Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

A Childhood in Motion

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was born in Istanbul's Şehzadebaşı district on June 23, 1901. His father, Hüseyin Fikri Efendi, was a judge, and his work took the family to different parts of Anatolia. The family was originally from Batum. His mother, Nesibe Bahriye Hanım, came from Trabzon's Kansızzâdeler family. 

Tanpınar spent his childhood in Ergani Madeni, Sinop, Siirt, Kirkuk, and Antalya as his father's assignments changed. His schooling changed with them, from a missionary school in Siirt to lycées in Kirkuk, Vefa, and Antalya.

These constant moves became part of the background of a writer who would return often to memory, place, and what we carry with us when we leave somewhere behind.

He arrived in Istanbul in 1918 and spent a year as a boarding student at the Veterinary School before transferring to the Faculty of Letters at Darülfunun, which later became Istanbul University. There was a particular reason for the change. Tanpınar already knew the poetry of Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, and when he learned that Yahya Kemal taught in the literature department, he wanted to study with him. He graduated in 1923 with a thesis on the Ottoman poet Şeyhî. Years later, he wrote an entire book about his teacher, simply titled Yahya Kemal. His influence on Tanpınar would last throughout his life.

A Teacher, Scholar, and Writer

Tanpınar spent much of his working life as a teacher and scholar. He taught in Erzurum, Konya, Ankara, and Istanbul's Kadıköy district through the 1920s and early 1930s, and at the Gazi Terbiye Enstitüsü in Ankara from 1930. In 1933, he took over the aesthetics and mythology courses at the Academy of Fine Arts after the death of the poet Ahmed Haşim. 

In 1939, a new chair in nineteenth-century Turkish literature was established at the Faculty of Letters for the centenary of the Tanzimat reforms. Minister of Education Hasan Âli Yücel appointed Tanpınar to lead it, and he became a professor there.

Between 1943 and 1946, he served in the Grand National Assembly as a member of parliament for Kahramanmaraş. After his party did not renominate him in 1946, he worked for a period as a secondary education inspector at the Ministry of National Education. He returned to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1948 and to his university chair in 1949. His health declined during his final years, and he died of a heart attack in Istanbul on January 23, 1962.

His novels Mahur Beste, Huzur, and Sahnenin Dışındakiler are closely connected, sharing characters and the same historical world. Huzur, the novel most closely associated with his name, follows a failed relationship in Istanbul in the days before the Second World War. Its present-day action takes place over roughly twenty-four hours, while memories and flashbacks open the story into a much larger period of time. It closes as news of Germany's invasion of Poland arrives in the background. At its center is the search for huzur, an inner sense of peace, during a period of enormous social and cultural change.

Regulating Time

Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, serialized from 1954 and published as a book in 1961, is Tanpınar's best-known novel outside Türkiye today. It is narrated by Hayri İrdal, whose life stretches across the reign of Abdülhamid II, the Second Constitutional era, and the early Republic. At the center of the novel is a fictional institute created to regulate the country's clocks. Through it, Tanpınar looks at people trying to find their place between old and new, East and West.

Two characters make this contrast especially clear. Nuri Efendi approaches clocks through an older craft tradition. Halit Ayarcı sees time as something that can be organized, standardized, and put to practical use. The institute grows out of this second view. Much of the novel is very funny, but time itself carries a more serious meaning. A clock can easily be reset to a new hour. A society cannot change its relationship with the past quite so easily.

Henri Bergson's philosophy of time was one influence on Tanpınar's fiction, along with his reading of Marcel Proust and his treatment of memory. Tanpınar also wrote about cities. 

Beş Şehir (1946) brings together his essays on Ankara, Erzurum, Konya, Bursa, and Istanbul. The cities become a way for him to think about history, memory, and the changes he had witnessed in Türkiye.

Tanpınar the Poet

Tanpınar wrote poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and literary history, yet poetry remained especially important to him. Late in his life, he chose only thirty-seven poems for his collection Şiirler. A fuller collection, Bütün Şiirleri, was published after his death and included poems left outside that selection. Music, dreams, and time appear repeatedly in his poetry, just as they do in his fiction.

During the 1950s, Tanpınar traveled abroad six times. His longest stays came in 1953, when he spent six months abroad, and in 1959, when he spent a full year away. Much of this time was spent in Paris, and his travels also took him through England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria.

Recognition After His Death

Tanpınar wrote in his diaries about feeling that his work had received too little recognition. 

Interest in his fiction grew considerably after his death, particularly from the 1970s onward, as his novels were republished and more of his letters, diaries, and unfinished writings appeared in print. Orhan Pamuk later described him, in a blurb for the English edition of The Time Regulation Institute, as "undoubtedly the most remarkable author in modern Turkish literature."

Tanpınar was buried in Aşiyan Cemetery in Istanbul, near his teacher Yahya Kemal. His gravestone carries the opening lines of one of his best-known poems, Ne İçindeyim Zamanın: "Ne içindeyim zamanın / Ne de büsbütün dışında."

The Words Tanpınar Left Behind

Yekpâre means whole, unbroken, or in one piece. Tanpınar uses it in his poetry, most famously in Ne İçindeyim Zamanın, where time appears as a continuous whole rather than a series of separate moments.

Huzur means peace of mind, tranquillity, or inner calm. It is different from barış, which usually refers to peace between people, groups, or states. In Tanpınar's title, huzur refers to something more personal and inward.

Medeniyet means civilization. Tanpınar often wrote about medeniyet değişmesi, the changing of civilizations, when thinking about the enormous cultural changes between the late Ottoman period and the early Republic.

Saat can mean clock, watch, or hour. It sits at the center of his best-known title, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. Saatleri comes from saat plus the plural -ler; ayarlama means regulating or adjusting and comes from ayarlamak; enstitü means institute and entered Turkish through French.