^#smrgSAHAF Barbara Flemming Armağanı 1 = Essays in Honour of Barbara Flemming 1 - 2002

Jan SCHMIDT

Barbara Flemming, Professor emerita of Turkish at the University of Leiden, has recently celebrated her seventieth birthday. With the present collection of essays, including a text edition and translations, students, colleagues and friends wish to pay their respects and show their gratitude for having come to know her, for her extraordinary talent to stimulate their curiosity, and, more generally, to thank her for her contribution to knowledge and insight from which they, in one way or another, all have profited. We are grateful to Professor Sinasi Tekin who generously offered to publish the contributions in the Journal of Turkish Studies.

Barbara Henriette Flemming was born on May 28, 1930, in Hamburg. She finished her secondary school training in the aftermath of the war. In 1948 she was among the first German pupils invited to Britain. Having spent an important term at Ackworth School near Pontefract, Yorkshire, she graduated from her Hamburg secondary school early in 1949. A wish to study literature was set aside temporarily. Apprenticed first in Hamburg, she went to Turkey in 1951 on a three-year contract with a Turkish export firm. She worked at the Istanbul office, with postings in the Izmir main office. She absorbed Turkish, through private lessons and use. From Izmir she travelled about in the coastal areas of western Anatolia where tourism had not yet come. Her trips to Ayasoluk, Tire and Birgi, sites of the Aydin dynasty, which always ended in a visit to the mosque of Aydinoglu Isa Bey at modern Selcuk, were part of the preparation (as she came to realize) for her own research on Fahri the Aydin poet.

Her early years in Istanbul, with "Of Mice and Men" in Turkish on Muhsin Ertugrul's Stage and first readings in Varlik, catching up on modern literature in general, reinforced her wish to study. Returning to Hamburg when her contract was finished, she began her university Study at Hamburg University, studying Turcology, Islam, Arabic and Persian with Bertold Spuler, Annemarie von Gabain, Wolfgang Lentz, Omeljan Pritsak and Tourkhan Gandje¥. Hanna Sohrweide and Sinasi Tekin were among her fellow-students. At the University of California at Los Angeles where she had been granted a Research Assistantship at the Near Eastern Center, she spent two years of intensive study with Gustave E. von Grunebaum and Eshref Shevky and, making the biggest impact of all, Andreas Tietze. On May 25, 1961, she teceived the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at UCLA. Her dissertation, composed in German, is a study of the history of the south-western areas of Anatolia; the period covered is from the Turkish conquest to the final incorporation of the region into the Ottoman Empire. Her sources revealed a good deal of intercourse between Turkish Anatolia and Mamluk Egypt.