Adile Sultana

Who was Adile Sultana?

Adile Sultan was an Ottoman princess, a female Diwan poet, and a philanthropist. She was the daughter of Sultan Mahmud II and sister of the Sultans Abdülmecid I and Abdülaziz.

She was born as daughter of Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and his wife Zernigar Sultan in 1825 in Constantinople. Adile Sultan lost her mother at a very young age, and was raised by Nevfidan Kadın, the chief woman in the palace. She received a high standard of education in the palace. Just as her father, she was much interested in the arts.

Adile Sultan married in 1845 the commander of the fleet Kapudan Pasha Mehmet Ali Pasha, who afterwards served a short while as Grand Vizier to her brother Sultan Abdülmecid I. The couple faced the death of their three children. Mehmet Ali Pasha also died in 1868 and their daughter Hayriye Hanim Sultan died young as well. In deep mourning, Adile Sultan entered the order of Naqshbandi and devoted herself to charitable activities.

Adile Sultan had a summerhouse in Validebağ and a famed palace in Kandilli, the Adile Sultan Palace, both on the Asian part of Istanbul. She left her palace in Kandilli following the death of her husband and moved to the Coastal Palace in Fındıklı. She donated the Adile Sultan Palace to the state on the condition that it be converted into the first secondary high school for girls in the Ottoman Empire. Her wish was fulfilled only in 1916, when the Young Turk activist, statesman, and educator Ahmed Rıza opened the Adile Sultan İnas Mekteb-i Sultanisi, today known as Kandilli Anatolian High School for Girls, although it became not the first, but the second secondary school for girls in the empire. The high school moved to a new building in 1969, and the Adile Sultan Palace burned down in 1986 due to an electrical short-circuit. It was reopened in 2006 as the Sakıp Sabancı Kandilli Education and Culture Center.