The Story of the Little Greek Boy Who Became a Powerful
Pasha: Myth and Reality in the Life of İbrahim Edhem Pasha, c.
1818–1893
İbrahim Edhem Pasha is a puzzling figure of nineteenth-century
Ottoman history, if only because of the paradoxical discrepancy between his
considerably high notoriety among historians and students of history and his
relatively obscure career as a high-level dignitary of the Empire. Part of this
is due to the fact that he owes much of his fame not to his own achievements but
rather to those of his son, one of the major iconic figures of Ottoman
modernization, Westernization, culture, and science during the same period. Indeed, Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910) is known to almost everyone as the first
Ottoman Muslim painter in the Western tradition, the founding father of Ottoman
archaeology and of its showcase, the Imperial Museum (today’s Archaeological
Museum), and the promoter of protective measures against the predatory appetite
of Western archaeologists. Edhem Pasha is therefore at the same time brought to
the light and overshadowed by his own son, becoming a sort of ‘dependent
variable’ of this historic character, but also granted some degree of agency and
responsibility in the formation and shaping of Osman Hamdi Bey’s atypical
character and career.
Not unrelated to all this is the fact that Edhem Pasha presented the rather
remarkable characteristic of having been born to a Greek family of Chios
sometime before the massacre of 1822, and of having been promised to a
bureaucratic career as a Muslim as a result of the combined effects of
captivity, enslavement, and conversion in the household of a prominent political
figure of the time, Mehmed Husrev Pasha. Although there is no ‘hard’ evidence to
confirm this extraordinary fate, there are quite a number of reasons why this
version of facts is particularly attractive to historians and informed laymen
alike. First, and probably most obviously, the sheer ‘exoticism’ of the
anachronistic revival in the nineteenth century of what could have been standard
practice three centuries earlier: the
devşirme, or levy of
young Christian children from conquered lands, was one of the most favored (and
somewhat idealized) ways in which the Ottoman imperial system developed its
bureaucratic and military elite, based on the implicit replacement of
feudal/aristocratic lineage by meritocratic recruitment and formation. To what
extent this was really as potent a system as it has been claimed by some is open
to discussion; nevertheless, it is quite clear that this system had completely
disappeared well before the capture of the little Greek boy who was to become
Edhem Pasha; the capture and enslavement of the youngest survivors of the 1822
massacre was therefore an aberration, an anachronistic episode resulting from
the very specific conditions that arose from the revolt of the Chian population
and from the violent Ottoman reaction it triggered. The second, and probably
less explicit, reason for the interest shown in Edhem’s strange life story is
somewhat linked, once again, to his son’s outstanding career. The notion that
the man who worked so intensely for the adoption of Western cultural and
artistic norms and did so in part through a museum and archaeological activity
that was more or less directly linked to Greek antiquities was of Greek origin
is still considered as a tempting argument in the direction of some sort of
genetic inclination.
Finally, a third, and much more objective, reason for Edhem Pasha’s notoriety has
to do with the fact that at around age twelve, along with three other young
slaves from Husrev Pasha’s household, he was sent out to France to receive a
Western education. Much symbolic value is generally attached to this voyage that
took place in 1831, for it is the first known example of Muslim children being
destined to an education in Europe following a decision of the state or of a
member of the ruling elite. To many, this is one of the first and most
significant signs of a form of prelude to the process of Westernization that
would form the core of the
Tanzimat reforms. The fact that
among the four children Edhem would eventually reach the highest rank and
achieve the most successful career is obviously one of the reasons he seems to
have overshadowed his three companions and has this become the example
par excellence . But this also fits in very well with the
other specificities of the character: his Greek origin, his status as a captive
and slave, his long stay in France, his formation as an engineer, his profile as
a man of science, and, once again, the fact that not only his elder son Osman
Hamdi, but two others, İsmail Galib and Halil Edhem, were also to become
prominent figures in the arts and sciences, turn Edhem Pasha’s life story into a
sort of synopsis of successful Westernization.
My point here being the investigation of the story and history of Edhem Pasha
from the perspective of his rather exceptional origins, a good starting point
would be to examine the available evidence about the most obscure period of his
life, that of his infancy and childhood. In the absence of any proper monograph
or biography devoted to the character, the thirty-five page long chapter that
the famous biographer İbnülemin Mahmud Kemal İnal devoted to this character in
his monumental
Son Sadrâzamlar (The Last Grand Viziers)
is still the best and most consistent source on the subject. Therefore, it is
worthwhile to quote
in extenso his
description of Edhem’s formative years:
İbrahim Edhem Pasha was born
towards 1818 [1234 of the Hegira] in Chios. At a time when the revolt of the
Christian subjects (rayas) of Chios was being repressed, he was brought to
Istanbul as a captive. He was purchased by the Grand Admiral Husrev Pasha. He was educated in the latter’s household together with similar
slaves.
In the short curriculum vitae written—upon my
request—by his son Halil Bey, the latter says the following: “A man by the
name of Hacı Efendi at the service of Mehmed Husrev Pasha, Mahmud II’s
commander-in-chief, grand admiral and grand vizier, found the one-year-old
Edhem somewhere on the Anatolian shores of the Black Sea, brought him to the
pasha’s mansion, and the pasha’s wife had brought up the orphan boy as if he
were her own. Edhem did not know what part of the Anatolian shores he came
from or what his father’s name had been; he only believed that he had been
brought from the slopes of the Circassian mountains.”
