Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and remade its laws, alphabet, and religious institutions.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman military officer who founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and spent the next fifteen years remaking the country from the top down. He replaced Islamic law with European legal codes, switched the alphabet from Arabic to Latin, ended the caliphate, banned the fez, and gave women the vote. Born around 1881 in Salonica, an Ottoman port city now called Thessaloniki in Greece, he trained in Ottoman military schools and earned his reputation at Gallipoli in 1915 by commanding the 19th Division that held off the Allied assault. He died on November 10, 1938, at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. In 1934 the Turkish parliament gave him the surname Atatürk, meaning "Father of the Turks." It is still a criminal offense to insult his memory in Turkey.
How Atatürk won Turkey's independence
By 1919 the Ottoman state had lost World War I, Allied troops occupied Istanbul, and Greek forces had come ashore at Smyrna (now İzmir) on the Aegean coast. The peace terms being written in Paris aimed to reduce the Turks to a small territory in central Anatolia.
Atatürk was one of the empire's few generals who came out of the war respected. He had stayed clear of the ruling party's wartime failures. In May 1919 the Ottoman government sent him to eastern Anatolia to disband the remaining soldiers. Instead of carrying out the order, he rallied them into a nationalist force. At assemblies in Erzurum and Sivas, he defined a simple goal: hold on to the Ottoman territories where Turks and Muslims were the majority, and let the Arab lands go.
A Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara in April 1920 and proclaimed itself the legitimate government of Turkey. Meanwhile the sultan's ministers in Istanbul, the Sublime Porte, signed the Treaty of Sèvres, accepting the partition. The nationalists refused.
The independence war was fought mainly against the Greek army. The turning point came along the Sakarya river in the summer of 1921, when the Greek advance on Ankara was stopped after weeks of fighting. In August 1922 the nationalist forces launched a general offensive that drove the Greeks back to Smyrna in two weeks. Much of the city burned in the aftermath, and the Christian inhabitants were killed or driven out.
In July 1923 the two sides signed the Treaty of Lausanne, which threw out Sèvres and confirmed Turkey's new frontiers. Under its terms, around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians living in Turkey were moved to Greece, and some 400,000 Muslims in Greece were moved to Turkey. Turkey became a republic in October 1923, with Ankara as its capital.
How Atatürk remade Turkish society
The reforms came fast. In March 1924 the national assembly ended the caliphate, an office that had claimed authority over Sunni Islam for four centuries. The vote happened in Ankara, far from the old imperial center in Istanbul. The news shocked Muslims across the world, from India to Egypt. The caliphate has not been restored.
Religious courts and religious schools were closed. In 1926 Turkey adopted the Swiss civil code, replacing Islamic family law. Polygamy was outlawed and women gained equal rights in divorce and inheritance. Turkish women could vote in national elections by 1934. French women could not until 1944.
In 1925 the fez was banned and brimmed hats were required. The fez had been Ottoman reform headgear less than a century earlier, introduced just before the Tanzimat reforms as a modern replacement for the turban. Now Atatürk declared it a symbol of the old order.
A Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script in 1928, imposed across the country within months. The shift left the next generation unable to read anything written before, including religious texts.
In 1934 a surname law ordered every Turkish citizen to choose a family name. The assembly gave Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, and no one else was allowed to use it.
The rule was single-party, with a controlled press. Revolts were crushed harshly. The Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, a Kurdish and religious uprising in the southeast, was put down and its leaders hanged. The Dersim operations of 1937-1938 killed thousands of Kurdish Alevis. Kurdish identity was denied official recognition in law, a policy that planted the roots of a conflict that continues today.
What does Atatürk mean?
Atatürk means "Father of the Turks" in Turkish. It was not a birth name. The Turkish parliament created it in 1934 after the Surname Law, which ordered every citizen to choose a family name. The assembly gave this name to the president alone, and the law forbids anyone else from using it.
Before 1934 he was known as Mustafa Kemal. The name Kemal, meaning "perfection," was given to him by his mathematics teacher at the military secondary school in Salonica.
Atatürk's legacy in Turkey today
Atatürk's portrait hangs in every Turkish classroom and government office. Law No. 5816, passed in 1951, makes it a crime to insult his memory, punishable by up to three years in prison. The law is still enforced.
The Turkish military treated the secular order as its responsibility. It intervened in politics four times between 1960 and 1997 to protect what Atatürk had built. But the country kept holding elections, and religious and conservative voters eventually won them. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has governed since 2002, reversing parts of his program. In 1934 Atatürk's government had turned Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum. In 2020 it was converted back into a mosque.
Atatürk built the Turkish state that exists today. Turkey still argues about which parts of his program to keep.