Ihsan Ahmet Bali

İhsan Bâli, who built a distinguished, wide-ranging life defined by hard work, humor and devotion to the people he loved, passed away on November 19, 2025 in his home in New York. Born in Istanbul, he spent his early years in Ankara attending the well-regarded Ankara College, where he completed primary, middle and high school. His father, Mehmet Fevzi Bâli, was the founding dean of the first law school of the Turkish republic, Ankara Law School. In İhsan’s childhood in Ankara, the family had a large home on campus complete with a private cook for the family. From an early age, İhsan developed an interest in cooking and a passion for eating, always in the kitchen observing and learning from professional cooks as well as from his mother, Leman (Koral) Bâli. He also loved story-telling, famously stretching out long cold walks home from school in frigid Ankara evenings to keep listening to stories told by the aunt who picked him and his younger brother, Ahmet, up after school. On one occasion, his habit of slow-walking resulted in a bad case of frost-bite on his ears. For the rest of his life, the thinned cartilage gave his ears a distinctive look that earned him many a nickname!

 

İhsan grew up in a tight-knit family with his younger brother Ahmet and his maternal cousins, Nevnihal, Neslihan and Latif, who lived nearby. As a student, he showed the discipline, curiosity and ambition that would shape much of his life. Initially considering becoming a lawyer and later imagining a future in architecture, he eventually opted for engineering (with some nudging from his father) after graduating from high school. He joined a generation of students in the first decades of the new Turkish republic who chose to dedicate themselves to the work of state-building. His career choice led him to the prestigious and highly competitive Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where he earned his degree in civil engineering in 1954, opening the door to a career in the emerging field of modern transportation engineering.

Shortly after graduating from ITU, he left Turkey for the United States to deepen his training. He first attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he completed a second B.S. in 1956, this time in transportation engineering. The one thing he longed for during his first experience abroad was the home cooking he had grown up with. Living in the “international house” at Berkeley in his first year in the U.S. he soon took charge of a communal kitchen, armed with recipes sent by his mother at his request. As a young man, he quickly learned the essentials of reproducing the beloved meals of his childhood and hosting friends and classmates for dinner parties. Those years abroad broadened his worldview and gave him a love of travel that stayed with him all his life. They also gave him access to cutting-edge research that was transforming infrastructure planning in the mid-twentieth century. But despite the opportunities the U.S. presented, he was committed to contributing his expertise to Turkey’s development, and he returned home eager to put his training to use. But before leaving the U.S. he and cousin Latif who had also come to the U.S. to study traveled in the West Coast working over the summers including at a cannery and a lumber yard where İhsan narrowly escaped losing at least one finger.

 

Building a career and building the infrastructure of the state

 

His early career took shape within two of the most important institutions responsible for Turkey’s rapidly expanding transportation network: the national Highway Authority and the Istanbul municipality. Over the first twelve years of his professional life, he worked alongside international specialists and senior officials in the Ministry of Housing and Development, focusing on the planning and construction of the land-transport system for Greater Istanbul. These were formative years not only for him, but for the city itself. Istanbul was entering a period of explosive population growth and urbanization, and the need for coherent, modern, long-horizon planning was acute. İhsan became part of the small cohort of engineers helping to guide that transformation. It was also during his early career that İhsan did his military service in the Turkish armed forces, which included serving as a “Frog Man” diving with the navy as well as putting his engineering expertise to use.

 

After twelve years of leading Istanbul transportation projects often together with multinational teams, his expertise and experience working with international engineers caught the attention of global firms. In 1968, he was invited to apply for a position with De Leuw Cather & Co., the respected American civil and transportation engineering consultancy that would later become part of the Parsons Corporation. Having fallen in love with a young woman already making her career with the United Nations in New York, İhsan had every reason to accept the opportunity to relocate to the U.S. He married Neylan Akra in September 1968 and began to build a new life together with her in New York, opening a second chapter in his career and personal life. He threw himself into the challenge of establishing himself as a seasoned professional in the U.S. with gusto, completing a second master’s degree while working full time, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University.

