Halil İNALCIK 1916 - 2016

He graduated from Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geography, Department of New Age History in 1940. In 1942, he completed his doctoral dissertation titled “Tanzimat Reform Era and the Bulgarian Question“. In 1943, he became an associate professor with his dissertation titled “Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate for the Great Ricat“. In 1947 he was elected as a member of the Turkish Historical Society. During 1949-1951 he worked on Turkish manuscripts at the British Museum and at the Ottoman Public Resources Office. In 1952, he became a professor with his thesis “Cooperation between Ottoman-Crimean Khanate during the Decade of Vienna ”. After retiring from Ankara University in 1972, he established the Chair of Ottoman History at the University of Chicago. He lectured as visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Harvard Universities. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1986, he founded the Department of History at Bilkent University in 1993. For 23 years, he gave lectures to graduate and postgraduate students in the Ottoman History Department of the same university. At the end of the 20th century, he was nominated by the International Center for Biography in Cambridge among the world's top 2000 scientists in the field of social sciences. He had a very good level of Ottoman Turkish, good level of English, French, German and he had an intermediate level of Arabic, Persian and Italian languages. İnancık published many of his works.