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How Europeans adopted Anatolia and created Turkey
Erik Jan Zürcher
Professor of Turkish Studies, Leiden University, [email protected].
Introduction: a country inherited and created
The Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, is in many ways a continuation of the 600-
year old Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman “imperial legacy” is of course shared by a
great many states in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East that were under
Ottoman Turkish rule for between three- and five hundred years1, but there can be
little doubt that Turkey is the repository of the military and administrative traditions
of the empire. If other countries inherited different limbs, Turkey inherited the head
and the heart: the capital Istanbul with the central bureaucracy of the state, which by
the end of the Nineteenth Century counted tens of thousands of civil servants and the
army that had played such a crucial role throughout Ottoman history and which by the
final decade of the empire had become the dominant force in politics as well.
There is a paradox here. In spite of the existence of a large measure of continuity
between the empire and the republic, and most of all between the late empire and the
early republic, Turkey also was a conscious creation, the result of an act of will, in
two different senses. First of all, the fact that the country survived the post-World War
I crisis as a united and sovereign state at all was due to the determination of a small
band of nationalist officers, civil servants and intellectuals, who managed to galvanize
a war-weary, decimated and exhausted population into a resistance movement that
managed to win successive wars against the Armenians and the Greeks and make life
so difficult for the victorious British and French that they had to scrap their plans to
divide Anatolia amongst themselves and their clients.Then, victory having been won and recognized at the peace negotiations of Lausanne
(1922-23), the circle around Mustafa Kemal pasha Atatürk, the leader of the national
resistance movement, set about building a nation-state that would be able to hold its
own in the modern world. The wave of reforms unleashed from 1924 onwards,
collectively known (at least in Turkey) as the “Kemalist revolution”, had as its
ultimate goal the creation of a modern nation-state, a secular republic modelled after
European examples. This political edifice was to be supported by a well-educated,
forward looking population, whose mentality was to be changed through what Atatürk
termed the “social and cultural revolution.”
The questions this article wants to address are, first of all, who were these people who
embarked on the ambitious project of building an entirely new Turkey on the
remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia? And, secondly, to what extent does
knowledge of their background help us to understand their ideological stance and their
political choices? Before we can try to answer these questions, we have to determine
who actually were the leaders of the Republic of Turkey in the period, let us say, the
first twenty years, in which that country was shaped. Can we find them in parliament?
Or in the party apparatus?
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Parliament, cabinet and party
For most of the period between the proclamation of the republic (October 1923) and
the end of World War II Turkey was a one-party state. Opposition parties were active
in 1924-1925 and in 1930, but they were suppressed within months, when they
appeared to be gathering grass-roots support. The mechanisms of parliamentary
democracy were kept in place throughout the period, with two-stage elections at
regular four-year intervals and parliamentary sessions. In reality, however, candidates
for parliamentary seats were handpicked by the party leadership and they ran
unopposed din the elections. In many cases, the parliamentary seat was a sinecure, a
reward for political loyalty or recognition of a person’s social status, talent or cultural
role. That is how Atatürk’s oldest friend (and distant family member) Nuri Conker
came to represent Kütahya in the National Assembly and how the journalist Yakup
Kadri and the historian Fuat Köprülü became the unlikely representatives of far away
Mardin and Kars respectively.
The real political influence of the large majority of the members of the assembly was
very limited indeed.. Debates were mostly limited to the closed sessions of the
parliamentary party and ministers rarely had to defend their actions in the assembly.
