[1][4][5] 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.

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.

[1] In early 1918, Bektöre was serving in Istanbul as General Secretary of the Society of Active Youth consisting of Turks of Crimean descent.

He also learned that in December 1917 Tatars refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Bolsheviks, and, on 23 February 1918, a firing squad of the Black Sea Fleet executed their elected President, Noman Çelebicihan.

[4] Later that year, Bektöre, Cafer Seydamet Qırımer, and a small group of Crimean Tatar patriots living in Istanbul traveled to Crimea on a gunboat to join the struggle for independence.

He extensively wrote poems which had nationalistic tones:[4] My Tatars and my birthplace, My childhood's cherished times, Unceasingly I yearn for, Excruciating rhymes.

[7] In Quru Özen, he founded and distributed Şar-şur, a journal that was written by hand, and he got children to learn and recite his poems,[1] including Tatarlığım[8][9] (lit.

[4] In 1924, due to the increased determination of the Soviet authorities to liquidate national ambitions, he left Crimea for Dagestan where he was to be a teacher of languages in the Pedagogical Institute in the city of Temir-Khan-Shura (now called Buynaksk).

[2] In 1926, he participated as a delegate from Dagestan in the All-Union Turcological Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the replacement of Arabic script in Turkic-Islamic lands by Latin alphabet was adopted.

[4] On 25 March 1932 he was arrested by the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD (the precursor of KGB) on charge of "belonging to the secret Turkmen Nationalist Organization."

On 17 December 1948, he was rearrested on charge of "being a dangerous person" and exiled for life to the town of Bolshaya Murta on the Yenisey river north of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia.