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.