As it is
absurd to imagine that a “one-year-old” child “believed that he had been
brought from the slopes of the Circassian mountains,” this matter does not
deserve the least attention.
An article signed “M.S.” in the
Hayat encyclopedia declares in subjective and
arbitrary fashion that “even though it is said that he was from Chios, that
is a false rumor” and then proceeds—much like Halil Bey—to say that “Husrev
Pasha’s steward came across this abandoned child in one of the regions of
the Black Sea shores and brought him to the pasha’s mansion when he was
still one year old.”
From what we have heard from some of the
pasha’s acquaintances, it seems that because he had been brought to Istanbul
at a very young age, he did not know where he came from, but he would say
that he had come from the Bosporus and would reject those who claimed to be
related to him. But in actual fact, he seems to have had Christian relatives
in Chios at the time.
Quoting from Kitâbü’l-Akdü’l-Semin fi Tarihi Erbaati Selâtin , the author of
Hızâneti’l-Eyyâm fi Terâcimü’l-İzâm says the
following: “He was born in Chios to a Greek family. In 1822, during the
Greek war of independence, when clashes occurred on the island, he was one
of the persons captured by the Turks. He was sold as a slave in Istanbul. Husrev Pasha purchased him. Some have also claimed that he was of Circassian
origin.”
Mahmud Celâlüddin Pasha, who knew Edhem Pasha well,
writes in his Mirat-ı Hakikat that “he was from
Chios and of Greek origin, and was brought as a captive during the
repression of the rebellious subjects of Chios,” which seems to be the most
reliable version.
As is well known, Husrev Pasha would have
his slaves and foundlings trained and educated in his mansion and would see
to it that they be employed in the highest offices once they had been
formed.
He then decided to send Hüseyin, Ahmed, Abdüllatif and
Edhem from among these boys to Paris for their education and to cover all
their expenses.
[2] What makes İnal’s biographical synopsis “the best and most
consistent source” in my words is not really its accuracy, but rather the
author’s commendable effort at seeking all possible sources, at recording all
existing versions of the story, and at subjecting them to a critical—and
sometimes even sarcastic—treatment. In a nutshell, even though he does give some
place to those sources that go against it, he ends up clearly supporting the
claim that the pasha was a Greek child from Chios orphaned during the massacres
of 1822.
The tension between these two major versions—Chios versus the Black Sea—is
interesting in ways that go clearly beyond the desire to ascertain factual
information. One feels that there is more at stake there, which makes it all the
more tempting to go back to the roots of the two stories. With respect to the
“Black Sea story”—which I will avoid calling Pontic, since the whole point is
that it tries to negate Greekness—it is interesting to note that it is most
frequently encountered in sources from the 1930s and 1940s, starting with
Alâettin Gövsa’s
Meşhur Adamlar (Great Men) and
Türk Meşhurları (Great Turks).In both these biographical
dictionaries, the author insists on using vague expressions such as “the shores
of Anatolia,” “the slopes of Circassian mountains,” and “the Anatolian shores of
the Black Sea,”
[3] while
relegating the Chian version to a cursory reference to “other rumors,”
[4] or even goes as far
calling it a “false story.”
[5] In a contemporary article, the historian İsmail Hakkı
Uzunçarşılı chose to avoid the question altogether by inserting a vague
reference to the fact that “he was educated in Husrev Pasha’s household.”
[6] Again, during the same
period, Mehmed Zeki Pakalın would take up this issue in his
Son
Sadrâzamlar ve Başvekiller (
The Last Grand Viziers
and Prime Ministers ):
He is from Chios. He was born in 1818
(1234 of the Hegira). As one of Husrev Pasha’s men, Hacı Ahmed Efendi,
brought him to the mansion when he was one year old to become a slave as was
the custom then, like many others he was brought up there and treated like a
son.
[7] Pakalın’s statement above is a strange and awkward one, which, while
accepting his Chian origins, simply chooses to ignore the fact that he may have
been Greek/Christian. As to his career start as a slave, that matter is
completely euphemized by suggesting that slavery was “the custom then,” that
many more shared this status, and that he was “treated like a son.” The end of
the quotation leaves the impression that Edhem might as well have been a little
Muslim orphan boy from Chios, adopted by a loving and caring family in
Istanbul.
Pakalın’s predicament becomes obvious in the footnote attached to this passage. Contrary to the body of the text, where the matter is treated in a cursory
manner, the long footnote reveals a much more complex situation. The first
reference in the footnote is meaningful: Pakalın starts by taking up the story
of the “Circassian mountains” as it appeared in Alâettin Gövsa’s
Great Men . What is certainly striking is that Pakalın’s
comment above reproduces almost word for word the brief life story İnal said he
had received from the pasha’s son, Halil Edhem. The real difference, however,
lies in the treatment these two authors will give to this information. While
İnal rather sarcastically dismissed it as an ‘absurdity,’ Pakalın chose to use
it as his main argument, without even commenting on it. An additional comment by
Pakalın allows us to see a strong connection between Halil Edhem’s version of
his father’s life story and Gövsa’s.
İbrahim Alâeddin Bey took this
information from the precious work by the name of İstanbul
Şehreminleri (The Mayors of Istanbul) by the esteemed researcher
Osman Ergin, chief of the correspondence bureau of the city. The biography
in my dear friend’s work, which I quote below, was written by Halil Bey,
then mayor, and he tells me that he only changed in it the term “slave” into
“recruit.”
