Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

• 1. Introduction

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  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk left behind a sentence that many Turks came to treat as his will: "My mortal body will turn into dust, but the Republic of Turkey will last forever." He was a field marshal and statesperson who founded that republic and served as its first president. Few figures are argued over as fiercely, and the argument has never settled into a single verdict. This documentary follows three questions. How did an officer of a collapsing empire end up building a nation? What did he try to change in the daily lives of ordinary people? And who was left outside the country he imagined?

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• 2. Names and Origins

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  In Salonica, then an Ottoman city, a boy named simply Mustafa was born to Ali Rıza Efendi and Zübeyde Hanım. His father worked as a military officer, a title deed clerk and a lumber trader. His mother was born in 1857 to a farming family in Langaza, west of Salonica. Only one of his siblings survived childhood, a sister named Makbule, who died in 1956.

  Schooling pulled the boy in different directions. His mother encouraged religious school, which he attended reluctantly and only briefly. His father then sent him to the Şemsi Efendi School, a private school with a more secular curriculum. When Mustafa was seven, his father died. His mother wanted him to learn a trade, but in 1893 he sat the entrance exam for the Salonica Military School on his own initiative. In 1896 he moved to the Monastir Military High School, where he excelled at mathematics. He enrolled at the Ottoman Military Academy in Constantinople on the 14th of March 1899 and graduated in 1902. On the 11th of January 1905 he graduated from the Ottoman Military College.

  The second name, Kemal, means perfection or maturity in Arabic, and nobody is sure where it came from. One account says a mathematics teacher gave it to him in admiration of his capability and maturity. Another says the teacher, who was also named Mustafa, wanted a way to tell the two apart. The biographer Andrew Mango suggests the young man may have chosen it himself, as a tribute to the nationalist poet Namık Kemal.

  The Turkish Parliament granted him the surname Atatürk in 1934. It means "Father of the Turks" or "Turk like his ancestors", and it derives from the title Atabey in Turkic history. He then appeared as Kemal Atatürk, and the given name Mustafa disappeared altogether. From 1935 to 1937 he also used the Old Turkic name Kamâl, which can mean fortification, fortress, army or shield.

  Claims about his ancestry are strikingly varied. Mango describes the family as Muslim, Turkish-speaking and precariously middle-class. Authors including H. C. Armstrong and Norman Itzkowitz trace his father's line to Söke, in Aydın Province of Anatolia. Others think Ali Rıza was of Albanian or Slavic origin, and the Torbeš community claims descent from Muslim Slavs. His mother is variously described as Turkish, Yörük, Albanian or Macedonian. Salonica was home to Muslims, Greeks, Bulgarians and a large Jewish community. Opponents angered by his later reforms took advantage of that mix and claimed he had Jewish Dönme ancestors.

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• 3. A Soldier's Wars

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  The police arrested him soon after graduation over his activities against the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Several months of confinement ended only with the support of Rıza Pasha, his former school director. He was then posted to the Fifth Army in Damascus as a Staff Captain, alongside Ali Fuat (Cebesoy) and Lütfi Müfit (Özdeş). There he joined Vatan ve Hürriyet, meaning Motherland and Liberty, a small secret society of reformist officers led by a merchant named Mustafa Elvan (Cantekin).

  He joined the Committee of Union and Progress as member number 322, though he later became known for opposing and frequently criticising its leadership. He proposed taking politics out of the army, which the CUP leaders disliked. Late in 1908 they sent him to Tripolitania, in present-day Libya, to suppress a tribal rebellion. According to Mikush, he volunteered. He put down the revolt and returned to Constantinople in January 1909. That April, soldiers staged a counter-revolution known as the 31st of March Incident. He was instrumental in suppressing it and in deposing Abdul Hamid II.

  In 1911 he volunteered to fight the invading Italians in Libya, mostly around Derna and Tobruk. The odds were grim. An Italian army of 150,000 men faced about 20,000 Bedouins and 8,000 Turks. Many Ottoman troops had been sent to Yemen just before Italy declared war. Britain, which controlled Egypt, refused to let reinforcements cross it. Officers like Mustafa Kemal reached Libya dressed as Arabs, or aboard the few available ferries. His forces still repelled the Italians several times, including at Tobruk on the 22nd of December 1911.

