Şevqiy Bektöre (Crimean Tatar Cyrillic: Шевкъий Бектёре, , sometimes anglicized as Shewkiy Bektore or Shevki Bektore; 1888 – 1961) was a Dobrujan-born Crimean Tatar poet, publisher, educator, academic, and activist for ethnic Crimean Tatar causes. He created the first Arabic script alphabet modified specifically for Crimean Tatars and authored Crimean Tatar and Turkmen language textbooks. He served in Crimea, Caucasus, and Central Asia, and spent much of his adult life in Joseph Stalin’s gulags. Biography Şevqiy Bektöre was born in 1888 in Kavaklar, today officially known as Chirnogeni, a village situated in the Crimean Tatar countryside west of Mangalia, in Dobruja. At the time, the region was part of the Kingdom of Romania; from 1420 to 1878, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. His parents were prosperous farmers hailing from Crimea. As a result of the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) followed by the loss of Crimea to the Russians in 1783, in the early 19th century consecutive waves of threatened Crimean Tatars left their properties and fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some of them settled in Dobruja, but by the time Bektöre was born, the region had been annexed by the Kingdom of Romania, following the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. When Bektöre was 6 years old, his father, who was also a schoolteacher and the governor of township, convinced many of his fellow villagers to move further inland to Anatolia, Turkey. They settled in Central Anatolia, west of Ankara, near Polatlı on the road to Eskişehir, naming their village Karakaya. Bektöre completed his elementary school in Karakaya and his secondary education in the neighboring town of Haymana. Then, at the age of 17, he went to Istanbul for his higher education entering the Divinity Faculty of the Istanbul University where he met students of Crimean descent and acted in the Crimean Students Association in Istanbul. In 1909 he took his first trip to Crimea, which was part of Russia, where he looked for his lost relatives and made folklore and ethnographic studies. In 1912, he participated in the First Balkan War. At the beginning of World War I in 1914, when the Ottoman Empire was again at war with Russia, Bektöre was teaching in Crimea. He escaped the war, fleeing to Turkey via Azerbaijan and Iran. In early 1918, Bektöre was serving in Istanbul as General Secretary of the Society of Active Youth consisting of Turks of