Halil Berktay
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Halil Berktay, born 1947 in Turkey, is a Turkish historian who was a Maoist in 1960s and 1970s. [1]
Berktay graduated from Robert College in 1964. He studied economics at Yale University, USA and received his BA in 1968 and a MA in 1969. He earned his PhD from Birmingham University in the UK in 1990. He worked as a lecturer at the Ankara University between 1969-1971 and later between 1978-1983. Between 1992-1997, he taught at both Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara and Bosphorous University in Istanbul. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1997. He has been teaching at Sabanci University since then.
Halil Berktay's research areas are Turkish nationalism in 20th century and its historiography. He studies the social and economic history and Europe, especially that of medieval history from a comparative perspective. He has also written on the construction of the Turkish National Memory.
In September 2005, Berktay and his fellow historians from different academic backgrounds (Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem, Selim Deringil and many others) held the controversial conference on the Armenians during the last days of Ottoman Empire.
[edit] Excerpts of an interview with Halil Berktay
"Before the Armenian events, there is the whole background of the 19th century. (...) With the Allies forcing the Dardanelles [in 1915], the Ottoman Empire, that had suffered one defeat after the other in the Balkans and that had nothing but the lands of Anatolia left, entered into a psychosis of (...) being cornered and squeezed, of helplessness. [At the same time], Armenian bands massacred a lot of Muslims as well. In such a process, it is impossible to find out who threw the first stone, who committed the first crime. Everybody has a story. Turks, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, everybody. In each of these stories, those who tell them are always in the role of victims. They themselves have never committed injustices against others, and they have been the only ones who have suffered. One can remark that 1915 killings of Armenians are remembered and the Cretan massacres committed against the Turkish Muslim population of the island between 1896-1900 are not remembered. I come from a family of Cretan immigrants myself. I know that my two great uncles have been hanged to the tree in our garden by a band of Greeks." Radikal 10 September 2000
