"There are two Mustafa Kemals. One the flesh-and-blood Mustafa Kemal who now stands before you and who will pass away. The other is you, all of you here who will go to the far corners of our land to spread the ideals which must be defended with your lives if necessary. I stand for the nation's dreams, and my life's work is to make them come true."
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
(1881-1938)
Prologue
A week before my departure to Greece, in order to attend the course “Tracing back Europe: from Thesaloniki to Istanbul”, talking at one of my classes about nationalism and national identity in the 19th century, an intriguing dispute aroused towards a recent event that took place in our little town: the uncovering of a Mustafa Kemal Atatürk bust, a initiative of the local Turkish community. The intriguing part of this event was the decision of the local council to disassemble the statue of Mircea I (1386-1418), the Wallachian ruler, decision taken in the same time interval. The disassemble of Mircea’s statue, the legendary leader -who defeated the sultan Yildirim Beyazit I at Rovine, in 1394, and the symbol of the heroic struggle of the Romanian people against the ottomans - aroused a wave of protests within the local community. Now, the dispute was moving into my class and some of my students demanded explanations for this decision what, they said, was not a proof of tolerance but an example of humiliation.
Ataturk bust at Tulcea
I tried to explain that the initiative of the Turkish community had not a historical motivation and absolutely not a provocative but only a symbolic one. The entire dispute was in fact determined by the local authorities’ dumbness, since they didn’t explain that Mircea’s statue was disassembled because a better place was found for it. But this dispute gave me the chance to demonstrate how easily the mass opinion can be manipulated and how the mass manipulation was successfully used within the nationalist propaganda in the 20th century. Unfortunately, it was not enough time for another important question: who was in fact this “Turk” with a fancy bow called “Atatürk”? I promised to discuss this subject after my return and I’m very glad that I had the opportunity to study this topic particularly during our wanderings through Greece and Turkey.
Atatürk – the symbol
No one who visits Turkey can fail to miss the omnipresence of Atatürk. In every town, in every school, university, sports centre, post office, tax office, public and private buildings and institutions, banks, most offices, many shops, you will see pictures and busts of Atatürk. His face became shortly a familiar image: Atatürk young at cadet school in Thessaloniki with twirling moustaches; Atatürk in uniform; Atatürk with his adopted daughters or groups of women, unveiled, of course; Atatürk looking up, Atatürk looking down; a paunchy Atatürk a year or so before his death. You can find his smiling face in the shopping malls on magnets, bookmarks, paperweights, mirrors, calendars, cigarette cases, jewelry boxes.
Ataturk's statue at Bergama
Bank-notes carry his portrait, his statue is in every town and his sayings are regarded as sacrosanct. He may have died in 1938, but rather than fading into the background over the past seven decades, Atatürk has attained an omnipresent status that is rivalled by none. Atatürk passed the borders between reality and legend; he has become a mythical figure, the civilisator hero, a living icon.
Atatürk – the hero
The hero is a charismatic figure of action who emerges inexorably in response to cataclysmic events, dominates the moment by the force of his personality, channels the course of developments through his vision and personal power, and achieves a lasting impact. In this sense, the hero is, at once, mythic and god-like, the chosen instrument of history and the creative power that re-shapes it, the symbol of the age and its giant stride into the future. There are crucial moments in history when nations are borne and dispersed peoples are gathering together around an ideal or a man who represents the aspirations of his nation.
Atatürk is a testament to all of these concepts. By personality and achievement, he stands “transcendent and preternatural” as a compelling product of his nation and time. As he often articulated it, his leadership did represent the will and the aspirations of a nation which rightfully took pride in its heroes and historical grandeur.
It’s an amazing thing that the man who struggled so much to give his people an identity became the spine of this identity! In the chaos of the First World War and shortly after, Atatürk was the man who gave a meaning to the word Turk. Often in history the nations gave birth to great men, in our case a man gave birth to a nation!
