Andreas Tietze

Who was Andreas Tietze?

Andreas Tietze was a world-renowned Austrian Turcologist and one of the founders of Turkic studies in the United States. He was educated in Vienna and built his career in, respectively, Istanbul University, Turkey, where he had taken refuge from the Hitler regime; and then in the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was emeritus professor of Turkish in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, as member of the department from 1958 to 1973 and chairman from 1965 to 1970; and finally the University of Vienna.

Tietze was born in Vienna on 26 April 1914, the son of prominent art historians. He studied history and languages at the University of Vienna from 1932 to 1937, when he received his doctorate. A diary of two trips he made to Anatolian Turkey during his student days remains one of the primary firsthand accounts by foreign visitors on the life in countryside in the early days of the Turkish Republic.