Honorary Member of TÜBA, Professor Halil İnalcık lost his life
Professor İnalcık known as Patriarch of Historians passed away at hospital where he was being treated on 25th July.
Two ceremonies were held at both Bilkent and Ankara Universities for 100-year-old, Professor İnalcık on 27th July 2016 in Ankara and the funeral was buried at Fatih Mosque Cemetery after the funeral prayer at İstanbul Fatih Mosque on 28th July 2016.
Who is Professor Halil İnalcık?
He was born in Istanbul on 26 May 1916 to a Crimean Tatar family that left Crimea for the city in 1905. He attended Balıkesir Teacher Training School, and then Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geography, Department of History, from which he graduated in 1940. His work on Timur drew the attention of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, who facilitated his entry as an assistant to the Modern Age Department of the university. He completed his PhD in 1942 in the same department. His PhD thesis was on the Bulgarian question in the late Ottoman Empire, specifically during tanzimat, and constituted one of the first socioeconomic approaches in Turkish historiography. In December 1943, he became assistant professor and his research interest became focused on the social and economic aspects of the Ottoman Empire. He worked on the Ottoman judicial records of Bursa and in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. He became a member of the Turkish Historical Society in 1947.
In 1949, he was sent by the university to London, where he worked on Ottoman and Turkic inscriptions in the British Museum and attended seminars by Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Here, he met other influential historians such as Bernard Lewis. He attended a congress in Paris in 1950, where he met Fernand Braudel, whose work greatly influenced him. He returned to Turkey in 1951 and became a professor in the same department in 1952. He lectured as a visiting professor in Columbia University in 1953–54 and worked and studied as a research fellow at Harvard University in 1956–57. Upon his return to Turkey, he lectured on Ottoman, European and American history as well as administrative organisation and Atatürk's reforms. In 1967, he lectured as a visiting professor in Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the International Association of Southeastern European Studies (French: Association Internationale des Etudes du Sud-Est Européen) in 1966 and held the presidency of this institution between 1971 and 1974.
In 1971, Harvard University offered him a permanent teaching position and the University of Pennsylvania offered him a five-year contract. He refused these, wishing to stay in Turkey. However, in the meantime, the political turmoil in Turkey worsened and students became increasingly involved in conflict, hindering education. In 1972, he accepted an invitation to join the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he taught Ottoman history until 1986. Between 1990 and 1992, he lectured as a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton. In 1992, he returned to Turkey after an invitation by Bilkent University, where he founded the history department, teaching at the postgraduate level, and taught until his death. In 1993, he donated his collection of books, journals and off-prints on the history of Ottoman Empire to the library of Bilkent University. He had been a member and president of many international organizations, he was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Historical Sciences, also a member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.
Professor Halil İnalcık, knows 7 languages, was selected as member of TÜBA in 1993.
The interview with Professor Halil İnalcık with the 3rd President of TÜBA Professor Yücel Kanpolat at TÜBA Presidency in 2009.