The story is widely questioned by historians as no record of such habit has been found, and originated from the fact that the Ottoman Empire did not recognize the partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The oldest known written records of the story come from the 1930s and 1940s, and are attributed to Michał Sokolnicki, an ambassador of Poland to Turkey, who used to tell it during diplomatic meetings.
[1][2][3] According to the story, after the Partitions of Poland in 1795, whenever the sultan of the Ottoman Empire had received the diplomatic corps, there always had been left one empty chair reserved from the representative from Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
He learned the story from Ali Fuat Cebesoy, a Turkish army officer and politician, who was acquainted with the Istanbul Polish community.
[2] The accuracy of this account is widely questioned by historians, as no record of such a habit from the early nineteenth century has been found.