It is an open secret that the Sultan's representatives have
often approached some European Foreign Offices with the promise of
concessions to be granted on condition that the Turkish refugees in
their territories were handed over to the Sultan, or at any rate
expelled across the frontiers.
Yet, in spite of his uniform success in the struggle with his Turkish
subjects, the Sultan has more than once been face to face with imminent
danger owing to the efforts of this party. The most daring of these
attempts was made by a certain Suavi Effendi, whose name I mentioned
before, who was a very cultured as well as courageous member of the
_Ulema_ class, and was one of the organisers of the once powerful
Young-Turkish movement Suavi Effendi was in London about thirty-five
years ago, finding it safer to print here the political literature
of the movement to be smuggled into Turkey, but before the fall of
the late Sultan he went back to Constantinople, and was engaged
in educational and journalistic work. Soon after the accession of
Abd-ul-Hamid, Suavi collected a band of some hundreds of desperate
refugees, who had flocked into the capital from the provinces which
were lost as the consequence of the Russo-Turkish War, and with them
he attacked the Sultan's palace. Before, however, they could release
the ex-Sultan Murad from his captivity, to be reinstated in his place,
they were overtaken by the guards in the palace garden, and, after a
fearful struggle, Suavi and most of his followers perished. The mere
rustic private who is credited with having cut Suavi Effendi himself
down is now the all-powerful Hassan Pasha, the present head of the
police guarding those quarters of the capital which border on Yildiz
Kiosk. He is a man of great physical strength and ferocity. Most men
who are denounced as being Young-Turkish adherents are handed over to
him before being sent into exile, and terrible tales are related about
his beating the prisoners. The Sultan not long ago conferred on him the
rank of a Field-Marshal for his loyal service, though Hassan is so
ignorant that he cannot even write his own name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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