For those who wielded real power in the first twenty years of the Kemalist republic,
we have to look elsewhere, to the members of the thirteen cabinets that governed the
country between 1923 and 1943. A further distinction can be made, however. Quite a
few of the persons who figured in the cabinets of this era held office only once, or if
more than once, for a short time only. To get a glimpse of the group that made up the
hard core of the republican political system, I have therefore selected those persons,
who held office in at least three of the thirteen cabinets between 1923 and 1943. There
were 22 of these, but five more persons should be added to the list for different
reasons. First of all, of course, there is the president himself, Mustafa Kemal Pasha
Atatürk (1881-1938), who had been a member of the first National Assembly during
the independence war, but as president obviously remained outside parliament after
the proclamation of the republic in October1923. He was and remained
unquestionably the most powerful figure in the system, especially after the
suppression of all political opposition in 1925-1926. İsmet Pasha İnönü headed seven
out of ten cabinets in the first fifteen years of the republic and thus would have been
included in the list anyway, but his true significance was greater than that figure
would suggest, as he succeeded Atatürk as president in 1938. More so than Atatürk in
his later years, Inönü as president kept a firm grip on day-to-day policy making,
relegating his prime ministers to a subordinate role. Fevzi Pasha Çakmak only figured
in the first cabinet of 1923-1924, but thereafter he remained Chief of the General Staff
throughout the period. As a loyal, essentially non-political, professional soldier he
was trusted by Atatürk and İnönü. In exchange he was by and large given a free hand
in the running of the armed forces. Given the key role of the army in the
establishment of the republic, this made him one of the most powerful figures in the
country. The same can be said for Kazım Pasha Özalp, who was twice minister of
defence, but for ten consecutive years (1925-1935) he held the key post of President
of the National Assembly. That all of these have to be included in any list of the most
powerful men of the republic is obvious. This is perhaps less so with the final person
to be added, Dr. Reşit Galip. He was influential as a member of the mixed
commission on the population exchange between Turkey and Greece and as a member
of the Independence Tribunal in Eastern Anatolia, but his importance lay primarily in3
his role as architect of the reform of higher education in Turkey in 1932-1933. His
early death in 1934 cut short his career.
The Republican People’s Party, which was the only legal party in Turkey for nineteen
out of these twenty years, did not function as an independent entity even in the years
before Turkey officially became a one-party state in 1936-7. On every level there was
a de facto congruence between state and party, but the Turkish situation was very
different from that in, for instance, the Soviet Union in that the party was clearly
subservient to the state and functioned as its instrument for mobilisation and
propaganda. Searching for independent party leaders, with a power base distinct from
that in the government, is therefore not a fruitful exercise.
The president’s circle
After 1928, during the last decade of his life, Atatürk left the day to day running of
the country largely in İsmet’s hands, but the fact that he remained the undisputed
leader with dictatorial powers (in fact, if not on paper) meant that access to the
president and close links with him, especially if these links were well-known and
visible, remained an important instrument of power in the Turkey of the twenties and
thirties. Atatürk gave plenty of opportunities to gain access to him, as he invited
personal and political friends as well as people who had attracted his attention through
their work regularly to his dinner table. Almost no evening passed without one of
these dinner parties taking place. They lasted from late evening until dawn and during
them, both alcohol and conversation flowed freely. The fact that decisions reached
during these informal gatherings were sometimes imposed on İsmet and his cabinet, is
an indication of their importance, but this phenomenon also caused growing irritation
on the side of the cabinets in the thirties. Thanks to the published register of visitors to
the president over the years 1932-1938 and to the research of Walter Weiker based on
it, we know who the most frequent visitors were and who could thus be regarded as
the president’s inner circle in his later years, irrespective of the official position held
by them.2 A group of ten people emerges from the data, who were “frequent” or even
“very frequent” visitors throughout this six year period. These should be added to the
cabinet members mentioned above.
The core leadership
We are then left with a group of 37 persons (see the appendix), who can reasonably be
described as the core leadership of the Turkish republic in its first twenty years
(although there were, of course, shifts between different subperiods and not all of the
persons involved were as important in, say, 1940 as they had been in 1930). What can
we say about the common characteristics of this group? I propose to look at five
variables: age, geographical origin, religion, education and professional career, having
established first what is obvious at a glance: every single one of them was a man. 3
Age
The average age of the group of cabinet ministers and that of the president’s circle is
almost identical: Members of both groups were forty years old on average when the
republic was proclaimed en around fifty-five when Atatürk died. The uniformity of
the age group is striking. 26 of the 37 persons were born between 1878 and 1888, 18
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of them between 1879 and 1884. We are definitely dealing with members of a
recognizable generation here.
Geographical origin
When we look at where they hailed from, we see that more than a third (13 persons,
or 35 percent) came from the Ottoman Balkans, or in Ottoman parlance: from Rumeli.
Selanik (Thessaloniki), Atatürk’s home town and the main urban centre of Rumeli is
especially well represented, but small provincial towns like Köprülü (Veles) and
Yenişehir (Larissa) in Thessaly are represented as well. Almost a fifth (7 persons) of
the political leaders came from the Aegean, both from the islands and from the
Eastern littoral. It is important to remember that in terms of communications, culture
and development the Aegean area was much more akin to the Southern Balkans than
to inland Anatolia. A city like Izmir in many ways resembled Selanik far more than it
did Konya or Ankara.. In other words: those leaders who hailed from the Aegean and
those from the Southern Balkans can be considered as inhabitants of one cultural
sphere. To a large extent the same is true of the next two groups: those born in
Istanbul (7 persons or 19 percent) and in the Marmara basin – the area stretching from
Çanakkale in the West to Adapazarı in the east (4 persons, 11 percent). Taken
together, then, 84 percent of the leadership came from the areas that were most
developed, and best integrated with Europe. In a strictly geographical sense 62
percent of all Turkish republican leaders hailed from Europe. Contrast this with the
number of persons from Central or Eastern Anatolia: only five persons (13.5 percent)
came from these areas, from the Turkish heartland that was so fervently adopted as
national home and glorified by the Kemalists. The way these Kemalist leaders
embraced Anatolia is perhaps more understandable when we consider that almost half
of them (17 persons) came from areas that were lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1911-
1913, during the Tripolitanian and Balkan Wars. They and their families lost the
places they grew up in, when they were about thirty years old. They belonged to the
broad category of the muhacirs (refugees) of whom there were millions in late
Ottoman and republican Anatolia, who had to rebuild their lives in a new and
unfamiliar country.
What is also striking about the geographical, or topographical origins of the Turkish
leadership, is that with one exception (Mahmut Celal Bayar, later the third president
of Turkey) they came from an urban background, although the size of the settlement
varied from small towns like Yenişehir or Ödemiş through provincial centres like
Adapazarı or Çanakkale to cosmopolitan cities like Selanik or Istanbul.
Religion
Every single person in the group was a Muslim in the sense that he came from a
Muslim family. From what we know, very few seem to have been devout Muslims,
however. A man like Chief of Staff Fevzi Pasha Çakmak, known for his strong
religious convictions, was clearly an exception there.
Education
A very clear picture also emerges where education is concerned. The large majority of
the leaders were graduates of the Ottoman Empire’s military academy (mektebi
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harbiye), military medical school (mektebi tıbbiyeyi askeriye) and civil service
academy (mektebi mülkiye). No fewer than 27 out of 37 were the product of these
training establishments, that had been modelled on the French grandes écoles, fifteen
from the military academy, two from the military medical school en ten from the civil
service academy. The education of two persons I have not as yet been able to find
out, but the remaining eight came from an array of higher education establishments,
ranging from the Arts Faculty of the Darülfünun (Istanbul University) to medical
schools, an agricultural college and a school for postal officials. Interestingly,
Mahmut Celal Bayar, the only one to hail from a village, was also the only one to
have no higher education. Instead, he was trained on the job as a banker.
In other words: the leaders of the republic had received a European-style education in
modern secular schools. They all had at least one foreign language, most often
French. People with a traditional religious education are lacking: there was not a
single medrese graduate among them.
Professional career
The reason the 37 persons studied in this article have been selected in the first place
is of course the importance of their political careers. Nearly all of them came into the
politics of the republic with a professional career behind them, however. The
education they received predisposed them for professional careers of a specific type,
that of administrator, military officer, educator, doctor or engineer – in other words:
typical members of the modern professional class, as it had emerged in Europe in the
Nineteenth Century.
The harbiye, tıbbiye and mülkiye were the breeding ground for the military and civil
wings of the Ottoman state machinery and the training institutions for postal officials
and agricultural engineers also had as their prime purpose the production of experts
for the offices of the state. Those who graduated from the Arts Faculty of the
university may have gone into education or journalism, but they, too, were part and
parcel of the state machinery. Falih Rıfkı Atay was a leading newspaper journalist and
editor, but he also earned his livelihood as one of the Porte’s many thousands of
clerks and rose the rank of private secretary to the Navy Minister. The great educator
Hasan-Ali Yücel made his career in state schools. 34 out of 37 persons made their
professional careers at least partly in the service of the state. One (Mahmut Esat
Bozkurt), a lawyer, went into politics straight after university and therefore had no
independent professional career and another person’s career is unknown (Hasan Cavit
Belül). The one clear exception to the rule is again Celal Bayar, who made his career
as clerk and manager in the Deutsche Orientbank.
What this means, is that among the core leadership of the early republic we find no
traders, no landowners, no religious officials and no manufacturers at all. Nor do we
find anyone with a peasant or working class background.
A group portrait
What we are left with, then, is a group of 37 persons with a very clear and coherent
profile. A generation of men, born in the eighteen eighties in Muslim families in an
urban environment in Southeastern Europe and in the coastal areas of the Marmara
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and the Aegean; people, formed in the colleges, which the Ottoman Empire had
established after European models in the 19th Century, who knew at least one
European language and who went on to professional careers in the service of the state.
These are the main characteristics of the generation that shaped the secular, nationalist
Republic of Turkey and that carried through the eye-catching reforms of the twenties
which made such an impression in the West, from the introduction of the Swiss civil
code and the Western dress code to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and the ban on
religious orders. They were also the ones, who laid the groundwork for socioeconomic
developments in the thirties and forties, extending and nationalizing the rail
network, building sugar- and textile factories and eradicating malaria.
Continuities with the Young Turk period
Interestingly, the profile of this group shows remarkable similarities to that of their
predecessors, the leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress (the
“Young Turks”) that brought about the constitutional revolution of 1908 and was the
dominant political force in the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1918. Earlier
research conducted on the founders of the C.U.P, the members of its central
committee and the politically active military officers, who ultimately gave the
committee its power, gave the following results.:
They were all men, with the exception of one Sabbataic Jew, they were Muslims. 44
percent hailed from the Balkans (Rumeli), 21 percent from Istanbul and 12 percent
from the Aegean. The vast Asiatic parts of the empire brought forth only 15 percent of
the Young Turk leadership. Their background was almost exclusively urban, they
were educated in the modern European-type colleges and they made their careers in
the service of the state, like – in most cases – their fathers before them. 4
There was little overlap between the Young Turk leadership of 1908-1918 and the
Turkish republican leadership of 1923-1943. The overlap that can be seen is almost
completely limited to the category of politically active military officers, the category
to which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and İsmet İnönü themselves belonged. The reasons
why there is so little continuity between both groups at the top level are fairly
obvious. Having lost the war, the C.U.P. leaders were discredited after October 1918.
The most prominent Unionists fled the country aboard a German submarine. Many of
those who remained were arrested by the British and interned in Malta, awaiting trial
for their role in the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916. Those Unionist leaders who
had resurfaced after the Turkish victory in the war of Independence (1922) and had
not unequivocally shown their loyalty to Atatürk’s leadership, were eliminated in a
series of political show trials in the summer of 1926.Nevertheless, the biographical data make it clear that both groups of leaders came
from an almost identical pool sociologically. They also had a shared political
background as most of the republican leaders had been members of the Committee of
Union and Progress. Some of them had held important military or administrative
functions during the Young Turk era before 1918. Here we touch on a very sensitive
issue in the historiography of modern Turkey. If the government of the republic was
in the hands of people who had a political, administrative or military career in the
years before 1918, that fact automatically raises the question, who among them were
involved in the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 and to what extent. The direct7
involvement in some of the most gruesome aspects of the Armenian policies of the
C.U.P. has been demonstrated for some cabinet ministers of the republic (Abdülhalik
Renda, Ali Cenani, Şükrü Kaya) but much more research needs to be done here.5 The
careers of some of the republican leaders are such that they give us a prima facie case
to further investigate, even if we do not have any hard evidence at this point: Ali
Çetinkaya was one of the fedais (armed volunteers) of the C.U.P. and an important
member of the Teşiklati Mahsusa (Special Organisation), which was instrumental in
the terror campaigns against the Ottoman Christians. Kılıç Ali was adjutant to Enver
Pasha’s brother Nuri Pasha during the latter’s campaign in the Caucasus and Kazım
Özalp was commanded the mobile gendarme force in Southeastern Anatolia in 1915-
16. One would like to know more about these people’s activities during World War I,
if only to exonerate them.
There are at least three areas in which the shared background described above has
arguably influenced the mentality and the policies of the Kemalist leadership in a
decisive way. These three areas are: nationalism and nation building;
secularism/positivism; and the search for modernity. Taking into account the
background of the Kemalist leaders undoubtedly helps us better to understand their
aims and choice of policies.
Nation building in Anatolia
With half of the leaders hailing from areas lost to the Empire in 1911-1913 and thus
technically having become muhacirs (refugees), although that term is not usually
applied to these members of the elite in Turkey, the loss of the Balkan provinces and
the Aegean islands of course constituted a trauma of the first order. To the Ottoman
elite, the Balkans (Rumeli) was their home, their ancestral land. It is perhaps useful
here to reacquaint a European readership with just how long some of the main towns
and cities of the Balkans had been in Ottoman hands: places like Sofia, Nish, Üsküp
(Skopje), Monastir (Bitola) and Selanik (Thessaloniki) had all been conquered
between 1385 and 1390 and so had an Ottoman past stretching back more than 500
years. There was a strong consciousness of this fact and a feeling that the legacy of
the glorious forefathers had now been lost. This is visible, for instance, in the lines of
one of the best known poems of the famous poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, himself a
native of Skopje:
“When I passed my youth in Balkan towns
I felt a yearning with every breath I took.
Byron’s sad melancholy ruled my heart then.
In youth’s daydreams I roamed the mountains;
Breathed the free air of Rakofça’s fields.
I felt the passion of my raiding ancestors:
Every summer, for centuries, a run to the North
That has left a thundering echo in my breast.”
This is a fragment from Açık Deniz (High Seas), which the poet wrote in 1925 when
he had long since settled in Istanbul.
It would not have been surprising had a strong irredenta movement, aiming to
reconquer the lost territories, developed among the Ottoman elite after 1913. This,
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however, was not the case. Reversing the losses of 1913 was part of the war aims
formulated by the Ottoman government when it joined Germany in World War I, butthis had no practical effect, as drawing Bulgaria into the orbit of the Central Powers
(and thereby opening up the vital supply route between Germany and the Ottoman
Empire) took precedence over rearranging the borders in the Southern Balkans. After
World War I and the Turkish victory in the independence struggle (1919-1922), when
the conference on the Near East was convened in Lausanne, the Turkish delegation
went there with a brief to demand a plebiscite in Western Thrace (the area west of the
Maritza river populated by a Muslim majority) and to reclaim the Aegean islands
adjacent to the Anatolian coast, but when Greece, Britain and France refused to grant
these demands, the delegation acquiesced. The National Assembly in Ankara then
ratified this decision. After 1923, during the Kemalist republic, relations between
Turkey and its Balkan neighbours actually became quite good. A distinct Rumeliidentity can be discerned in literary products such as Yahya Kemal’ s poem, in the
naming of shops and restaurants (and after the introduction of family names in 1934
also of families) or in the performance of Macedonian music at President Atatürk’ s
dinner table, but by and large the reaction of the “generation of 1880” to the loss of
the homeland of so many of its members was not focused on the lost provinces.
Instead the republcian elite invested its emotional capital in the discovery and
adoption of Anatolia as its new fatherland.
A new interest in Anatolia can already be discerned after the constitutional, or Young
Turk, revolution of 1908. It is visible in the publication of the historian Ahmet Şerif’s
reports from Anatolia in the Young Turk daily Tanin (Echo) in 1909, which opened
the eyes of many city dwellers to the harsh realities of life in Anatolia.. After 1912 the
interest increased. Mehmet Ziya Gökalp, the leading ideologue of the Young Turk
era, propagated the idea that the peasants of Anatolia represent “ true” Turkish culture
and values as opposed to the “Byzantine”and “Arab” high culture of the Ottomans. In
1916 the “ Towards the People” (Halka Doğru) movement, inspired by the same sort
of idea, is started in Izmir. In the republic this was to develop into the idealisation of
the Anatolian peasant (köycülük) that made up one of the strands of the Kemalist
ideology and which is symbolised by Atatürk’s dictum “the true master of this
country is the peasant.”