  On the 16th and the 17th of January 1912, he was assaulting the Italian-held fortress of Kasr-ı Harun at Derna when two Italian planes bombed the Ottoman forces. A limestone splinter from damaged rubble struck his left eye. The tissue damage was permanent, though he did not lose his sight entirely. He tried to leave the Red Crescent medical facility after two weeks, but the eye worsened and he had to go back. On the 6th of March 1912 he became commander of the Ottoman forces in Derna. He held the city and its region until the war ended on the 18th of October 1912, ten days after the Balkan Wars began.

  On the 1st of December 1912 he reached a new headquarters on the Gallipoli peninsula. During the First Balkan War he joined the amphibious landing at Bulair under Fethi Bey, which Bulgarian forces repulsed. In June 1913 he fought in the Ottoman force that recovered Dimetoka and Edirne from the Bulgarians. Edirne carried huge weight for Turks, because it had served as the Ottoman capital between 1365 and 1453.

  In 1913 he was posted to Sofia as military attaché to all the Balkan states. At a New Year's Eve ball there he met Dimitrina Kovacheva, daughter of General Stiliyan Kovachev, whose forces he had fought. She had recently finished her education in Switzerland. They danced, then began dating in secret. He twice asked her parents for permission to marry, the second time in 1915, and twice they refused. It left him with a lifelong sadness.

  The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in 1914 beside the Central Powers. Mustafa Kemal thought the decision a fatal mistake. He had little respect for his old classmate Enver Pasha, the War Minister who steered the empire into the war after rising from a junior colonelcy. He found a patron in Cemal Pasha instead. At Gallipoli he organised and commanded the 19th Division, attached to the Fifth Army. He became the front-line commander after correctly anticipating where the Allies would attack, and he held his position until they retreated.

  In the Caucasus, a massive Russian offensive had reached key Anatolian cities. On the 7th of August he rallied his troops and counterattacked, and two of his divisions captured Bitlis and Muş. The CUP government then proposed putting him in charge of a new Hejaz Expeditionary Force. He refused, and the army was never formed. On the 7th of March 1917 he took command of the Second Army, and that August he took over the Seventh Army from Fevzi Pasha.

  The Seventh Army served under the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, with whom Mustafa Kemal did not get along. With İsmet Bey he wrote to Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha about the grim shortage of resources on the Palestinian front. They urged a stronger defensive line farther north, in Ottoman Syria, commanded by Turks rather than Germans. Talaat ignored them, and Mustafa Kemal resigned and went back to Constantinople.

  There he was told to accompany the crown prince Mehmed Vahideddin on a train trip to Austria-Hungary and Germany. On the Western Front he inspected the German lines and decided the Central Powers would soon lose. He said so to Kaiser Wilhelm II and his senior generals in person. After Mehmed VI Vahideddin became sultan in July 1918, Mustafa Kemal was sent back to the Seventh Army in Palestine. The Battle of Megiddo began on the 19th of September. The Eighth Army collapsed on the coast, and British bombers destroyed the Seventh Army as it retreated from Nablus on the 21st of September 1918. He still managed to form a defence line north of Aleppo. According to Lord Kinross, he was the only Turkish general of the war who never suffered a defeat.

  The Armistice of Mudros was signed on the 30th of October 1918. On the 13th of November he returned to an occupied Constantinople, where the Allies were dividing up the empire around him.

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• 4. Defiance in Anatolia

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  By December 1918, leaders of the underground CUP resistance group Karakol had approached him to lead a movement against the Allies. The historian Erik-Jan Zürcher argued that he suited the role because he was "trusted as a Unionist CUP member and a patriot but not too closely involved either with the ruling clique of Enver and Talaat or the Armenian massacres".

  On the 30th of April 1919 he was named inspector of the Ninth Army Troops Inspectorate, with orders to reorganise leftover Ottoman units and improve security. In practice the post made him a plenipotentiary of Anatolia, responsible for all civil and military personnel there. He reached Samsun on the 19th of May 1919. In June he issued the Amasya Circular, declaring the country's independence in danger. He resigned from the Ottoman Army on the 8th of July, and the government in Constantinople issued a warrant for his arrest. Kâzım Karabekir and other commanders in Eastern Anatolia nonetheless followed his lead.

