Ibrahim Edhem Pasha

Ibrahim Edhem Pasha (1819–1893) was an Ottoman statesman who held the office of Grand Vizier in the beginning of Abdulhamid II's reign between 5 February 1877 and 11 January 1878. He served numerous administrative positions in the Ottoman Empire including Ottoman minister of foreign affairs in 1856, Ottoman ambassador to Berlin in 1876 and Ottoman ambassador to Vienna from 1879 to 1882. He also served as Army Engineer and Ottoman minister of interior from 1883 to 1885. In 1876-1877 he represented the Ottoman Government at the Constantinople Conference.

Early life
He was born of Greek ancestry,     in a Christian Greek Orthodox village on the island of Chios. As a young boy in 1822 he was orphaned and captured as a prisoner of war by Ottoman soldiers during the massacre of the Greek population of Chios. He was sold into slavery brought to Constantinople and adopted by the (later) grand vizier Husrev Pasha. Lacking his own children and family, Hüsrev Pasha raised several children who had been orphaned or bought as slaves, he had adopted up to ten children as such, many of them ascending to important positions in society in time.

The child, now named İbrahim Edhem, quickly distinguished himself with his intelligence and after having attended schools in Turkey, he has been dispatched along with a number of his peers, and under the supervision of his father, then grand vizier, and of the sultan Mahmud II himself, to Paris to pursue his studies under state scholarship. There he returned a bachelor of arts, and was one of the top pupils at the Ecole des Mines. He has been a classmate and a friend of Louis Pasteur. He has thus become Turkey's first mining engineer in the modern sense, and he started his career in this field.

Edhem Pasha lineage
Ibrahim Edhem Pasha was the father of Osman Hamdi Bey, a well-known archaeologist and painter, as well the founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. Another son, Halil Edhem Eldem took up the archaeology museum after Osman Hamdi Bey's death and has been a deputy for ten years under the newly founded Turkish Republic. Yet another son, İsmail Galib Bey, is considered as the founder of numismatics as a scientific discipline in Turkey. Later generations of the family also produced illustrious names. Whereas the architect Sedat Hakkı Eldem, a cousin, is one of the pillars of the search for modern architectural styles adopted by the Republic of Turkey (called the Republican style in the Turkish context) in its early years and which marks many important buildings dating from the period of the 1920s and the 1930s in Turkey. A great-grandson, Burak Eldem, is a writer while another, Edhem Eldem, is a renowned historian.