The Legacy of Prof. Dr. Halil İnalcık Honored in Yalova
The scholarly legacy of Prof. Dr. Halil İnalcık, known as the "Pole Star of Historians," was honored with an international workshop held under the academic coordination of Bursa Uludağ University and the leadership of the Prof. Dr. Halil İnalcık Ottoman History Research Institute. The event, which took place in Yalova, brought together expert academics and young researchers working in the fields of history, language, and literature.
Leading figures in the field, including Prof. Dr. Cemal Kafadar from Harvard University, as well as Prof. Dr. Özer Ergenç, Prof. Dr. İsenbike Togan, Prof. Dr. Feridun Emecen, Prof. Dr. Ali Akyıldız, Prof. Dr. Judith Pfeiffer, and Dr. Evrim Binbaş, participated in the workshop. The three-day event, representing approximately 20 universities from four different countries, was coordinated by Associate Professor Dr. Hacer Karabağ Arslan, a faculty member of the Bursa Uludağ University History Department. The workshop served as an academic school for 15 graduate students accepted through an application process from both within and outside the country. Students from our university's History Department also actively contributed to the event by taking on roles in all stages, including registration and field organization.
In a first for Turkey, the workshop, which brought together institutions such as the Republic of Turkey Directorate of State Archives, the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), and the Turkish Language Association (TDK) for the first time and was deemed worthy of support by the TTK, achieved a broad consensus on methodological unity and standardization in the publication of Ottoman sources. A comprehensive "consensus and recommendations text" prepared in this context will be finalized in the coming months with contributions from all stakeholders. The aim is for the text to be continuously developed through new workshops to be organized in the future, thereby transforming into an internationally accepted methodological guide and positioning Turkey to assume a leading and decisive role in historiography.