Very Good Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928) Original cloth bdg. with marbled boards. Cr. 8vo. (20 x 13,5 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). 176, [1] p. Lithographed edition. Extremely rare first and only edition of this guide to the distances and meridian calculations of some cities from Batumi located on the shores of Black Sea, Europe until Great Britain, Asia, and Africa shores, prepared for Turkish naval officers, mariners, and vessels, describing the shores of the countries located on these routes. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ibrahim Edhem Pasha was an Ottoman statesman, who held the office of Grand Vizier at the beginning of Abdul Hamid II's reign between 5 February 1877 and 11 January 1878. He resigned from that post after the Ottoman chances of winning the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) had decreased. He furthermore served in numerous administrative positions in the Ottoman Empire including minister of foreign affairs in 1856, then ambassador to Berlin in 1876, and to Vienna from 1879 to 1882. He also served as a military engineer and as Minister of Interior from 1883 to 1885. In 1876-1877, he represented the Ottoman Government at the Constantinople Conference. He was born in Chios of Greek ancestry, in a Christian Greek Orthodox village on the island of Chios. Strangely, his connection to Chios is not well-documented: his son Osman Hamdi Bey claimed that he was a member of the Scaramanga family, but Edhem Pasha himself tried to efface his Greek connections. As a young boy in 1822, he was orphaned and captured by Ottoman soldiers during the massacre of the Greek population of Chios. He was sold into slavery, brought to Constantinople, and adopted by the (later) grand vizier Hüsrev Pasha. Lacking his own children and family, Hüsrev Pasha raised about ten children who had been orphaned or bought as slaves, many of whom ascended to important positions. The child, now named Ibrahim Edhem, quickly distinguished himself with his intelligence and after having attended schools in the Ottoman Empire, he was dispatched along with a number of his peers, and under the supervision of his father, then grand vizier, and of the sultan Mahmud II himself, to Paris to pursue his studies under state scholarship. There he returned with a Bachelor of Arts and was one of the top pupils at the École des Mines. He was a classmate and a friend of Louis Pasteur. He thus became Turkey's first mining engineer in the modern sense, and he started his career in this field. Edhem Pasha was the father of Osman Hamdi Bey, a well-known archaeologist, and painter, as well as the founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Another son, Halil Edhem Eldem took up the archaeology museum after Osman Hamdi Bey's death and has been a deputy for ten years under the newly founded Turkish Republic. Yet another son, Ismail Galib Bey, is considered the founder of numismatics as a scientific discipline in Turkey. Later generations of the family also produced illustrious names. The architect Sedat Hakki Eldem, a cousin, is one of the pillars of the search for modern architectural styles adopted by the Republic of Turkey (called the Republican style in the Turkish context) in its early years and which marks many important buildings dating from the period of the 1920s and the 1930s. A great-grandson, Burak Eldem, is a writer while another, Edhem Eldem, is a renowned historian. More names include Erol Eldem, Tiana Eldem, Levent Eldem, and Ercan Eldem, an architect. (Source: Wikipedia). Özege 4522.; Only one copy in OCLC: 162837008 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).
