Sabina Toziya

Sabina Toziya — Biography

Sabina Toziya, born Sabina Ajrula, was an actress whom Turkish viewers knew as Hayriye Çakırbeyli, the stern mother in Eşkıya Dünyaya Hükümdar Olmaz, although she spent the larger part of her career on stage, in film and on television in Macedonia. When she died in Skopje on August 10, 2021, aged 75, the Macedonian press remembered her as the "poet of Macedonian theatre".

She was born in Skopje in 1946 into a family of Turkish descent. While many Turks left Macedonia in the 1950s, her family chose to stay, and although her mother tongue was Turkish, she went to school in Macedonian. She trained as an actress at the Skopje State Theatre and also worked as a voice artist. Her film career began in 1969 and was at first tied to Yugoslav productions, among them The Red Horse and Solunski Patridii (as Fatime). Later she played Grozda in Salon Harmoni and Dr. Vera Perkova in the film Shadows.

She reached Turkey in 2012 as Afife Hatun in Star TV's Muhteşem Yüzyıl. From 2015 she played Hayriye Çakırbeyli, a Black Sea woman devoted to her traditions who keeps the Çakırbeyli family standing after her husband's death. In the same period she played Mevlide in My Mother's Wound, Havva in Bal Kaymak, Milica in Familijata Markovski, and the lead in Vera. She left the series in January 2021 after a partial stroke caused by a brain tumor, and was buried in Skopje on August 13.