The Establishment of Faculty of Languages and History-Geography, First Graduates and Halil İnalcık

The Faculty of Languages and History-Geography, which was established by particular efforts of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1935, is among significant higher education institutions that represent the educational, cultural and scientific values of the secular Republic. The Faculty has assumed the special mission of reconstruction of Social Sciences and the education of qualified researchers and teachers. The Faculty, with Turkish and foreign scholars that joined its ranks since its formative years, has produced numerous cultural and scientific studies in various fields, including History, Geography, Anthropology, Sumerology, Hittitology, Archeology, Philosophy, Western and Eastern Languages. Halil İnalcık, among the first graduates of the Faculty, entered the world of scholarship with his PhD dissertation entitled Tanzimat and the Bulgarian Question (1942) prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Enver Ziya Karal. İnalcık, has since gained a well-deserved, esteemed place among the historians of the world, with over 200 articles and tens of books that he produced. This renown is based on İnalcık’s command of foreign languages; his talent and aptitude in reaching primary sources; his success in producing comparative analyses; and his abstinence from ideologically-loaded positions, as an informed scholar about the developments in the Western and Eastern worlds.