The Destruction of the Pashas' Mansion: A Sad Tour of the Streets(2)

  Through the back windows of our building on Tesvikiye Avenue, beyond the cypress and linden trees, you could see the remains of the mansion of Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha, a Circassian from the Caucasus who werved as grand viier for a short while during the Russian-Ottoman War. As a young boy (in the 1830s, a decade before Flaubert wrote that he wanted to "move to Istanbul and buy a slave"), he'd been brought to Istanbul and sold into slavery, eventually to find his way into the household of the Governor of Tunis, where he was raised speaking Arabic, before being taken to France for much of his later youth. When he returned to Tunis to join the army, he quickly rose through the ranks, serving in top posts at command headquarters, in the governor's office, the diplomatic corps, and the finance ministry. Finally, just as he was turning sixty, he retired to Paris, whereupon Abdulhamit (Acting at the suggestion of another Tunisian, Sheikh Zafiri) sommoned him to Istanbul. After engaging him as a financial adviser for a short time, he made him grand vizier. The pasha thus became one of the firtst in a long line of foreign-educated financial expert who, given the mandate to pull Turkey from a sea of debts, went beyond dereaming (like their counterparts in so many other poor countries) of national reform along western lines. As with many of his successors, people expected a great deal from this pasha, simply because he was more western than Ottoman or Turk. And for precisely the same reason--that he wasn't Turkish--he felt a deep shame. The gossip was that Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha would make notes in Arabic when returning home in his horse-drawn carriage from his meetings held in Turkish at the palace; later he would dictate these to his secretary in France. The coup de grace was a report of rumors that his Turkish was poor and that his secret aim was to establish an Arabic-speaking nation; while knowing them to be mostly baseless, the ever-suspicious Abdulhamit nevertheless gave these denundiations some credence and removed the pasha as vizier. Because it woyld have been unseemly for a fallen grand vizier to take refuge in France, the pasha was forced to end his days in Istanbul, spending his summers at his Bosphorus villa in Kurucesme and his winters as a half prisoner in the mansion in whose garden we would later build our apartment house. When he was bot writing reports for Abdulhamit, he passed the time composing his memoirs in French. These memoirs (translated into Turkish only eighty years later) prove their author to have possessed a greater sense duty than of humor: He decided the book to his sons, one of whom would later be executed for his involvement in the attempted assassination of Grand Vizier Mahmut Sevket Pasha, by which time Abdulhamit had bought the mansion for his saughter Sadiye Sultan.