Country: Turkey

About Ilber Ortayli
İlber Ortaylı (born 1947 Bregenz, Austria), is a leading Turkish historian, professor of history at the Galatasaray University in Istanbul and at Bilkent University in Ankara. Since 2004 he has been the head of the Topkapı Museum in Istanbul.As the son of a Crimean Tatar family who fled Stalin's persecution and deportation, he was born in a refugee camp in Bregenz, Austria in 1947 and came to Turkey when he was 2 years old. Ortaylı attended elementary school and St. George's Austrian High School in İstanbul and then Ankara Atatürk High School. He graduated from Ankara University Mekteb-i Mülkiye (Faculty of Political Science) and completed his postgraduate studies at the Chicago University under Professor Halil İnalcık and at the University of Vienna. He obtained his doctorate at Ankara University in the Faculty of Political Sciences. His doctoral thesis was Local Administration in the Tanzimat Period (1978). After his doctorate, he attended to 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, protesting the academic policy of the government established after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. After teaching at several universities in Turkey, Europe and Russia, in 1989 he returned to the Ankara University and became professor of history and the head of the section of administrative history. İlber Ortaylı is widely known as a polyglot. He can speak Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Crimean Tatar, German, Arabic, French, Russian, Persian, Italian, Latin, Greek, Slovakian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and English.