What Happened to the Ottoman Sultan’s Concubines After the Dynasty Fell?

What Happened to the Ottoman Sultan’s Concubines After the Dynasty Fell?

A woman who was once called the last Empress of the Ottoman Empire stands on a provincial railway platform west of Istanbul. She has not eaten a full meal in months. Her clothes are the same ones she wore when soldiers sealed the doors of Feriye Palace 18 months earlier, and they hang loose on her now. In her hand is a one-way passport valid for one year, issued by a government that has just revoked her citizenship. In her coat is an envelope containing 1,000 pounds—the total sum the Grand National Assembly has determined the women of a 600-year dynasty are worth. The Simplon Orient Express idles on the tracks at Çatalca station, a small stop on the Thracian line chosen specifically because the main terminal at Sirkeci is too public. It is the night of March 10, 1924. Emine Nazikeda Kadın, chief consort of the last Ottoman Sultan, is about to leave the only country she has ever known. She will not be asked whether she wants to go. She is not alone on the platform. Around her are the other women of the Imperial household. Consorts, attendants, daughters, and granddaughters are clutching whatever they managed to carry out of a palace that had already been ransacked under police supervision before they reached the station. Most of them packed lightly. They believed the exile would last a few months. Within two years, some of them would be washing dishes in hotel kitchens in Nice. Within five years, one of them would die in a rented room in Cairo without enough money for a proper funeral. And one of the old Sultan’s consorts, a woman named Müşfika, would refuse to board any train at all.

Seven days earlier, on March 3, 1924, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara had passed Law Number 431. Its full title was the Law on the Abolition of the Caliphate and the Expulsion of the Ottoman Dynasty from the Territories of the Republic of Turkey. It contained four articles. The first abolished the Caliphate as an institution, declaring it absorbed into the meaning and concept of the Republic. The second banned from Turkish soil, permanently, without appeal and without exception, the deposed Caliph, all male and female members of the Ottoman dynasty, and their sons-in-law, including any descendants born to the women of the dynasty. The third gave the affected persons a maximum of 10 days to leave. The fourth stripped every one of them of Turkish citizenship. In a single vote, 156 dynasty members were denationalized. Once servants, attendants, and infant grandchildren who refused to be separated from their families were counted, the total expelled rose into the hundreds.

This law marked a decisive break. The Sultan himself had already fled. Mehmed VI Vahideddin, the 36th and last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, had boarded the British battleship HMS Malaya at the Golden Horn on November 17, 1922, accompanied only by his son Şehzade Mehmed Ertuğrul and a small staff. He took no jewelry and no valuables, only personal belongings and a set of clothes. The reigning Caliph, Abdul Mejid II, who had been appointed as a purely spiritual figurehead after the Sultanate was abolished, received even less warning than the law promised. He was put aboard the Simplon Orient Express on the night of March 4, less than 24 hours after the vote. The train did not leave from Sirkeci; it left from Çatalca, out of sight. The Jewish stationmaster at Çatalca was reportedly the last person to bow to an Ottoman Caliph on Turkish soil.

Each exile received 1,000 pounds sterling. A few, including the Caliph, received 2,000 pounds sterling. The law gave them one year to liquidate any property they owned in Turkey. Anything not sold within that window reverted to the state. In practice, the confiscation had already begun before the trains left. Jewelry, furniture, books, manuscripts, paintings, porcelain—four centuries of personal possessions accumulated across Topkapı, Dolmabahçe, Yıldız, and the Feriye palaces—were seized by police, auctioned at token prices to intermediaries who frequently disappeared with the proceeds, or simply taken outright.

The historian Kader Karamusral, working from the Presidential Republican Archive, documented how the Republic treated the physical dispossession of the harem women as a deliberate political act; not simply confiscation, but severance. The government was not just taking their property; it was erasing the material evidence that these women had ever held any status at all. Power of attorney documents filed by consorts in 1925 and 1928, attempting to recover buildings, mines, and concessions that had belonged to their husbands, were rejected or ignored. One of those consorts, Abdul Hamid II’s Müşfika Kadın, would refuse to leave in the first place. She would outlive Ataturk, outlive the single-party state, and die in 1961 in a house 400 meters from the palace where she had once been an imperial consort.

