Thinkers Timeline

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. He was born in 1881 in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece), then a thriving Ottoman port. His birth name was simply Mustafa. He earned the additional name Kemal, meaning 'the perfect one', from a mathematics teacher at his secondary school. He was given the surname Atatürk, meaning 'Father of the Turks', by the Turkish parliament in 1934 when surnames became compulsory under his reforms. He was a career military officer in the late Ottoman army. He fought in Libya against Italy in 1911-1912 and in the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913. He became famous internationally for his successful defence of the Gallipoli peninsula against Allied forces in 1915 during the First World War. He was an Ottoman general by the war's end. When the Allies began partitioning the defeated Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal organised an armed nationalist resistance from Anatolia. He won the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) against Greek, Armenian, French, and British forces, in a war that also included the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Greeks, and other minorities from much of Anatolia. He abolished the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923, becoming its first president. From then until his death he led an extraordinary programme of reforms: the abolition of the caliphate, the secularisation of law and education, the replacement of Arabic script with Latin alphabet, women's suffrage, civil marriage and divorce, monogamy, and the comprehensive Westernisation of dress, names, and public life. He governed through a single-party state. He died at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul on 10 November 1938 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 57.