Ahmet Tevfik Okday

Ahmet Tevfik Pasha (‎; 11 February 1845 – 8 October 1936), later Ahmet Tevfik Okday after the Turkish Surname Law of 1934, was an Ottoman diplomat and statesman of Crimean Tatar origin. He was the last grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire.

Tevfik Pasha had the misfortune of all three of his terms as Grand Vizier coinciding with disastrous moments in late Ottoman history; his first term with the deposition of Abdul Hamid II, the second term with the occupation of Istanbul after World War I, and the third term with the abolition of the Sultanate. In addition to serving as Grand Vizier, Ahmet Tevfik was also a diplomat, a member of the Ottoman Senate, and long time Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Early life Ahmet Tevfik was born on 11 February 1845 in Üsküdar, Istanbul. His father, Ferik Ismail Hakkı Pasha, was a Crimean Tatar descended from the Giray dynasty. He lost his mother, Gülşinas Banu Hanım, shortly after his birth. His aunt took care of his education, allowing him to speak Persian, Arabic and French fluently.

Ahmet Tevfik entered military service but left after becoming a junior officer, entering government bureaucracy training. He left the military at the age of 22 -he was a participant of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War- and entered the Sublime Porte's Translation Office. From 1872, he held various foreign ministry posts. After serving as an ambassador in Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Athens, in 1885 he served as the Ottoman chargé d'affaires and ambassador to Germany in Berlin for ten years. He represented the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Constantinople, which ended the 1897 Greco-Turkish War. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, as a reward for his work, gifted him a mansion, known first as the Italian Ministry Mansion, then the Foreign Ministry Mansion, finally the Tevfik Pasha Mansion. It was a neoclassical eclectic structure made largely of wood, and it became the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry.

He retained his ministry following the Young Turk Revolution, and in December 1908 he was appointed to the Senate of the Ottoman Empire , the upper house of the also-revived parliament, the General Assembly (Turkish: Meclis-i Umûmî). He resigned from the Foreign Ministry with the fall of the Kâmil Pasha cabinet in early 1909, and was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James's on 6 April 1909, though he didn't arrive to his post due to the 31 March incident of 13 April. Ahmet Tevfik Pasha, who had only reluctantly taken up the post at the urging of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, formed a government made up of mostly non-partisan and neutral members and took precautions to limit the chaos that had begun in Istanbul and Adana. After the Army of Action entered Istanbul and restored the constitutional government, and Abdul Hamid was deposed, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha resigned and Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha returned as grand vizier.

Ambassador to London Afterwards he formally began his London ambassadorship, and was ambassador during the July Crisis. He returned to Istanbul after war was declared on Britain. He visited Germany again in September 1918 as a member of a delegation announcing the accession of Mehmed VI (Sultan since July 4, 1918). A political scandal that contributed to the fall of the government was the escape of Mehmed Reshid from prison and his subsequent suicide, who was high ranking CUP member who was known as the "butcher of Diyarbakır" during World War I. Damat Ferid Pasha accused Tevfik of being soft on the Unionists, which prompted Tevfik Pasha to arrest key Unionists after the event. Ferid Pasha succeeded Tevfik on the 4 March 1919.

Paris Peace Conference

After his second term as grand vizier, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha became the President of the Ottoman Senate (which had not yet been dissolved, unlike the lower house). He then attended the two Ottoman delegations to the Paris Peace Conference to negotiate peace terms in 1919, which he was head of, and in 1920 though he understood the presented terms as unacceptable. The 1920 delegation which was headed by the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha accepted the terms and signed the Treaty of Sèvres. When his eyesight began to fail, Tevfik settled in the hotel. After the 1934 Surname Law, he adopted the last name "Okday". He died on 8 October 1936 in Istanbul at the age of 93, and is interred at the Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery.

His biography, written by his grandson Şefik Okday, was published in 1986 and is titled My Grandfather, the Last Grand Vizier, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha (Turkish: Büyükbabam Son Sadrazam Ahmet Tevfik Paşa).

Family Tevfik Pasha and his daughtersWhile serving as chargé d'affaires in Athens, he met and married Elisabeth Tschumi, a Swiss woman working as a governess to the children of another diplomat, daughter of Jacob Tschumi. She changed her name to Afife following their wedding, but she chose to stay Protestant. However, a few days before Elisabeth's death in 1949, she decided to be buried next to her husband as a Muslim. They had five children together.

According to his grandson Şefik Okday, Tevfik Oktay's first two children, İsmail Hakkı Pasha and Ali Nuri Bey (father of Şefik), were secretly baptized. A daughter, Zehra Hanım, married Mazlum Bey, the son of Minister of Internal Affairs Memduh Pasha. Naile and Gülşinas died young. Ali Nuri Bey married Edibe (Ayaşlı) Hanım, the granddaughter of Sadullah Pasha, whom he met during Tevfik Pasha's tenure as Ambassador to Berlin. Their wedding was the first to be gender integrated in the Ottoman Empire.

İsmail Hakkı Pasha first married Ulviye Sultan, daughter of the Sultan Mehmed VI, making him a Damat, or imperial in-law. This made İsmail Hakkı Pasha a son of a grand vizier and son-in-law of the Sultan. He was one of the first officers to answer calls of resistance during the Turkish War of Independence. An apocryphal story has the officer of the imperial family meeting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whereupon the renegade asked him, "What news did you bring from your father and the sultan?", İsmail Hakkı Pasha answered "[that] I came to fight." Tevfik Pasha, informed of his son's escapade by the angered sultan replied, "he went to fulfill his duty". Mehmed VI enacted a divorce on the couple. Following the Sultan's exile, İsmail Hakkı Pasha remarried with Ferhunde Hanım, the great-aunt of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit.