What Happened to the Ottoman Princesses After Turkey Exiled the Dynasty?

On the night of the third of March 1924, the same day the Grand National Assembly in Ankara abolished the caliphate, the last Ottoman Caliph, Abdulmejid the Second, was driven with his family to the small railway station of Catalca, outside Istanbul, and put on a train to Switzerland. With him was his only daughter, Durrusehvar, ten years old. The same law ordered every member of the Ottoman dynasty, men, women and children, to leave Turkey forever. Their property was confiscated, and they were given passports that let them leave but never return. For more than six hundred years the house of Osman had ruled from the Balkans to Arabia, and its princesses had grown up in palaces on the Bosphorus. None of them could ever have ruled. But the new Republic saw the dynasty as the symbol of the old regime that had lost the war, and around a hundred and fifty of its members were sent into exile. The last Sultan, Mehmed the Sixth, had already fled on a British warship in 1922. In this video, we trace what actually happened to the Ottoman princesses after Turkey exiled the dynasty. From the last Sultan's death in San Remo in 1926, when, according to the historian Ekrem Bugra Ekinci, creditors held his coffin until his debts were paid, to Fehime Sultan, abandoned in Nice by her husband and kept alive by a few loyal eunuchs. From a double wedding in Nice in November 1931, when Durrusehvar, seventeen, and Niloufer, fifteen, married the sons of the Nizam of Hyderabad and sailed to India on the same ship as Mahatma Gandhi, to the death of a maid in childbirth that led Niloufer to found a hospital that still carries her name. We follow Neslisah, the granddaughter of both the last Sultan and the last Caliph, exiled from Turkey as a child and from Egypt in 1957, the law of 1952 that let the women come home, Durrusehvar's choice to be buried in England rather than in Turkey, and her son's burial in Hyderabad in 2023. This is the full story of the women of a six-hundred-year dynasty who were told they could never come home. If you made it this far, leave the word Niloufer in the comments. And if you enjoyed the video, please subscribe. These deep dives take real work, and your support genuinely makes a difference. Sources: • Murat Bardakci, Neslishah: The Last Ottoman Princess (American University in Cairo Press, 2017) • Imran Mulla, The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince (Hurst, 2025) • Ayse Osmanoglu, Babam Sultan Abdulhamid (1960) • Ekrem Bugra Ekinci, The bitter story of the Ottoman dynasty's exile, Daily Sabah (2015) • Turkiye Today, Remembering Sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin (2025) • Middle East Eye, review of The Indian Caliphate (2025) • The Friday Times, From the Sublime Porte to Hyderabad (2019) • Wikipedia, Mehmed VI • Wikipedia, Abdulmejid II • Wikipedia, Abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate • Wikipedia, Durrusehvar Sultan • Wikipedia, Nilufer Hanimsultan • Wikipedia, Moazzam Jah • Wikipedia, Mukarram Jah • Wikipedia, Niloufer Hospital • Wikipedia, Sabiha Sultan • Wikipedia, Fatma Ulviye Sultan • Wikipedia, Neslisah Sultan • Wikipedia, Fehime Sultan • Wikipedia, Osmanoglu family #OttomanEmpire #OttomanHistory #OttomanPrincess #Durrusehvar #Niloufer #Neslisah #Abdulmejid #MehmedVI #LastSultan #Caliphate #Istanbul #Turkey #TurkishHistory #Hyderabad #Nizam #NilouferHospital #Nice #WomenInHistory #RoyalWomen #RoyalFamilies #ExiledRoyalty #LostKingdoms #DynastyHistory #HistoricalDocumentary #ForgottenHistory