7 Kemal Atatürk 7

Kemal Atatürk

(b. 1881, Salonika [now Thessaloníki], Greece—d. Nov. 10, 1938,

Istanbul, Turkey)

K

emal Atatürk (Turkish: Kemal, Father of Turks) was

a soldier, statesman, and reformer who was the

founder and first president of the republic of Turkey from

1923 to 1938.

Atatürk was born in Salonika, then a thriving port of

the Ottoman Empire, and was given the name Mustafa.

Early in life he decided on a military career. He attended a

military secondary school, and for his excellent work in

mathematics, he took the name Kemal, an Arabic word

meaning “the perfect one.” He entered the military acad-

emy in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1899 and in 1902

the General Staff College. He served in the Italo-Turkish

War in 1911–12 and in the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. These

wars undermined the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire.

During World War I (1914–18), Kemal opposed Turkey’s

alliance with Germany. He nevertheless fought for Turkey,

achieving great success against Allied forces during the

Dardanelles campaign. His outstanding military abilities

and widely circulated political opinions calling for an inde-

pendent Turkish state won him a popular following. He

opposed the presence of foreign powers in Turkey and

desired an end to the Ottoman Empire. The eventual

Allied victory brought British, French, and Italian troops

to Anatolia.

Modern Turkish history may be said to begin on the

morning of May 19, 1919, the day Mustafa Kemal landed at

Samsun, on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. Abandoning

his official reason for being in Anatolia—to restore order—

he headed inland for Amasya. There he told a cheering

crowd that he had come to prevent the nation from