In one of the coldest Decembers that Turkey had seen for
years, Bahá'u'lláh and, His family -- including His two faithful brothers Mirza
Musa, entitled Aqay-i-Kalim, and Mirza Muhammad-Quli, together with Mirza Yahya
-- set out on their journey to the city of Adrianople. The officer commissioned
to take charge of the journey was 'Ali Big Yuz-Bashi. According to a statement
by Mirza Aqa Jan, it appears that Bahá'u'lláh was accompanied by 12 of His
companions. Among them was the notorious Siyyid Muhammad-i-Isfahani, whose evil
spirit was increasingly casting its shadow upon the exiles. Through his satanic
influence he brought much pain and anguish to their hearts and created severe
tests and trials for them. (Adib Taherzadeh, ‘The Child of the Covenant’)
Here is how Shoghi Effendi describes this very sad and
inhumane event:
Pursuant to the peremptory orders issued for the immediate
departure of the already twice banished exiles, Bahá'u'lláh, His family, and
His companions, some riding in wagons, others mounted on pack animals, with
their belongings piled in carts drawn by oxen, set out, accompanied by Turkish
officers, on a cold December morning, amidst the weeping of the friends they
were leaving behind, on their twelve-day journey, across a bleak and windswept
country, to a city characterized by Bahá'u'lláh as "the place which none
entereth except such as have rebelled against the authority of the
sovereign." "They expelled Us," is His own testimony in the
Suriy-i-Mulúk, "from thy city (Constantinople) with an abasement with
which no abasement on earth can compare." "Neither My family, nor
those who accompanied Me," He further states, "had the necessary
raiment to protect them from the cold in that freezing weather." And
again: "The eyes of Our enemies wept over Us, and beyond them those of
every discerning person." "A banishment," laments Nabil,
"endured with such meekness that the pen sheddeth tears when recounting
it, and the page is ashamed to bear its description." "A cold of such
intensity," that same chronicler records, "prevailed that year, that
nonagenarians could not recall its like. In some regions, in both Turkey and
Persia, animals succumbed to its severity and perished in the snows. The upper
reaches of the Euphrates, in Ma'dan-Nuqrih, were covered with ice for several
days -- an unprecedented phenomenon -- while in Diyar-Bakr the river froze over
for no less than forty days." "To obtain water from the
springs," one of the exiles of Adrianople recounts, "a great fire had
to be lighted in their immediate neighborhood, and kept burning for a couple of
hours before they thawed out."
Traveling through rain and storm, at times even making night
marches, the weary travelers, after brief halts at Kuchik-Chakmachih,
Buyuk-Chakmachih, Salvari, Birkas, and Baba-Iski, arrived at their destination,
on the first of Rajab 1280 A.H. (December 12, 1863), and were lodged in the
Khan-i-'Arab, a two-story caravanserai, near the house of Izzat-Aqa. Three days
later, Bahá'u'lláh and His family were consigned to a house suitable only for
summer habitation, in the Muradiyyih quarter, near the Takyiy-i-Mawlavi, and
were moved 162 again, after a week, to another house, in the
vicinity of a mosque in that same neighborhood. About six months later they
transferred to more commodious quarters, known as the house of Amru'llah (House
of God's command) situated on the northern side of the mosque of Sultan Salim.
-Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’)
Bahá'u'lláh was now virtually a prisoner of the Ottoman government.
Bahá'u'lláh was now virtually a prisoner of the Ottoman government.