Ataturk statue in Bursa
Emerging as a military hero at the Dardanelles in 1915, he became the charismatic leader of the Turkish national liberation struggle in 1919. He blazed across the world scene in the early 1920s as a triumphant commander who crushed the invaders of his country. Following a series of impressive victories against all odds, he led his nation to full independence (it’s an interesting thing that Turkey had its own independence war when you think that the most important moments of the Balkans states’ modern history, including Romania, are the independence wars against the Turks….).
Being in Turkey for the first time, I expected to see everywhere monuments celebrating the Ottoman great victories. It was a surprise to find the sultans in a quiet mausoleum in Bursa, when the statues celebrating Atatürk’s victories could be seen everywhere. The victories of Gallipoli, Sakarya and Dumlupinar seem to be more important and have a stronger echo than the victories of Nikopolis, Belgrad or Mohacz. The history of Turkey starts at Sakarya and Dumlupinar and the history of the Turkish nation starts with Atatürk. The Ottoman sultans created a state without a nation; Atatürk created a nation and gave it a state.
Ataturk's statue in Istanbul
It was not easy to make a nation out of the amalgam of peoples who lived within Turkey's borders. The process of making the nation was intimately connected with the modernizing of the Turkish nation: the campaign against "Oriental dress," for example, was concerned just as much with homogenizing, with getting rid of regional distinctions, as it was with Westernizing. A kind of Turkish Anatolian nationalism was invented, substituting the compact geographical identity of modern Turkey for the diffuse cultural-imperial thing that Ottoman civilization had been.
As the national struggle ended, the heroic leader proclaimed: “Following the military triumph we accomplished by bayonets, weapons and blood, we shall strive to win victories in such fields as culture, scholarship, science, and economics”, adding that “the enduring benefits of victories depend only on the existence of an army of education.”
Ataturk - the legendary hero
It was in 1923 that "the hero of the Turks" created a republic out of an antiquated empire. From 1923 to his death on 10 November 1038, in just 15 years, he introduced sweeping reforms to modernize the nation: the Arabic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet; government and education were separated from religion; the legal system was overhauled on the basis of European models; women were given equal rights under the law; hats replaced the traditional headgear and women were discouraged from wearing the veil. A vast transformation took place especially in urban life: Turkey's cultural life embraced many aspects of Western civilization, technology and the arts, including opera, ballet, and sculpture. Schools and universities, too, became westernized. In 1934, when the surname law was adopted, the national parliament gave him the name “Atatürk” (Father of the Turks).
Atatürk – the man
As all the mythical figures, Atatürk’s legend surpasses entirely his real life. It’s hard to think that Atatürk was also a human being, with all his strengths and weaknesses. But when you try to see beyond the veil of mystery surrounding his life, you realize that it’s not an easy task.
No taboo is greater in Turkey than the inviolability surrounding Atatürk. There is still a law on the books that protects his memory from insult. He has been designated as the Eternal Leader of the Nation. The National Assembly passed a law restricting the use of this surname to “the person of the Gazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha” (The title Gazi originally meant a warrior on behalf of Islam, and was given by the Ottoman sultans to generals-then still called Pashas-for outstanding exploits).
Not surprisingly for a man with such godlike credentials, the details of Atatürk’s personal life have always been strictly off-limits. The official biography let us know that Atatürk “enjoyed reading, listening to music, dancing, horseback riding and swimming very much. He had an extreme interest in the Zeybek (Western Anatolian) folk dances, the Rumeli (Balkan Peninsula) folk songs and wrestling. He enjoyed playing backgammon and billiards. He put great value on his horse named Sakarya and his dog Fox. He built up a rich library. He invited statesmen, scientists and artists to dinners and debated the current issues of the country with them. He paid great attention to his appearance. He loved nature very much. He frequently went to the Atatürk Forest Farm and personally participated in the activities”.
Ataturk's bust in Konurlar
But very little is known of his existence outside the public arena; the very idea of delving into his romantic life is considered akin to sacrilege.
