Adile Sultan

Adile Sultan was born on 23 May 1826. Her father was Sultan Mahmud II, and her mother was Zernigar Hanım.[1][2] After her mother's death in 1830,[3] when she was four years old, she was entrusted to the care of her father's senior consort, Nevfidan Kadın.[1][4]

Adile's was educated at the palace. She took lessons of Quran, Arabic, Persian, music and calligraphy. She took her calligraphy lessons with Ebubekir Mümtaz Efendi, the most famous calligrapher of the era. With the education she received, combined with her sensitive personality, she went on to write poems, becoming the only princess to do so.[5]

After her father's death in 1839, when she was thirteen years old, her elder half-brother, the new sultan Abdulmejid I, took her under his guardianship.[6]

In 1845, her brother Sultan Abdulmejid arranged her marriage to Mehmet Ali Pasha, who had been serving as an advisor in the imperial arsenal. Born in Hemşin, he was the son of Hacı Ömer Agha, the chief agha of Galata. He came to Istanbul at a very young age, where he spent his childhood in the Enderun.[7]

The preparations for the marriage began on 24 March 1845,[8] and the marriage contract was concluded on 28 April in the apartment of the sacred relics, Topkapı Palace. After the ceremony was performed, the trousseau was brought to the Darüssaade Ağa from where it was taken through the Tophane Street to Çırağan Palace. The wedding celebrations were delayed until next summer.[9] The wedding took place in February 1846, and lasted a whole week.[9] On the last day of the celebrations, Adile was taken to Neşatabad Palace located in Defterdarburnu. [10] This palace once belonged to Hatice Sultan, daughter of Sultan Mustafa III.[11]

After the marriage, Mehmet Ali Pasha became commander of the fleet, and served on this position for five times, and afterwards served a short while as Grand Vizier to her brother, Sultan Abdulmejid.[10] The two together had three children, one son Sultanzade Ismail Bey, and three daughters, Hayriye Hanımsultan, Sıdıka Hanımsultan, and Aliye Hanımsultan.[10] He died in 1868 during the reign of her younger half-brother, Sultan Abdulaziz.[10] Their only surviving daughter, Hayriye was born in 1849. She was successively the wife of two pashas. She built a convent (tekke) near the mausoleum of her father. She died in 1869, a year after her father.[12]

Adile Sultan was a religious woman.[13] In about 1845, she bacame a follower of Sheikh Shumnulu Ali Efendi,[14] and became a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. She held meetings of sheikhs and dervishes in the Neşetabad Palace, which also served as a sort of application bureau for poor people who would make their needs known to the big-hearted sultan.[13]

Adile Sultan was a poetess and a scholarly, cultivated, and pious woman renowned for her benevolence, good works, and charity. She penned beautiful elegies to her husband when he died. Those in her service and in close relations with her always spoke with pleasure of her and her polite manners.[15] She was also in the habit of smoking the water pipe.[16]

She always dressed in a completely Turkish fashion gown of heavy fabrics with four flounces, shoes of chamois leather, shawl tied as a sash around her waist, the so-called salta wide-sleeved jacket over this ensemble, on her head something like a fez wrapped in a silk headkerchief pinked along the edges, and onto which she had fastened exquisite brooches of emeralds and rubies in the shape of roses, a larger one in the center flanked by two smaller ones. Other than these she wore no jewels or decorations.[16]

Adile Sultan had a summerhouse in Validebağ and a palace in Kandilli, the Adile Sultan Palace, both in the Asian part of Istanbul.[17] She left her palace in Kandilli following the death of her husband and moved to the Coastal Palace in Fındıklı. She donated the Adile Sultan Palace to the state on the condition that it be converted into the first secondary high school for girls in the Ottoman Empire. Her wish was fulfilled only in 1916 (due to wars), when the Young Turk activist, statesman, and educator Ahmed Rıza opened the Adile Sultan İnas Mekteb-i Sultanisi ("Adile Sultan Imperial Girls School"), today known as Kandilli Anatolian High School for Girls, although it became not the first, but the second secondary school for girls in the empire. The high school moved to a new building in 1969, and the Adile Sultan Palace burned down in 1986 due to an electrical short-circuit. It was reopened in 2006 as the Sakıp Sabancı Kandilli Education and Culture Center.[18]

Even though she was not much more successful than Leyla Hanım and Fıtnat Hanım, two renowned female poets of her era, Adile Sultan's literary works shed light on the incidents in the palace and the administration of the Ottoman Empire. Adile Sultan also composed a poem about the alleged murder of her younger brother Sultan Abdülaziz (1830–1876), which was officially known as a suicide. She also assisted with printing the Diwan of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566).

Her poetry, Adile Sultan's Divan, was published in 1996.

Adile Sultan died on 12 February 1899 at the age of seventy-three, the last surviving child of Mahmud. She was interred in the mausoleum of her husband in Eyüp, Istanbul.[19][20]

• Order of Charity, 18 January 1879[21]

• Adile Sultan Palace
• Kandilli Anatolian High School for Girls
• List of Ottoman princesses

• Brookes, Douglas Scott (2010). The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-78335-5.
• Kolay, Arif (2017). Hayırsever, Dindar, Nazik ve Şâire Bir Padişah Kızı: Âdile Sultan.
• Uluçay, Mustafa Çağatay (2011). Padişahların kadınları ve kızları. Ankara: Ötüken. ISBN 978-9-754-37840-5.

• Her biography (in Turkish)