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The situation looked very bleak for the Turks as their armies were being disbanded and their country taken under the control of the Allied Forces. But a catastrophe turned things around. Ever since independence in 1831, the Greeks had entertained the Megali Idea (‘Great Plan’) of a new Greek empire encompassing all the lands which once had Greek influence-the refounding of Byzantium, in a way. During World War I, the Allies had offered Greece the Ottoman city of Izmir. King Constantine declined for various reasons, even though his prime minister, Venizelos, wanted to accept. After the war, however, Alexander became king, Venizelos became prime minister again and Britain encouraged the Greeks to go ahead. On 15 May 1919, they did. The Turks, depressed and hopeless over the occupation of their country and the powerlessness of the sultan, couldn’t take this: a former subject people capturing an Ottoman city, and pushing inland with great speed and ferocity. Even before the Greek invasion, an Ottoman general named Mustafa Kemal had decided that a new government must take over the destiny of the Turks from the powerless sultan. He began organizing resistance on 19 May 1919. The Greek invasion was just the shock needed to galvanize the people and lead them to his way of thinking. The Turkish War of Independence lasted from 1920 to 1922. In September 1921 the Greeks very nearly reached Ankara, the nationalist headquarters, but in desperate fighting the Turks held them off. A year later, the Turks began their counter-offensive attack and drove the Greeks back to Izmir, where their Anatolian adventure begun, by 9 September 1922. Victory in the bitterly-fought war made Mustafa Kemal even more a national hero. He was now fully in command of the fate of the Turks. The sultanate was abolished and after it, the Ottoman Empire. A Turkish republic was born, based in Anatolia and eastern Thrace. The treaties of World War I, which had taken everything the Turks had, were renegotiated. Venizelos even came to terms with Mustafa Kemal, signing a treaty in 1930. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Reforms Mustafa Kemal undertook the job of completely redesigning a society. After the republic was declared in 1923, a constit ution was adopted (1924); polygamy was abolished and the fez, mark of Ottoman backwardness, was prohibited (1925); new, western-style law codes were instituted, and civil (not religious) marriage was required (1926); Islam was removed as the state religion, and the Arabic alphabet was replaced by a modified Latin one (1928). In 1930, Constantinople officially became Istanbul and other city names were officially Turkified (Angora = Ankara, Smyrna Izmir, Adrianople Edirne, etc). Women obtained the right to vote and serve in parliament in 1934 (even before Switzerland). In 1935, Mustafa Kemal sponsored one of the most curious laws of modern times. Up to this time, Muslims had only one, given name. Family names were purely optional. So he decided that all Turks should choose a family name, and they did. He himself chose Atatürk, or ‘Father Turk’, and officially became Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Ataturk lived and directed the country’s destiny until 10 November 1938. He saw World War II coming and was anxious that Turkey stay out of it. His friend and successor as president of the republic, Ismet Inönü, succeeded in preserving a precarious neutrality. Ankara became a hotbed of Allied-Axis spying, but the Turks stayed out of the conflict. |