Delicious Memories of Şahende Hanım

Year 1910... A hot summer night... The young woman was watching the street with absent-minded looks from the window of a wooden house with a bay window, on one of the narrow streets of Sultanahmet. He was arrested... While the others were sent to the Bekirağa Company for questioning, he was to be "guested" at the house of police officer Hasan Efendi "as a tribute to himself".

Shortly after, he would write the following lines in his notebook, which he always had with him in the room where he was kept as a prisoner "in the grip of his grief": "I am deprived of the honor of seeing even the sky as spacious." Even the heart finds comfort.

Long live freedom, long live, long live with justice... Let the spirit of freedom be justice!.." However, two years before the day these lines were written, thousands of people celebrated the declaration of the Second Constitutional Monarchy with great enthusiasm in Sultanahmet Square, and the joy of gaining freedom spread across Rumelia like a wind. It spread in waves from Anatolia to all the subjects of the empire.

So what happened in these two years that the freedom that was "enslaved" took an Ottoman woman with three children "enslaved"? This notebook, in which Şahende Hanım, the only female defendant of the "Cemiyet-i Hafiye Case", one of the most important political cases of the Committee of Union and Progress, recorded the days of "the detention that left a very pleasant memory on her married life", bears witness to this extraordinary period of our history. .
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 280

Year of Print: 2016


Language: Turkish
Publisher: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları

First Print Year: 2016

Number of Pages: 280

Language: Turkish