EX-SULTAN'S LOVE IDYLL.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 276, 20 November 1926, Page 23

EX-SULTAN'S LOVE IDYLL.

PINED FOR DAUGHTER OF GARDENER. A typically Turkish idyll had a tragic anti-climax the other day, when one of the four widows of the late Sultan Mahommed VI. threw herself into the Nile. She was pulled out in time, and after she was revived her rescuers heard a strange story. A few days before the Sultan fled from Turkey in 1922, he was walking in his beautiful gardens along the Bosphorus when he 6uw a pretty young girl, with her face unveiled, walking among the flowers, "Who is that?? -, he asked. "That is Melek, the daughter of your Majesty's gardener," his aide replied. Immediately falling in love with her he ordered her to be sent into the royal harem, but he left the same day in too great a hurry to take her. In his exile he became more and more unhappy as the weeks passed, and his three wives decided that the only thing to do was to send for Melek and make her No. •i wife. On Melek's arrival at San Remo she was made favourite of the harem, and the Sultan became more contented. When the Sultan died of heart failure Melek was so grief-stricken that Ehe tried to throw herself from the balcony of the Villa Magnolia at San Remo. She accompanied the body to Damascus for the interment, and then drifted over to Egypt. Unable to get any financial help from the Turkish Government she threw herself in the Nile.