Ataturk Dies: Father of Modern Turkey Mourned

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had minimal formal military education beyond the War Academy in Istanbul, but he commanded the defense of Gallipoli in 1915, reorganized the shattered remnants of the Ottoman army after World War I, and carved a secular republic out of the ruins of a six-hundred-year-old empire. He died on November 10, 1938, at 57, from cirrhosis caused by decades of heavy drinking. The clocks in Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul were stopped at 9:05 a.m., the moment he died. Several remain stopped today. Born in Thessaloniki (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in 1881, he attended military schools and graduated from the War College in Istanbul. At Gallipoli in 1915, he repelled the British and ANZAC forces in a campaign that cost both sides hundreds of thousands of casualties and made his military reputation. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the war, the Allies occupied Istanbul and planned to partition Anatolia. Ataturk organized a nationalist resistance movement based in Ankara, fought a war of independence against Greek, Armenian, and French forces between 1919 and 1923, and negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the borders of modern Turkey. The Turkish Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923, with Ataturk as its first president. His reform program was the most rapid cultural transformation any country had attempted. He abolished the sultanate and then the caliphate, separating religion from the state. He replaced Islamic law with a civil code modeled on Switzerland's. He mandated the Latin alphabet for Turkish, replacing the Arabic script overnight and requiring the entire literate population to relearn how to read. He gave women the vote in 1934, before France. He banned the fez and encouraged Western dress. He adopted surnames, choosing "Ataturk," meaning "Father of the Turks," for himself. His reforms were imposed from above, often by force. They modernized Turkey's institutions but created tensions between secular and religious populations that persist a century later.