Kurban Said - Vacca's Claims To The Pseudonym "Kurban Said"

Vacca's Claims To The Pseudonym "Kurban Said"

Bello Vacca, an Italian born in Tripoli, who often went by the alias Ahmed Giamil Vacca-Mazzara also laid claim to the pseudonym Kurban Said. During the early 1970s, he appeared on the doorstep of Baron Omar Rolf Ehrenfels, husband of Elfriede Ehrenfels, who had registered "Ali and Nino" with German authorities. Vacca introduced himself: “Kurban Said, C’est moi!” (“Kurban Said, It’s me!”). The Ehrenfels were astonished.

Vacca also wrote British publisher Hutchinson in 1975 claiming that he, as Kurban Said, had collaborated on several books with Essad Bey and they had had plans to publish them together - "Kurban Said" and "Essad Bey". Vacca named two titles: “Jihad” (Sacred Way) and “Kaloglan: From Samarkand to Tangiers.”

Vacca was a friend of Essad Bey as well as his drug dealer and he was expelled from Egypt in 1938 on charges of drug dealing and arms smuggling. Vacca also is the person who arranged and financed the Muslim-style gravestone capped with a stone-carved turban for Essad Bey, who is buried in the sea coast town of Positano, Italy.

In 1944 - two years after Essad Bey's death, it was Vacca who arranged for the translation of "Ali and Nino" into Italian for the first time. However, although he had already identified the title as "Ali and Nino" in the obituary tribute that he had written for Essad Bey in 1942; in the 1944 edition of the novel, Vacca changed the title to "Ali Khan" and identified the author as "M. Essad Bey," instead of "Kurban Said." After all, he himself claimed to be Kurban Said. Vacca introduced further changes in the Ali Khan novel, most prominently, the name of Ali's true love "Nino Kipiani" and whose name had been part of the original title of the novel ("Ali and Nino") became "Erica Kipiani", based upon the name of Lev Nussimbaum's estranged wife, Erika Loewendahl, who had left him in 1937 to marry Rene Fulop-Miller.

Vacca tried to make the case that he himself was related to Essad Bey, four generations back - the implication being that Vacca himself was "sole survivor" and, thus, in line to inherit Essad Bey's wealth.

The motivation became evident in correspondence from Vacca to Omar Rolf Ehrenfels asking his advice in regard to approaching Hutchinson Publishers (London) who he said had not paid Essad Bey for the biography of Reza Shah. Vacca sought to claim the money and told Ehrenfels that he had his papers all in order as proof of the kinship relationship.