page_title: List of ironclad warships of the Ottoman Empire
section_title: Lüft-ü Celil class
hierarchical_section_title: List of ironclad warships of the Ottoman Empire / Lüft-ü Celil class
caption_attribution_description: The Turkish Gun-Boat Lufti Djelil, sunk by the Russian batteries near Braila.
context_page_description: In the 1860s and 1870s, the Ottoman Navy ordered or acquired a series of ironclad warships, built almost entirely in foreign shipyards. The first class, the four Osmaniye-class ironclads, were ordered from British shipyards in the early 1860s, and a fifth ship, Fatih, was ordered in 1864; this vessel was purchased by the Prussian Navy in 1867. That year the Ottomans ordered the ironclad Feth-i Bülend and the two-ship Avnillah class, all from Britain. In the meantime, the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, placed orders for several ironclads from French shipyards; these included Asar-i Tevfik and the Asar-i Şevket and Lüft-ü Celil classes. They also awarded the contract for Iclaliye to an Austro-Hungarian firm. Egyptian efforts to assert their independence angered Sultan Abdülaziz, who demanded Egypt surrender all of the ironclads it had ordered, which it did in 1868. By this time, a second Feth-i Bülend-class ironclad had been ordered; this ship, Mukaddeme-i Hayir, was the first ironclad built in the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal.
context_section_description: Egypt also ordered a pair of sea-going monitors, the Lüft-ü Celil class, the only vessels of that type built for the Ottoman Navy. They carried their main battery in a pair of revolving gun turrets, which were mounted on the centerline. Their firing arcs were restricted by large forecastles and sterncastles that were necessary to provide the freeboard required to operate at sea. Though they had one fewer gun than the Asar-i Şevket-class casemate ships, their turrets allowed them to fire all four guns to either side, compared to only three per broadside for the casemate ships.
  Both vessels saw action during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, in which Lüft-ü Celil was sunk by a Russian artillery battery on the Danube. Hifz-ur Rahman engaged Russian minelayers at the mouth of the Danube but otherwise saw little action. She survived the war and was laid up for the following twenty years, like the rest of the ironclad fleet. She was mobilized at the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 but was in poor condition, and she saw no action as a result. The ship was eventually sold in 1909 and broken up.
caption: Illustration of Lüft-ü Celil
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