Last update September 24, 2026
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and changed the country more completely than perhaps any other twentieth-century leader altered their own nation. He was born in Thessaloniki in 1881 and gained an early reputation as a soldier, particularly during the defence of Gallipoli in 1915, where his leadership contributed to the repelling of the Allied forces and earned him the status of a national hero long before he acquired political power.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, Atatürk directed the Turkish War of Independence against the Allied forces that were occupying the country and also against the empire’s own failing government. He succeeded in doing so, and instead of setting up the sultanate once again, he got rid of it altogether and declared Turkey a republic in 1923 with himself as its first president. This move was what put him at odds with most of the revolutionary figures of his time, since they generally tended to replace one throne by another.
What then was a fast and frequently forceful campaign of secularization and modernization. Atatürk got rid of the caliphate, substituted the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, gave women the right to vote many years before most European countries did so, and imposed Western dress codes and legal systems on a population which was still strongly attached to Ottoman and Islamic traditions. While not everybody accepted the speed of the changes and some of them are still disputed in Turkey today, the reforms had more than any single event before or after to determine the form of the modern state.
He died in 1938 and yet his image can still be seen in almost every shop, office, and classroom in Turkey, decades following his death. Even if a visitor disagrees with the details of his politics, it is difficult to spend time in Turkey without realising how central he remains to the way the country sees itself.