İbrahim Edhem Pasha

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İbrahim Ethem Pasha (source&permission: Chamber of Mining Engineers of Turkey)

İbrahim Edhem Pasha was an Ottoman statesman who held the office of Grand Vizier in the beginning of Abdulhamid II's reign between 5 February 1877 and 11 January 1878.

He was of Greek origin, and was born in the island Chios (Sakız in Turkish). In his early childhood, during the uprisings and the subsequent clashes on that island in 1822, he had either been sold as a slave as some sources claim or, after having fled to İzmir through his own means, ended up by being adopted by the (later) grand vizier Koca Mehmed Hüsrev Pasha. Hüsrev Pasha was well-known for his love of children and had adopted up to ten children as such, many of them ascending to important positions in society in time.

The child, now named İbrahim Ethem, quickly distinguished himself with his intelligence and after having attended schools in Turkey, he has been dispatched along with a number of his peers, and under the supervision of his father, then grand vizier, and of the sultan Mahmud II himself, to Paris to pursue his studies under state scholarship. There, he has been a classmate and a friend of Louis Pasteur. He has thus become Turkey's first mining engineer in the modern sense, and he started his career in this field.

He is the father of Osman Hamdi Bey, a well-known archaeologist and painter, as well the founder of the İstanbul Archaeology Museum and of the İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts. Another son, Halil Ethem Eldem (the surname Eldem adopted according to the civil records reform in 1928) took up the archaeology museum after Osman Hamdi Bey's death and has been a deputy for ten years under the newly founded Turkish Republic. Yet another son, İsmail Galib Bey, is considered as the founder of numismatics as a scientific discipline in Turkey. Later generations of the family also produced illustrious names. Whereas the architect Sedat Hakkı Eldem, a cousin, is one of the pillars of the search for modern architectural styles adopted by the Republic of Turkey (called the Republican style in the Turkish context) in its early years and which marks many important buildings dating from the period of the twenties and the thirties in Turkey. A great-grandson, Burak Eldem, currently pursues research on such topics as 2012: Appointment With Marduk.