Fragment from a letter sent from Prizren to Venice

On the 29th [November] I came to Prizren and went to my friend Haxhi Stosha's guest house. On the same day, I asked Mr. Haxhi Stosha what is being said about the disease, where it is and how. He told me everything he knew. There is no disease in Prizren, nor Skopje, nor Sofia, nor Thessaloniki, but in Skopje, Sofia and Thessaloniki there was, but now it is gone, while in Pristina it is still there, a Turkish merchant brought it to Pristina; from Skopje he had come to the inn where he got sick and died. After him the whole khan was infected and they all died on the same day, and since the Turks do not know how to take care of themselves, the whole country is infected, and so they stood around the crosses(?) — twenty to thirty died in a day and up to fifty people have died. Thus the Turks [Muslim Albanians] had fled to the surrounding villages. There were no more than ninety families left in Pristina, who did not want to flee because of their faith; and so of those ninety families, few have survived, but all of them have died, and those who fled to the infected villages have been and many of them have died, and are still dying in the villages they fled to, five, six, and ten a day; some day more or some less.

Source: Mijušković, Slavko (1971). Pojava kuge u Prištini 1781 godine i reagovanje sanitetskih vlasi u Boki, Zadru i Venecici. In Vjetari, Prishtina (2–3), p. 109–20. Original source: Državni Arhiv u Kotru (DAK), UP, fasc. 108, p. 531, 569a. (Translation: Yll Rugova.)