b. 1921
From princess to empress to a royal forgotten amid Egypt’s transformations.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Kafr Ammar and Kafr Turki in Turkhan Giza Egypt
طرخان
he site of a major cemetery dating from the Predynastic Period to the Roman Period south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile near Kafr Ammar in the 21st nome of Upper Egypt. The bulk of the 2,000 tombs date to the foundation of the Egyptian
or Turkhan (Urdu: سلسله ترخان ) was established by Turkic Tarkhan and they ruled Sindh, Pakistan, from 1554 to 1591 AD. General Mirza Isa Beg founded the Tarkhan Dynasty in Sindh after the death of Shah Hassan Arghun of the Arghun Dynasty. Mughal …
Tarkhan-Mouravi — ( ka. თარხან მოურავი) (Tarkhnishvili, თარხნიშვილი, or Tarkhan Mouravishvili, თარხან მოურავიშვილი) is a Georgian noble family, claiming descent from the Shamkhal dynasty of Tarki, in Dagestan. Originally known as Saakadze (სააკაძე), they acquired …
Tarkhan (Egypt) — Tarkhan is the modern name for an Ancient Egyptian cemetery, located about 50 km south of Cairo on the West bank of the Nile.The cemetery was excavated in two seasons by Flinders Petrie. Tombs of almost all periods were found, but most…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Dadeshkeliani
The Dadeshkeliani or Dadishkeliani (Georgian: დადეშქელიანი, დადიშქელიანი) was an aristocratic family from the mountainous western Georgian province of Svaneti. They ruled the Principality of Svaneti from the 1720s to 1857.
History[edit]
Although the Dadeshkeliani themselves claimed the descent from the Shamkhal dynasty of Tarki, in Dagestan,[1] historic evidence shows that they were spun off from the House of Gelovani, a princely dynasty of Svaneti known since the 11th century.[2] One princess of the Gelovani family is said to have survived the destruction of her clan by the princes Dadiani, who usurped the Principality of Svaneti in the mid-17th century, and to have fled to Kabarda in the North Caucasus. Her eldest son, called Dadesh, married into a local princely family and his name was later transformed into a separate family name locally pronounced as Dadeshkeliani. His descendants were able to return to Svaneti to reclaim the domain from the Dadiani, attaining to the principate of Svaneti in the 1720s for the second time.Since then, the Gelovani ruled the Lower Svaneti, whilst the Dadeshkelian - the Upper Svaneti. In the 1820s, the Principality of Svaneti effectively split into two as a result of a blood feud between the rival Dadeshkeliani branches. Through the mediation by the princes of Mingrelia, both branches accepted nominal Russian suzerainty in 1833. Nevertheless, they continued to run their affairs independently and did not allow Russian officials or church missions into the area until the late 1840s.
Continuing dynastic strife among the Dadishkeliani, their defiance to the Russian government, and vacillation during the Crimean War (1854-1856), however, led to direct Russian intervention. In 1857, Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, Viceroy of the Caucasus, ordered Svaneti to be subdued by armed force. The prince of Svaneti, Constantine, chose to negotiate, but was ordered into exile to Erivan. On a farewell audience in Kutaisi, he quarreled with a local Russian administrator, Alexander Gagarin, and stabbed to death him and three of his staff. When captured, Constantine was summarily tried by court martial and shot. In 1858, the principality was abolished and converted into a district administered by a Russian-appointed officer (pristav). Several members of the Dadeshekeliani family were exiled to the remote Russian provinces and those who remained in Georgia were deprived of their privileges of autonomous princes.[3]
Monday, August 10, 2015
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Friday, July 3, 2015
QUEEN FAWZIA
QUEEN FAWZIA
Cecil Beaton/Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
By Suzy Hansen
In 1939, when Princess Fawzia of Egypt married the crown prince of Iran, Mohammed Reza, the teenagers united two great Muslim lands. Each side had political and personal motives for welcoming the union: for the Egyptian King Farouk, the princess’s brother, the marriage asserted a constitutional monarch’s power in a region lorded over by the British. For the shah of Iran, formerly an ordinary soldier, the century-old Egyptian royal family conferred aristocratic legitimacy on his own. At the wedding in Cairo, guests received bonbon boxes made of gold and precious stones; flower-filled floats paraded down the wide avenues; fireworks were set off over the Nile.
The 17-year-old princess grew up in sophisticated, exclusive Cairo speaking French, English and Arabic. She was a knockout: a more luscious version of Hedy Lamarr, a softer Vivien Leigh. Cecil Beaton photographed her for the cover of Life magazine. Her life was chronicled in newspapers worldwide, which referred to her as “one of the world’s most beautiful women.”
When the crown prince became shah, Fawzia became the empress of Iran; their daughter was Princess Shahnaz. Yet rumors of Fawzia’s marital unhappiness reached Cairo. A member of the Egyptian court was sent to Tehran, where he discovered Fawzia to be neglected and gravely ill: Her shoulder blades, he reported, “jutted out like the fins of some undernourished fish.” King Farouk demanded that the two divorce. Princess Shahnaz stayed in Iran.
In time, Fawzia married again, in 1949, to a royalist officer named Ismail Cherine, and had two more children. The Egyptians, most of whom were poor and disenfranchised, had by then turned against the royal family. King Farouk was viewed as a corrupt and incompetent playboy, a monarch beholden to an occupying foreign power. In 1952, a military coup led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser was widely heralded among Egyptians (and much of the world) as an act of emancipation. Farouk boarded the royal yacht and sailed to Italy, never to return to the throne. Fawzia, unlike most of her relatives, stayed in Egypt with her family. They settled in a villa in Alexandria, where she lived a quiet, almost anonymous life in reduced circumstances, melting into the background of a rapidly growing city.
In 1976, President Anwar Sadat, in an act of conciliation, invited Princess Shahnaz, her family and their friend, an Iranian architect named Keyvan Khosrovani, to be his guests at a royal palace in Alexandria. One day they visited Fawzia in her villa and had tea in her sitting room, looking through giant photo albums and gazing out on a garden of date trees. As they were leaving, Khosrovani recalls, Queen Fawzia remarked, “Of course because you have called on me, I should call on you in return.” Princess Shahnaz and Khosrovani were surprised: the palace they were staying in had once been Fawzia’s own home. She had not been there in 24 years.
When some of her former servants heard about her visit and showed up to see her, according to Khosrovani, many of them had tears as they embraced their princess. “Come now let me show you the palace,” Fawzia said, and led the way up the stairs to the coronation hall. She pointed to the verses of the Quran written in the walls above. “I am afraid I think my brother did not read carefully all the verses,” she said. “If he had, we would still be here as the ruling royal family.” Later she added: “Twice in my life, I lost the crown. Once I was the queen of Iran, and once I was the princess here.” She smiled. “It’s all gone now. It doesn’t matter.”
In a century, Egypt went from monarch to military coup, then from socialism to oligarchy, then from dictatorship to revolution again. Amid these waves of transformation, a queen became a mere shadow. In the violent, uncertain days of early July, when the Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was being deposed by the Egyptian Army, Princess Fawzia of Egypt, the onetime empress of Iran, died in Alexandria and was buried in Cairo. “When you visit the tombs of kings and queens, you see they leave everything behind,” she said the day she led her visitors through her old palace, “even the crowns.”
King Farook
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