The feeling that Anatolia was the “ Turk’s last stand”, the homeland that had to be
secured at all cost, directly led to the attempts of the Young Turks and their Kemalist
successors to homogenize the population of Anatolia and to turn it into a land forTurks only. This process started already in 1914, with the expulsion of over 150.000
Greek orthodox from the Aegean seaboard in retaliation for the expulsion of hundreds
of thousand of Muslims from the Balkans and it culminated in the Armenian genocide
of 1915-1916. It is no coincidence that refugees both from the Balkans and from the
Caucasus played a very important role in the persecution of the Armenians. The
nervousness about the future of Anatolia on the part of the Young Turks, as well as
their essential ignorance of the true state of affairs there is demonstrated by the fact
that very shortly after the end of the major Armenian persecutions, at the end of 1916,
the Turkish nationalist “Turkish Hearths” (Türk Ocakları) organisation, which was
closely linked to the Committee of Union and Progress, sent an emissary to Anatolia
to investigate whether the heterodox Muslims living there, such as Alevites and
Tahtacis, were in fact converted Christians and thus of doubtful loyalty.6
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Those Armenians who remained or returned after the end of World war I, were
largely hunted out of the country by a campaign of intimidation during the war of
independence. The Turkish victory over the invading Greek army in 1922 led to a
mass panic among the Greek Orthodox of Western Anatolia in September 1922. As a
result three quarters of a million people crossed the Aegean aboard almost anything
that could float. The agreement concluded between Turkey and Greece in Lausanne in
1923 not only saw to it that the remaining Greek Orthodox of Anatolia were forcibly
exchanged with the Muslims of Greece (with the exception of the community in
Eastern Thrace), it also legitimized and made permanent all population movements
that had taken place since October 1912 (the start of the Balkan War).
The independence struggle after World War I was waged in order to “safeguard de
national rights of Anatolia and Rumeli” and the leaders of the resistance, including
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, made a conscious effort to sacralize Anatolia as the historic
home of the Turks, whose earth had been coloured red by the blood of the “martyrs”
since the first Turkish conquest in 1071.7 Emotional appeals were made to the
population to defend the fatherland. After the proclamation of the republic, the cult of
Anatolia persisted and particularly in the Nineteen Thirties, the old Anatolian
civilisations such as that of the Hittites, were claimed as Turkish, thus staking out a
historical claim to the territory older than that of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs or Kurds.
The adoption of Anatolia as the true homeland of the Turks went deep and it was a
feeling shared even by many who were not Kemalists. Turkey’s most famous modern
poet, Nazim Hikmet Ran, a communist and an internationlist who many times fell
foul of the Kemalist authorities, spent years in Turkish prisons and died in Moscow,
in one of his best-known and loved poems, Vasiyet (Testament) expresses his wish to
be buried in an Anatolian village thus:
“Comrades, if I am not granted to see that day;
If I should die before freedom comes:
Lift me up and carry me
Bury me in an Anatolian village cemetery.”
The poet who wrote these lines in 1953 was a native of Salonica, who was born there
in 1902 and first set foot in Anatolia when he was eighteen years old!
Secularism, science and education
The leaders of the republic, like the Young Turks before them only more so, had a
strong belief in science as the panacaea for Turkey’s ills. Atatürk constantly harped on
the necessity to imbue the people with a scientific spirit and his dictum “The only true
spiritual guide in life is science”, coined in 1933, is still among the most widely
quoted today. The belief in science brought with it an equally strong belief in
education as the gateway to development and modernisation. The republcan
leadership and its supporters saw themselves as the “enlightened” (münevver, later
aydın) who brought the light of science and progress to the ignorant masses. The
iconography of the republic symbolised this through the frequent depiction of Atatürk
in the role of a teacher, with blackboard and all, in pictures and statues.
