Esma Sultan

At fifteen, Esma Sultana is Sultan Abdülhamid I’s youngest daughter. She is engaged to be married soon to Küçük Hüseyin Paşa, the Chief Admiral of the Ottoman Navy. The blond, blue-eyed girl is so fetching and delicate, she looks like a character from a fairy tale. She puts her knitting down on the velvet sofa. She stands up and shyly walks to the corner of the room where her wedding gown hangs, the umpteenth time she has done so this day.

She strokes it lovingly, as if it’s an object of worship. Made of pink silk, the gown is in two pieces, a top and a skirt. Uniting the two parts is an elaborate embroidery of a flowering plant, with its roots on the hem of the skirt and its thin, long branches flowering around the bodice. It is a feast for the eyes with its spangles and crystal beads and silver thread. Open on the front, it has a square furbelowed collar and a neck-shawl of the same fabric.

Its puffy sleeves are gathered at the elbow and vented to the wrists with golden buttons. She smiles with anticipated happiness and turns away to the window that looks out at the palace gardens. It is the spring of 1792 and the magical day has finally arrived. The magnificent wedding begins with a cannonade from Topkapı Palace. All the citizens are invited to the ceremony.

Acrobats and tumblers are performing in the public squares. Games and spectacles and amusements have been organized in all corners of Istanbul. Fireworks from Tophane streak across the night-sky. Multicoloured lanterns illuminate the palaces, the mansions and the houses of both the European and Asian shores of the Bosphorus. And amid all this merriment and excitement, beautiful Esma Sultana is married to her beloved.

Esma was the most powerful sister of Sultan Mahmud II. She had a palace in Divanyolu, manor houses in Çamlıca, Maçka and Eyüp, a mansion in Ortaköy. She was a poet and an accomplished musical composer.