“He is one of Husrev Pasha’s recruits. As Husrev
Pasha had no children of his own, he would feed and train many orphaned
children. There even was a separate school for them inside his mansion. Many
of the children who were thus educated ended up in the highest
positions.
Edhem, when he was not even one year old, was
brought to the mansion from the Black Sea by one of Husrev Pasha’s men by
the name of Hacı Efendi, Edhem Pasha thought of himself as being Circassian. There is no clear information on this.When he arrived at the mansion,
Husrev Pasha’s second wife, known as the Little Lady, adopted him and
brought him up.”
[8] Indeed, this is exactly how the whole matter is presented in Osman
Nuri Ergin’s work.
[9] In
light of this information, the picture gets clearer. By the end of the 1920s,
Halil Edhem Bey seems to have given Osman Nuri Ergin a text to be used for his
own biography, and Ergin used this in his 1927 publication, which served as a
reference for Gövsa’s biographical dictionary. In doing so, he had brought
slight modifications to the text, turning the “Black Sea” into the “Anatolian
shores,” granting “Hacı Efendi” the additional name of “Ahmed,” and reducing
“Husrev Pasha’s second wife, known as the Little Lady” to “the pasha’s wife.”
Interestingly, when some fifteen years later İnal would ask for the same
information, instead of giving him the text he had first given to Ergin, Halil
Edhem would hand him Gövsa’s version of his own text, with the only amendment of
reverting from Hacı Ahmed Efendi to Hacı Efendi.
What we gather from this is that his son Halil Edhem seems to have played an
important role in the emergence of the claims that Edhem Pasha was not from
Chios but from the Black Sea or from the Caucasus, and that he was not
Greek/Christian but Muslim. It would probably make sense to link this to his
character and to the political and ideological context of the time. Indeed, even
though Halil Edhem Bey (1861–1938) had an intellectual profile and a scientific
career very similar to his elder brother Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), the two
siblings showed some remarkable differences, too. As an archaeologist and as the
director of the Imperial Museum, Osman Hamdi Bey had devoted most of his energy
to the study and preservation of a pre-Islamic heritage, and his private life
denoted a strong attachment to Western— in fact predominantly Parisian—values
and attitudes. Although issued from the same cultural environment, Halil Edhem
Bey had professionally concentrated on Islamic and Ottoman objects, and while he
did succeed his brother at the head of the Imperial Museum at the latter’s death
in 1910, he had also played an essential role in the setting up of the Museum of
Pious Foundations, the ancestor of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. These
differences, rather than conscious choices and inclinations, should be seen as a
logical consequence of the times. After all, Osman Hamdi Bey had died in 1910,
only a year and a half after the Young Turk Revolution that had unleashed a new
nationalist discourse; his allegiances were therefore still to a large extent
contained within the framework of Ottoman patriotism and a strong commitment to
the West. Halil Edhem Bey was almost twenty years younger, and had made most of
his independent career, after his brother’s demise, at a time when nationalist
ideology had reached its peak. In a country that had been through the Unionist
era, had been defeated and occupied at the end of World War I, had fought a war
of independence against Greece, and had been exposed to an ever-increasing dose
of Turkish nationalism, there is little doubt that there was little incentive
for a high-level bureaucrat to promote the idea that he was the son of a Greek
convert. In short, then, it appears that as the combined result of his own
generational penchant for a more nationalist stand and of a gradual exacerbation
of nationalist feelings in the country, Halil Edhem Bey felt the need to revise
his father’s already doubtful origins, and that many authors, out of friendship,
respect, empathy, or simply because they believed it, chose to include this
version of facts in their biographical compilations.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that while he implicitly embraced Halil
Edhem Bey’s “Black Sea thesis” in his long footnote, Pakalın still inserted a
few comments that suggested that the Chian version should not be dismissed
altogether. Referring to an earlier work by Ergin where Edhem Pasha is noted as
having been born in Chios, he ends his footnote
with the following words:
Edhem Pasha, like many others, was brought to
Izmir as a small child and sold there as a slave during the massacres of
Chios that were conducted in order to take revenge from the Greeks after
their rebellion in the Morea. Among these slaves, known as the “slaves of
Chios,” apart from Edhem Pasha and some others, one can count Hekim İsmail
Pasha and Cavid Pasha, once governor of Manisa. Edhem Pasha was known
and recounted by all as being from Chios. Some even say that he had
relatives there who still maintained the Christian faith.
[10] It seems
then that Pakalın had really inserted Halil Edhem Bey’s version into his
footnote out of a feeling of duty, but had then felt the need to end the note by
recounting the Chian version, which he evidently found much more likely. In the
body of the text, however, he had rather politically chosen a middle way by
referring to Chios and to slavery, but by omitting any reference to a possible
Greek and Christian origin. At any rate, after İnal’s later publication and his
rather demeaning way of dismissing the Black Sea story, no serious author has
ever dared to revive this myth.A case in point would be İsmail Hami Danişmend,
who basically summarized İnal’s version together with its criticism of other
scenarios,
[11] while
Reşad Ekrem Koçu simply resorted to a long quotation from İnal.
