Hüseyin Rauf Orbay

Hüseyin Rauf Orbay (27 July 1881 – 16 July 1964) was a Turkish naval officer, statesman and diplomat of Abkhaz origin. As captain of the cruiser Hamidiye he became a national hero of the Balkan Wars; as Minister of the Navy he signed the Armistice of Mudros that ended the Ottoman Empire's First World War; and in 1922–1923 he served as Prime Minister of the Ankara government during the War of Independence. ¹

He was born in the Cibali district of Constantinople to an Abkhaz family; his father, Mehmet Muzaffer Pasha, was an admiral and later a member of the Ottoman Senate. Educated at the Tripoli military school and the Heybeliada Naval School, from which he graduated in 1899, he rose through postings that took him to the United States, Britain and Germany. Given command of the cruiser Hamidiye in 1909, he broke the Greek blockade of the Dardanelles in the First Balkan War and raided Balkan League shipping across the Mediterranean and the Red Sea for almost eight months — the first commerce-raiding cruise of its kind, which made him the "Hero of Hamidiye". ¹

In the First World War he served with the Special Organization in Iran and Mesopotamia and as Chief of the Naval Staff during the Gallipoli campaign. Made Minister of the Navy in October 1918, he led the delegation that signed the Armistice of Mudros. He then joined the national movement in Anatolia, helped issue the Amasya Circular, sat in the last Ottoman parliament, and was arrested and exiled to Malta by the British for twenty months. Released in a prisoner exchange, he reached Ankara in November 1921, and on 12 July 1922 he succeeded Fevzi Çakmak as Prime Minister of the Ankara government, serving until 4 August 1923; his refusal to authorise İsmet İnönü to sign the Treaty of Lausanne opened the rift that ended his premiership. ¹

A founder of the opposition Progressive Republican Party in 1924, he was tried in connection with the 1926 İzmir assassination plot and sentenced in absentia to ten years' imprisonment while he was in Vienna for medical treatment. He refused to return under the 1933 amnesty, holding that a man guilty of no crime could not accept pardon like a bandit; he came home in 1935, cleared his conviction in court in 1941, sat as an independent deputy for Kastamonu, and served as ambassador to London from 1942 to 1944. He died of a heart attack in Istanbul on 16 July 1964 and is buried in the Sahrayıcedit Cemetery at Erenköy. ^{1 2}

Two details in the sources deserve note. The scholarly biographies the articles themselves cite print his birth year in their titles as 1880, against the 27 July 1881 given by both articles and by Wikidata; this record follows 1881 and preserves the variant. And no text tradition names a school for him: the Turkish article's infobox gives his religion as Islam generically, and Wikidata's Sunni Islam value rests solely on an import from that same Turkish Wikipedia, so under the museum's two-source rule his faith is recorded as unknown. ^{2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.