THE LIFE AND SCIENCIFIC METHODS OF MEHMED TAHIR FROM BURSA

Abstract

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 1925 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.