In one of the most elaborate and comprehensive narratives by Bosnian Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, a monk recalls the time he spent in Istanbul's notorious remand prison, the "damned court", suspected of espionage by the Ottoman authorities: a small town in the small town where "guilty and wrongly accused, imbeciles and lost or simply wrongly arrested, people from Istanbul and from all over the country", cut off like "on some devil's island", are held, maltreated and terrorized. The monk is particularly impressed by the story of a young Turk about the struggle for succession of two sultan's sons and how the fraternal quarrel was made into a means of conflict between "Christianity" and the Ottoman Empire. "The Damned Court" was published in 1954 (German 1957), there was Andr.