The women expelled in March 1924 had been the living infrastructure of an institution that governed the private world of the Ottoman state for more than 400 years. The Imperial Harem, the Harem-i-Humayun, was not a fantasy. It was an administrative machine with a hierarchy as rigid as the military. At the top sat the Valide Sultan, the reigning Sultan’s mother, who controlled the Harem’s finances, marriages, and internal politics, and who was, by most accounts, one of the most powerful people in the empire. Below her were the Kadins, up to four formal consorts at any time, ranked first through fourth. Below them, the Ikbals, concubines the Sultan had elevated. Below them, the Gozdes, women he had noticed but not yet chosen. Below them, the Kalfas, stewardesses who earned their freedom after nine years of service. And at the bottom, the Cariyies, slave concubines and servant girls, many of them Circassian or Abkhazian, purchased or gifted as children from the Caucasus.

At its peak under Murad III in the late 1500s, the Harem at Topkapı Palace occupied more than 400 rooms and housed as many as 1,000 women, children, and eunuchs. The corps of black eunuchs alone numbered between 800 and 1,200 in the early 17th century. Even in the late Imperial period, after the court moved from Topkapı to Dolmabahçe in 1853, and then to Yıldız under Abdulhamid II in 1880, the Harem still housed several hundred women at any given time. The rooms they were expelled from in March 1924 were converted into the Republic’s first museum by decree on April 3, 1924. Within months, tourists were paying admission to walk through the corridors where these women had slept, prayed, given birth, and grown old.

The exiles scattered. Most were forbidden from settling where they wanted. Egypt and Syria, both former Ottoman provinces, were blocked by the British, by King Fuad I of Egypt, and by Ankara itself. They drifted instead to Switzerland, France, Italy, Lebanon, and eventually to Alexandria and Cairo. They had no income, no property, no citizenship, and in most cases, no skills that any European economy recognized. The 1,000 pounds covered their train fare and perhaps a month of hotel rooms. After that, they had nothing. The financial collapse was total.

Inside the palace, even lesser consorts had received annual allowances large enough to maintain personal entourages of 20 servants. Princesses had been given dowries worth tens of thousands of pounds. The civil list, the annual state budget that funded the entire imperial household, had been abolished in 1922 and was never replaced by any compensation or pension. Now, these women, trained in calligraphy, embroidery, Ottoman poetry, and the management of palace kitchens, found themselves in European cities that had no use for any of those skills. They undersold whatever jewelry they had managed to smuggle out, sewn into their clothes. When the jewelry ran out, there was nothing left to sell. Members of the dynasty washed dishes in hotel kitchens, begged for money on the streets of Nice and Paris, and searched through garbage for food.

Some survived on the charity of Ottoman Armenians who had themselves fled to Europe years earlier. Others received remittances from sympathizers abroad. The Nizam of Hyderabad, Osman Ali Khan, sent money from India. King Hussein ibn Ali of the Hejaz contributed what he could. And Prince Omar Tosun of Egypt organized occasional payments, but most of these transfers never reached the scattered women. They were intercepted by intermediaries, delayed by broken postal routes, or lost entirely because the recipients had no fixed address and no legal identity in the countries where they lived. The government in Ankara monitored the exiles constantly, reacting to marriages between dynasty members and foreign royals, tracking their movements through intelligence channels, and ensuring that no foreign government extended them formal recognition.

Three Ottoman princesses were married into the wealthy royal family of Hyderabad in Nice in 1931, specifically to rescue the family from destitution. Others, including Neslişah Sultan, Mehmet VI’s eldest granddaughter, who had been three years old on the Çatalca platform, were married to Egyptian princes for the same reason. Neslişah later described it with no sentimentality. The women of the dynasty were tired of darning, ironing, and mending. She had spent her childhood in Switzerland and Nice on the diminishing proceeds of sold jewelry, attended schools where no one knew what her family had been, and married Prince Abd el Moneim of Egypt in Cairo in 1940 at the age of 19. She would spend six months under house arrest after Nasser’s revolution, lose everything again, and eventually return to Istanbul, where she died in 2012 at the age of 91, the last Ottoman princess who had been alive on the night of the Çatalca train.

