Looking into the households members of the Bedirhani family lived in during the late 19th century, the following patterns can be identified:
While not all children of Emir Bedirhan lived together under the same roof after their father had passed away, the family did tend to cluster and form, by the standards of late 19th century Istanbul, comparatively large household communities. While almost half of Istanbul households
312 See BOA, ŞD. 370.34, ek 3 and 5, 15. Kanun II 1305 M (January 27, 1890), for one example.
313 Meriwether, The Kin Who Count, pp. 35-36 and Bouquet, “Famille, familles, grandes familles,” p. 203.
consisted of three or fewer individuals in the late 19th century,314 the Bedirhani households were considerably larger. Often, brothers shared one home, with younger brothers moving in with older, already married siblings and their families. Ali Şamil Paşa Bedirhan was the head of a particularly large household, he lived with several wives, concubines and their children. His living situation was regarded as fairly exceptional by the standards of late 19th century Istanbul as well.315 The sheer size of the Bedirhani family stood out to their contemporaries and is, to this day, mentioned in most sources on the family. The family was, by any standards, rather big. Emir Bedirhan is said to have fathered a legendary forty sons and forty daughters316 – I was able to trace twenty-three sons and eighteen daughters. In the generation of the sons of Emir Bedirhan, the average number of children was 4.5, which was slightly above the Istanbul average at the time.317 The family was further divided and structured by the different wives of Emir Bedirhan and their respective children. These branches or factions of the extended family stood close together and shared common interests, sometimes also rivaling with other family branches about resources and influence. One example for these internal divisions, which will be addressed in greater detail throughout the following chapters, was alluded to by Mehmed Salih Bedirhan in his memoirs. He recalled tensions between the children of his own grandmother Ruşen Bedirhan and Ali Şamil Paşa, who had a different mother.318 Servants and other dependents were also an integral part of the Bedirhani family: When they left their homeland in Eastern Anatolia and were sent into exile, the Bedirhanis were accompanied by a
314 Alan Duben & Cem Behar, Istanbul Households. Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880 – 1940 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 50.
315 For the comparisons, see Duben & Behar, Istanbul Households, pp. 50-55.
316 Lütfi, Emir Bedirhan, p. 33 mentions twenty-one sons and twenty-one daughters who survived their father’s death in 1868. Altogether, Lütfi claimed that Emir Bedirhan fathered ninety-six children.
317 Duben & Behar, Istanbul Households, p. 161. While the authors give the average number of children per woman, the Bedirhani family tree is much better documented for the sons of the family, i.e. on the patrilineal side.
318 Uzun & Bedir-Han, Defter-i Â’malım, p. 37.
number of servants, among them wet nurses and teachers of the Bedirhani children. One of them was the Kurdish poet Hacı Kadir [Hacî Qadirê Koyî] (1815–1897) from Köysancak in Iraq, who was employed as a tutor for the children of the family.319 In 20th-century Kurdish nationalist historiography, Hacı Kadir was idolized as an early Kurdish national poet.320 But the Bedirhani household also had many non-Kurdish members in Ottoman times: Both Emin Ali Bey and Abdurrahman Bey Bedirhan, for instance, employed Greek governesses for their children.321 As they were part of the urban elite of Ottoman Istanbul, the Bedirhani family employed numerous servants.322 Some of them accompanied the family members into exile after the murder of Rıdvan Paşa in 1906.323
The boundaries of the household and the residential units of members of the Bedirhani family were not fixed, but exhibited great fluidity. As family members moved across the empire for employment or to do business, they were hosted by their relatives in Istanbul, Damascus or Jerusalem. Traveling family members found accommodation for shorter or even extended periods of time, as the childhood trajectory of Mehmed Salih Bedirhan, who traveled with his grandmother Ruşen and lived with different family members in Istanbul, Syria and the Aegean island of Lemnos throughout the 1880s, aptly illustrates.324 In times of need,
319 Strohmeier & Yalçın-Heckmann, Die Kurden, p. 35. According to Celadet Bedirhan, Hacı Kadir was the son of the Kurdish religious scholar Mela Ehmed from Anatolia. Hacci Kadir came to Istanbul to study and eventually also died there in 1912. See Herekol Azizan [Celadet Bedirhan], “Klasikên me. An Şahir û Edîbên me ên kevin.” In: Hawar 33 (October 1, 1941), pp. 6-14.
320 See e.g. the depiction in Alakom, Eski İstanbul Kürtleri, p. 114.
321 Kamuran Bedirhan in his autobiographical interview, Joyce Blau, “Mémoires de l’émir Kamuran Bedir-Khan.” In: Études Kurdes 1 (2000), p. 79, and Müveddet Gönensay, Müveddet Gönensay’ın Anıları, pp. 8-9.
322 According to Duben & Behar, Istanbul Households, p. 50 only 8 % of Istanbul households around the turn of the century had live-in servants. By these standards, the Bedirhanis were part of the urban elite.