For the Kemalists, the need to base progress and development in the adoption of a
scientific worldview, made it imperative to secularize the state but also society. They
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were strongly influenced by a mixture of late-Nineteenth Century French positivism
and German materialism and they were passionately anti-clerical, holding the
preachers, religious teachers and mystical sheikhs responsible for the ignorant state of
the people. Most Young Turks and Kemalists paid lip-service to an idealized form of
“true” Islam, which was supposed to be rational and open to science, but this was
coupled to a firm rejection of Islam as it was practiced in Turkey as well as to the
demand that Islam’s role be restricted to that of a personal conviction, not that of a
dominant force in society. The almost caricature-like depiction of religious figures as
forces of darkness can be traced in many literary works of the Kemalist era, starting
with Yakup Kadri’s Nur Baba (“Father Light”) published in1922.
There can be little doubt, indeed the memoirs of leading Kemalists tell us as much,
that this generation first became acquainted with these ideas during their years in the –
civilian and military – colleges, in which all of them with a single exception were
educated. The educational programme of these colleges, modelled as they were after
contemporary European schools, in and of itself inculcated a secular, science-oriented
worldview, whether in agriculture, enigineering, medicine or the arts of war. The
students also learned European languages, mostly, French and avidly read French
novels as well as French and German philosophy. Apart from the content of the
curriculum, the fact that it was the European-type college education that had given
them access to successful careers, must have been instrumental in shaping their ideas
on the key role that education could play in development. In this they were typical
modern professionals, attached to qualifications and diplomas.
Bourgeois modernity
The third area, where we can safely say that the shared background of the Kemalists
has been of decisive influence, is their cultural interpretation of modernity.
Kemalist modernity was expressed in many ways. The universal emblems of
modernity – smokestacks, railways, dams, tractors – were used by the Kemalists as
they were elsewhere in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, but there are two areas
where the Kemalist modernisation ideal was particularly visible. The first is that of
dress. As president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk dressed first as an Ottoman gentleman in
frock coat, with the Fez or Nationalist Kalpak as headgear. After the promulgation of
the dress code in 1926, when traditional clothing was banned and European dress and
headgear were made compulsory for men, he appeared as a European gentleman,
wearing smoking, tenue de ville or, in the country, plusfours. His entourage fiollowed
suit. Pictures of the republican leadership in the Twenties and Thirties show groups of
bourgeois gentlemen in trilbies and panama hats, only their upright bearing betraying
the military background of most of them. The ladies who appear in the pictures often
wear high heels and fur coats. Children of course wear school uniforms in school but
quite a few boys seem to have been dressed as sailors when at home.
The second area where we can clearly see the expression of a distinct lifestyle, is in
architecture and the rearrangement of the public space. While the Kemalists did
relatively little to restore the old Ottoman town centres (many of which were in
ruinous condition after ten years of warfare), they did lay out new towns where they
created the sociabilities that were an integral part of the bourgeois lifestyle: parks with
benches, cafes and tearooms, clubs and theaters. Under İnönü, who was himself an
11
enthousiast, the races became the principal venue for Ankara’s society. It was not
unusual for the members of the republican elite, the president himself among them, to
keep dogs as pets, something which was definitevly frowned upon in more traditional
Muslim circles.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that what the Kemalists aspired for in terms of
cultural modernity was in fact the European bourgeois way of life. Obviously, the
Young Turk and Republican leaders did not constitute a bourgeoisie in Marxist, or
socio-economic terms. They were state-employed civil servants, teachers and officers.
Therefore it should come as no surprise that ideologically and politically they
positioned themselves differently from what one might expect from members of a
European bourgeoisie. Liberalism never developed into a strong current in Kemalist
Turkey. However, in a broader sense, they did belong, or aspired to belong, to the
culture of European Nineteenth Century “Bürgertum”8 and they found the examples
after which they modelled themselves not only in far away Berlin or Paris, but much
closer to home as well: in the towns and cities of the Southern balkans and the
Aegean, as well as in the capital Istanbul, the explosive growth of a Greek (and to a
lesser extent Bulgarian, Armenian and Jewish) bourgeoisie was one of the most
remarkable developments in the socio-economic history of the Ottoman Empire
between 1860 and 1912.9 The cultural codes of the Kemalist leadership seem to have
echoed those of the Non-Muslim urban middle class that they had enviously observed
during their youth in fin de siècle Salonica, Sofia or Smyrna.
