Seyyan Hanim

Seyyan Oskay (born 1913, İstanbul - died 16 May 1989, İstanbul) was a Turkish tango singer. In the Ottoman Empire the public appearance of Muslim Turkish women was unthinkable. Actresses and singers were invariably Jewish, Armenian, Greek or Levantines; on no account would they be Muslim. This only began to change after Atatürk instigated his revolution separating religion and state. The very first Turkish woman who, because of these new circumstances, dared to appear on a stage was a Tango singer called Seyyan Hanim. She was a protegé of Kemal Atatürk himself, who seeing that her career symbolized a new openness to the west, vigorously supported her. Though on account of her success she became an important figure for the emancipation of women in Turkey, a tragic irony was to occur: she married an army officer and was to spend the next twenty years of her life in an obscure east Anatolian garrison. Once every year, with her husband being one of the few people who knew about it, she would make the long journey from her secluded home to Istanbul, where she appeared on stage and made recordings. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.