Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Turkish Republic and remade it in fifteen years. Born in Salonica around 1881 to a minor customs official, he was educated in military schools, where a mathematics teacher gave him the second name Kemal, meaning perfection. He joined the Young Turk movement, served in Libya against the Italians and in the Balkan wars, and made his reputation at Gallipoli in 1915, where as a divisional commander he blocked the Anzac advance at Chunuk Bair, telling his men that he was not ordering them to attack but to die. After the Ottoman defeat and the Allied occupation, he was sent to Samsun in May 1919 nominally to disband forces and instead organised the nationalist resistance. The Grand National Assembly met at Ankara in 1920, and the war against the Greek invasion was won at Sakarya and Dumlupınar in 1921-22, ending with the population exchange and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. He then abolished the sultanate, declared the republic in October 1923, and abolished the caliphate in 1924 — removing the institution that had claimed leadership of Sunni Islam for four centuries. The reforms came in rapid succession: religious courts and schools closed, the Swiss civil code and Italian penal code adopted, the fez banned, the Latin alphabet replacing Arabic script in 1928, the Gregorian calendar, surnames required in 1934, and women given the vote in 1934, before France or Italy. It was authoritarian and single-party. He died in 1938 of cirrhosis, and the parliament had given him the name Atatürk, father of the Turks. His mausoleum in Ankara remains a site of national pilgrimage, and insulting his memory is a criminal offence in Turkey.
- Lived: 1881 CE – 1938 CE
- Nationality: Turkish
- Roles: general, statesman
