Ömer Seyfettin

Ömer Seyfettin (11 March 1884 – 6 March 1920) was a Turkish writer, officer and teacher, born at Gönen and died of diabetes at Istanbul, aged thirty-six. ^{1 2} With Ziya Gökalp and Ali Canip Yöntem he founded the magazine Genç Kalemler (Young Pens) at Salonica in 1911, the starting point of the national-literature movement and its programme of simplifying Turkish. ¹ He is counted a founder of the modern Turkish short story; his best-known works are Ashâb-ı Kehfimiz, Efruz Bey and Yalnız Efe. ¹

Ömer Seyfettin was born at Gönen, the son of a military official, entered the Military Academy and graduated in 1903 as a lieutenant, serving on the empire's western borders including Kuşadası. ¹ He served with the Action Army in 1909 and taught at İzmir, was recalled in the First Balkan War, was defeated at Yanina in January 1913 and spent about twelve months as a prisoner of war in Greece. ¹ He left the army in 1914, taught literature at Istanbul and became chief author of Türk Yurdu, published most of his stories from 1917, and wrote for Büyük Mecmua in 1919–1920. ^{1 2} He was hospitalised at Haydarpaşa on 23 February 1920; an autopsy found undiagnosed diabetes, the cause of his death on 6 March 1920, and his remains were moved to Zincirlikuyu Cemetery in 1939. ²

His short novels include Ashâb-ı Kehfimiz (1918), Efruz Bey (1919) and Yalnız Efe (1919), and his story collections include Harem (1918), Yüksek Ökçeler (1922), Gizli Mabed (1923) and Beyaz Lale (1938). ¹ He wrote Turanist poems between 1914 and 1917, and his narrative strategy — an event that wakes his hero and changes his stance — left a lasting mark on the Turkish story. ¹

This section is read as a presentation of positions reported from the sources, not as a verdict of the museum.

His name is bound to the national-literature movement and the "New Language" programme of simplifying Turkish towards the spoken tongue — literary and national positions that name no religious school for their holder. ¹ No source names a school for the man himself: the Arabic article's infobox religion field is empty, the English and Turkish articles carry no religion field, and Wikidata gives only the generic value Islam, so his school is left unnamed in this entry. ^{3 4}

• The English, Turkish and Arabic Wikipedia articles on Ömer Seyfettin, and Wikidata item Q297504. ^{1 2 3 4}