He was a man who had spent long years of his life in the battlefield; a very lonely man, in fact, despite all the masses adoring him. He had a variety of brief liaisons with women in his youth enjoyed the drinking tables with his friends. His marriage to Latife, a 24-year-old from a prominent family in Izmir was brief. In his book “Atatürk. The biography of the founder of the modern Turkey”, Andrew Mango describes her as “an ambitious young woman” with a “pretty face and attractive brown hair” and “a strong will”. She had studied Law at Sorbonne, she spoke a number of Western languages, in fact, she worked as a translator, a personal assistant for Atatürk After the broken marriage, Atatürk adopted his daughters Afet (İnan), Sabiha (Gökçen), who later became the first female combat pilot in the world, Fikriye, Ülkü, Nebile, Rukiye, Zehra and his son Mustafa. Additionally, he had two children under his protection, Abdurrahim and İhsan.
We do not know the real reasons why Kemal decided abruptly to divorce Latife after only two years of marriage. Maybe this strong will cultivated woman was a “hard nut” for him, for sure there were clashes between two obstinate personalities. Latife's diaries and other papers were for years judged so potentially explosive that they were kept under lock and key in a sealed vault by the Turkish History Institution for 25 years. Her family subsequently refused to make the vault's contents public out of respect, they said, for Atatürk.
Another interesting detail what gives a clue about the silence around Atatürk's private life is the fact that since the 1950’s attempts to make a film based on Atatürk's life have been on the agenda but they have not yielded any fruit. It is not hard to understand the reason why such a film was never realized: Turkey would never like to see its founding father, which it sees as a holy person, be portrayed as a person with human weaknesses. Atatürk's military personality is indisputable. But just as his charismatic pose in military uniform, his poses in a swimming trunk at the seashore, or swinging with childish joy are also equally effective. However, while the state supports Atatürk's military aspects in the projects it has supported up until today, it has overlooked an image of Atatürk that had good relations with women or enjoyed drinking and chatting with his colleaguesOf course, the interest for piquant details is more an occidental inquisitiveness and the “mystery” beyond Atatürk’s “real life” doesn’t seem to irritate the Turks. Private life could make a common person from a hero and the Turks do not need this. They need the image of a great leader and a hero, a unifying symbol and no more.
Atatürk's legacy – the kemalism
On November 10, 1938, following an illness of a few months, the national liberator and the Father of modern Turkey died. Many decades after his emergence, he stands as a transcendent and triumphant figure. His ideology - first known as “Kemalism”, later as “Ataturkism” - remains the fundamental doctrine of his Turkish Republic. Its basic principles stress the republican form of government representing the power of electorate, secular administration, nationalism, mixed economy with state participation in many of the vital sectors, and modernization.
Ataturk's bust in Thessaloniki
(Ataturk's memorial house)
But the kemalism is not only political ideology, as you may be tended to think, but also a way of life. And this not only for the people of Turkey but for the Turks living outside the Turkey borders, too. I spoke about this subject during the course with Fahri Mintes (our host for the Turkish part of the seminar), a 43 years old man who has been living in Netherlands for 33 year but who call himself a kemalist.
Kemalism, for Fahri, is synonym with progress and modernization, “the willing to learn from others, to perform and became better than them.” Studying, observing, analyzing and performing are the ways of a kemalist life. A kemalist is focused on progress and he doesn’t stumble over any obstacle in reaching his goals, neither tradition nor religious beliefs. Traditions are nice to remember and the faith is in your soul. A kemalist is open minded and open to outside, he knows only two verbs: to will and to do.
And Fahri demonstrated us very well, during the time spent in Turkey, the meaning of these two verbs.
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Beside the legend and the mystery, more important is the essentially hopeful message that Atatürk left his people: “East and West can meet on the ground of universal secular values and mutual respect, that nationalism is compatible with peace, that human reason is the only true guide in life.” This is a fundamental message for all those interested in understanding such important issues as resurgent nationalism, religious fundamentalism and the challenges to democracy in emerging nations.
Bibliography
- Ahmad, Feroz,
- Landau, Jacob M., Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey
- Lengyel, Emil, They Called Him Atatürk
- Mango, Andrew, Atatürk. The biography of the founder of the modern Turkey
- Turkey's first First Lady: Latife Hanım, Gül Demir and Niki Gamm, Istanbul - Turkish Daily News, 23 February 2008
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