Nuri Berköz

Who was Nuri Berköz?

M. Nuri Berköz was born in Shaki, Azerbaijan in 1889. After completing his primary education in the local Russian-Tatar School, his father decided to immigrate to Ottoman Turkey with his family in early twentieth century. Upon the death of his father a while after their arrival at Bursa, he and his younger brother Mahmud first enrolled with the Bursa Military Junior High School, then Bursa Military High School.

After graduating from Işıklar, he was admitted in 1909 to the Ottoman Military Academy in Istanbul, and graduated from this distinguished institution as a young infantry lieutenant in 1912.

At the outset of the First World War, he was first sent to the eastern front to join the Second Caucasus Corps. As he spoke fluent Russian, however, after a while it was considered more appropriate to employ his capabilities not at the battlefront, but elsewhere. He was first sent to Iranian Azerbaijan on a special mission, then in 1916, to Denmark and Sweden. Between 1917-18, during the revolution years in Russia, he was stationed in Saint Petersburg and later in Moscow as a member of the special commission dispatched for the exchange of Ottoman-Russian Prisoners of War.