  A congress he assembled at Sivas on the 4th of September 1919 produced the Misak-ı Millî, or National Pact. The congress made him head of its executive committee, which gave him the legitimacy he needed. Governors and commanders pledged loyalty to his Committee of Representation, and those who refused were overthrown by nationalist agents. In December 1919 the last Ottoman parliamentary election gave a sweeping majority to the Association for Defence of Rights for Anatolia and Roumelia, which he headed. He stayed in Angora, now known as Ankara.

  British forces dissolved the parliament in Constantinople on the 18th of March 1920, shortly after it adopted the National Pact, as the Allies occupied the city. Mustafa Kemal called a fresh election for a new parliament in Angora. The Grand National Assembly opened on the 23rd of April 1920 with him as speaker, which left the country with two rival governments. In May 1920 Ottoman courts-martial sentenced him to death in absentia, along with Halide Edib (Adıvar) and Ali Fuat (Cebesoy).

  On the 10th of August 1920, Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha signed the Treaty of Sèvres, finalising the partition of the Ottoman Empire. It included regions that Turkish nationals regarded as their heartland. Mustafa Kemal insisted on complete independence and persuaded the Assembly to raise a National Army. It had to fight Armenian forces in the east and Greek forces advancing from Smyrna, which they had occupied in May 1919. A steady flow of gold and weapons from the Russian Bolshevik government, beginning in the autumn of 1920, made the army's successes possible.

  The Greek army advanced as far as the Sakarya River, just eighty kilometers west of Ankara. On the 5th of August 1921 the Assembly promoted him to commander in chief. The Battle of the Sakarya, fought from the 23rd of August to the 13th of September 1921, ended in a Greek defeat. On the 19th of September the Assembly gave him the rank of Mareşal and the title of Gazi. The Allies hoped to impose a modified Treaty of Sèvres on Angora, but the proposal was rejected. In August 1922 he launched an all-out attack on the Greek lines at Afyonkarahisar, the Battle of Dumlupınar, and Turkish forces regained İzmir on the 9th of September 1922. The next day he telegraphed the League of Nations that the Turkish population was so worked up that the Ankara government would not be responsible for the ensuing massacres.

  The Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922. The Conference of Lausanne opened on the 21st of November 1922, with İsmet İnönü representing the Assembly. Turkey refused any proposal that would compromise its sovereignty, such as control of its finances, the Capitulations or the Straits. The conference paused on the 4th of February and resumed after the 23rd of April, focusing mainly on economic issues. The Treaty of Lausanne was signed on the 24th of July 1923, recognising the Assembly as the government of Turkey. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on the 29th of October 1923, and Republic Day is still a national holiday.

  The new president then placed Fevzi Çakmak, Kâzım Özalp and İsmet İnönü in political positions where they could carry out his reforms.

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• 5. A Secular State

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  "We are returning to the days of the first caliphs." That was the cheer that greeted the new republic, and it showed how little the public knew about his intentions. The revolutionaries turned their backs on what they saw as the corruption and decadence of cosmopolitan Constantinople. They made Ankara, a provincial town deep in Anatolia, the capital. The new government studied the institutions and constitutions of France, Sweden, Italy and Switzerland and adapted them to Turkish needs.

  Many of the reformist ideas were not new. They had been common in Ottoman intellectual circles at the turn of the 20th century, and they were voiced more openly after the Young Turk Revolution. Mustafa Kemal designed a banner in which each change from Ottoman to republican rule was an arrow. The result is known as the Six Arrows, or Kemalism. Its fundamentals of nationalism, populism and statism were not new to Turkey's elite either. What made them unique was that they were formulated explicitly for Turkey's needs. The Kemalist definition of secularism, for example, differed sharply from the version found in predominantly Christian states.

  The sultanate was gone, but a caliph remained. Abdülmecid II had been elected after the sultanate fell, and he kept his own treasury and a personal service that included military personnel. Mustafa Kemal said there was no religious or political justification for this. He and İnönü feared the arrangement nourished hopes that the sovereign would return in the guise of caliph. İnönü, Çakmak and Özalp consented to abolition on the 1st of January 1924. The caliphate was officially abolished on the 3rd of March 1924, and its powers within Turkey passed to the Grand National Assembly. Sharia courts were abolished on the 8th of April 1924.

  Other Muslim nations debated whether to accept the unilateral move. A Caliphate Conference in Cairo in May 1926 declared the caliphate "a necessity in Islam" but could not carry out its decision. Further conferences in Mecca in 1926 and Jerusalem in 1931 reached no consensus. Turkey refused to accept a revived caliphate and saw the idea as an attack on its very existence.

  In 1925 he appeared in Kastamonu, one of the most conservative towns in Anatolia, wearing a Panama hat. He used the moment to argue that the hat was the headgear of civilised nations. The fez had been introduced by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826 as part of Ottoman modernisation, and the Hat Law of 1925 replaced it with Western-style hats. He first made the hat compulsory for civil servants, and many adopted it willingly. A later law of 1934 on prohibited garments pushed Western suits, ties, fedoras and derbies in place of religion-based clothing.

  He was careful with women's dress. The law never referred to women's clothing, because he believed women would adapt of their own free will. His wife Lâtife Uşaklıgil, who was often photographed beside him on public business, covered her head in the Islamic tradition. Yet he said that the real role models for future Turkish women were his adopted daughters, Sabiha Gökçen and Afet İnan.

  A decree of the 2nd of September 1925 closed all Sufi orders, along with their tekkes and other religious lodges. Some lodges were converted to museums, such as the Mevlana Museum in Konya. Religious bodies could continue only as politically neutral social associations.

  The Turkish penal code, modelled on the Italian one, passed on the 1st of March 1926. The new civil code, modelled on the Swiss one, followed on the 4th of October 1926. For the first time, Islamic law was separated from secular law and confined to matters of religion. Under the civil code, women gained equality with men in inheritance and divorce. He argued it was scientifically impossible for Turkey to progress while Ottoman gender separation persisted. He delayed writing the principle of laïcité into the constitution until the 5th of February 1937. On the 5th of December 1934, Turkey granted women full political rights. The 1935 elections sent 18 women to a parliament of 395 members. That same year the British House of Commons had nine women among 615 members, and the US House of Representatives had six among 435.

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• 6. Alphabet and Classrooms

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  "We shall do it in three to five months." Mustafa Kemal is said to have scoffed these words in the spring of 1928, when linguists and professors he had gathered in Ankara estimated that a new alphabet would take three to five years. Literacy stood at as little as 10% of the population. The American educator John Dewey, whom Mustafa Kemal had invited to advise on schools, found that learning to read and write Turkish in the Arabic script took roughly three years. The proposed Latin-based alphabet could be learned in a few months.

  The Language Commission created the alphabet at his initiative. On the 1st of November 1928 he introduced it and abolished the Arabic script. The first Turkish newspaper printed in the new letters appeared on the 15th of December 1928. He travelled the countryside himself to teach citizens the new alphabet. The literacy rate more than doubled, from 10.6% in 1927 to 22.4% in 1940. Congresses, mobile libraries and a new copyright law supported the effort.

  In 1923 Turkey had three main kinds of schools. The most common were medreses, built on Arabic, the Qur'an and memorisation. Next came the idadî and sultanî schools, the reformist institutions of the Tanzimat era. Last were colleges and minority schools that taught in foreign languages. The Law on Unification of Education, number 430, took effect on the 3rd of March 1924. Every school had to submit its curriculum to a new Ministry of National Education. The clergy were made subordinate to a department of religious affairs. Religious schools were pushed up into higher education, and later governments restored them to secondary level after his death.

  Dewey came in the summer of 1924 and later wrote a report with recommendations for the Turkish system. He also took an interest in adult education. Turkish women were taught child care, dress-making and household management, along with skills for working outside the home. Coeducation arrived at university level in 1923-24 and became the norm across the system by 1927. Between 1923 and 1938, primary school enrolment rose by 224%, from 342,000 to 765,000. Middle school enrolment grew about 12.5 times, from around 6,000 to 74,000. High school enrolment grew almost 17 times, from 1,200 to 21,000.

  Mustafa Kemal took a personal hand in two textbooks. The first, Vatandaş İçin Medeni Bilgiler, published in 1930, explained comparative government and the rules of governance for the new state institutions. The second, Geometri, appeared in 1937 and introduced many of the geometry terms Turkey still uses. He founded the Turkish Education Association on the 1st of January 1928 to support talented children in financial need. In 1931 he established the Turkish Language Association and the Turkish Historical Society. In 1933 he ordered Istanbul University reorganised as a modern institution, and he later established Ankara University.

  His language work took a strange turn with the Sun Language Theory. It proposed that all human languages descended from a single Central Asian primal language. He introduced it into Turkish political and educational circles in 1935, though he later corrected its more extreme practices.

  Religion entered the classroom in another way. In 1924 three Turkish translations of the Qur'an were published in Istanbul, and public readings caused significant controversy. With his support, Parliament approved an official project. The Directorate of Religious Affairs appointed Mehmet Akif (Ersoy) to compose a translation and the scholar Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır to write a commentary titled Hak Dini Kur'an Dili. The version of Yazır's work read in public reached print only in 1935. In 1932 he explained that he wanted to "teach religion in Turkish to Turkish people who had been practising Islam without understanding it for centuries."

  The arts were drawn into the same effort. In 1927 the State Art and Sculpture Museum opened in Ankara, highlighting a form rarely practised because of the Islamic tradition of avoiding idolatry. He named banks after ancient peoples, Sümerbank in 1932 and Etibank in 1935. From 1932, hundreds of People's Houses and People's Rooms offered arts, sports and cultural events across the country. In 1934 he commissioned the first Turkish operatic work, Özsoy, composed by Adnan Saygun and performed by the soprano Semiha Berksoy at the People's House in Ankara.

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• 7. Limits of Dissent

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  The vote on the 8th of November 1924 went 148-18 in his favour, with 41 members absent. It began as a censure motion against him, and it turned into a confidence vote within his own party. Before it, so many deputies had been denounced as opposition sympathisers at a private party meeting that he said he feared being in the minority in his own party. He chose not to purge them. Afterwards he said that the Turkish nation was firmly determined to advance fearlessly on the path of the republic, civilization and progress.

  The only party in the Assembly was the People's Party, which he founded on the 9th of September 1923. It was renamed the Republican People's Party on the 10th of November 1924. Kâzım Karabekir and his friends had formed a breakaway group on the 17th of October 1924. On the 17th of November it became the Progressive Republican Party, with 29 deputies, and the first multi-party system began. Rauf Bey, Refet Pasha and Ali Fuat Pasha, early supporters from the War of Independence, were among its members. The new party favoured liberalism in economics and conservatism in social life, in contrast to the statism and modernism of the ruling party.

  In 1924, as the Mosul question was on the table, Sheikh Said began organising a rebellion. He was a wealthy Kurdish tribal chief of a local Naqshbandi order in Diyarbakır. He opposed the abolition of the caliphate, Western-style civil codes, the closure of religious orders, the ban on polygamy and obligatory civil marriage. His forces seized government offices and marched on Elazığ and Diyarbakır. Officials saw a counter-revolution in the making. With Mustafa Kemal's support, İsmet İnönü replaced Ali Fethi Okyar as acting prime minister. On the 3rd of March 1925 İnönü invoked the Law for the Maintenance of Order, which gave the government exceptional powers, including the authority to shut down subversive groups. The law was repealed in March 1927. A one-party regime was established de facto in 1925, after the adoption of the 1924 constitution.

  A plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal was uncovered in Smyrna in 1926. It originated with a former deputy who had opposed abolishing the caliphate. A narrow inquiry became a sweeping investigation, which in truth served to undermine opponents of his cultural reforms. Karabekir, the leader of the Progressive Republican Party, was brought before the tribunal. Surviving CUP leaders Mehmet Cavid, Ahmed Şükrü and İsmail Canbulat were found guilty of treason and hanged. The investigation also found a link between party members and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, and the party was dissolved. The pattern of organised opposition was broken. It remained the only broad political purge of his presidency.

  He rejected both fascism and communism, and he kept the totalitarian party rule found in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy out of Turkey. Some saw this as a way of removing competition. Others believed it protected a young state from unstable ideologies and competing factions. The arrests known as the 1927 Detentions targeted members of the Communist Party of Turkey. Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Nâzım Hikmet and Şefik Hüsnü were tried and sentenced to prison. In 1937 a delegation headed by Mustafa Kemal decided to censor Kıvılcımlı's writings as harmful communist propaganda.

  On the 11th of August 1930 he tried a multiparty experiment again and asked Fethi Okyar to found a new party, insisting that it protect the secular reforms. The Liberal Republican Party succeeded around the country. Without a real political spectrum, however, it became the center of opposition to his reforms, especially over the role of religion in public life. On the 23rd of December 1930, Islamic fundamentalists rebelled in Menemen, a small Aegean town. The Menemen Incident came to be seen as a serious threat to the secular reforms, and Okyar dissolved his own party.

  Mango answered critics of the single-party system this way: "Mustafa Kemal's enlightened authoritarianism left a reasonable space for free private lives. More could not have been expected in his lifetime." Pluralism failed in this period, in part because the country's groups had not agreed on a minimum of shared values, mainly secularism. A more lasting multi-party period began in 1945, and in 1950 the CHP ceded its majority to the Democratic Party.

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• 8. The Cost of Nationhood

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  "Citizen speak Turkish!" was a campaign launched in the 1930s by law students and sponsored by the government. It pressured non-Turkish speakers to use Turkish in public. In practice it went beyond encouragement and amounted to outright prevention of any other language. The campaign belonged to a wider Turkification policy, which sought a homogeneous, unified and above all secular nation under the Turkish banner.

  The Surname Law obliged Turks to adopt fixed, hereditary surnames and forbade names with connotations of foreign cultures, nations, tribes or religions. Many ethnic Armenians, Greeks and Kurds changed their names as a result. Endings such as "yan" and "poulos" could not be registered, and "-oğlu" was substituted. A parallel programme replaced non-Turkish place names with Turkish ones. The names it targeted were usually of Armenian, Greek, Laz, Bulgarian, Kurdish, Assyrian or Arabic origin. The Resettlement Law of 1934 set out the basic principles of immigration, but some regard it as a policy of assimilating non-Turkish minorities through forced, collective resettlement.

  His own part in the Ottoman genocides has been debated. He belonged to the CUP, which initiated and carried out the Armenian genocide during the First World War, but he was not directly involved. Historians still dispute how critical or supportive he was. In speeches for domestic audiences, he presented Turks as innocent victims of horrific Armenian atrocities. By some accounts, he expressed disapproval of the events to foreign audiences.

  After the war, the nationalists relied on the support of genocide perpetrators and those who had profited from it. The return of Armenian survivors was seen as a mortal threat, and so it was made impossible. His followers were responsible for expelling or murdering many Christians from Anatolia. Turkish generals were ordered "to eliminate Armenia physically and politically". The Turkish army massacred nearly 100,000 Armenians in Transcaucasia, and another 100,000 fled Cilicia during the French withdrawal. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia outside Istanbul was largely complete by the end of this process. It was carried out through large-scale massacres, flight, expulsions and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

  After the republic's founding, CUP war criminals were granted immunity. The Treaty of Lausanne set Turkey's current borders and provided for the expulsion of the Greek population. Its protections for non-Muslim minorities had no enforcement mechanism and were disregarded in practice. Armenians who avoided deportation and lived outside the capital continued to face forced Islamisation and the kidnapping of girls after 1923. Expulsions to Syria continued until 1929.

  Supporters point to other achievements. The Kemalist government planted four million trees, modernised agriculture, built flood controls and opened rural schools and agricultural banks. A land reform lifted the heavy taxes that Ottoman rulers had placed on peasants, and he was called the "Father of Turkish Agriculture". Heavy industrial production rose by 150%, and GDP per capita climbed from 800 USD to around 2000 USD by the late 1930s. Abroad, he sought closer ties with Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Romania and Greece. He also helped create the Balkan Pact, which resisted the expansionist aggression of Italy and Bulgaria in the 1930s. Admirers praise his military record, his nation-building and his diplomacy, and see an inspiration for anti-colonial movements. Critics condemn him for instituting a dictatorship, for assimilationist policies that targeted minorities like the Kurds, and for continuing a persecution of Christian minorities begun by the CUP. Conservative Muslims have criticised his secular agenda.

  He died on the 10th of November 1938 at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, at the age of 57. His long-time prime minister, İsmet İnönü, succeeded him as president. The personality cult around him, and the Kemalist historiography that grew with it, still shape Turkey's political culture and the way the country tells its own story.

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