[12]
True, the failure of Halil Edhem Bey’s version in the face of İnal’s insistence
on the Chian origins (the said insistence probably not unrelated to İnal’s
animosity against Halil Edhem Bey) is of no help to us for ascertaining Edhem
Pasha’s origins. Indeed, while İnal’s version sounds rather convincing, it is
also true that his arguments against Halil Edhem Bey’s are much more consistent
than those he uses to promote his vision of the facts. It should be noted, for
example, that all the information he provides is in fact drawn from other
sources, none of which is based on any kind of ‘hard’ evidence, but rather on
personal narratives. The only direct evidence of a different kind that he uses
is the popular—and rather amusing— satirical poem composed by Hersekli Arif
Hikmet and Deli Hikmet “while they were working on cups (i.e.drinking) in one
of the taverns of Yenikapı” on the occasion of Edhem Pasha’s nomination as Grand
Vizier in 1877:
That such a post of honor
[13] is filled
By a vile
apostate like Georgi the Fool
[14] Helps you understand
in what state we are;
True, though Server
[15] is also a man of
conceit,
Compared to shit, dung smells like amber.
[16]
Not very ‘hard’ evidence, but certainly a good indication that Edhem
Pasha’s identity as a convert was common knowledge among the popular masses of
the Ottoman capital. What is surprising, however, is that İnal did not use some
sources that might have confirmed even further his beliefs. One of these is
Mehmed Süreyya’s famous biographical dictionary,
Sicill-i
Osmanî, where the author explicitly noted the following: “He is from
Chios. After conversion, he was brought up and educated in Husrev Pasha’s
household and thus started his military career, before being sent to France for
his education.” There is no ambiguity here about his origins and the fact that
he was a convert; the mention that “he has knowledge of French and Greek” is an
additional indication that goes in the direction of İnal’s thesis.
[17] To this one should add
the crucial source that is constituted by his personnel file in the State
archives, according to which “he was born around 1232 (1816/1817), was brought
up, trained, and educated until the age of twelve as a slave in the household of
his master, Husrev Pasha” and was then sent out to Europe.
[18] Interestingly, this document, while
giving a birth date that precedes the massacres and explicitly mentioning his
status as a slave, does not mention any place of birth or any linguistic skill
whatsoever. The core of this record seems to have been established in 1882, and
it is generally the rule that these records were filled out on the basis of
information provided by the bureaucrats themselves. In that case, one would have
to assume that it was Edhem Pasha’s own choice, as a high-ranking bureaucrat
with more than forty years of service behind him, to withhold—without having to
really lie otherwise than by omission—any information that might have been
connected to his Greek/Chian origins.
Obviously, if that were the case, one would have to admit that Edhem Pasha was
rather naïve if he really believed that common and popular knowledge could be
erased by such tactics. To any careful reader, the combination of a birth date
before 182 2 and of male slave status was rather transparent. The episode of 1822
was exceptional in nature not only because of its violence, but also because of
the fact that there had been no military action against a Christian population
for over a century that could have resulted in such a massive outflow of
captives. Referring to these events, the chronicler Cevdet Pasha noted that
“penniless Zeybeks made a fortune” and that “male and female slaves were sold
for fifty piastres,” a ludicrous sum that told of the extent to which the market
had been flooded by the incoming captives.
[19] In 1856, the French historian Numa
Denis Fustel de Coulanges was struck by the way in which slavery had created a
form of ‘recycling’ of the survivors of the massacres:
Once Chios was
devastated, what became of the Chians? They had not all died; some had been
saved by fleeing, while slavery preserved a large number of them. In the
face of the greatest misfortunes that a race may endure, the Chians have
remained as industrious, as capable, and as happy as in the times of
prosperity. They have survived the destruction of their land. Many enslaved
Chians have remained in Turkish lands. Slavery in Turkey is a means of
making a fortune and of rising to the offices of the administration; there
is presently a certain minister of the Porte whose price can be seen at the
slave market of Constantinople. Under these circumstances, those Chians who
have become Muslims have managed to follow their path in life. In April of
the year 1855, when I was in Chios, I saw an Egyptian man-of-war carrying
troops to the Crimea anchor off the island; the captain of the ship and the
colonel of the regiment, both bearing the title of bey, were born in Chios;
captured and taken to Alexandria, they had risen in the army and the navy
and were now on their way to defend the country where they had been
enslaved. There are countless Chians who thus occupy high posts in the
Ottoman administration: one of them once ruled over Tunis.
[20] This was
common knowledge, and any Muslim official of some standing known to be from the
island was bound to be identified with one of the (possibly) hundreds of young
boys who were captured and then converted to Islam. This was all the more
obvious to foreign observers, not the least because it provided them with a
rather typical Orientalist story to tell. Already in the 1850s a certain
Destrilhes, ferociously opposed to Mustafa Reşid Pasha, was very outspoken about
Edhem Pasha’s identity: “A very elegant fine face, rather noble, but with
something dishonest about it.A Turk grafted on a Greek.”
[21] In 1858, commenting on his mission to
Belgrade, the
Times of London spoke of “Ethem Pasha,
who is said to speak the Slavonic language fluently,” probably due to a
confusion between Greek and Slovenian.
