Proclamation of the Turkish Republic
The Turkish Republic emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire and a brutal war of survival. After Ottoman defeat in 1918 and the punitive Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which partitioned Anatolia among Greece, Armenia, France, Italy, and a reduced Turkish rump, Mustafa Kemal organised military resistance from Ankara. The Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) expelled Greek forces from western Anatolia, defeated Armenian resistance in the east, and negotiated French and Italian withdrawals. The Greek army's defeat culminated in the burning of Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922 and the deaths of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians. The subsequent population exchange under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) transferred some 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey, demographically homogenising both states. The Republic was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with Mustafa Kemal as president. He inherited a devastated Anatolia: the Armenian population had been destroyed in 1915-16, the Greek Orthodox community removed by the exchange, and the country exhausted by a decade of continuous war. Kemal's programme was radical Westernisation imposed from above: abolition of the caliphate (1924), the Sufi orders (1925), and the Ottoman legal codes; replacement of Arabic script with the Latin alphabet (1928); prohibition of the fez; Western dress laws; and an intensive language-purification programme replacing Arabic and Persian loanwords. The Kemalist project pursued aggressive secular Turkish national identity, opening a lasting cleavage between the Ankara elite and the devout Anatolian heartland that structured Turkish politics through the twentieth century. The break with the Ottoman past was made deliberately and fast. The sultanate had been abolished in 1922 and the caliphate followed in March 1924, ending an institution that had existed in some form since the seventh century and leaving Muslims elsewhere to argue about it ever since. The alphabet was changed from Arabic to Latin script in 1928 with a few months' notice, the religious courts and orders were closed, the calendar and the weekend were moved, and surnames were made compulsory in 1934.
- Year: 1923 CE
- Category: Political
