President Erdoğan’s daughter gets engaged to engineer

ISTANBUL

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan, got engaged to Selçuk Bayraktar on March 20 in a family gathering at Istanbul’s Tarabya Huber Palace near the Bosphorus.

The engagement ceremony was conducted under heavy security and members of the media were not allowed near the mansion. Guests were only allowed in after being checked from a list and several vehicles entered Tarabya Huber Mansion between 2 and 3 p.m.

The engagement ceremony of Sümeyye Erdoğan and Bayraktar, an engineer defense industrialist whose company manufactures unmanned aerial vehicles, was postponed earlier this month when Bayraktar’s father, Özdemir Bayraktar, suffered a heart problem and had to be taken to hospital hours before the event at the same venue on March 12.

Turkish media had first reported earlier this month that Sümeyye Erdoğan and Selçuk Bayraktar had decided to marry.

The president’s daughter studied sociology and politics at Indiana University in the U.S. before earning a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. 

Baykar, the company run by Selçuk Bayraktar, Özdemir Bayraktar and his two brothers, has been developing unmanned vehicles both for the Turkish military and for other countries. 

Selçuk Bayraktar graduated from Istanbul Technical University in 2002. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology.