Leyla Saz

Leyla Saz (1850 – 6 December 1936) was a Turkish composer, poet and writer, born at Istanbul and died there. ^{1 2 3} She was the daughter of Hekim İsmail Pasha, the palace physician, whom the Turkish article describes as of Rum (Greek) origin, and she spent seven years of her childhood inside the harem of Dolmabahçe Palace as a lady-in-waiting to the sultan's women. ^{2 1} She composed some two hundred musical works and left memoirs of the imperial harem, recreated after the originals were lost in a fire, which remain a primary first-hand source on nineteenth-century harem life. ¹

Leyla Saz was born at Istanbul in 1850, learned piano from the age of seven with an Italian teacher and Turkish music with Medeni Aziz Efendi and Nikoğos Ağa, and took lessons in French, ancient Greek and theology while her father governed Crete. ^{1 2} She married Giritli Sırrı Pasha, travelled with his postings across Anatolia and the Balkans, and was the mother of the architect Vedat Tek (born 1873). ¹ Widowed in 1895, she settled at Istanbul, where her home became a literary salon; she wrote for Mürüvvet from 1887 and worked on Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete. ¹ Her memoirs, The Imperial Harem of the Sultans, appeared in a French edition at Paris in 1925; she took the surname Saz under the 1934 Surname Law, died at Istanbul on 6 December 1936 and was buried at Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery. ¹

She composed about two hundred vocal and instrumental works and more than fifty songs, and published poetry from 1887. ¹ Her chief written legacy is her memoir of the harem, Harem ve Saray Adât-ı Kadîmesi in Turkish and Le Harem impérial in French (Paris, 1925), whose original drafts were destroyed by fire and which she recreated from memory. ^{2 1}

This section is read as a presentation of positions reported from the sources, not as a verdict of the museum.

The sources present her memoirs as a rare eyewitness account from inside the imperial harem — her principal historical value. ¹ No source names a religious school for the woman herself: none of the three articles carries a religion field, and Wikidata carries no religion value for her at all. What the Turkish article does state is that her father was a palace physician of Greek (Rum) origin — a father's origin, and any conversion of his, are family background and are not attributed to her, and her harem childhood and Ottoman repertoire are milieu and work, not attestation — so her school is left unnamed in this entry. ^{2 4}

• The English, Turkish and Arabic Wikipedia articles on Leyla Saz, and Wikidata item Q545441. ^{1 2 3 4}