Peride Efendi was an Ottoman Turkish woman who, in the spring of 1919, rescued Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from a British assassination at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul shortly before the Turkish War of Independence began.
Biography[]
Peride's handkerchief
Peride Efendi was born on October 17th, 1941 in Istanbul to a Meliha, a journalist, and Mümtaz Soyolouğlu, a politician. She was secretly adopted by a wealthy Ottoman Turkish family in 1892 after being discovered as a lone baby in one of the hotel’s time-traveling rooms; she was thought to be the daughter of the retired mintmaster Naim Efendi and the niece of the owner of the Pera Palace Hotel, the Greek businessman Bodosakis, at the time of the British occupation of Istanbul at the end of World War I.
Peride's husband was killed while serving in the Ottoman Army during the war, and she raised her daughter Leyla at her family home. Peride fell desperately in love with the Turkish general Mustafa Kemal while he was staying at the hotel in 1919 and planning out the Turkish War of Independence, having met him a couple of times at the Palace. In the spring of 1919, the British thought that Mustafa Kemal was organizing resistance against them, so they prepared to have him assassinated. Without anyone knowing, Peride stopped the assassination attempt after a tip-off from the Ottoman officer Fahrettin and with the help of the black marketeer-turned-nightclub owner Halit Vatansever, enabling Kemal to board the SS Bandirma on 16 May 1919 and liberate Türkiye. Peride gave Kemal her handkerchief as a farewell gift, and the handkerchief was preserved and framed at the Pera Palace Hotel into the 2020s. Esra Köksüz, who was initially thought to be Peride’s descendant but actually turned out to be her twin sister, would go on to become a journalist, although Esra was unaware of her family history due to being raised an orphan. Although Peride was born in 1941 and therefore out of her time, she still aged like others and was physically 27 years old in 1919.
Despite having been murdered by a time-traveling Duchess Sonya in a new course of events before stopping Kemal’s assassination, Esra was able to accomplish what Peride had previously done by posing as her and working with Halit. The pair eventually disarmed a bomb on the SS Bandirma and finished what Peride was suddenly rendered unable to do. Esra gave Kemal Peride’s monogrammed handkerchief as a parting gift, just as Peride herself had originally done.
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