Mehmet Tahir from Bursa was Mustafa Kemal’s teacher from Thessaloniki
Military Junior High School. At the period he lived, he was called as “the
greatest bibliography scholar of the Turks”. Mr. Tahir was born in Bursa in
1861. He graduated from the Military Academy in 1883 with the rank of Infantry
Lieutenant. He had worked in Skopje, Bitola and Thessaloniki Military Junior
High Schools not only as a teacher but also a principal. He took place in
Motherland and Liberty Association as one of the founders whose Thessaloniki
department was opened by Mustafa Kemal in 1906. After participating in The
Committee of Union and Progress between the years 1908 and 1911, he worked as a
deputy in the National Assembly. After having retired with the rank of
lieutenant colonel, He was brought to Topkapı Palace Library Management as the
manager. He died in
İstanbul. He has got 25 masterpieces and the most famous masterpiece of him,
“Osmanlı Müellifleri (Ottoman Authors)”, has still been used at the Harward
University as one of the sources. He paid attention to the usage of maps in
Geography courses. So, he brought French atlases to his classrooms. He was
against rote learning in History and Geography courses. He used to teach a
country’s borders, regime and population first. He made his students draw the
map first and he used to talk about old and existing relationships between
countries then. He accepted Geograpy as the basis of the History. In his
History courses, he requested his students to write some extra questions and
give him back. By means of this he made himself become eager to search. He was
in favor of the renewal and the purification of the language. In his Literature
courses, he used to explain the terminologies first and then used to broaden
all. He used to examine the text which was written by his students and ask for
corrections according to the spelling rules. Then he himself used to do the
corrections by looking at the papers. He was against rote learning
(memorization), but he used to ask his students to memorize moral and national
poems as well as proverbs. Mehmet Tahir was one of the founders Thessaloniki
Department of the Motherland and Liberty Association which is secretly founded
by Mustafa Kemal. Mustafa Kemal paid 500 Liras and bought some parts of Mehmet
Tahir’s books called “Ottoman Authors” and saved from the printing house while
Mehmet Tahir was suffering from powerty in his last years, Mehmet Tahir’s
tombstone was built in 1935 by Atatürk.
Journal Section | Articles |
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Authors | |
Publication Date | September 1, 2014 |
Published in Issue | Year 2014 Volume: 1 |