May 15, 2020, marks the 128th anniversary of the birth of Bekir Chobanzade, one of the great minds of the Turkic world.
A scientist, teacher, poet, he perfectly knew German, Hungarian, French, Arabian, Persian, Turkish, knew almost all Turkic languages. Working in different years at Tauride and Azerbaijan universities, being a full member of the Institute of Oriental Peoples, the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, the Paris Society of Linguistics, he left a huge scientific, methodological, literary and artistic heritage.
Bekir Chobanzade became the founder of Azerbaijani linguistics, a well-known specialist in Uzbek, Kumyk, Balkar, Kyrgyz, and Crimean Tatar literature. He has published more than 150 books and articles in various languages on the problems of Turkic languages and literature.
The last years of his life, Chobanzade lived in Baku, but this did not save him in the years when the methodological destruction of the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia began.
On January 28, 1937, Bekir Chobanzade was arrested in Kislovodsk and sent to Baku under escort. He was accused of “counter-revolutionary activity” and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out immediately on October 13, 1937. Only 20 years later in 1959, his poems again saw the light of day, however, but only those that did not mention the word “Crimea”.
