how his manuscript had become besmirched with bird-droppings across the years. ‘I live with the birds, and in this way they give their opinion of my philosophy,’ he said, and we laughed together till tears came to his eyes, and I realised that this must have been the first time in his long exile that he had laughed together with another human being.

When he opened the second volume his mood changed and he became lyrical and elegiac, for this was the collected poetry of his lifetime. The poems were in chronological order, the first one written in 1917 on the Mezzolombardo front, on the eve of the battle of Caporetto. He explained that he, like Hemingway, had been seriously wounded in that battle, and that this experience had changed the course of his life. After the War he joined the Socialist Party in Vienna, had fled to Rumania when Hitler came to power, had for a time operated a delicatessen in Varna on the Black Sea coast, later emigrated to the US and found a job as butler for the Vanderbilts at their estate in Newport, and had gone to New York University at night and eventually obtained a doctorate in biology, after which he had obtained his post at the University of Istanbul. And his book contained poems from all those years and countries, written in places as far apart as a steamer on the Black Sea and a subway car in New York, all of them expressing his transcendental feeling of universal love. As I came to the end of the volume I noted that the last poem was written in 1953; it was called Mesons and Melons and was dedicated to Professor Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who had formulated the Uncertainty Principle. I asked Franz why he had not written any poems after this. He paused for a moment and then answered, ‘Because nothing of consequence has happened to me in the twenty years since then; I am at one with the universe and there is no longer any need to read or speak or write!’ But when I said goodbye to Franz and left his little shack I could see that he looked pathetically sad, and his face lit up in a smile when I promised to return and talk with him again one day, for an exile’s life can be terribly lonely even on the lovely isle of Prinkipo.