Esma Sultan, the daughter of Sultan Abdul Hamid I and aunt of Sultan Abdülmecid I, lived in luxury in her magnificent villa in Istanbul, but still her life passed in sadness because she could not have the one thing she wished for most; a child. At length she decided to adopt a child, the daughter of Gök Bey Gogen[2] who belonged to one of the noble families of the Ubykh tribe of Circassia in the Ottoman Empire, after reaching satisfactory terms with the mother and father, when Rahime was a toddler one year of age. the child was particularly diminutive, delicate and graceful, so she renamed her Perestu, the Persian word for swallow. All the kalfas in Esma Sultan's villa behaved toward this child as though she were a daughter of an Ottoman imperial princess, and indeed her disposition and manners were so lovely that they became devoted to her.[3] In the mean time Princess Esma Sultan carefully arranged the training and education of Perestu.