A Life Dedicated to Science: The Issues Underlined and Reminded by the Legendary Historian Halil İnalcık in an Interview

In this article, there will be evaluations from an interview with Halil İnalcık, a leading member of Language and History-Geography Faculty, because of the 75th anniversary of the faculty’s establishment. The comments and evaluations in the interview will be used to relate national, organizational and scientist “identification-identification construction” processes to space and time. In other words, the article will be evaluated as a “memory” study in terms of bringing together the personal history and social history in certain periods. It also reminds us the importance of how the occurrences in certain periods are perceived by the persons experiencing, and how it this perception is not similar in all places. This article tries to show, 1) What is the importance of the Faculty of Language and History-Geography as one of the most important institutions of the early period of Turkish Republic, in the identity construction of leading historicist Halil İnalcık and; 2) how his perspective of history reflected in evaluating his own individual experiences.