Irfan Orga

İrfan Orga (October 31, 1908 – November 29,1970) was a Turkish fighter pilot, staff officer, and author, writing in English. He published books on many areas of Turkish life, cookery, and history, as well as a life of Atatürk, and a universally admired autobiography (Portrait of a Turkish Family, 1950). He also wrote two educational books for children.

Educated at Kuleli Military High School, Harbiye Staff College, and Eskişehir Air College (1919–1933), Orga was born into a wealthy Ottoman Turkish family in Istanbul. Soon, with the outbreak of World War I, his life was changed forever. His father Hüsnü died on the way to the Dardanelles, his uncle Ahmet in Syria. Orga witnessed at first hand not only the hardships of war, but also the Allied Occupation of Constantinople, the end of Ottoman Empire, and the birth of the modern Turkish republic.

Orga opens his iconic memoirs with images of his childhood. He tells of his wealthy bourgeois family in Istanbul, Turkey, in the early 1900s. His mother, Şevkiye (1895–1940), is a young Balkan/Turkish beauty (aged fifteen at his birth). His father runs his own business. He describes his autocratic grandmother as an eccentric socialite.