Ilber Ortayli
| İlber Ortaylı | |
|---|---|
İlber Ortaylı
|
|
| Born |
May 21, 1947 Bregenz, Austria |
| Residence | İstanbul |
| Citizenship | Turkish |
| Fields | History |
| Alma mater | Ankara University |
| Doctoral advisor | Halil İnalcık |
| Known for | History of the Ottoman Empire History of Turkey Seljuk Empire |
| Influences | Halil İnalcık |
İlber Ortaylı (born 21 May 1947) is a Turkish historian and professor of history at the Galatasaray University in Istanbul and at Bilkent University in Ankara. In 2005, he was appointed as the director of the Topkapı Museum in Istanbul, until he retired in 2012.
As a descendant of a Crimean Tatar Mirza nobility from his mother, İlber Ortaylı's family fled Joseph Stalin's persecution and deportation, and was born in Bregenz, Austria in a refugee camp on 21 May 1947. He came to Turkey when he was 2 years old.
İlber Ortayli is heir to a bilingual Turkish family so that he obtained German from his father and Russian from his mother. As a polyglot historian he has enough competency in Italian, English, French, Persian and also in Ottoman Turkish and Latin in order to fluently employ or maintain historical research with historical documents in the archives. His published articles are mainly in Turkish, German and French and various of them are translated in English.
During his studies in Turkey, he also worked as a travel guide which according to him improved his approach to the history: cultivating his apprehension in practice and gave him an opportunity "to give lecture on history" to different groups of people from different backgrounds. He gives credit to his experiences as travel guide for writing "popular history" books and essays.
He made acquaintance with intellectuals both from Turkey and from other countries. Notable are Halil İnalcık, Murat Bardakçı, Irene Melikoff, Bernard Lewis, Andreas Tietze.
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