Riza Tevfik Bolukbasi

Riza Tevfik Bolukbasi lived from 1869 to 1949 and was an Ottoman and Turkish philosopher, poet and liberal politician born in Mustafapasa, now Svilengrad in Bulgaria, then part of the Adrianople Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. He was one of four Ottoman signatories of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, a role that led to his inclusion among the 150 persona non grata figures banished from the new Turkish Republic in 1923; he spent twenty years in exile across several countries before receiving amnesty in 1938 and returning to Turkey in 1943. He is remembered as an early popularizer of Western philosophy in Ottoman Turkish intellectual life, as the author of the Gallipoli Diaries, and for his Turkish translations of the poetry of Omar Khayyam.