THE ETERNAL – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk : Father of all Turks

*By Anca DOCE

Today marks the 83rd anniversary of the passing away of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and its first president from 1923 until his death on November 10, 1938.

Gazi Mustafa is eternal, well rooted in the hearts of generations of Turks who bring him every year, at this time, the well-deserved homage. It is the day when time will stop in place for Turks, but also for all those who bear his admiration and want to pay homage not only to the creator of modern Turkey, but to one of the most prominent political leaders of the twentieth century. The Turkish nation thus commemorates Atatürk, through the sirens that are heard at exactly nine and five minutes, in Turkey, recalling the moment when he embarked on his eternal journey.

Young Mustafa

Atatürk was born in 1881 in Thessaloniki, then an important port of the Ottoman Empire, receiving the name Mustafa. His mother, Zübeyde Hanım, came from a farming community in western Thessaloniki, and his father, Ali Riza, had been a lieutenant in a local militia unit during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

When his father died, Mustafa was seven years old, but Ali Riza had a significant influence on the development of his son’s personality. Young Mustafa was enrolled in a secular school that was to prepare him for a bureaucratic career, but he fell in love with the uniforms worn by the military in his neighborhood. Wanting to pursue a military career, Mustafa took the entrance exam to the military high school where he later had outstanding learning results, receiving the nickname Kemal – “The Perfect One”, from his math teacher. In 1895 he began his studies at the Military School in Monastir (now Bitola, Northern Macedonia), there he met and became friends with Ali Fethi (Okyar), who later joined him in the creation and development of the Republic of Turkey. After graduating from the Monastery, Mustafa Kemal entered the Istanbul War College in March 1899, which he graduated in 1902 as a lieutenant.  He later attended the General Staff College, graduating in 1905, becoming one of the youngest officers in the empire.

Military career

The year 1911 marked a significant moment in Atatürk’s life, when he fought the Italians in Tripoli and won a decisive victory, proving his skills in the military field.

He distinguished himself by his outstanding services after the beginning of the Balkan Wars in 1912. In 1914, when he was a military attaché in Sofia, World War I began and alliances deployed soldiers in the Gallipoli Peninsula and the battle of Dardanelles (Canakkale) began. Mustafa Kemal fought against the British army in Damascus in 1918, and later in the Turkish War of Independence (1920-1923). With the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, the Ottoman Empire was history and the Republic of Turkey was born.

Republic of Turkey – Creation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Atatürk was no ordinary leader, so his memory is still alive in the hearts of his people today. After Mustafa Kemal led the Turkish people to gain the independence of the state under the occupation force stationed on the country, following the defeat suffered by the Ottoman Empire in 1919 and later established the Turkish Republic in 1923, Atatürk set in motion a real economic revolution, social, policy, cultural and religious.

Mustafa Kemal once the president of the state began reforming the country, with the aim of bringing it into the twentieth century, aligned with the western states.  Its main instrument was represented by the Republican People’s Party, formed on August 9, 192, and his program was embodied in the party’s “Six Arrows”: republicanism, nationalism, populism, etatism (state industrialization, meant to make Turkey self-sufficient as an industrialized state in the twentieth century) secularism and revolution.

The main changes to reform the nation were the disbandment of the Caliphate on March 3, 1924 (since the early sixteenth century, Ottoman sultans claimed the title of caliph of Muslims); religious schools were dismantled, and on April 8, the abolition of religious courts followed. In 1925, wearing the fez was banned, and the process of women’s emancipation was encouraged even by Mustafa Kemal’s marriage in 1923 to a woman educated in the West, Latife Hanım. In December 1934, women received the vote for parliamentary members and were eligible to hold parliamentary seats.

Almost overnight, the entire system of Islamic law was changed, and from February to June 1926, the Civil Code (Swiss model), the Penal Code (Italian model) and the Commercial Code (German model) were adopted. As a result, the emancipation of women was strengthened by the abolition of polygamy, marriage was made a civil contract, and divorce was recognized as civil action.

A reform of truly revolutionary proportions was the replacement of the Arabic alphabet – in which the Ottoman Turkish language had been written for centuries – with the Latin alphabet. This officially took place in November 1928, bringing Turkey on the path of one of the highest literacy rates in the entire Middle East.

Another important step was the adoption of family names, a law that was enacted in 1934, and the Assembly then gave Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”).

During his lifetime, Atatürk actively encouraged the admiration of his people for his achievements as a war hero and a Republican father. Moreover, he always stressed the fusion of his personal trajectory with the national one, arguing that the nation is both an extension and a reflection of his person. This is the true legacy left to the Turks in the form of Nutuk, his famous 36-and-a-half-hour speech.

After the transition to the eternal ones, on November 10, 1938, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk remained in the memory and heart of the Turks. As he himself stated in one of his speeches: “There are two Kemal Mustafa in me: one, myself, who will lose and disappear; the other, the one who embodies the nation and who will live forever through it! “, the father of all Turks even after decades of time, embodies the Turkish nation and knows eternal life through it.