[22] Following his accession to the post of Grand Vizier in 1877,
these reports had started increasing in frequency. One such article in the
New York Times was particularly rich in details
concerning the statesman’s origins, down to the cliché of the overzealous
convert:
It is a curious fact that the destinies of the Turkish Empire
should, at this, the greatest crisis it has ever encountered since it
existed, be intrusted (sic) to two men who are not only not of Turkish race,
but not of any Mussulman race—such as Arab, Persian, Indian, Caucasian,
Kurd, & c. The Grand Vizier is by origin a Greek, saved when a child by
the Turkish troops in the massacre of the Christian inhabitants of the
island of Chio, and brought up in the faith of the Prophet; a brother who
escaped remained true to the religion of his ancestors, and has for some
years past had the care of the orthodox souls resident at Couscoundjouk, a
suburb of Constantinople, situated on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus,
nearly opposite the
Yali of his brother, the Sadr’azam,
with whom, nevertheless, he has held no intercourse. [. . .] Like most
converts—or perverts, or renegades, as you will—and especially those brought
up in early life to Islamism—Edhem Pasha is a thorough-going disciple of
Mohammed, though too well educated a man and too much imbued with European
ideas and manners to wish to be considered a fanatic.
[23] The pasha’s death in 1893
was yet another occasion for foreign sources to remember his exotic profile.An
article in
Le Temps had him born “in 1813 in the island
of Chios of Greek parents,” adding that “he was captured by the Turks who
devastated the island in 1822.”
[24] The French geologist Gabriel-Auguste Daubrée, who had
studied with the young Edhem at the Mining School of Paris, remembered him in an
obituary as a Greek from Chios:
Edhem Pasha was of Greek origin and from
the island of Chios, where he almost perished during the massacres that
bloodied this island in 1822. Khosrew Pasha, a Turkish personality who then
took him in, was struck by the precocious intelligence of the boy, and had
him educated, and then sent to Paris to perfect his instruction.
[25] Most
interesting were the comments made by his contemporaries, people who had known
him personally and had regular social intercourse with him. Among these, most
remarkable were the Greeks, who, for understandable reasons, had always a more
specific interest in the pasha’s life story. Georges Adossidès, writing under
the pseudonym of Georges Dorys, devoted a paragraph to Edhem Pasha, a
contemporary of his father, Kostaki Adosidis Pasha (1822–1895), the ruler of
Samos:
Most of the war prisoners, on the other hand, were converted to
Mohammedanism. During the Hellenic rebellion alone, tens of thousands of
Greeks were reduced to slavery and forcefully made Muslims. This
practice sometimes had strange results. Thus a Greek who was enslaved in
Chios became, under the reign of Abdülaziz, the eminent Grand Vizier Edhem
Pasha, while his brother, who had escaped capture, became a simple priest in
a poor parish of his island. By the way, Pappa Nicoli, as he was named, kept
the best of relations with his brother.
[26] Another son of a
contemporary, Alexandre Mavroyeni Bey, the son of the famous Spyridon Mavroyeni
Pasha (1817–1902), had a similar story to tell:
Edhem Pasha was of Greek
origin and a Chian. In 1821, during the Greek revolution, he was only two or
three years old. The Turks captured him and made him a Muslim. His paternal
uncle was a Greek priest. They say that Edhem would receive him at home. His
eldest son, who married a French
bourgeoise , is Hamdi
Bey, the founder and director of the Imperial Museum of Constantinople.
[27] Most
striking of all, because the reference is ‘from the horse’s mouth,’ so to speak,
that of the famous banker Georgios Zarifi in his memoirs:
Osman Hamdi used
to say he was of Greek origin and a member of the Scaramanga family; and
that his grandfather was captured in Chios. His grandfather was brought up
as a Turk and one day became grand vizier.
[28] One immediately notices how
superficial and potentially unreliable all this information is. Apart from the
many factual errors that can be verified—the fact that Edhem Pasha was not
Abdülaziz’s but Abdülhamid’s grand vizier or, more blatantly even, the fact that
he was not Osman Hamdi’s grandfather but his father—one realizes that the whole
story of the Orthodox priest relative is extremely ‘flexible’: he is generally a
brother, but can become an uncle; he is generally considered to have remained in
Chios, but some locate him in Istanbul; he generally has contacts with Edhem
Pasha, but some tell a very different story … From the strictest point of view
of historical rigor and method, one is likely to have to dismiss all these
erratic references as the building blocks of a myth. But one can as well claim
that while methodologically not extremely solid, the ‘no smoke without fire’
approach is not to be discarded altogether. The least one could say is that even
if this were to amount to little more than an urban legend, the persistence and
longevity of these references certainly make it worthwhile to consider
investigating the smoke, if not the fire. It is my impression, therefore, that
there is here much more than a myth; and that what we may be witnessing among
all this confusion, are the inevitable inconsistencies of a story that lacks its
most decisive backing, that of the protagonist himself. Indeed, the most
remarkable feature of all these testimonies is that they are all based on
hearsay and never from any kind of declaration or confidence made by Edhem Pasha
himself. As such, the most valuable of all is certainly the one provided by
Zarifi about Osman Hamdi Bey telling him about his ancestry. Despite the major
inconsistencies in this information—the confusion between grandfather and father
and the certainly rather imaginative link to the Scaramangas—one has to admit
that, unless Georgios Zarifi had a hidden agenda that made him distort or invent
this information, Osman Hamdi Bey
did know (or believe) that his
father was of Chian origin.
The picture becomes thus becomes clearer, in terms of the smoke, if not in terms
of the fire. Against the backdrop of a ‘public opinion,’ local and foreign,
unanimous about the Chian origins of Edhem Pasha, we have a different attitude
that seems to characterize three family members’ approach to the question. Osman
Hamdi Bey, the eldest son, and the one closest to a Parisian and cosmopolitan
profile, seems to have been openly an advocate of the Chian thesis. His brother
Halil Edhem, some twenty years younger, seems on the contrary to have dismissed
this thesis, to the point of inventing and promoting an alternative ancestry
that might have replaced and occulted the undesirable Greek connection. The one
who is not easy to understand is Edhem Pasha himself, the ‘Greek boy,’ whose
attitude in this respect is extremely difficult to fathom, in the absence of any
indication, direct or indirect, of his thoughts on this matter. Indeed, while
one can explain and understand to a large extent the two sons’ opposite stands
in terms of their mentalities and, most of all, of the political context in
which they evolved, the father’s position remains a mystery, veiled by the thick
silence with which he seems to have covered the whole issue.
As I have shown earlier, there are some indications that may suggest that Edhem
Pasha was trying to hide—without lying—his origins or that at least he was
certainly not a partisan of disclosing openly his possible links to the Chian
tragedy. The fact that he did not mention his birth place or his linguistic
skills in his official record goes in that direction. Yet there is one more
source that may point even more clearly at a desire to avoid the matter
altogether: his biography in the famous French biographical dictionary edited by
Gustave Vapereau:
Edhem Pasha, an Ottoman statesman, born around 1823, is
one of the first among his compatriots to have been sent to France for his
education. He was brought to Paris in 1831 by Mr. Amédée Jaubert, together
with four other children of Circassian origin, and placed at the Institution
Barbet.
[29] This version of the pasha’s life story is extremely different from
most of the Western narratives we have seen up to now, mostly because there is
no reference whatsoever to his Chian origins. In fact, this
text goes further than just not mentioning Edhem Pasha’s birth place: it gives a
date that, although an approximation, is designed to make sure that it does not
fit the ‘Greek boy’ tale. Indeed, given that the events took place in 1822 and
that to be captured as a boy one would have had to be born before that date, the
mention of “around 1823” vague as it may be, sounds like a rather subtle way of
misleading the reader, while at the same time not lying. The same could be said
of the notion of h im being “the first among his compatriots” to have been
educated in France: the reference is implicitly to Muslim Ottomans, and to the
fact that Edhem was one of them. True, he was a “compatriot,” or rather he had
become one through conversion; but in the absence of any reference to Chios or
to 1822, there is simply no way the innocent reader would assume that he had not
been born a “compatriot” from the very start. Again a ‘white lie,’ it seems,
designed to cover up any possible religious difference. Finally, yet another
subtle innuendo in the text works in the same direction of distortion: the
phrase “together with four other children of Circassian origin” (
avec
quatre autres enfants d’origine circassienne ) is a gem of
ambiguity. Is one to understand that he was brought to Paris with four other
children, who (unlike him) were of Circassian origin, or with four other
children, who (like him) were (also) of Circassian origin? Grammatically and
syntactically, both are possible, but it is clear that the most obvious meaning
the reader would give to this statement is the latter meaning of a shared
regional origin. All in all, without ever having to lie, the author of this
biographical entry had made sure that Edhem Pasha
looked like an
Ottoman Muslim subject of Circassian origin.
Who would that author be, then, and why would he resort to all these subtleties
to ‘clear’ the pasha’s reputation? The answer is rather simple, when one knows
that
Who’s Who type of compilations generally function
on the basis of the collection of biographical data from the individuals
themselves. In all likeliness, this short biography was sent by Edhem Pasha in
response to Vapereau’s request. Moreover, this kind of a text would be entirely
consistent with the tactics Edhem Pasha seems to have developed of juggling half
lies, half truths, and judicious omissions. One has, therefore, to come to terms
with the likelihood that Halil Edhem may not have been the initiator of this
‘negationist’ version of his father’s life story, and that Edhem Pasha himself
should have started it at a relatively early date. In fact, one could even find
traces of yet earlier efforts by the young Edhem to cover up his origins. Thus,
if one is to consult the archives of the prestigious École des Mines in Paris,
where he spent some three years as a foreign student, it is striking to note
that his record, which has him registered on 26 October 1835 under the name of
“Etem Efendy” provides the date of birth of 1818, but combined with
“Constantinople” as his place of birth.
[30] Unless this was a shortcut used by the
school’s administration, who may have assumed that any Ottoman subject was bound
to be born in Istanbul, this may well be the first instance of Edhem’s effort at
forging a new identity for himself at a very early stage of his life, when he
was only seventeen, which might in turn explain that he should have resorted to
an outright lie instead of using the subtle tactics he would develop later.
From the perspective of the historian, all this points in the direction of a
rather paradoxical situation. In the absence of real ‘hard’ evidence linking
Edhem Pasha to his Chian roots, those sources that seem most trustworthy—his
official record, his student record, his earliest published biography and many
later ones—are in fact the most likely to distort reality, which, on the
contrary, seems to be more consistently conveyed by the much less formal sources
of hearsay, gossip, and potentially subjective memoirs. In other words, what
most would consider being of historical significance turns out to be little more
than a story, while the stories that circulated with a strong undertone of myth
and urban legend end up being more likely to help us reconstitute the historical
reality of the little Greek boy who became a powerful pasha.
Interestingly enough, although Edhem Pasha’s counterfactual claims end up
blurring our vision of historical reality, they do help us understand better how
an alternative story came to emerge in the mind of Halil Edhem Bey. What makes
it possible to retrace the genealogy of the Circassian/Black Sea story is a
‘missing link’ that connects the Vapereau biography of 1858—which we assume has
been written by Edhem Pasha himself—to the Osman Nuri [Ergin] biography of
1927—which we know was written on the basis of information provided by Halil
Edhem Bey. The missing link, interestingly, is by the same author, Osman Nuri,
but dates from 1911 and is not a properly biographical work, which is why it
seems to have been overlooked. This work was about Sultan Abdülhamid II and his
reign, and it was under the topic of the conference held in 1876 that Edhem
Pasha came into the foreground. Before analyzing the conference itself, Osman
Nuri had chosen to present the Ottoman delegates, the second of which was Edhem
Pasha:
Edhem Pasha, the ambassador in Berlin, who was the second
delegate at the Conference, was born in the island of Chios in 1238 of the
Hegira. As his parents were poor, they sent the boy to Istanbul and placed
him as a slave in Husrev Pasha’s mansion. As Husrev Pasha soon understood
that his slave was extraordinarily bright and gifted, and that he possessed
a remarkably strong character, he decided to have him sent at his expense to
be educated in one of the great cities of Europe; indeed in 1832 he sent him
to Paris for his education, together with four Circassian boys, under the
supervision of Amédée Jaubert.
[31] Once again, the text started with an implicit
negation of the Greek/Chian/Christian scenario. The choice of the year 1238 was
not innocent: given that that particular lunar year started on 17 September
1822, it was once again a way of placing the pasha’s birth date
after the bloody events of the spring of that year. Yet the
real ‘creative’ element came with the story of the poor parents who surrendered
their child as a slave to Husrev Pasha. This incredible and fairytale-like
story—somewhere between Cinderella and Tom Thumb—was evidently invented to
provide an alternative to some of the most basic elements of the story. If the
parents surrendered their child, it meant that they were still aliv e, and that
therefore they were not victims of the massacres. In fact, the whole story could
be understood without ever needing to think that the parents were Greek; the
poor Chian Muslim parents of the child see no other way out of their misery than
to entrust him to a powerful household in Istanbul. Not very convincing,
perhaps, but still a good try at ‘cleaning’ a dubious curriculum vitae. The link
between this biographical synopsis and the entry in Vapereau’s consecutive
editions of 1858, 1865, 1870, and 1893, has to do with the very similar wording
of the two texts, especially with respect of the factual information from his
return to Istanbul to the beginning of his career at the palace. True, the
introductory sentences were very different, but this was mostly due to the
different audiences that were targeted. One could easily fool a Western audience
by omitting whatever was felt to be problematic; but when it came to a local
audience who already knew the man as a Chian and possibly as a Greek, there was
need for more detail, hence the whole story of ‘voluntary’ enslavement by
possibly Muslim parents. Once this initial point was made, however, the rest of
the Turkish text read pretty much like a translation of the Vapereau biography. Clearly, then, Halil Edhem Bey had given Osman Nuri a Turkish translation of the
biography his father had himself written, adapting only the first lines to the
needs of a public that was likely to know that the pasha was of Chian origin. Denial, as it were, was not the making of the son alone; the father had started
well before him and provided him with a blueprint of an alternative story to
tell. The difference between the two lay probably in the fact that the father
had been content with occulting the facts by omitting some of the information,
while the son, obviously pressed by a very different political context, had gone
one step further and tried to rewrite his father’s history.
The question to be answered, then, is why Edhem Pasha may have felt the need to
hide his identity, even if this was a futile effort. In the absence of any
explicit statement from him, one can only try to guess what his motivations may
have been. His sons’ radically opposite attitudes towards their father’s
exceptional identity are relatively easy to grasp. Educated in Paris in the
1860s, fascinated by Western civilization, science, art, and culture, eventually
becoming a full and recognized member of the select world of archaeology, his
father’s Greekness was not a liability to Osman Hamdi, who might even have found
some appeal to the rather striking irony behind the situation. His brother, on
the contrary, educated in the Germanic tradition some twenty years later, and
scientifically most active at a time when Turkish nationalism had reached its
apex, Halil Edhem was bound to feel uncomfortable with such a ‘mixed’ ancestry. Yet, when it came to Edhem Pasha himself, the matter must have been very
different: after all, it was about him, his childhood, his parents, and what
must have been—depending on how young he was—a very traumatic experience. One
can only imagine that once he had reached an age where he fully understood the
‘transformation’ he had been through he would have chosen to leave behind him as
much of his painful past as possible. It would certainly be wrong to assume any
kind of similarity between the experience of, say, a sixteenth-century
devşirme and that of Edhem Pasha in the nineteenth
century. The fluid and hybrid identities that might have existed in the Early
Modern period were hardly imaginable in the context of the nineteenth century,
not to mention the fact that the practice of
devşirme had
long fallen into oblivion. This sense of anachronism must have been all the more
true in the eyes of the young Edhem during his long stay in Paris. What could
still have been tolerable—and probably inevitable—in an Ottoman context must
have felt extremely awkward in the French capital. A Greek identity, the
massacres, conversion, captivity, and enslavement: all of this must by far have
exceeded what the young boy was willing to reveal of his complex past to the
people who surrounded him. It was only natural, then, that he should have tried
to forge a new past, one that was consistent with the new identity that he had
acquired and on which depended his very future. Back in Istanbul, even if he
knew that the story of his origins would never go away, he stuck to his new
identity, reinforcing it with a strong patriotic stand that found its most basic
expression in an allegiance to Islamic forms and traditions. Yet, at the same
time, he also played the Western card and became one of the strongest advocates
of a total commitment to the scientific values he had acquired during his
education in Paris. No wonder, then, that his character and personality should
have been considered by many as somewhat out of the ordinary, not to say
eccentric.
