Wittek and the Austrian Tradition

Abstract

If I were to offer one specific reason for our meeting today, beyond a general and justifiable intention to commemorate the contribution made to early Ottoman historical studies by the late Professor Paul Wittek, it would not be that the year 1987 marks any of the usual anniversaries in the life of our subject. Wittek, a Fellow of this Society, was the first occupant of the Chair of Turkish in the University of London, from 1948 to 1961. It is still seven years short of one hundred since he was born, on 11 January 1894, in Baden, to the south of Vienna, the son of a Gymnasium headmaster; and it is less than a decade since The Times recorded the death, at the age of eighty-four, in an outer suburb of London, of this quintessentially Austrian scholar.