There is a rare thrill that comes from being afforded a behind-the-scenes insight into the inner world of one of history’s great dynasties.
That is precisely what Ayse Osmanoglu, a writer and member of the House of Osman, the Ottoman dynasty, has given us in her new book Palace in the Mist, published on 3 July by Hanedan Press.
Osmanoglu, who lives in England, is a princess by lineage - a descendant of two Ottoman sultans, Murad V and Mehmed Resad, and the granddaughter of an imperial prince exiled from Istanbul in 1924 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, did away with the caliphate.
This makes her uniquely placed to pen this captivating book set in the twilight of the Ottoman empire.
Palace in the Mist tells the intimate story of Osmanoglu’s ancestors in the palaces of Istanbul against the backdrop of the 1908 Young Turk revolution, which transformed the empire’s history.
It is an unusual work, somewhere between a novel and an academic history. Every major character depicted is real and Osmanoglu has gone to great lengths to ensure her portrayals are historically faithful.
Her aversion to embellishment means that some of the characters occasionally feel thin and under-written. Yet this is a price well worth paying for the book’s accuracy and authenticity.
Indeed, Osmanoglu’s sources are unique: the obscure memoirs of figures who lived at that time, and accounts passed down to her personally.
“During my childhood, I was lucky enough to be told numerous stories regarding bygone times by my paternal grandparents and my great-aunts and uncles and I tried to commit all of these to memory,” she tells us at the book's opening. “They gave me a precious insight into what life was like for the people who lived in the Ottoman palaces at the turn of the 20th century.”
The Young Ottomans, a band of reformers who aimed to turn the empire into a liberal constitutional monarchy, launched a coup against the reigning Sultan Abdulaziz on 30 May 1876.
They swiftly deposed him and installed his nephew Prince Murad, Osmanoglu’s ancestor, as the new sultan.
Murad, a liberal constitutionalist, was so paranoid that people would suspect him of having conspired against Abdulaziz that he had a nervous breakdown. He was deemed unfit to govern and the sultanate passed to his younger brother, who became Sultan Abdulhamid II on 1 September 1876.
A parliament was established, along with a constitution. But before long the highly paranoid Abdulhamid dissolved parliament and began arresting dissenters. He felt threatened by his own family, and locked them up too.
This included Murad and his son Prince Mehmed Selahaddin, confined in the “gilded cage” of the Ciragan Palace for 28 years.
Palace in the Mist begins in the final years of Abdulhamid’s iron-fisted rule and Osmanoglu reconstructs that history in vivid prose and with fastidious attention to detail.
We are told, for instance, about the sultan’s “crisp white linen shirt and navy-blue trousers” and the gold buttons of his tailored jacket.
“The world moves against me,” he whispers at one point, waving a pistol around in an empty room.
Betrayal and revolt are central themes of the book. The Young Turks, including one of the protagonists, Captain Hafiz Ismail Hakki, grapple with the prospect of betraying the sultan in an attempt to establish the empire as a democratic constitutional monarchy.
There is plenty of intrigue; in one scene masked rebels stand over a table on which lie “the Qu’ran and the revolver, gleaming ominously in the golden light”.
But Osmanoglu also pays attention to the lives of the women of the Ottoman imperial family, including young princesses living in confinement.
