Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi

Öz

Şükûfe Nihal Başar, one of the significant writers of the early Republican period, is also the first woman geographer to graduate from Darülfünûn. The author of the travel genre, Finlandiya (Finland) and Domaniç Dağlarının Yolcusu (The Traveler of the Domaniç Mountains), shows a special interest in geography apart from professional reasons, and includes Anatolian geography in her novels, poems and newspaper articles, which she wrote with a national romantic sense. In her socialist realist works, which clearly bear the effects of the Anatolianism movement, she deals with different subjects from the First World War to the National Struggle, from national awareness to the nationalization of Anatolia. Village life, which the Republican intellectuals mystified with a romantic optimism, who reproduced the arguments of the official discourse in his works, is handled realistically in the works of Şükûfe Nihal, who personally traveled to the farthest corners of Anatolia with the belief that travel provides the experience of discovering new places and increases patriotism and creativity. She tries to compare the pre-republican and post-Republican era with an objective approach in her work, Çölde Sabah Oluyor! (It's Morning in the Desert!, 1951). While handling the idea of village development with the adventures of Adnan Hocagil, an idealist and hardworking civil servant, she explores Anatolia, which was not known enough for centuries and remained a ‘terra incognita’ desert for Turkish intellectuals, within the framework of love of country and desire to live together.