 

A second chapter in New York

 

Life in New York was full of new adventures. In leaving Istanbul, İhsan was determined that physical distance would not separate him from his son from his first marriage, Omer. Soon Omer was traveling to New York to visit his father in his new home. Within a couple of years of the move to the U.S., his small family grew with the arrival of his two daughters, Aslı and Elif. İhsan made a point of maintaining his family’s sense of identity and ties to Turkey in small and not-so-small ways. In their daily life, their home was filled with the smells of Turkish cooking, often drawing on recipes his mother had sent him when he first came to the U.S. as a graduate student. Their home became a central node of the small Turkish-American community in New York, made up of diplomats working at the Turkish consulate to the United Nations and professionals who had come to the U.S. to study and remained to develop their careers. This expatriate community provided a bridge between Istanbul and New York comprised of weekend dinner parties and children’s playdates that immersed his daughters in Turkish language and tradition even as they grew up abroad. There were also biennial visits to Turkey in the summers and when the family spent a summer in the U.S., Omer would sometimes join them on trips to discover new places from West Virginia horse farms to the monuments and museums of Washington, DC.

 

İhsan’s sense of Turkish identity sat alongside a deep appreciation for and love of the city that became his second home. He and Neylan made a point of enjoying all the best aspects of living in one of the great cities of the world. Their bookshelves had a special section reserved for a collection of hundreds of “Playbills” from all the Broadway shows they attended and a broad array of programs from concerts, ballets and operas at Lincoln Center. The couple’s shared love of music and theater extended to their daughters (and eventually their grandchildren), with many family excursions to see plays, musicals and concert events every year. At home, there was rarely a moment on the weekends when the sounds of classical music did not provide the steady backdrop to family life, whether from the radio, their extensive LP collection (played on their Bang & Olufsen turntable and sound system) or when Neylan or the girls would play on the family’s Steinway piano.  Asli and Elif fondly remember to this day WQXR playing on the car radio as İhsan drove them along the FDR Drive to their weekly swimming classes at the Vanderbilt YMCA in Manhattan during their school years. Even as he was an avid user of the buses traversing the City, İhsan was a man who loved to drive his family around Manhattan for any errand, including trips to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn periodically for fresh fish, Pathmark by the Brooklyn Bridge for weekly groceries, and to and from the U.N. to pick Neylan up from late nights working with the Security Council.

 

Family life and career kept İhsan very busy. While his wife advanced at the UN, İhsan successfully navigated the professional transition of re-establishing himself in the U.S. The combination of transportation engineering and operations research proved powerful; it positioned him to take on increasingly complex roles at the intersection of finance, design and long-term project planning at De Leuw Cather. His ascent in the company was steady and well earned. In 1978, he became responsible for the technical and financial oversight of all of the corporation’s projects in the greater New York area. The portfolio was wide: highway improvements, transit facilities, bridges, tunnels and other heavy-infrastructure projects essential to one of the world’s most demanding urban regions. Over the next eighteen years, he served as project director for numerous transportation systems and facilities across the United States and abroad, including several projects in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. His colleagues came to rely on his precision, his gift for time management, and his unflappable judgment—traits that would become an enduring part of his family’s stories about him. After twenty-eight years with the firm, he retired in 1996 with the title of Vice President and head of the New York office.

 

In the final ten years of his career, İhsan not only managed the demands of leading the busy New York office of a major engineering firm, but also held down the home front when Neylan was appointed the first woman to serve as Director of the Security Council Affairs at the UN. He was a devoted father and one who prioritized the value of education. After Omer finished high school at the prestigious Lycée Saint Joseph in Istanbul, he joined the family in the U.S. pursuing his undergraduate studies in business administration at Rutgers University. Both of İhsan’s daughters graduated high school from the United Nations International School in Manhattan and went on to college in fields that reflected their father’s passions. Aslı set out to become a lawyer and eventually earned a JD and PhD and become a law professor, following her paternal grandfather’s path. Elif went to Cornell to study hotel and restaurant administration, sharing her father’s delight in the culinary arts as well as his interest in the business-side of travel and accommodation. İhsan and Neylan instilled in their children the confidence that they could do anything they wanted and the discipline to work hard enough to realize their ambitions. While Neylan set a trailblazing example for her daughters of a woman excelling in a previously male dominated field, İhsan made sure that his confidence in his daughters’ potential was alive every day and delighted in a magnet in the kitchen that greeted the family every morning with the wisdom that “Let’s Face It, Women Are Smarter.” İhsan also made sure that his children knew to strive for a work-life balance, emphasizing the importance of quality time with family and friends and reminding them when they became too preoccupied with their studies or their professional lives of his evergreen advice: “Şişir şunu be!” (just get it done!).

 

A third chapter in retirement

 

Retirement for İhsan was not an end to his own career so much as a pivot to new horizons, a new education and an opportunity to pursue his dreams. For decades, İhsan had nurtured a passion for cooking. With work obligations finally behind him, he immersed himself fully. He enrolled at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now known as the Institute of Culinary Education) and at 65, graduated as the most mature chef to earn their certificate after completing an internship at the storied Water Club in Manhattan, where his daughter Elif had also worked years earlier. What followed was nearly thirty years of exuberant, generous cooking. His homes in New York and Istanbul became hubs of constant, joyful hospitality—dinners that stretched late into the evening, holiday feasts that combined French technique with Turkish haute cuisine, and quiet weekday meals that somehow felt celebratory simply because he had made them.

 

Family and friends still talk about his signature dishes, the precision of his knife work and the satisfaction he took in perfect flavor and presentation. Throughout their childhoods, his daughters, Aslı and Elif, had watched their father make elaborate traditional Turkish dishes whenever their parents threw dinner parties in New York. They knew their father was a great cook, but they never imagined he would become a professional-grade chef. His grandchildren, Eren, Kaan, Kaya and Ayla grew up taking for granted that their Dede was a chef, absorbing his sensibility and his love for food. When Kaan was born in 2010, İhsan and Neylan spent the next 10 years generously spending their Tuesdays to Thursdays with Kaan, then adding Kaya to the party in 2012. They would play games and sing songs with Anneanne and read books with Dede who would always end the evening making delicious dinners for the boys.  This routine included a Thursday dinner with grandkids and their parents first at İhsan and Neylan’s Manhattan apartment and then at Elif and Fred’s Brooklyn apartment. Later, when Aslı relocated to the east coast in 2020, their youngest grandchild, Ayla, was added to the mix with family dinners in Brooklyn shifting from weekday evenings to weekends with Aslı and Elif’s families around the dining table with İhsan and Neylan. In all of these dinners İhsan’s culinary mastery resulted in an amazing weekly feast. Kaan, in particular, has followed in his grandfather’s footsteps from a young age, becoming an eager sous-chef with all the makings of a future chef who will carry on his Dede’s legacy.

 

Retirement also gave İhsan and Neylan, the chance to travel widely. They embraced it together, whether on European river cruises, long-planned trips across the United States, or journeys to Alaska and Hawaii. There were also lighter adventures: a memorable “boys’ trip” to Florida’s theme parks with his brother, Ahmet, and cousin, Latif. Early stages of his daughters’ careers took them away from New York to Los Angeles in the case of Aslı and Chicago in the case of Elif, expanding the family’s geography for a time and providing more reason to travel as he and Neylan made a point of spending time with their daughters wherever they might be. Throughout these years Istanbul also remained a second home base, a place where the company of extended family and old friends filled İhsan and Neylan’s lives with meaning and connection. İhsan’s son Omer, and his family — wife, Zehra and son, Eren — were based in Istanbul so they were especially fortunate to enjoy more frequent and longer visits to Istanbul in İhsan’s retirement years. Eventually both daughters returned to the New York area so İhsan and Neylan could enjoy weekly family gatherings without having to travel during and after the pandemic years. 

 

İhsan’s life was full—professionally, personally, creatively—and much of its richness stemmed from qualities that defined him from the start. He had a mischievous wit, sharpened over time into a style of humor that could disarm tension or draw people closer with a single perfectly timed comment. He had aphorisms that became family lore. He was a man of deep loyalty: to friends from childhood, to colleagues he respected, to the family at the center of his life. And he had a mind that delighted in order—mapping, organizing, tracking details, making lists, mastering time. In fact, his handwriting can be likened to a typeface all its own, so precise and meticulously drawn was each letter. His many talents made him indispensable in his professional life, but they were just as present at home, where he orchestrated family logistics with an efficiency that was legendary.

 

His beloved wife of fifty-seven years, Neylan, predeceased him by seven months. He is survived by his children Omer, Aslı and Elif, their spouses Zehra, Tal and Fred, and by his grandchildren, Eren, Kaan, Kaya and Ayla, all of whom were shaped in one way or another by his affection, advice, and cooking.

 

Those who knew him will remember a man of principle and discipline, but also of delight and humor—a host, a storyteller, a music lover, a planner, a chef, a loving father and grandfather who built a vibrant life across continents and careers. He was the rock of the family and the life of the party, and he will be missed deeply by all who had the privilege of knowing and loving him.