Author(s): Luminița Munteanu / Language(s): Turkish,English,French
Issue: 18/2018
Zeyneb Hanoum (Hanım), one of the muses and also main characters of the novel Les désenchantées
by Pierre Loti (1906), whose real name was Hadice Zennur, has fled Turkey in january 1906, before the
publication of the above mentioned book, in company with her younger sister, Nuriye Neyrünnisa, better known
in the Occident as Melek Hanoum and, later, as Nouriyé Rohozinska, in order to escape Sultan Abdülhamid’s
persecution. The two Ottoman ladies, who were partly of French descent and had been given a progressive,
liberal education, travelled a while around Europe, visiting and also staying for different intervals of time in
France, Switzerland, Italy, London, Brussels, Spain. Unlike her sister, who married in 1908 a Polish aristocrat
and composer and adapted herself to Paris lifestyle, Zeyneb Hanoum was greatly disappointed with her Western
and, in particular, French experience, all the more so as « her Occident », primarily based on book knowledge,
proved to be a distant mirage. Disenchanted with both the « Orient » and the « Occident », she has decided to
go back to Turkey six years later, in 1912, and to get on with her life ; she never returned in Europe until her
death, in 1923. Our article deals with her « European impressions », published in 1913 in London, with the
support of the British journalist Grace Ellison.
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