Fehime Sultan, a daughter of Murad V, who had once composed waltzes in the salons of Istanbul, became known in Nice as the “butterfly princess” for spending her nights dancing with Spanish and Argentinian gigolos in hotel ballrooms. She died of tuberculosis in poverty in a city that remembered her only as a curiosity. Nazikeda Kadın arrived in San Remo, Italy, where Mehmed VI had settled in a rented villa called the Villa Magnolia. She was given a room on the same floor as his apartment so that he could come to her each morning for coffee, the last remnant of a domestic routine that had once taken place inside Dolmabahçe, a palace with 285 rooms, 68 toilets, 46 reception halls, and a chandelier that weighed 4.5 tons. The villa in San Remo was rented on credit. Mehmed VI spent his remaining months writing appeals to foreign governments, to Britain, to France, to the League of Nations. None were answered. He died on May 16, 1926, at the age of 65. There was no state funeral. There was no diplomatic delegation. There was not even a burial during daylight hours. His body had to be interred at night because his creditors had threatened to seize the coffin to recover unpaid debts. His remains were eventually moved to the Selimiye Mosque Cemetery in Damascus in a country that had once been an Ottoman province.

Nazikeda moved to Monte Carlo, then to Nice, and then to Cairo. She had entered the palace as an Abkhazian princess from Sukhumi, a teenager from the Marshania family selected for the imperial household. She had risen to Baş Kadın, the highest-ranking woman in the Ottoman Empire. The woman who had once managed the domestic affairs of a palace complex valued at hundreds of millions of pounds spent her final decade in a rented apartment in Cairo, dependent on occasional contributions from distant relatives and the dwindling charity of exiled Ottoman communities scattered across North Africa. She was remembered by those who knew her in exile for a single quality: she never complained, even when she had gone without food, even when the money was gone and the jewelry was sold. She maintained the same composure she had carried through Feriye Palace during the 18 months of starvation under house arrest. She died on April 4, 1941, at the age of 74, and was buried in the Abbasiya Cemetery. No Ottoman flag marked her grave. No representative from any government attended.

Fatma Mihrengiz Kadın, the third consort of Mehmed V, had been 54 years old and already chronically ill when she was expelled in March 1924 with her son, Şehzade Ömer Hilmi, and his two young children, Mahmud Namık and Emine Mukbile. They went first to Beirut, then to Nice, and finally settled in Alexandria, where the cost of living was lower, and where a small community of Ottoman exiles had formed around the remnants of the Khedival court. Ömer Hilmi, her only son and the link between her and any claim to support, died in Alexandria in 1935. Mihrengiz survived him by three years, dying on December 12, 1938, at the age of 69 in a city that was not her own, having spent the last 14 years of her life stateless.

But the law had not finished with the women it expelled. Müveddet Kadın, the third consort, had been the mother of Mehmed VI’s only son, Şehzade Mehmed Ertuğrul. She followed the family first to San Remo, then to Nice, where she spent 20 years watching her son grow up stateless in a country that owed them nothing. Ertuğrul had been 11 years old on the night of the Çatalca platform. He never returned to Turkey. He died in Nice on July 2, 1944, at the age of 31. His mother, who had by then spent 20 years trying to get home, petitioned the Turkish government for permission to return on humanitarian grounds. In 1948, she was granted an individual exception. She took the surname Çiftçi under the Republic’s naming laws, moved to Çengelköy on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, and died there on December 20, 1951, at the age of 58. She had been home for three years. Her son had never made it back at all.

Nevare Hanım, the fourth consort, chose a different path entirely. She was 22 years old when she stood on the platform at Çatalca, younger than some of the kalfas who served her, and younger than many of the women who had spent their entire lives inside the harem and could not imagine an existence outside it. Two months into the exile, on May 20, 1924, she divorced Mehmed VI in San Remo. The divorce was granted under Italian civil law, a jurisdiction that had no category for Ottoman imperial consorts, and processed the case as it would any other marital dissolution. She remarried a man named Mevlud Bey, took the name Leyla Sönmezler, and returned to Turkey under her new identity. She never spoke publicly about her years as an imperial consort, not once—not to journalists, not to historians, not to her own children. She died on June 13, 1992, at the age of 91, likely the longest-lived of any of Mehmed VI’s women. She had simply erased the first chapter of her life and replaced it with silence.

