İlber Ortaylı

İlber Ortaylı (born 21 May 1947) is a Turkish historian and professor of history of Crimean Tatar origin at the MEF University, Galatasaray University in Istanbul and at Bilkent University in Ankara.

He was born on 21 May 1947 in a refugee camp in Bregenz, Austria where his parents, Crimean Tatars, had fled to avoid Joseph Stalin's persecution.

His family immigrated to Turkey when he was 2 years old.

Ortaylı is maternally a descendant of Crimean Tatar Mirza nobility.

He grew up trilingual, learning German from his father and Russian from his mother.

As a polyglot historian he is proficient in Turkish, Italian, English, French, Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Russian and Latin.

His published articles are mainly in Turkish, German and French and a variety of them are translated into English.

During his studies in Turkey, he worked as a travel guide, which, according to him, influenced his approach to history.

It cultivated his apprehension in practice and gave him an opportunity "to teach history" to different groups of people with various backgrounds.

He credits his experiences as a travel guide in his writing of "popular history" books and essays.

He made acquaintance with intellectuals from both Turkey and other countries.

Notable are Halil İnalcık, Irene Melikoff, Bernard Lewis, Andreas Tietze.

His doctoral thesis was Local Administration in the Tanzimat Period (1978).

After his doctorate, he joined the faculty at the School of Political Sciences of Ankara University.

In 1979, he was appointed as associate professor.

In 1982, he resigned from his position to protest the academic policy of the government established after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état.

After teaching at several universities in Turkey, Europe and Russia, he in 1989 returned to Ankara University and became a professor of history and the head of the department of administrative history.

Several of Ortaylı's political positions have been criticized, notably his denial of the Armenian Genocide.

Ortaylı published numerous articles focused on diplomacy, cultural history and intellectual history.

Some examples are:

In 2001, he received the Aydın Doğan Foundation Award for his work "Family in the Ottoman History".

In 2005, he was appointed as the director of the Topkapı Museum in Istanbul, until he retired in 2012.

His biography Zaman Kaybolmaz: İlber Ortaylı Kitabı (Time Does not Disappear: Book of İlber Ortaylı) was published in 2006.

The book includes a long journalistic conversation with Nilgün Uysal, passages from his childhood, student years in Ankara, Vienna and Chicago, his recent reflections on near history events and anecdotes from the years when he worked as a travel guide all over Turkey.

Ortaylı started elementary school at St. George's Austrian High School in İstanbul and later transferred to Ankara Atatürk High School.

He studied public policy at Ankara University Mekteb-i Mülkiye (School of Political Science) and later left for Vienna to attend University of Vienna, where he studied both Slawistik and Orientalistik while he worked with Andreas Tietze.

He received his master's degree under the supervision of professor Halil İnalcık at the University of Chicago and obtained his doctorate at Ankara University in the School of Political Sciences.

In 2007, he received the Medal of Pushkin for his "great contribution to the spread and study of the Russian language, the preservation of cultural heritage and the rapprochement and mutual enrichment of different nations’ and people's cultures" under a decree signed by Vladimir Putin and announced officially by the Kremlin, the ceremony took place at the Russian Consulate in Istanbul.

In 2011, he was chosen as honorary member to the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He is a member of the Foundation for International Studies, the Societas Iranologica Europeae and the Austrian-Turkish Academy of Sciences, Tarih vakfı (Economical and Social History Institute of Turkey).

He also published articles on urban history like Latins of the Pera district of the Constantinople for Istanbul and various historical cities which were once under the Ottoman influence; history of provincial administration focusing on the transformation of institutions in the Ottoman Empire from the beginning to the 19th century.