Ertugrul Osman, Link to Ottoman Dynasty, Dies at 97
Sept. 24, 2009
Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97.
The cause was kidney failure, according to his wife, Zeynep, who was visiting Istanbul with him when he died.
Mr. Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian ruler who in 1299 established the kingdom that eventually controlled parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Osman would have eventually become the Sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.
For the last 64 years, Mr. Osman formally His Imperial Highness Prince Ertugrul Osman lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a four-story building on Lexington Avenue in the East 70s. At one time he kept 12 dogs in his home, a two-bedroom unit up a narrow, dim stairway, and enlisted neighborhood children to walk them.
Given the gap between what might have been and what was, Mr. Osman was often asked if he dreamed that the empire would be restored. He always answered, flatly, no.
“I’m a very practical person,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “Democracy works well in Turkey.”
In an interview for Al Jazeera television in 2008, he refused to say an unkind word about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led the revolution that deposed his family.
Ali Tayar, an architect from Istanbul and a friend, said in 2006 that Mr. Osman had “no ambitions to return, and he doesn’t want anyone to think he does.”
“But he’s an incredibly important link to Turkey’s past,” Mr. Tayar added.
Born in 1912, Mr. Osman was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman emperor; his grandfather, Abdul Hamid II, ruled from 1876 to 1909. In 1924, the royal family was expelled by Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. “The men had one day to leave,” Mr. Osman said. “The women were given a week.”
Mr. Osman attended school in Vienna and moved to New York in 1939. He returned to Turkey for the first time 53 years later, in August 1992, at the invitation of the prime minister. On that trip, he went to see the 285-room Dolmabahce Palace, which had been his grandfather’s home (and where he had played as a child). He insisted on joining a tour group, despite the summer heat. “I didn’t want a fuss,” he said. “I’m not that kind of person.”
As a young man, Mr. Osman ran a mining company, Wells Overseas, which required him to travel frequently to South America. Because he considered himself a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, he refused to carry the passport of any country. Instead, he traveled with a certificate devised by his lawyer. That might have continued to work had security measures not been tightened after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2004, he received a Turkish passport for the first time.
Mr. Osman married Gulda Twerskoy in 1947. She died in 1985. At a party in 1987, he met Zeynep Tarzi Hanim, an Afghan princess. Nearly 30 years his junior, she had been raised in Istanbul and was living in New York. They married in 1991. He has no other survivors.
Mr. Osman often impressed interviewers with his dry wit and knowledge of trends in politics, architecture and pop culture. When Didem Yilmaz, a filmmaker, interviewed Mr. Osman for “Seeking the Sultan,” a short documentary film about him, she expected to find him bitter about his life’s trajectory. Instead, she said, she found him to be “kind, understanding and contemplative.”
At one point, she added, he said to her knowingly, “If I had a bad life, it would be better for your film.”
Correction: Oct. 5, 2009
Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sept. 24 about Ertugrul Osman, a descendant of Turkish royalty, misstated the length of time his second wife, Zeynep, lived with him in a Manhattan apartment and misstated the ownership of 12 dogs that lived there at one time. Ms. Osman has lived there since the couple married in 1991, not “for the last 64 years.” (Mr. Osman had lived in the apartment for that length of time.) And the dogs were owned by Mr. Osman, not by the two of them.
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Turns out he was the last descendant of the Ottoman Empire and was expelled from Turkey when the Turkish Republic was founded. Below is the article from the NY times for reference:
