Ataturk Born: Founder of Modern Turkey

Mustafa Kemal was born in Thessaloniki in 1881, when the city was still part of the Ottoman Empire. He attended military schools, graduated from the War Academy in Istanbul, and became one of the empire's most capable officers during the slow-motion collapse of Ottoman power in the early twentieth century. At Gallipoli in 1915, he commanded the Turkish forces that repelled the British and ANZAC landing at Chunuk Bair, one of the most critical engagements of the campaign. He told his soldiers: "I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places." They held. The campaign cost both sides hundreds of thousands of casualties and made Kemal a national hero. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the Allies occupied Istanbul and planned to partition Anatolia among Greece, Italy, France, and Armenia. Kemal organized a nationalist resistance based in Ankara and fought a war of independence from 1919 to 1923 against Greek, Armenian, and French forces. He won. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 established the borders of modern Turkey. He became the first president of the Turkish Republic and embarked on the most rapid cultural transformation any nation had attempted. He abolished the sultanate and then the caliphate. He replaced Islamic law with a civil code based on Switzerland's. He mandated the Latin alphabet for Turkish, replacing Arabic script overnight. He gave women the vote in 1934, before France. He banned the fez and encouraged Western dress. He established secular public education. He adopted surnames, choosing "Ataturk," meaning "Father of the Turks," for himself. His reforms were imposed from above, sometimes by force. They created a modern, secular state but also suppressed Kurdish identity and other minority cultures. The tension between secularism and religious conservatism that he embedded in Turkey's political DNA persists a century later. He died on November 10, 1938, at 57, of cirrhosis. The clocks in Dolmabahce Palace were stopped at 9:05 a.m. Some remain stopped today.