Fadıl Bey (1857-1938) was born in Selanik (Thessaloniki),today in Greece, where she completed his primary and secondary education before traveling to Istanbul, where he graduated from law school.

[1] The period of Azra Erhat’s birth was a time of upheaval, coinciding with the occupation of Constantinople by British, French, and Italian forces.

[2] Erhat received two years of primary education in Volksschule, Vienna, before her father's work necessitated another move, this time to Brussels, Belgium.

When Erhat's father died in 1932, Azra stayed in Brussels at a friend's home to complete high school while her family moved back to Istanbul.

In 1934 Azra entered the Istanbul University Faculty of Arts degree, where her most influential instructor was the Austrian romance philologist and prolific literary critic, Leo Spitzer.

On September 1, 1936, Erhat accepted the offer and transferred to the newly inaugurated Department of Classical Philology of the Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography at Ankara University.

In 1948, during a cleansing of left-leaning thinkers, Erhat and fellow faculty members, including Pertev Naili Boratav, Behice Boran, Adnan Cemgil (tr), and Niyazi Berkes, were dismissed from Ankara University.

From 1956 until her retirement in 1975, Erhat worked in the library of the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) Near and Middle East Center.

Drawn from Erhat’s distinctive humanism gained “from local values and bridges between Western cultures and Anatolian cultures,” her language and writing style “provides a simple and understandable epic text.” Enabling readers who are unable to read the original texts, Erhat’s translations, “which are not only linguistically but structurally and formally successful, also carry the Anatolian identity that the translator cares about and reflect the epicenter of the land they belong to.”[9] In the Introduction to Azra Erhat’s book, İşte İnsan (Ecce Homo), Azra writes: (Turkish):[10] Büyük tuttum bu işi: dört yıllık düşüncemi, yaşantımı bir kitaba sığdırmak isterdim.

Özgürlük, mutluluk, insancılık... Sorunlar, saçları altın tellerle örülmüş öcüler gibi çekti sürükledi beni oradan oraya.

Convincing his closest friends and fellow members of the Turkish intelligentsia of the unspoiled beauties of the shoreline and rural environment of Bodrum, authors Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, Azra Erhat, and others soon joined Cevat, who had renamed himself Halikarnas Balıkçısı (the Fisherman of Halicarnassus).

[13] Finding herself immersed in a lush natural landscape seemingly unchanged since antiquity, Erhat viewed her surroundings as “the scenes of historical and mythological events.” Expressing her strong belief that Anatolia gave birth to Western civilization, Erhat charmed her companions (and soon her readers) with detailed discussions from Classical Literature on Halicarnassus, Troy, Pergamum, Ephesus, and other famous Anatolian sites of Ancient Greece.

[18][19] Enduring until the end of their lives, the relationship between Azra Erhat and the Fisherman of Halicarnassus (Turkish: Halikarnas Balıkçısı) blossomed into a love story regularly nourished by Blue Cruises when they were together and thousands of letters written to each other when they were apart.