What really happened to the daughters of the Ottoman sultans after the empire fell? For six centuries the House of Osman ruled a stretch of the world so vast it spanned three continents, and the daughters of its sultans were raised inside marble palaces along the Bosphorus with jewels valued in the millions. Then, on March 3, 1924, Law Number 431 ended all of it in one afternoon. One hundred and fifty-five members of the Ottoman dynasty were stripped of Turkish citizenship, given a thousand British pounds each, a one-year passport, and ten days to leave the country forever.

In this long-form documentary, we trace the real stories of the Ottoman sultans' daughters after the collapse of the empire, from the panicked midnight train out of Çatalca station to the fading hotels of Nice, from the diamond-draped courts of Hyderabad to the regency palaces of Cairo, and finally back to Istanbul, where the last Ottoman princess born inside the empire died in 2012.

You will learn how Sultan Mehmed VI, the thirty-sixth and final sultan, slipped out of Dolmabahçe Palace in the pre-dawn hours of November 17, 1922, and was ferried into exile aboard the British warship HMS Malaya. You will meet Princess Dürrüşehvar, daughter of the last Ottoman caliph Abdülmecid II, whose marriage to Prince Azam Jah of Hyderabad on November 12, 1931 saved the exiled dynasty from financial ruin. You will meet her cousin Princess Niloufer, the Kohinoor of Hyderabad, whose grief over a maid lost in childbirth led to the founding of Niloufer Hospital. You will meet Princess Neslişah Sultan, born in Istanbul on February 4, 1921, the last imperial princess greeted with a cannon salute at her birth, expelled as a toddler in 1924, married to Prince Abdel Moneim of Egypt in 1940, who became the first lady of Egypt during the 1952 to 1953 regency, was imprisoned under Nasser in 1957, and finally returned home to die in Istanbul in April 2012 at age ninety-one.

But this is also a story of poverty and quiet tragedies. We cover Princess Fehime Sultan, the butterfly princess of Nice, who died of tuberculosis in September 1929 after her husband abandoned her penniless. We cover Princess Ayşe Sultan, daughter of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who embroidered Quranic verses by hand to pay her rent. We cover the overgrown Ottoman graves at Bobigny cemetery outside Paris. We cover the 1952 law that finally let female descendants return after twenty-eight years in exile, and the 1974 amnesty that extended the right to the men after fifty.

Topics covered:
The abolition of the Ottoman sultanate on November 1, 1922
The abolition of the Caliphate and Law 431 on March 3, 1924
The expulsion of the Ottoman royal family from Istanbul
Life in exile on the French Riviera and in Paris
The 1931 Hyderabad marriages of Dürrüşehvar and Niloufer
The Nizam of Hyderabad Mir Osman Ali Khan and his legendary wealth
The Ottoman princesses who married into the Egyptian royal family
The 1952 Free Officers coup and the fall of King Farouk
Princess Neslişah Sultan, the last Ottoman princess
The 1952 return law and the 1974 general amnesty

Sources:
Neslishah: The Last Ottoman Princess by Murat Bardakçı, American University in Cairo Press
The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem by Douglas Scott Brookes
Babam Sultan Abdülhamid, memoir of Ayşe Sultan
Genealogy of the Imperial Ottoman Family, 2005
From Exile to the Homeland: The First Returning Members of the Ottoman Dynasty 1924 to 1951
Cornucopia magazine, The Dynasty Writes Back by Philip Mansel
Daily Sabah, The Bitter Story of the Ottoman Dynasty's Exile
Associated Press obituaries for Neslisah Osmanoglu, April 2012
Britannica entry on Mehmed VI
Insight Turkey, review by Necmettin Ayan
Aramco World, review by Tom Verde
The Friday Times, From the Sublime Porte to Hyderabad
Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, How Did the Ottoman Dynasty Survive in Exile

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