Ahmed Niyazi Bey

Who was Ahmed Niyazi Bey?

Ahmed Niyazi Bey was the Ottoman bey of the Resne area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An ethnic Albanian he was a member of the Young Turk Revolution. Ahmed Nyazi Bey is also known for the Saraj, a French-style estate he built in Resne.

Niyazi Bey, a senior captain, raided the military depot in Resne and with two hundred men, including the town's mayor, escaped into the surrounding mountains from where he issued a proclamation calling for the restoration of the 1876 Constitution. At roughly the same time, Major Ismail Enver Bey, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, retreated into the mountains near Resne. Other officers followed both men's examples and took to the hills to form their own Çetes. Because their actions carried the appearance of having sparked the Revolution, Niyazi and Enver, one Albanian and the other a Turk, later gained popular acclaim as the 'Heroes of freedom'. Of the two officers, Niyazi focused on mobilizing the Albanian community for the revolutionary cause.

He was a Mücahit-i Muhterem, who in his dual capacity as hero of the constitutional revolution and revered member of the CUP and a key figure throughout the whole Macedonian tour. A pious officer, he quickly became disillusioned with the CUP's secularist and Turkist tendencies, and was killed by the Sultan's spies in 1912.