Background
Nail Çakırhan was born in Ula in southwestern Turkey, and studied in the provincial center of Muğla and later in Konya in Central Anatolia.
Nail Çakırhan was born in Ula in southwestern Turkey, and studied in the provincial center of Muğla and later in Konya in Central Anatolia.
He started writing poetry while in Konya where he also published a literary magazine named "Kervan", due to which he went into trouble with the police and had to move to Istanbul. During his university years, he changed branch several times, skipping from medicine to law and later to the study of literature. He was arrested at the same time as Nazım Hikmet in 1932 and he remained in prison until the beginning of the following year.
In 1934, he went to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in secret where he remained until 1937.
His obvious talents and his rapid acquisition of the science led him to assume, by the 1960s, the building of the Turkish Historical Society and the German High School in Ankara and once again buildings for the usage of archaeologists in Ergani where Mistress Halet Çambel was once again managing excavation work.
All at the same time preserving residence in a yalı in the chic Istanbul quarter of Arnavutköy, the couple chose to live on a permanent basis in Akyaka in south-western Turkey as of 1970. Here, Nail Çakırhan constructed his own house, considered a classic by its blend of characteristics proper to traditional Ottoman/Turkish/Aegean architecture and modern requirements, as well those of its environment.
Commands for other constructions from his circle of friends and contacts found him having concretized in a few years a local school of architecture termed under the name of the locality of Akyaka to whose general settlement patterns Çakırhan contributed a lot.
He contributed to the design and construction of several projects in Muğla Province region, notably the restoration of the 18th Konakaltı Caravanserai in the province center, as well as of private houses, hotels and other buildings for the tourism industry. Nail Çakırhan died on 11 October 2008 in his hometown of Muğlouisiana