A life dedicated to the development of his nation: Ismail Gaspıralı

Ismail Gaspıralı

Ismail Gaspıralı was born in 1851 in Bahçesaray, the capital of the Crimean dynasty. Gaspıralı, who spent his childhood years in Bahçesaray, began his education at the Muslim school in this city. Gaspıralı attended the Akmescit Russian School when he was ten years old; after studying at this school for two years, he transferred to Moscow Military High School (Milyutin Gimnazyumu). He was educated here for three years between 1864-1867.

When he was only 17 years old, Ismail Bey started work as a teacher at the Zincirli Madrasah in Bahçesaray, where he had once sat at the benches as a student. Ismail Gaspıralı, who was employed as a Russian teacher, also tried to give Turkish lessons to his students. İsmail Gaspıralı had to quit teaching because of his criticism of the traditional syllabus applied in madrasas and his discomfort with the ringing of bells during the entrance and exit hours of the class in which he taught in Russian.

In 1872, Gaspıralı went to Paris, where he learnt French and learnt about Western intellectual movements from the source.

Gaspıralı, who worked alongside Russian writer Ivan Turgenyev during his stay in Paris, ended his two years of Paris adventure at the end of 1874 and moved from Marseille to Istanbul and from there to Crimea.

Gaspıralı began his political career in 1878 as a member of the Bahçeşehir city duma and then became deputy mayor in November 1878.

Gaspıralı, who continued to climb in the political scene, served as the mayor of Bahçesaray for five years starting from March 1879.

In 1877, Gaspıralı got married for the first time and divorced his wife only two years later on the grounds because that her level of culture was not sufficient to understand his work and thoughts. His second marriage was in 1882 with Lady Zühre, the daughter of İsfendiyar Bey from one of the famous families of Kazan, the Akçurins, who made a great contribution to his work for the rest of his life.

Through this marriage, İsmail Bey became related to Yusuf Akçura, the son of Lady Zühre’s uncle, and had the opportunity to exchange ideas and work together with him.

Gaspıralı, who was in touch with the people during his term as mayor, was determined to bring his ideas to the people through newspapers and press.

For this purpose, Gaspıralı obtained permission from the Russian authorities after long efforts and published the newspaper Tercüman on 22 April 1883. The newspaper, which was prepared in Ottoman Turkish, also used words from Tatar and other Turkic languages. Tercüman became the first newspaper published in Crimea and the third Turkish newspaper among Russian Muslims. When the others closed down in a short time, Tercüman operated as the only Turkish and Muslim newspaper in the Czarist Russia for a long time.

The newspaper had a great influence in the Turkic world. Despite its limited circulation, Tercüman became one of the newspapers read by scholars in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Balkans and the Kafkas, as well as in Russia.

After 1906, Gaspıralı brought Âlemi Nisvan for women (the first women's magazine of Russian Turks), Mekteb-i Sübyan for students and teachers and Kah Kah Kah, a satirical magazine, to the publishing world.

Ismail Gaspıralı believed that one of the main steps in developing the national consciousness and intellectual level of the people was educational reform. In his opinion, the education system should first and foremost serve the teaching of the mother tongue and should include worldly as well as religious knowledge.

This system, which Gaspıralı called "Usul-ü Cedid", later became common. In 1895, the number of Usul-ü Cedid schools in the Russian Empire surpassed one hundred, and in 1914 it reached about 5 thousand.

 

Ismail Bey Gaspıralı did not only provide education for boys, but the first "usûl-ü cedit" school for girls opened its doors to female students in 1893 in Bahçesaray.

This grand reformer, educator, journalist, journalist, man of ideas and action, raised by the Turkic world, passed away on 24 September 1914 in Bahçesaray due to the lung disease he was struggling with and was buried near the mausoleum of Hacı Giray Han, the one who was the founder of the Crimean Dynasty.

In 1944, after the Crimean Tatar Exile, one of the most painful witnesses of history, Gaspıralı's grave was vandalised and destroyed along with many other historical artifacts.