323 Blau, “Mémoires de l’émir Kamuran Bedir-Khan,” p. 83.
324 Uzun & Bedir-Han, Defter-i Â’malım, pp. 35-40.
family members took relatives in to live with them, as was the case with Dilber Hanım and her children after her husband Kamil Bey Bedirhan went missing in the Russian-Ottoman borderlands in the aftermath of the First World War.325
While their father had been married four times and had, in addition, kept a number of concubines, most of Emir Bedirhan’s sons and grandsons lived either monogamously or with two wives. In doing so, they were in line with the Istanbul average at the time, with most men living monogamously.326 In this respect, the Bedirhani family underwent an “Ottomanization.” An exception that has already been mentioned was Ali Şamil Paşa Bedirhan. Another area where similar assimilations to norms prevailing within the Ottoman imperial elite can be observed is the choice of family members’ places of residence in late Ottoman times. In both Istanbul and in Damascus, the two centers of the Bedirhani family in the late 19th century, family members lived in well-off, recently developed suburban environments. This indicates the social standing and aspirations of the family in late Ottoman society. The family members’ neighbors came from diverse ethnic and linguistic background but most of them were, like the Bedirhanis themselves, Ottoman state officials. In spite of the undeniable rupture the First World War and the ensuing foundation of the Turkish Republic represented for the Bedirhani family history, residential patterns of the Bedirhani family members exhibit some continuity. Around the turn of the century, Ali Şamil Paşa lived in a spacious wooden konak in the neighborhood of Söğütlüçeşme in Kadıköy, Istanbul.327 From his house,
325 Malmisanîj [Mehmet Tayfun], Cızira Botanlı Bedirhaniler ve Bedirhani Ailesi Derneği’nin Tutanakları (Spånga: Apec, 1994), p. 39, citing from the records of the Bedirhani family meetings in 1920.
326 Duben & Behar, Istanbul Households, pp. 148-149.
327 Adnan Giz, Bir Zamanlar Kadıköy (1900 - 1950) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1988), pp.
134-135 and Müfid Ekdal, Kapalı Hayat Kutusu. Kadıköy Konakları (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005), pp. 378-379.
the train tracks leading away from the Haydarpaşa station could be seen.
Among Ali Şamil Paşa’s neighbors were the imperial palace jeweler Acemi Hüseyin Efendi,328 the Mısırlıoğlu family, who were money lenders (sarrafs) of Christian descent from Egypt,329 and the Greek Zamboğlu family.330 Ali Şamil Paşa Bedirhan lived thus among well-off and influential Istanbulites. When he was exiled from Istanbul in 1906, his wife continued to stay in their house in Söğütlüçeşme. Later, the building was used as a primary school during the Allied occupation of Istanbul until it was finally demolished in the 1930s.331 The plot of land in what is today Misak-ı Milli Sokak in Kadıköy currently hosts the building of the Kızılay Tıp Merkezi.332 Even after their family home was demolished, at least one of Ali Şamil Paşa’s descendants, however, continued to live in Kadıköy into Turkish Republican times: His son Übeyit Şamil [Çınar] had a dental practice there.333
Prior to 1906, Emin Ali Bey Bedirhan and his family also lived in Kadıköy, in a konak in the Mühürdar Caddesi. Abdürrezzak Bey Bedirhan, at the time working in the Yıldız Palace, lived on the European side of the Bosphorus, in the suburb of Şişli around the turn of the century, in a new house within a representative, recently developed neighborhood. Several of his younger, unmarried brothers lived in his household.334 The descendants of Osman Paşa Bedirhan and his wife Nesrin Hanım owned a house in the Feneryolu neighborhood and continued to live there in early Republican times.335 Not only the wealthy suburbs of Istanbul, but also the island of Büyükada, popular
328 Ekdal, Kapalı Hayat Kutusu, pp. 348-349.
329 Ekdal, Kapalı Hayat Kutusu, pp. 370-372.
330 Ekdal, Kapalı Hayat Kutusu, p. 376.
331 Ekdal, Kapalı Hayat Kutusu, pp. 378-379.
332 Bilgili, İstanbul’un Sokak İsimleri, p. 503.
333 Müfid Ekdal, Bizans Metropolünde ilk Türk Köyü Kadıköy (Istanbul: Kadıköy Belediye Başkanlığı Kültür Yayınları, 1996), p. 264.
334 For further information, see the respective chapters 4 and 5.
335 Alakom, Eski İstanbul Kürtleri, p. 168.
with the urban elite of the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attracted some members of the Bedirhani family. Zarife Hanım, a daughter of Emir Bedirhan and wife of Mehmed Arif Paşa Mardin, lived in a spacious köşk on the island in 1903, together with her son Ömer Fevzi and the second wife of her husband, Leyla Hanım, along with the latter’s children.336
2.8. Resources to Draw on to Claim Legitimation, Leadership, and