Are you curious enough to know where all the streets' names of our city come from? If not yet, don’t you think that it would be a very nice piece of information to know, since it’s a city that you live in? Here comes a new section of your weekly university paper!
Tunalı Hilmi
In modern Turkish history, particularly toward the end of the nineteenth century, quite a large number of Ottoman intellectuals worried about the disintegration of their Empire, by and large followed by the policy of “Ottomanism”. The increase in educational modernization during Sultan Abdulhamid II’s reign produced hundreds of educated men and introduced most of them to the liberal thoughts of the West. This younger generation of intellectuals came to be known as a whole as the “Young Turks”. Nonetheless, particularly before the beginning of the second period of Meşrutiyet, a good deal of them believed in the realization of Ottomanism and thus opposed the sultan’s pan-Islamist policy. Tunalı Hilmi was one of them.
Tunalı Hilmi was born in 1871 in one of the Balkan provinces of the Empire and became politically active while studying at the Gülhane medical school. He escaped to Switzerland in 1896 and intensified his work. In Geneva, he started publishing his views, along with several friends, in their newspaper, Osmanlı.
Tunalı Hilmi, like many other Young Turks, once favored the idea of Ottomanism, at the turn of the century and even in the early years of the second Meşrutiyet. Yet the consciousness of Turkish national identity developed to the point of extreme enthusiasm in Hilmi’s mind, as either an extension or repudiation of his earlier thoughts. In 1920, as forces that would create the new Turkish republic were gathering, he was elected to the National Assembly in Istanbul as a deputy for Ereğli. A few months later, he became a member of the Turkish Nationalist Grand National Assembly in Ankara, where he served as a member of Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People's Party from 1923 on. He had many contributions to the issues of Turkish language, women rights and village development. (Based on Karaman, M. Lutfullah, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Volume1, No.2- July 1997)

Hande Kaya (IR/III)