The foundation of the Republic of Turkey required a violent modernisation of state and society. In this month’s cover story: Murat Metinsoy explains how a new nation was forged in the embers of the Ottoman Empire.
The Republic of Turkey (or, Türkiye) is 100 years old in October 2023, an anniversary that marks a birth and a death. In Istanbul’s Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, the end of the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the Republic is described (in its English translation) bluntly: in decline, the Empire was ‘removed from the history scene’.
The sentiment is extreme, but, as we read in Murat Metinsoy’s cover story, it is not wholly inaccurate: Atatürk’s nation-building project was not a delicate undertaking. It was, as Metinsoy writes, a ‘secularising and modernising revolution’. In the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of his childhood in 1960s Istanbul (a city he diagnosed as suffering from post-Ottoman hüzün, ‘melancholy’), Pamuk remembers his Ottoman grandmother. ‘If anyone asked, she would say she was in favour of Atatürk’s Westernising project, but in fact – and in this she was like everyone else in the city – neither the East nor the West interested her’, Pamuk writes. ‘Like most people who live comfortably in a city, she had no interest in its monuments, history, or “beauties”.’
But in Istanbul – on the 100th anniversary of its replacement by Ankara as the nation’s first city – Atatürk is everywhere; you cannot miss him. The famous photograph of him ‘teaching’ the new alphabet inspires a statue at the port of Kadıköy and pop art on the other side of the Bosporus in Istanbul Modern, where he appears as a mannequin hand in Aydan Murtezaoğlu’s Karatahta (The Blackboard). The boat journey between the two offers a panorama of Turkish history: Atatürk’s statue at Sarayburnu, with the deposed Ottoman Topkapı Palace above him. Behind that, at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum, is a reminder, should we need it, of nationalism’s youth when compared with the collection of ancient objects from across the Aegean and beyond. And then there is Hagia Sophia, site of recent, but nonetheless historical, change. Atatürk decreed that it become a museum on 24 November 1934, the same day he became ‘father Turk’. It is now a mosque.
The Empire and the Republic The Republic of Turkey is 100 years old. Built on the ashes of an old empire, what place is there for the Ottoman past in the secular state?
The Mummies From Peru Older than their Egyptian counterparts, the preserved remains of Andean peoples fascinated 19th-century Europe, leading to a ‘bone stampede’ for Inca mummies. But to what end?
The War Without Love In 1173 the Angevin empire looked set to fall, facing rebellion on all sides. Against incredible odds Henry II won a decisive victory, silencing kings, lords – and his own children.
The Cost of Diamonds As Jewish lapidaries were held in Nazi concentration camps, diamond sales soared in the US. Both sides saw gemstones as integral to the war effort.
