Lesson Transcript

Herkese merhaba. Ben Seda Welcome to TurkishClass101.com
Today we have a fun topic.
We will talk about five historical figures in Turkey.
I will introduce the name of the historical figures to you.
But this was really hard to pick.
There are so many people in Turkish history which dates back hundreds of years ago.
So I had to think and mix and just pick some.
I picked three men and two women.
And the first one is the founder of modern Turkey,
the first president and the founding father of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
He was born in 1881 during the last days of the Ottoman Empire
and passed away on the 10th of November, 1938.
He was born in Selanik, the present-day Greek city,
and he was a well-educated Ottoman military official.
He attended many wars including Balkan Wars and World War I.
And after the Ottomans lost the World War I, the country was being torn away.
The French, the English, the Italians, the Greeks were occupying territories
and instead of submitting to it, Turkish people raised in the force back.
Mustafa Kemal was an inspector after the war and he went to Samsun.
His first goal was the establishment of an organized national movement
against the occupying forces.
In Amasya, he declared the independence of the country was in danger
and the sultan was doing anything about it.
He let the Englishmen occupy Istanbul.
So Mustafa Kemal Reyn resigned from the Ottoman army
and the Ottoman government issued a warrant for his arrest.
But with other military commanders active in eastern Anatolia,
Mustafa followed Atatürk's lead and acknowledged him as their leader.
And to make a very long story short,
the War of Independence Kurtuluş Savaşı started and Turks won and gained their freedom.
And after this victory, Mustafa Kemal and his friends founded Modern Turkey,
we know today, and he made a lot of reforms to modernize Turkey.
And so I have to cut this short because it's a year long course on Turkish history.
I can go on forever.
So you get the idea why he is the first one I started with.
And the second one is again a leader from a different era.
It is Fatih Sultan Mehmet, Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror.
He was an Ottoman sultan during the 15th century.
And he's one of the, I think, most famous ones.
He's known for his conquest of Constantinople, or the way we call it, Istanbul.
Istanbul was like a dream for many sultans back then.
And a lot of big leaders from the east tried to conquer but failed.
Actually, there's a Netflix short series on the conquest of Istanbul,
if you like to learn more details in movie style.
Anyway, this especially was important among Muslims
because it said there was a prophecy about getting Istanbul from the Christians
and a lot of people back then believed that
and then saw it as a fulfillment of prophecy and a sign of approaching apocalypse.
But it didn't happen, the apocalypse I mean, not the conquest.
Anyway, Sultan Mehmet was a visionary and a well-educated man,
well-educated emperor.
After the conquest, he claimed the title of Caesar of the Roman Empire, Kayzer-i Rum.
Those lands were called Rum Diyarı, the land of the Roman.
And based on the info that Istanbul had been the capital of the Roman Empire
since fourth century AD, and whoever possessed the imperial capital
was the ruler of the empire.
And he thought himself is the emperor of the Roman Empire.
That is really a different info, I think.
And anyway, he acted accordingly and he tried to centralize the empire
and set bases on a lot of government issues.
And after that, Ottoman Empire became Ottoman Empire.
So if you are curious about it, you can find books and movies
and documentaries out there.
You can check it out in detail.
The next one is a different figure.
He is Yunus Emre, dervish Yunus, a Turkish poet, a Sufi dervish.
And I think one of the best examples of Anatolian peaceful Islamic thought.
And I want to give you examples of his writing instead of explaining
what kind of person he is.
But I have to warn you, the translation doesn't sound a bit like the original.
So as you are learning Turkish, try to understand the Turkish version.
But I will give you the translation to help you understand it.
Okay, the first one.
İlim ilim bilmektir
İlim kendini bilmektir
Sen kendini bilmezsen
Bu nice okumaktır
Knowledge, knowledge is to know.
Knowledge is to know yourself.
If you do not know yourself, what does, what good does it do to study so much?
Something like that.
And another one is
Yunus'dur benim adım
Gün geçtikçe artar odum
İki cihanda maksûdum
Bana seni gerek seni
Yunus is my name, each passing day rouses my flame.
What I desire in both worlds is the same.
You are the one, you are the one I crave.
And there are so many poems he wrote, but I will give you just one more line,
not poem but one more line.
Bir kez gönül yıktın ise,bu kıldığın namaz değil
If you broke a heart once, it's not the namaz you perform.
And he was a peace-oriented, God-loving dervish, and all of his words were about the love of God,
love of all living things, which is thought to be in the image of God.
Okay, now we are done with the three figures.
Now the next two are women, and they are so different from each other.
One is Sabiha Gökçen, a modern woman, and she was an orphan, and one of the girls,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, adopted actually and raised as a modern capable woman.
She was a Turkish aviator, and actually she was the world's first female fighter pilot.
And she attended a lot of military operations and flew more than 8,000 hours.
And although being the first female fighter pilot in the world, there's not much to say about her,
because the all is technical, and you can read about her in detail if you're into the aviation
history of the world.
And before I continue with the next person, I have to say that there's an airport in Istanbul
called Sabiha Gökçen Airport.
It's in the Anatolian side.
Okay, last but not least, our next female figure is Hürrem Sultan.
I've chosen her because I see a lot of people are interested in her,
and there's a controversy around her story.
She was a concubine of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent.
Her real name was Roxalina, before she was kidnapped and sold as a slave to the Imperial Haram.
As soon as she arrived to the palace, she rose to be a favorite of Sultan Suleyman,
Sultan Süleyman.
And they were in love and breaking the Ottoman tradition,
Suleyman married her and made her his legal wife.
Before Hürrem Sultan, the sultans only married the foreign free noble ladies, not the slaves.
She was the first one who took the Haseki Sultan title as a slave.
And she had six children, including the future sultan Selim II.
And Hürrem was famous for achieving so much power to influence politics of the Ottoman Empire.
That's why she still gets a lot of attention all around the world, even today.
And there's a Turkish show about Suleyman and Hürrem called Muhteşem Yüzyıl.
If you are curious about it, keeping in mind that it's a fictional show.
You can get the idea of Hürrem's personality by watching it,
but not everything there is was what happened in the history, you know.
We have to draw a line in there.
And it's again the same with the show in Netflix about Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror.
It's a good way to imagine how was back then, but not everything is in line with the history.
So be careful about it.
And this was our list.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Fatih Sultan Mehmet, Yunus Emre, Sabiha Gökçen and Hürrem Sultan.
I hope you enjoyed the lesson.
I will see you next time.
Görüşmek üzere, hoşçakalın.

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