At any rate, the point here is not to write a psychohistory of Edhem Pasha;
rather, this whole matter constitutes an interesting occasion to discuss the
very thin line that lies between story and history, as well as the grey zone of
identities at the crossroads of imperial and national histories. Edhem Pasha’s
strange life story lacks the kind of documentary evidence that one would require
for a proper and reliable historical analysis, and it is more than likely that
it will have to remain so. In that sense, it has little more to offer than the
appeal of a good story, with even the possibility that it may be just a little
bit
too good to be true, if one considers that the most reliable
documentation—the rare and indirect records emanating from the pasha
himself—seems to suggest it may have been entirely fabricated. Interestingly
enough, however, a careful ‘archaeology’ of the sources reveals that however
badly documented it may be, the ‘myth’ is in fact more plausible and likely than
what appears to have been a rather conscious effort by Edhem Pasha, soon
followed by his younger son, to distort an already blurry historical reality. This, to the historian, is a sobering realization of the fragility of what one
tends to label a little too hastily as historical evidence, and of the very
relative nature of the distinction between story and history.
At another level, this story is a slap in the face of national(ist) historical
constructs and of modernist historiography. Edhem Pasha is one of the last and
in that sense almost anachronistic, products of a pre-modern empire, but it is
also one of its first experiments with modernity. A child survives the
traditional imperial response—a massacre—to a (somewhat) modern form of
insubordination—a revolution—by being assimilated through traditional
means—enslavement and conversion—, only to be transformed through
modernity—education in Europe. More importantly, however, and despite some
efforts to avoid it, this modern product of tradition embodies a disturbing
identity that challenges every possible nationalist scenario. From a Turkish
perspective, he is a man of dubious origins, which is precisely why his son will
eventually attempt to rewrite his history to fit the requirements of a new
ideological context. From a Greek perspective, he is lost from the moment he
crosses over into a new identity and thus ‘betrays’ the teleological construct
of the formation of the Greek nation.Compared to Victor Hugo’s story of the
Greek boy who asks for “powder and bullets,”
[32] Edhem Pasha’s life story stands like
an aberration; it can only be understood by transcending the Manichean
categories of modernist and nationalist historiography.
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Footnotes
Note 2
İnal 1940–1953:600–603.
Note 3
Gövsa 1933–1936:437; Gövsa 1945–1946:125.
Note 4
Gövsa 1945–1946:125.
Note 5
See İnal’s reference above to Hayat
Ansiklopedisi.
Note 6
Uzunçarşılı 1948:67.
Note 7
Pakalın 1942:403.
Note 8
Pakalın 1942:403n1.
Note 9
Osman Nuri 1927:260–261.
Note 10
Pakalın 1942:404n1.
Note 11
Danişmend 1955:510.
Note 12
İstanbul Ansiklopedisi s.v. “Edhem Paşa
(Sakızlı İbrahim),” (Koçu 1968:4915-4916).
Note 13
The grand vizierate.
Note 14
A popular nickname for Edhem Pasha, derived from the
fact that he was Greek (Yorghi/Georgi) and that he was somewhat
eccentric and obsessive compulsive (Deli/Fool). İnal claims that there
was a madman in the streets of Istanbul known by this name.
Note 15
Server Pasha (1821–1886) several times minister, and
later senator.
Note 16
İnal 1942:625: Böyle bir günde olub sadr nişin
/ Deli Corci gibi mürtedd ü mühin / Bundan et
hali kıyas ü tahmin / Gerçi Server ise de bir hud-bin / Boka
nisbetle tezek anberdir.
Note 17
Süreyya Bey 1893-1894:844–845.
Note 18
Ottoman State Archives (BOA), DH.SAİDd. 2/218, 25
Rebiyülahir 1299 (16 March 1882), personnel file of İbrahim Edhem
Pasha.
Note 19
Cevdet Paşa 1893:41.
Note 20
De Coulanges 1856:641. The person described as the
‘ruler of Tunis’ was in fact the prime minister of the Bey of Tunis,
Mustafa Haznedar or Hazinedar Mustafa Pasha (1817–1878), who married in
1839 Kolthoum, daughter of the Bey Mustafa Pasha (1786–1837, bey from
1835 to his death). Hazinedar Mustafa Pasha was in fact a certain Yorghi
Stravelakis, born in Chios in 1817, son of Stephanos Stravelakis, who
was killed during the massacres of 1822. Kolthoum and Mustafa Pasha’s
daughter, Cenine (Lella Kebire) would eventually marry Tunuslu Hayreddin
Pacha (1821–1890), Ottoman Grand Vizier in 1878–1879 (Yılmaz Öztuna
1989:482, 872–873).
Note 21
Destrilhes 1856:78.
Note 22
The Times of London , 12 February
1858.
Note 23
“Renegades in Turkish Service,” The New
York Times, 27 August 1877.
Note 24
Le Temps , 26 March 1893.
Note 25
Daubrée 1893:148.
Note 26
Dorys 1902:176.
Note 27
Mavroyéni 1989:21.
Note 28
Ζαρίφης 2002:273–274.
Note 29
Vapereau 1858:611–612.
Note 30
Archives de l’École des Mines, Registre des élèves, 178,
Paris.
Note 31
Nuri 1911:162.
Note 32
Hugo 1929.