On May 29, 2025, an international academic event and the opening of an exhibition were held in Kraków, Poland, to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the birth of renowned Turkic orientalist Sadıq Bey Ağabeyzade.
The event brought together representatives of diplomatic missions, scholars, turkologists and orientalists from Poland, Azerbaijan, Türkiye and other countries.
In his address, President of the Turkic Academy, Prof. Dr. Shahin Mustafayev presented Sadıq Bey Ağabeyzade as a prominent representative of the Azerbaijani Turkic intellectual generation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—figures who played a crucial role in modernizing society, advancing oriental studies and promoting educational reform. He underscored the significance of Ağabeyzade’s scholarly and cultural legacy within the broader context of interaction between Turkic and European academic traditions.
President Mustafayev emphasized the Turkic Academy’s strong commitment to studying and promoting the legacies of such distinguished individuals, implementing projects aimed at republishing their works and offering scholarly reflection on their contributions to Turkic and global science.
As a gesture of strengthening scientific and cultural cooperation, the President of the Turkic Academy donated a reprint of Sadıq Bey Ağabeyzade’s work to the library of the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Oriental Studies. The book — Textbook of the Turkmen Dialect with a Collection of Proverbs and Sayings of the Turkmens of the Transcaspian Region — was first published in Ashgabat in 1904. Republished by the Turkic Academy in honor of the scholar’s 160th anniversary, this work represents the first systematic description of Turkmen grammar and is a cornerstone of the Turkic linguistic tradition. In addition, Mustafayev presented the library with other publications produced by the Turkic Academy.
Participants of the seminar highlighted various aspects of Ağabeyzade’s influential role in the development of oriental studies, his contributions to the cultural and academic life of Azerbaijan, as well as his fate in emigration.
Sadıq Bey Ağabeyzade held the rank of Major General and served as Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Following his emigration, he spent a significant part of his life in Poland, where he taught Oriental languages at the university level. Many prominent Polish Turkologists were among his students. Ağabeyzade passed away in Lviv in 1944.
The event concluded with the opening of an exhibition titled "Sadıq Bey (1865–1944): In the Service of Two Nations", which showcased a wealth of archival materials and documents shedding light on the life and scholarly legacy of this eminent orientalist.
