28 September 2009 / ,
More than 80 years after his family was ordered from the country, the grandson of one of the last Ottoman sultans was buried Saturday as hundreds of admirers looked on.
Ertuğrul Osman, grandson of Sultan Abdulhamid II and heir to the Ottoman throne, died this week in İstanbul of kidney failure at the age of 97, after having lived most of his life in exile in a humble third-floor walk-up apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Osman's funeral in the garden of the mammoth Sultanahmet Mosque was attended by Turkish state ministers, artists and media glitterati. They lined up to pay their respects to Osman's widow, Zeynep Osman, herself a descendant of the royal family of Afghanistan. Osman himself was born into a family that still ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean. He was named after the founder of his dynasty, who lived seven centuries ago."
