Youssouf Bey: The Charged Portraits of Fin-de-Siécle Pera

Yusuf Franko Kusa Bey (1856–1933), a high-ranking bureaucrat in fin-de-siècle Ottoman imperial administration, was also a talented caricaturist. Because of his duties in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, and spending most of his life in Istanbul, he was both a member and an observer of high-society social circles in Pera [Beyoglu]. Ambassadors, ministers, diplomats, famous opera singers, painters, Pashas and Efendis, Madames and Monsieurs, were part of this social milieu, and most of them becam...