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The old Corcordia Theatre in Pera, Constantinople (that burnt-down in 1913, now occupied by the St. Antoine Catholic Church) was the venue for many singing and dancing acts from Europe. One of these performers was Margaret Morgan from New York whose family were trapeze artists here. Margaret would sell postcards featuring herself to the assembled spectators and her beauty was the talk of the town, her fashion style was eagerly copied by the society ladies of the city. She was the mistress of the Sultan Abdulhamit II’s feared head of secret police, Fehmi Pasha. Fehmi Pasha was notorious for extortion, with his band of ruffians bullying the merchants and confiscating goods and this was too much to bear by the German merchants of Constantinople whose ship was impounded and their protests and the intervention of British and German ambassadors and the German Kaiser eventually ensured that in 1907 he was sent to internal exile in Bursa - details from NY Times of the time. Later with the enactment of the liberal 1908 constitution, some of the more unpopular officials associated with the old regime were assassinated, among them Fehim Pasha, who died by public lynching in 1908 while escaping by carriage from Bursa. Margaret fearing for her security moved to Vienna. The postcard below demonstrate that this lady was quite happy to use this ‘honorific title’ and their sales were clearly lucrative enough to create multiple versions. |
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