In 1920, Rüşdü Beg, a member of a Palu noble family, ran to be the rep-resentative of the Ergani district in the National Assembly (1920–3) convened in Ankara, the embryonic parliament of the Turkish state founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. His namesake Rüşdü, the chief scribe (tahrirat müdürü) of the district, was also a candidate. When the ballots were counted, the latter protested the result, demanding an investigation because, he claimed, his votes had been attributed to his namesake’s total. The Palu administrators’ response was that although the voters did not formally specify which Rüşdü they meant, when they said Rüşdü Beg, they meant the late Necib Beg’s son, since the other one was known as Rüşdü Efendi. Rüşdü Efendi lost, and Rüşdü Beg won, serving as the Ergani representative in the National Assembly until 1923.

This book has shown the making and unmaking of the Palu begs as a noble family with de jure hereditary privileges within the Ottoman realm. Rüşdü Beg’s career exemplifies the drastic changes members of this family underwent in the late Ottoman Empire. Rüşdü was born in 1876; Abdullah Beg, who attacked the Weşin village in 1848, was his paternal uncle. His father was Necib Pasha, the former kaymakam of Palu and a Crimean War veteran discussed in this book. Rüşdü Beg appeared on the historical stage when he was appointed to the local administrative council (idare meclisi) of the district at the age of eighteen. Throughout the 1890s, even though his brother İbrahim Beg was more prominent, Rüşdü Beg’s name also came up repeatedly in land disputes with local Armenians, especially of the Tset (Kapıaçmaz) and Sakrat villages. During the 1895 Massacres, he and his brother demanded fees from Armenians who were desperately searching for safe refuge in Sakrat village. After being mainly his brother’s sidekick, Rüşdü Beg entered politics, serving first as an MP in the last, short-lived (January–March 1920) Ottoman parliament (Meclis-i Mebûsan), then in the National Assembly mentioned above. Four centuries after his ancestor Cemşîd Beg entered the Ottoman realm as a Kurdistan beg with hereditary privileges, Rüşdü Beg was a member of the Turkish parliament as the Ottoman Empire was on its deathbed.