In Şirahanım, who had married Mehmed VI in 1905 and been divorced by 1909, existed in a category the law barely acknowledged: a former consort of a deposed sultan with no legal standing in any country and no household willing to claim her. She tried in 1922 to reach her former husband in San Remo. She traveled there on her own money, arrived at the villa, and was turned away at the door. She was not even announced to him. The rejection destroyed whatever remained of her stability. She attempted suicide twice in the years that followed and died in 1930, alone, in circumstances that no historian has fully documented.

The 156 persons named under Law Number 431 were the dynasty’s recognized members—the sultans, princes, princesses, and formal consorts. But the harem had contained hundreds of other women who held no dynastic title and carried no legal protection. Kalfas, freed concubines, elderly retainers, servants who had entered the palace as children from the Caucasus in the 1870s and the 1880s, whose families had been scattered or destroyed by the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and who had known no world outside those walls for 40 or 50 years. Their fate is the part of this story that almost no one recorded. A document from the Presidential Republican Archive dated 1925 lists 30 formally enslaved palace men and women who were reassigned by the state as domestic servants in various government institutions. The Republic did not free them so much as redirect their labor.

Others, the ones who had no skills the state could use, no family to claim them, and no means of supporting themselves, were sent to the Darülaceze, the Ottoman state almshouse on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, which functioned as a poorhouse for the destitute and the abandoned. The women sent there had spent their entire adult lives inside palace walls. They had been brought to Istanbul as children—some purchased, some gifted by Caucasian families seeking advancement for their daughters, some taken as war captives—and they had grown old in an institution that defined their entire identity. The Darülaceze gave them a bed and meals. It did not give them a name, a pension, or a record.

In January 1952, the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported finding two former black eunuchs of Yıldız Palace, Zülkefil and Said, living in a shanty hut on the hill of Kısıklı in Istanbul. They had been expelled from the palace after Abdul Hamid’s deposition in 1909, and had lived in that single hut for 43 years. No government agency had checked on them in all that time. No welfare office had recorded their existence.

The press helped build the justification for their erasure. The magazine Resimli Ay, in its March and April 1924 issues, ran illustrated features that described the harem women as parasites and the palaces as treasure troves built with the blood of the poor nation. The language was carefully designed to make the public comfortable with what had been done. The historian Ahmet Refik published popular articles framing the lower-ranking harem women as victims of trafficking, not to advocate for their welfare, but to recast them as relics of a shameful system, making their forced reassignment into Istanbul’s domestic labor market seem like liberation rather than abandonment. The contemporary press referred to the harem itself as a “relic of an unwanted past,” a phrase Cara Mursel later adopted as the title of her academic study of the period. Most of the oldest and most vulnerable women—women who had been taken from their families as children 50 years earlier, whose Circassian and Abkhazian homelands had been devastated by Russian expansion, and who had no surviving relatives anywhere—simply vanished from the written record between 1924 and 1930. They left behind no memoirs, no letters, no photographs. They had been inside a system that used them, and then inside a republic that discarded them, and neither entity bothered to record what happened when the doors closed.

The sultans and the princes are the ones history remembers from this exile. The consorts, if they are fortunate, get a footnote. But the kalfas and the cariyies—the women who actually ran the harem, who cooked and cleaned and raised the children and managed the daily machinery of an empire’s private world—received nothing. Not even a footnote.

Not every woman from the harem left Turkey in March 1924. Destizer Müşfika Kadın had been the eighth consort of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Abkhazian, born around 1872, she had entered the palace as a young girl. When Abdulhamid was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 and sent to Salonica under house arrest, Müşfika was one of the only consorts who stayed with him through the imprisonment and remained at his side until his death on February 10, 1918. By 1924, she was a 52-year-old widow. Her dynastic status had been legally reclassified after the 1909 deposition—demoted, retitled, treated by the new Republican government as someone who had already lost whatever standing the Ottoman system had given her. The Republic decided she was no longer a member of the dynasty in any functional sense. Her name was not placed on the expulsion lists.

