Halil Berktay

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Halil Berktay (born August 27, 1947 in Izmir ) is a Turkish historian and professor at the Sabancı University in Istanbul as well as a columnist for the Turkish daily newspaper Taraf . He was a self- confessed Maoist for two decades and is one of the few Turkish experts who openly deals with the Armenian genocide .

Life

Halil Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish displaced family from Crete . His father Erdogan Berktay was a member of the Communist Party of Turkey from 1920. After Halil Berktay graduated from Robert College in 1964 , he studied economics at Yale University , where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and a Master of Arts in 1969 . There he co-founded the organization Students for a Democratic Society . His Ph.D. he received in 1990 from Birmingham University . From 1969 to 1971 and from 1978 to 1983 he worked as a lecturer at Ankara University .

Between 1992 and 1997 he taught at the Technical University of the Middle East (ODTÜ) and at the Bosporus University . He taught at Harvard University in 1997 and taught at Sabancı University before returning to Harvard in 2006.

Berktay's research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He wrote about the structure of the collective memory of Turkey.

In September 2005, Berktay and other historians including Murat Belge , Edhem Eldem and Selim Deringil held an academic conference on the fall of the Ottoman Empire .

Berktay revealed that the Turkish government had destroyed evidence and documents relating to the Armenian genocide in the Turkish archives . According to this, the purge was mainly "carried out by Muharrem Nuri Birgi, the former Turkish ambassador to London and NATO as well as Secretary General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry." mutual friend and confessed in relation to the Armenians : 'We really slaughtered them.' "

“Why don't we set up a commission again on this idea? The Turkish government names ten Turkish historians and adds five Armenian or five historians from the Armenian diaspora. And the Armenian government also names ten Armenian and five Turkish historians or those from the Turkish diaspora. Then there will be a total of thirty historians who together bring on ten international historians who are neither Turks nor Armenians. Then in this case we would have a real dialogue. "

- Halil Berktay

Works (selection)

  • Kabileden Feodalizme, Kaynak Yayınları , 1983
  • Cumhuriyet İdeolojisi ve Fuad Köprülü, Kaynak Yayınları , 1983
  • Bir Dönem Kapanırken , Pencere Yayınları, 1991
  • New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History (eds. Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi), ISBN 0-7146-3468-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Curriculum vitæ , Sabancı Üniversitesi.
  2. ↑ Okuma Notları ( Memento of September 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Taraf .
  3. ^ A b c Halil Berktay: A Genocide, Three Constituencies, Thoughts for the Future (Part I). In: Armenian Weekly. April 24, 2007, p. 4 , archived from the original on September 3, 2009 ; Retrieved September 4, 2008 (Talk given at the "Armenians and the Left" symposium on March 31, 2007).
  4. ^ Conferences , personal web site, Sabanci University.
  5. ↑ Didem Turkoglu, Challenging the National History - Competing discourses about a Conference (PDF; 470 kB) , Submitted to Central European University Nationalism Studies Program In Partial Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Budapest, Hungary, 2006
  6. ↑ a b c Gayane Abrahamyan: WikiLeaks on Armenian Genocide: Turkey 'Purged' Archives to Destroy Evidence. In: The Armenian Mirror-Spectator. September 16, 2011, archived from the original on September 16, 2011 ; Retrieved May 26, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Berktay, Halil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish historian and columnist
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Izmir