3 Review(s)

'Osman Aga was the son of an Ottoman officer settled in the town of Temeschwar, in the West of present-day Rumania. Entering the army in his turn he was taken prisoner by the Austrians and most of his autobiography is concerned with the eleven years he spent in captivity and his eventual escape in 1699. He spent much of the period in the capacity of groom, servant and even pastrycook in noble households and his dramatic and somewhat colloquial account of his experiences is unique in the Turkish literature of the period, the first autobiographical novel in the language and giving an interesting and unusual perspective on life in the age of Ottoman decline. He knew a number of European languages and after his return was employed as interpreter and diplomatist in negotiations on the western border. The late Dr Kreutel presents, for the first time, the full original text of the memoirs, normalised to standard Ottoman orthography, on the basis of the unique autograph manuscript in the British Library, and provides an introduction and notes on the linguistic peculiarities of the work. In German and Turkish.