She stayed. She moved to a modest house at Serencebey Yokuşu number 53 in the Yıldız neighborhood of Istanbul, less than half a kilometer from Yıldız Palace, where she had once lived as an imperial consort behind walls that enclosed gardens, fountains, a private theater, a porcelain workshop, and staff quarters for hundreds. She lived alone. She cooked her own meals. She walked the same streets where carriages had once carried her. In 1934, when the Republic passed the surname law requiring every citizen to adopt a family name, she chose “Kayisoy.” In 1936, desperate and aging, she petitioned the Turkish government for restitution of property that had belonged to Abdul Hamid—buildings, agricultural land, mines, industrial concessions worth enormous sums that the state had absorbed wholesale after 1909. She retained the prominent Turkish Jewish lawyer Sami Günzberg to file the claim. She had documentation. She had power of attorney granted in 1925 and again in 1928. The Turkish Foreign Office rejected every filing, ruling that she had never been placed in effective possession of any of Abdul Hamid’s assets at the time of his death. The legal reasoning was circular; the state had seized the assets before she could inherit them and then cited her lack of possession as grounds for denying restitution.

She died on July 16, 1961, at the age of approximately 89, of pleurisy in the same modest house on Serencebey Yokuşu where she had lived for 37 years. She is buried at the Yahya Efendi Cemetery on a hillside above us in the shade of the walls of the palaces that had once been her world. She is one of the very few imperial consorts ever buried in her homeland.

Behice Hanım, another of Abdul Hamid’s consorts, had gone to Naples with her surviving son in March 1924. She lived in Italy for 45 years. She was finally permitted to return to Istanbul and settled in Suadiye on the Asian shore. She died on October 22, 1969, seven months after coming home at the age of 87. She is buried at Yahya Efendi beside Müşfika.

Princess Ayşe Osmanoğlu, daughter of Abdul Hamid II and Müşfika Kadın, was exiled with her husband Mehmed Ali Bey to Paris in March 1924. Her husband died in 1937. She said later that he died of homesickness. There was no medical term for it, but she used the word anyway. She returned to Istanbul in 1952, the first year women were legally permitted to come back after 28 years of exile and 28 years of separation from her mother. She wrote a memoir called My Father, Sultan Abdul Hamid, based largely on Müşfika’s spoken recollections. It was serialized in Hayat magazine in the late 1950s and published as a book in 1960. She died on August 10, 1960, at the age of 72, weeks after publication. She is buried next to her mother at Yahya Efendi—the daughter who left and the mother who refused to.

On May 28, 1952, under the government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and the Democrat Party, the Turkish Parliament passed an amendment to Law Number 431 allowing female members of the Ottoman dynasty and their sons-in-law to return to Turkey. The exile had lasted 28 years for women. Most of the consorts were dead by then. Nazikeda had died in Cairo 11 years earlier. Mihrengiz Kadın, consort of Mehmed V, had died in Alexandria in 1938 after 14 years of statelessness. Müveddet had made it home early through her individual petition but died in 1951, a year before the general amnesty. The women who survived long enough to use the law were mostly princesses and granddaughters, not the consorts who had spent decades starving in European hotel rooms.

The men waited longer. On May 15, 1974, under Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, a general amnesty permitted male dynasty members to return. The exile had lasted 50 years and two months for men. Most of the surviving princes were elderly. Many had died abroad. The younger ones had built new lives in countries that had given them what Turkey had taken away—a passport and a name. Those who returned were not given citizenship immediately. They were followed by undercover police officers for a period after arriving. Ertuğrul Osman, the would-be 43rd head of the House of Osman, remained in his apartment in New York until he was finally granted Turkish citizenship in 2004 at the age of 91.

Hundreds of descendants of Ottoman consorts and concubines are alive today. Ayşe Gülnar Osmanoğlu, a novelist and great-great-granddaughter of Mehmed V through Mihrengiz Kadın’s son Omer Hilmi, writes fiction about the dynasty. She dedicates her Ottoman dynasty novel series to her grandparents who left Istanbul on March 6, 1924, on a train they believed they would ride in the other direction within months. Nilhan Osmanoğlu, a great-great-granddaughter of Abdulhamid II, is a media figure in modern Turkey. The family has campaigned with limited success for the return of confiscated property and the creation of a foundation to preserve the dynasty’s legacy. The Turkish government has not complied.

Topkapı Palace, where more than 1,000 harem women once lived, raised children, grew old, and died, is now the most visited museum in Turkey. The Turkish government charges 1,500 lira for an entrance ticket. Tourists walk through the 400 rooms of the Imperial Harem, past the quarters of the Valide Sultan, past the baths of the consorts, past the corridors where cariyies once carried trays of sherbet in porcelain cups, and take photographs of the tile work. The state that expelled the women who lived inside those rooms now sells tickets to their memory.