Who was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk?
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. He led the Turkish War of Independence and introduced sweeping reforms that modernized the country.
Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881 in Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He became a military officer and gained fame for defending the Gallipoli peninsula against Allied forces in 1915 during World War I. After the war, he led the national resistance against the occupation of Anatolia.
Following victory in the War of Independence, the Republic of Turkey was declared on October 29, 1923, with Ankara as its capital and Mustafa Kemal as president. His reforms included replacing Arabic script with a Latin-based alphabet, introducing a secular legal system and giving women the right to vote and run for office in 1934.
The name Atatürk
In 1934, a law required all Turkish citizens to take surnames, and the parliament gave him the name Atatürk, meaning father of the Turks. He died on November 10, 1938, in Istanbul. His mausoleum, Anıtkabir, in Ankara, is visited by millions of people.
Did You Know?
Every year on November 10 at 9:05 a.m., the time of his death, people across Turkey stop for a moment of silence and sirens sound.