Giritli Sırrı Pasha
Giritli Sırrı Pasha ("Sırrı Pasha the Cretan") was a 19th-century Ottoman administrator and man of letters of Turkish Cretan origin.
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He was born in 1844 in Kandiye, Crete, Ottoman Empire as the son of Helvacızade Salih Tosun Efendi. He started out as a clerk in the local Ottoman bureaucracy in Crete and later came to İstanbul, pursuing an education with a particular religious emphasis. Climbing through the hierarchy, he served as governor of Trabzon, Kastamonu, Ankara, Sivas and Baghdad, and was noted as a successful administrator.
He published his writings of a personal and political nature under the title "Letters of Sırrı Paşa" (Mektubat-ı Sırrı Paşa). Yet another collection is his commentaries (tefsir) of various verses of the Koran, united under the titles Sırr-ı Kur'an (the secret of Koran), Sırr-ı insan, Sırr-ı Tenzil, Sırr-ı Meryem and Ahsenü'l-Kasas. The last one in particular, on the theme of the stories of Joseph and Jacob, remains a work of reference in Turkish literature.
Sırrı Pasha married the poet and composer Leyla Saz, and was the father of Vedat Tek, a groundbreaking figure of Turkish architecture.
He died at a relatively early age in 1895.
Sources
- Ottoman Researches Foundation Archived 2011-09-28 at the Wayback Machine (in Turkish)
