Island of Pain

Islands, due to their specific location and natural isolation from the mainland, have always had a special place in the agendas of those in power. Devil's Island near French Guiana, a notorious prison for the most hardened criminals from the `metropolitan city` and opponents of the state, immortalized in the books of two former convicts and a phenomenal film starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen.

Goli Otok and St. Gregory, the traumatic symbols of Yugoslav political persecution, Robben Island, west of Cape Town, the apartheid response to Goli Otok which served as a warehouse for disobedient blacks, Alcatraz - perhaps the most famous prison of all time and of course Vozroždenija, the former island which due to a series of `genius` decisions of Soviet politicians and the tragedy of the Aral Sea experienced transformation into a peninsula, a former secret center for testing chemical and biological weapons, host to explosions of bombs with Anthrax, Bubonic Plague and Variola Vera. None of these centers of evil can be compared to the continuous, centuries-long existence of misery, death and misfortune on the islet of Poveglia, located in an attractive position in the Venetian lagoon that is a magnet for millions of tourists every year.

Although politics played a secondary role in the history of Poveglia, the bizarreness of its history is difficult to digest. Due to the frequent visits of the bacteria `Yersinia Pestis` which, through bloodthirsty fleas and the mediation of rats - was on the verge of exterminating humanity in the `old world` several times - the authorities of the Venetian Republic decided that the nearby island was an ideal place for Quarantine, a 40-day isolation of potential plague sufferers. Later, the island was promoted to a mass grave for the victims of that disease and an isolation center for those who were already sick. Poveglia quickly gained such a reputation that even the Benedictine Order rejected it as a gift from the `Venetian Doge`.

After the fall of Venice, the other `owners` of this piece of land tried to make it look good and to persecute the superstitions that surrounded it. Fortifications, a lighthouse, customs terminals were built, but all of that was doomed in advance, whether due to superstition or a real curse that followed the island is difficult to say, depending on how much one believes in the supernatural. Since the plague was not in fashion at that time, patients with other serious infectious diseases were brought to the island to die in isolation...

Normally, if a tiny island-slash-mass grave of more than 100,000 plague victims had its reputation justifiably tarnished - it was completed in the twentieth century when a prison was built for perpetrators of the most serious crimes, the criminally insane, so that after the First World War, the influx of mentally ill young people, a consequence of the ``war that was supposed to end all wars,'' was resolved by building an insane asylum to house the mentally ill. The resident psychiatrist in the asylum (whose name, unfortunately, has not been recorded by history, and therefore from now on we will call him Giuseppe) was a creative doctor who fought against madness in his own way. Since Lobotomy had not yet crystallized as a procedure (that would happen some ten years later), Giuseppe, on his own, amateurishly engaged in lobotomies of `difficult` patients, using adapted kitchen utensils and other unsuitable devices as if they had come from a script for a cheap horror film.

In his years of hard struggle with madness, Giuseppe fell victim to the altar of mental health, and went crazy himself and one night butchered several patients with a knife. The next morning, complaining that the spirits of the murdered began to haunt him, Giuseppe climbed the lighthouse and threw himself from there, as another in a series of suicides that had become a custom in Poveglia.

The asylum existed until 1968 when it was finally closed, the lunatics were redistributed to various asylums on the mainland, and with the closure of the institution - the island was completely abandoned and remains abandoned to this day, an uninhabited neglected tragic pearl a few hundred meters from one of the most famous tourist centers on the planet. The locals were not eager to visit the island, and foreigners...it seems they are not thrilled about visiting a rat infested mass grave either, and therefore the island remains aloof from the events. Only the occasional foolish `ghost hunter` heads there to `record` the alleged wailing voices of the suffering souls who have not found peace in the afterlife and have remained in `no man's land`, between the two worlds, trapped in eternal waiting.

(Roger Mortis, 090)