Appendix: 37 Leaders of the Turkish Republic 1923-43
Cabinet
İsmet İnönü Izmir/Smyrna 1884-1973 military officer
Fevzi Çakmak Istanbul 1876-1950 military officer
Kazim Özalp Köprülü/Veles 1880-1968 military officer
Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda Yanya/Janina 1881-1957 civil servant
Refik Saydam Istanbul 1882-1942 military doctor
Şükrü Kaya Istanköy/Kos 1883-1959 civil servant (law)
Şükrü Saraçoğlu Ödemiş 1887-1953 civil servant (law,
edu)
Recep Peker Istanbul 1888-1950 military officer
Ali Çetinkaya Afyon/Karahisar 1878-1949 military officer
Mahmut Celâl Bayar Gemlik 1884-1983 banker
Fuat Ağralı Midilli/Lesbos 1878-1957 civil servant (law,
fin)
Tevfik Rüştü Aras Çanakkale 1883-1972 medical doctor
Ali Rana Tarhan Istanbul 1883-? Ptt official
Muhlis Erkmen Bursa 1891-? Agricultural eng.
Hulusi Alataş Beyşehir 1882-1964 military doctor
Saffet Arıkan Erzincan 1887-1947 military officer
Şakir Kesebir Köprülü/Veles 1889-1965 civil servant
Süleyman Sirri Selanik/Thessaloniki 1874-1925 engineer
Hasan Ali Yücel Istanbul 1897-1961 arts fac, educator
Reşit Galip Rodos 1893-1934 medical doctor
Hasan Hüsnü Saka Trabzon 1885-1960 civil servant
Zekai Apaydın Bosna/Bosnia 1877-? civil servant
12
Mahmut Esat Bozkurt Kuşadası 1892-1943 lawyer
Esat Sağay Selanik/Thessaloniki 1874-1938 military officer
Hilmi Uran Bodrum 1884-? ?
Naci Tınaz Serfice/Servia 1882-1964 military officer
President’s circle
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Selanik/Thessaloniki 1881-1938 military officer
Kılıç Ali (Emrullahzade Asaf)Istanbul 1889-1971 military officer
Nuri Conker Selanik/Thessaloniki 1881-1937 military officer
Salih Bozok Selanik/Thessaloniki 1881-1941 military officer
İsmail Müştak Mayakon Yenişehir/Larissa 1882-1938 civil servant
Müfit Özdeş Kırşehir 1874-1940 military officer
Falih Rıfkı Atay Istanbul 1893-1971 journalist
Hasan Cavit Betül
Cevat Abbas Gürer Niş/Nish 1887-1943 military officer
Tahsin Uzer Selanik/Thessaloniki 1879-? civil servant
Edip Servet Tör Adapazarı 1880-1960 military officer
1 Brown, L. Carl (1996) Imperial legacy. The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East
(New York: Columbia University Press).
2 Weiker, Walter F (1970) Kemal Atatürk’ün yakınları (1932-1938), Belleten 34, 609-627.
3 Data obtained from: Öztürk, Kazım (1973), Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Albümü (Ankara: Önder);
Demiral, Cafer (1973), Türkiye’nin 42 hükümeti (Ankara: Başbakanlık); Gövsa, İbrahim Alaettin
(1946), Türk Meşhurları Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Yedigün).
4 Zürcher, Erik Jan (2003) The Young Turks – Children of the Borderlands? International Journal of
Turkish Studies, 9, 275-286.
5 Akçam, Taner (2001) Turkey’s Carefully Forgotten History, Le Monde Diplomatique September
2001.
6 Birdoğan, Nejat (1994) İttihat – Terakki Alevilik Bektaşilik Araştırması (Baha Sait Bey) (Istanbul:
Berfin).
7 Zürcher, Erik Jan (2000) Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics
1908-1938, in Kemal H. Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, (Leiden: Brill) pp. 150-179.
8 Kocka, Jürgen (1988) Bürgertum im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Deutschland im Europäischen
Vergleich (München: Taschenbuch).
9 Göçek, Fatma Müge (1996) Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and
Social Change (New York, etc: Oxford University Press).