Roxelana
Personality

Hürrem's contemporaries describe her as a woman who was strikingly good-looking, and different from everybody else because of her red hair. Hürrem was also intelligent and had a pleasant personality. Her love of poetry is considered one of the reasons behind her being heavily favoured by Suleiman, who was a great admirer of poetry.

Hürrem is known to have been very generous to the poor. She built numerous mosques, madrasahs, hammams, and resting places for pilgrims travelling to the Islamic holy city of Makkah. Her greatest philanthropical work was the Great Waqf of AlQuds, a large soup kitchen in Jerusalem that fed the poor.

It is believed that Hürrem was a cunning, manipulative and stony-hearted woman who would execute anyone who stood in her way. However, her philanthropy is in contrast to this as she cared for the poor. Prominent Ukrainian writer Pavlo Zahrebelny describes Hürrem as "an intelligent, kind, understanding, openhearted, candid, talented, generous, emotional and grateful woman who cares about the soul rather than the body; who is not carried away with ordinary glimmers such as money, prone to science and art; in short, a perfect woman."
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