The oldest member of the Ottoman royalty passed away in a Beirut hospital at the age of 92 on Tuesday.
Sultanzade Yavuz Alpan died from heart failure on Tuesday night at the American University Medical Center in Beirut, the Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reported.
He was the great-grandson of Sultan Abdulmejid I and the oldest of the remaining 21 Ottoman sultans.
The Turkish Embassy in Beirut said that Alpan’s funeral ceremony would take place in Beirut following the noon prayers.
Photo: Ihlas News Agency.
The title that Alpan held, “sultanzade,” is given to the son of a sultana – an Ottoman imperial princess.
Alpan was born in the northern Palestinian city of Haifa after his family was forced to leave the Turkish Republic when it issued a law in 1924 forcing all members of the Ottoman royal family to be exiled.
This followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 after its defeat in WWI.
Bilun Alpan, Yavuz’s sister, was 6 at the time of the exile, and she moved with her father and mother to France, where the family stayed in Paris for a year, and then in Nice for a year and a half.
They then moved to Palestine, where the late sultanzade was born in 1928. A year later, the family relocated to Lebanon, settling down in Beirut, where Bilun died at the age of 101 in 2019.
It is to note that the female members of the Ottoman royalty were given permission to return to Turkey in 1952, while the male members were only allowed to return 2 decades later, in 1974.
