A former district governor (mutasarrıf) and a civil servant who adopted living his life with honor as a motto. After retiring from his position, he aims to resist the moral decay around him and begins working at Altın Yaprak Anonim Şirketi, but resigns because he cannot turn a blind eye to his boss's immorality. This honorable stance ignites the downfall of his family's economy. Following his resignation, he loses all his authority step by step due to his growing children's desire for a luxurious and modern life, his wife Hayriye Hanım's incitement, and his eldest son Şevket's imprisonment. Unable to bear the scandals turning in his house, he helplessly watches his children fall away like leaves. By the end of the novel, he suffers a stroke (paralysis), falls ill, loses all his stubborn morality, and agrees to a life of dependency in his 'fallen' daughter Leyla's luxury home. He is a tragic figure who is a victim of his own honesty.
He worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Internal Affairs until he was thirty. Following the successive deaths of his sister and mother, he became disillusioned with Istanbul and spent 25 years wandering in exile as a district governor in Anatolia. He never took bribes and remained clean, but because of this, he could not leave any financial security for his children. Approaching forty, he married Hayriye Hanim under pressure from his friends.
Formerly, he had a clean, meticulous, and respectable appearance. In his days of retirement and poverty, he transforms into an unkempt and sorrowful old man with baggy knees on his trousers and worn-out elbows on his jacket. By the end of the novel, he has a sickly, frail build, having suffered a mild stroke, with a crooked jaw and a dragging gait.
Fikret
Although they share similar characters, they know they have disappointed each other.
Şevket
He is the son in whom he invested the most hope and whose disaster he feels most deeply. Despite his crimes, he is the only person with whom he truly understands each other.
Leyla, Necla
He can never keep up with their modern, corrupted desires, and watches them as if they were a foreign species.
Hayriye Hanım
They grow distant from each other in the final period of their marriage. Ali Rıza Bey is repulsed by his wife's materialistic whims.