MIDEAST - Saudi Aramco World

n his 2003 memoir Istanbul:
Memories and the City, writer
and Nobel laureate Orhan
Pamuk recreates his extended
family’s apartment building in
the enclave where once lived
the viziers and pashas of the
Ottoman Empire. But by the
1950’s, when Pamuk was growing up,
their mansions of state had become
“dilapidated brick shells with gaping
windows and broken staircases darkened
by bracken and untended fig trees,” soon
to be razed to make way for apartment
buildings like his own. One of the
mansions Pamuk could see from his
back window was that of the 19th-century
Tunisian pasha Khayr al-Din, whom the
sultan had brought to Istanbul in 1878 to
help save the empire.
Known to history as the Tunisian Khayr
al-Din (or, in Turkish, Tunuslu Hayrettin
Pasha), he was born in the western Caucasus
around 1822. Then as now, this Circassian
region was embroiled in conflict
between the local populations and Russia.
His father, a local chief, is believed to have
died in battle against the Russians. “I definitely
know that I am Circassian,” Khayr
al-Din recalled, but “I do not remember
anything about my native place or my parents.
Either because of war or forced migration,
I must have been separated from my
family very early and forever lost track of
them. My repeated attempts to find them
came to naught,” he wrote in a memoir.
He was brought to Istanbul as a child—
too young to later recall by whom, or even
exactly when—and, as a mamluk, was indentured
to the Ottoman military governor of
Anatolia. Mamluk literally means “slave”
in Arabic, but “ward” would be a better
description of his situation: He was raised
and educated with the governor’s son in
a mansion on the Asian shore of the Bosporus.
But after that boy’s untimely death,
Khayr al-Din found himself, at age 17, on a
boat bound for Tunisia, then an autonomous
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MILITARY MUSEUM OF TUNISIA / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
This view of downtown
Tunis, capital of
Tunisia, was made in
1899, some 20 years
after Khayr al-Din
ended his seven-year
service as prime
minister and 32 years
after he wrote his
historic book on the
principles of good
government. Opposite:
Few portraits of Khayr
al-Din exist. This
painting by Mahmoud
ben Mahmoud was
later used by engravers
to produce the
image on the Tunisian
20-dinar currency
note. (See page 23.)
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