# Nadir Agha's voyage into the land of the Ottomans  
Nadir Agha was probably born in the 1870s in Abyssinia, in a region known as Galla-land. ${ }^{6}$ Richard Pankhurst, expert in the study of Ethiopia, notes that exports of slaves from the Ethiopian region in the early nineteenth century have been estimated at no less than 25,000 per year (1964, p. 228). He cites Blondeel who, quoting official figures, states that there were 600 slaves exported from Ethiopia, 'mainly Gallas, of whom [...] about 100 would be eunuchs' (Pankhurst, 1964, p. 224). As with many other enslaved Africans, Nadir Agha's original Abyssinian name is unknown. He was named Nadir by his first mistress (see below), who gave him the same name as her previous eunuch. A description of his childhood indicates that he had one elder brother and an elder sister who took care of him when he was very young. ${ }^{7}$ The description goes on to state that he lost his father at the age of six or seven in a raid from which he himself emerged with severe injuries. (His mother had passed away earlier.) A while later, he was kidnapped by a slave raider. He escaped from the latter's house only to fall into the hands of a slave trader a second time round, aged eight or nine. The slave trader would carry him into the land of the Ottomans. Before  
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[^0]:    5 For a biography of a chief harem eunuch, see Hathaway 2005. For short and descriptive biographies of thirty-seven African eunuchs of the imperial harem (1574-1752) (Resmi Efenndi, 2000).
6 In the first part of his memoir, Agha states that his native land is Galle, part of Abyssinia, and that his birthplace is a county town named Gümebadula. In his last interview, however, he states that he is from a village named Limnu, located in the southernmost corner of Abyssinia. According to Mahir Şaul, Nadir Agha belonged to an ethnic group named the Oromo, one of the Cushitic-speaking groups of people with physiognomic variations ranging from Hamitic to Nilotic (Ertuğ, 1998a, p. 7; Hayat, 1957, p. 6; Şaul, 2015, p. 10).