Hamide Ayşe Sultan

Hamide Ayşe Sultan (2 November 1887 - 10 August 1960) was an Ottoman princess, daughter of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his eighth wife Empress Müşfika Kadın, the daughter of Gazi Şehid Mahmud Bey Ağır and his wife Emine Hanım. She was known for publishing her memoirs by the name of Babam Sultan Abdülhamid in 1960.

Biography

Hamide Ayşe Sultan was born as the daughter of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his eighth wife Empress Müşfika Kadın, the daughter of Gazi Şehid Mahmud Bey Ağır and his wife Emine Hanım. She was the tenth child and sixth daughter born to his father, but the only child of her mother. At the overthrew of her father in 1909, the princess followed her parents into exile at Salonica. The next year she returned to Istanbul, where she married Ahmed Nami Bey on 9 August 1911 in the Bebek Palace and had Sultanzade Ömer Nami Bey and Sultanzade Osman Nami Bey. But later she divorced on 10 February 1921 and subsequently remarried to Mehmet Ali Rauf Bey on 3 April 1921 at the Nişantaşı and had Sultanzade Abdülhamit Rauf Bey. At the expulsion of the imperial family in 1924 she left Turkey and resided in Paris. Her mother, on the other hand, chose to remain in Turkey, so that the two did not see on another for some twenty eight years, until the princess's return from exile in 1952.

Princess Ayşe wrote her memoir in Istanbul after her return from exile, completing it by 1955. Princess Ayşe, for large portions of the memoir she relied on the memory of her mother, as the two lived together the princess's return to Turkey. The work originally appeared in the serial format in the Turkish popular magazine Hayat in the late 1950s, followed by its publication as a book in Istanbul in 1960, shortly before the princess's death. The fact that the memoir was written as a magazine serial accounts for its format.

At its publication, the major attraction of the book lay in the princess's recollections of her famous parent. Recognizing this, she titled her memoir Babam Sultan Abdülhamid (Turkish for "My Father, Sultan Abdul Hamid"). In it she crafted a personal view of Abdul Hamid the man the father, a kind of personal vindication to counteract what she saw as the distorted public image of the controversial ruler whose thirty three year reign ended in dethronement and vilification. Princess Ayşe died on 10 August 1960 at the Serencebey Yokuşu, at the age of seventy two and was buried in the imperial mausoleum at the Yahya Efendi dervish convent, adjacent to Yıldız Palace. Her mother survived her by nearly in year.

References

"Turkey: The Imperial House of Osman". web.archive.org. Archived from the original on May 2, 2006. Retrieved 6 February 2014.
The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. University of Texas Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-292-78335-5.
Fanny Davis (1986). The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-24811-5.

External links

Biography of Hamide Ayşe Sultan (Turkish)

Daughters of the Ottoman Sultans

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