Pushkin

The Grand Barrex at Scootarian Istanbul

were said to be the largest in the world when they were completed in the 1820s

by the 1850s, a grim war would turn them into the world's largest hospital.

To an experienced eyes, the Scootary buildings were magnificent.

To ours, in their first state, they were truly whiteed sepulchres, pest houses.

Those are the words of a British nurse named Florence Nightingale.

She sailed out to Istanbul during the Crimean War, a pointless conflict between Russia

and an alliance including the British.

Nightingale arrived late in 1854, the small team of nurses.

Their task was to assist in the care of wounded British soldiers coming back from the battlefront

to the hastily converted Barrex hospital at Scootary.

What did they discover waiting for them?

Oh, you gentle men of England can have little idea from reading the newspapers

of the horror and misery of operating upon these dying and exhausted men.

That this is the Kingdom of Hell, no one can doubt.

Within days of her arrival with fewer than 14 nurses, hundreds of casualties started arriving every day

from the fighting in the Crimean Peninsula.

These men were bleeding from abdominal wounds.

Their faces black with gunpowder and mud, their bodies crawling with vermin.

After each man died, he'd be stitched up in his own blanket and carried to a mass grave,

making space for the next to take his bed.

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