Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1898-05-13
SULTAN'S EUNUCH DEAD.
He Was Not Pretty, but Was Rich
ana Had Great influence.

severe loss through the sudden death
of Yaver-Aga, the kizlar agassy or
chief of the eunuchs of the imperial
seraglio, who throughout the present
reign had been one of the most inhu-
entail figures in Turkish politics, a
parsonage to whose advice many of
the most shrewd and clever devices of
the Sultan in dealing with the foreign
powers were justly attributed. BY
virtue of his strange Office he was en-
titled to be addressed as your High
ness, and ranked Immediately next to
the Grand Vizier, and before either
the Cabinet Ministers or the great
military dignitaries, even Khedive Abb
bas of Egypt and Prince Ferdinand of
Bulgaria, the latter in his capacity of
Turkish Governor-General of Eastern
Roumelia, being compelled at Con-
stantinople to yield the pas to the hid
eously ugly monster, for YaverAga
was frightful to behold, being almost
6 feet 6 inches high, coal black with
a small head, narrow shoulders, an
enormous stomach and the squeaky
and shrill voice peculiar to his class.
His official title was that of keeper
of the keys of paradise the Oriental
idea of paradise being a place peOpled
with hours as lovely as those of the
Sultan's harem.
Yaver-Aga had been for the past two
and twenty years in absolute control
of the latter, the despotic master of the
whole feminine portion of the house,
hold of the Sultan and responsible 20
the latter for the safekeeping and fl
deity and the discipline of every one
of the women, no matter whether Sui
tanas or mere odalisques. He was
probably the only man in the whole
of the Ottoman Empire whom the
Padishah implicitly trusted, and whose
advice was usually directed against
the European powers. Yaver-Aga was
MOhammedan of the most fanatic
and bgoted type, and there is much
at COnstantinople to indicate that he
was one of the principle instigators of
the Armenian massacres. AS chief
eunuch of the harem, it was his duty
to attend to the punishment of those
women who had offended the Sultan.
and many hundreds of fair ones have,
by his directions, been sewed into
sacks and pitched, under the cover of
night, into the swift-fowing waters of
the BospOrus.
There are several hundred eunuchs
employed in the imperial seraglio,
two-thirds of them coal black and the
remainder white. But they constitute
form of luxury which is slowly but
surely disappearing from modern Mo-
hammedan life, as is also polygamy
most of the leading Turkish dignitar-
les, pashas and beys at Constantinople
nowadays cOntenting themselves with
one wife, by which matrimonial rule
they not only comply with the re-
quirements of their marriages but try
to avoid all those harem intrigues,
jealousies, and disputes that consti-
tute the curse of domestic life in Mo-
hammedan countries. The chief eunuch
of the Sultan's eldest married daugh-
ter, Princess Zekie, has been nominat-
, ed to succeed Yaver-Aga as the sec
ond dignitary of the realm. Yaver's
colossal fortune, part of which he owed
to the prerogative of his Office of
charging 10 per cent. on everything
entering and leaving the seraglio, and
to the costly gifts he received from ma
tive and foreign dglitaries, has been
confiscated by the Sultan, the Aga hav-
ing left no heirs.