Instead, his death and long life (he died at the age of 97) will be the cause for private reflection in Turkey, very much in the way that the discovery at the back of a cupboard of a yellowing family photo can be a window into another dimension. That he passed away this week in the city of his birth is itself remarkable. Like the other members of his family he was banished from Turkey in 1924, his very existence seen as a threat to the legitimacy of the young republic. A curiosity more than a danger, he was allowed to return in 1992, and he revisited one of his ancestral homes -- Dolmabahçe Palace -- as an ordinary member of a scheduled guided tour. Though commentators speak sometimes of Turkey trying to re-establish a regional zone of influence in a neo-Ottoman foreign policy, I have yet to hear of a political force calling for a restoration of the actual throne.I first met him (“My name is Ertuğrul,” he told me) at a party in Manhattan where he lived, famously, in a rent-controlled apartment. A New York Times article of 2006 quipped that no one would be happier were the Ottomans to be reinstated than his landlord, who could bid adieu to a tenant who was paying such a measly rent. A few years later I managed to interview him during one of his summer visits to İstanbul. I was working on a project and was eager to talk to someone who had actually been dangled on Abdulhamid II's knee. Of course he was born in 1912, long after Abdulhamid had been deposed, and no one could fault him for remembering very little. His own abiding memory of authoritarian rule was the German “Fraulein” who ruled his nursery. Most of what he knew had been relayed to him by others. He spoke of a household composed of elderly concubines and of a monarch whose stark simplicity was at odds with the pomp with which he was surrounded.
The anecdotes he told -- of the plain steel letter opener the sultan used to deal with his mail, of exchanging a jewel-encrusted cigarette case for the plain box used by the American ambassador -- were all tales of the simplicity of majesty. It was clearly a style that he himself cultivated. My wife thought to present him with a copy “Osman's Dream,” a history of the Ottoman Empire and in that sense a history of his own family. She was carefully instructed by others to inscribe it to His Imperial Highness Prince Ertuğrul Osman, but he refused to let her do so, opting for plain Osman, instead.
He had his own professional life, running a mining company with interests in Latin America. And according to newspaper accounts carried no passport but a homemade laissez-passer, which in a simpler pre-9/11 world took him everywhere he needed to go.
Eventually he acquired a Turkish passport and took to spending more and more time in İstanbul. What struck him most as he rediscovered his homeland, he told me, was that “everyone spoke Turkish.” What had been for him a language of exile was spoken by everyone in the streets. Equally remarkable, as I discovered, when there was an exhibition of the Ottomans in exile in Dolmabahçe Palace to accompany a TRT documentary, was that the Turkey had managed to turn a family in exile into the commonplace and over six centuries of history into an heirloom on the shelf.
Reading of Ertuğrul Osman's death, I thought, for some reason, of the foppish display of imperial grandeur by Muammar Gaddafi during his much shorter sojourn in New York. The latter, a self-styled potentate, projects power as a circus, complete in this case with its own tent -- as blingdom and not kingdom. Mr. Osman, in his walk-up apartment in New York, saw majesty as the cipher for other people's expectations and the renunciation of his own. Though he never possessed a scepter, he understood the very bourgeois nature of monarchy, that in order to rule others you had first be able to govern yourself.
