Ertugrul Osman might have ruled the Ottoman Empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead he spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan.
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. He would have eventually become the sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.
Mr. Osman died on Sept. 23 of kidney failure in Istanbul. He was 97.
For the last 64 years, Mr. Osman - formally His Imperial Highness Prince Ertugrul Osman - and his wife, a niece of a former Afghan king, lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a four-storey building on Lexington Avenue in the East 70s. At one time they kept 12 dogs in their home, a two-bedroom unit up a narrow, dim stairway, and enlisted neighbourhood 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.
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 Mr. 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 in 53 years, 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 travelled 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.
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 him for Seeking the Sultan , a short documentary 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, Mr. Osman said to her knowingly, "If I had a bad life, it would be better for your film."
Ertugrul Osman
Ertugrul Osman was born on Aug. 18, 1912. He died on Sept. 23, 2009, of kidney failure in Istanbul. He was 97. He leaves his wife, Zeynep Tarzi Hanim.
New York Times News Service