Nilüfer Hatun
concubine of Orhan Gazi
Nilüfer Hatun (Ottoman Turkish: نیلوفر خاتون, called also Lülüfer Hatun or Ülüfer Hatun, died c. 1363 or c. 1380), was a consort of Orhan, the second Ottoman sultan, and the mother of Murad I, Orhan's successor.
Biography
Nilüfer Hatun was an enslaved concubine of Greek origins, who entered Orhan's harem in 1325, where she was converted to Islam and given the name Nilüfer. The following year, she bore Orhan a son, the future Murad I. After 1331, she was transferred to Iznik together with her son.
In March 1362, Orhan died and was succeeded as sultan by Nilüfer's son, Murad. Nilüfer, thus, became the first woman of Christian slave origins to be mother of an Ottoman Sultan and the first Valide Hatun of the Ottoman Empire.
Nilüfer commissioned the construction of an imaret, an hammam, a caravanserai and eighteen other buildings for various uses, especially charitable.
The date of her death is not known with certainty and is variously estimated between 1363 and 1383. She died in Bursa and was buried in the same city, in Orhan's türbe.
In 1388, Murad I commissioned the construction of the Nilüfer Hatun Imaret, at Iznik, dedicated to his mother's memory and financed by her waqf inheritance.
The public source identifies “Nilüfer Hatun” as concubine of Orhan Gazi. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nilüfer, Hatun and concubine.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q468123. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1363, 1380, 1325 and 1331.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nilüfer Hatun” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.