When was the Iliad epic first translated to Turkish?

Information regarding the world of Greek mythology had a place in the cultural consciousness of numerous Ottoman intellectuals in the nineteenth century. One of the most important figures of Turkish literature of the time, Namık Kemal (1840-1888) mentioned Homer's epics and Greek tragedy in one of his plays in 1881. In addition, Şemseddin Sâmî in 1891has collected all the information existing at the time about Troy in an article. Turkish readers became acquainted 1 with Troy and Homer's world of legends by the elder brother of Sami, Na'îm (1846-1900). He was the first person to translate a part of the Iliad into Ottoman in prose form. This translation was published in Istanbul in 1885 or 1886. In 1898 in Istanbul, a second Ottoman-Turkish translation of the first part of the Iliad, a translation which was not larger than the previous one, was published.

The only information about the translator is that his name was Hilmi, that he was from Thessaloniki and was a member of the censorship committee that was founded by Abdulhamid II. In later years, the interest in Homer and the Iliad continued. In 1918, Ömer Seyfeddin published a selection from the Iliad, using the French version. This selection was later published in 1927 in a series entitled "Examples from the World Literature" by the Ministry of Education.

Ahmed Cevad Emre (1887-1961) published a prose translation of the Iliad in 1957. Today we have several other translations, but the translation of Azra Erhat (1915-1982) and A. Kadir (1917-1985) first published in 1967 is considered to be by far the best.