In the pages of history, the Irish Famine of the 19th century remains a poignant chapter, marking a period of immense suffering and hardship. Amidst the devastating circumstances, an unlikely source of aid emerged – the Ottoman Turks, writes Harry Warren

 

The Great Famine was a catastrophic period in Irish history that saw mass starvation and disease ravage the country from 1845 to 1852. The primary cause of the famine was a disease known as potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, which destroyed potato crops across Ireland.

The Famine reached its climax in 1847, or ‘Black ‘47’, when it is estimated that one million people died from hunger and related diseases. Another million people emigrated from Ireland to escape the Famine and its consequences.

The British government, which had jurisdiction over Ireland at the time, failed to provide adequate relief and assistance to the Irish people. The British government’s policies exacerbated the crisis by prioritising the interests of landlords who evicted tenants from their land and exported food from Ireland while people were starving.

Observing the suffering, the English philanthropist James Hack Tuke said people in the worst-affected areas were “living, or rather starving, upon turnip-tops, sand-eels and seaweed, a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal.”
Famine relief was inadequate but some individuals outside of Ireland made extraordinary personal efforts to aid the Irish people and here is the story of one of them.

Thousands of miles away, in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, Sultan Abdülmecid, was 24 years old in 1847, having acceded to the Ottoman throne at 16, he would rule the empire, which reached from Morocco to Central Asia, until his death in 1861 from tuberculosis at the early age of 39.
The Sultan felt deeply for the suffering of the Irish people during the Famine. He learned about their plight in the Topkapi Palace from his Irish doctor, Dr Justin McCarthy, who came from Drishane in Co. Cork.

The Sultan wanted to send £10,000, over a million pounds in today’s money, in Famine relief, but, Lord Cowley, the British Consul in Istanbul, told him that it would be rude and diplomatically embarrassing for him to donate much more than the British Queen Victoria who donated £2,000.

With a heavy heart, he reduced the amount of money he wanted to send and instead sent £1,000.

Henry Wellesley, the British ambassador to Constantinople, expressed his gratitude on behalf of the British Empire on the donation, a sum worth over £130,000 in today’s currency. It was a generous and compassionate gesture but the Sultan wanted to do more.

The young Sultan was a man of faith and he sought a way to circumvent the niceties of the laws of diplomacy and find an additional way to help. Out of a sense of religious duty he felt compelled to observe the Islamic laws, one of them is specifically to help the suffering of those in need with the basic requirements of human dignity – food, shelter, clothing and education and he benevolently decided to send three ships laden with grain and medicine to Ireland.

The British authorities refused to allow any foreign ships like the Sultan’s to dock in the ports of Belfast or Dublin, so the ships quietly and secretly sailed into Drogheda where the Ottoman sailors unloaded their precious cargo on the docks of the river Boyne.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own