In the footsteps of Atatürk

Atatürk’s birthplace

Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881, the son of Ali Riza Efendi and Zübeyde Hanım. His birthplace was Salonica (the modern Thessaloniki) in Greece, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire, and visitors to that town can visit the three-storey house where he grew up on production of their passport. To make things easier for those who don’t want to travel all the way to Greece, there are also two replicas of the house in Turkey. The first of them is in the Atatürk Forest Farm (Orman Çiftliği) in Ankara, the second in Kutlukent, seven kilometers east of Samsun on the Black Sea.

The Çanakkale battlefields

Mustafa Kemal first rose to prominence as a military leader in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. It was at Gallipoli that Atatürk helped repulse the ANZAC troops as they came ashore in what is now Anzac Cove in 1915, giving his men the famous command: “I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die.” Later during the same campaign, he was fortunate to escape death when his pocket watch deflected a bullet at Conkbayırı (Chunuk Bair) where he had established his command post. Today, visitors to the battlefields can read his moving words to the mothers of the fallen ANZACS: “To us there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets...”

Planning the War of Independence

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Mustafa Kemal and a band of friends started to make preparations to free Turkey from the foreign troops that were occupying it. During this period Atatürk lived briefly with his mother and sister in Şişli in İstanbul in a house that is now a small Atatürk Museum on Halaskargazi Caddesi.

Landing in Samsun

On May 19, 1919 Mustafa Kemal and his friends arrived by boat in Samsun to launch the War of Independence. Today you can walk along a boardwalk called the Kurtuluş Yolu (Liberation Way) running down to the sea that serves as a reminder of this momentous event and visiting a replica of the steamship Bandırma on which the men arrived in Samsun (it’s on the eastern outskirts of town). Finally, you can drop in on the Gazi Museum, housed inside the early 20th-century Mantika Palas, a grand hotel in which Ataturk stayed several times. Amongst its more memorable souvenirs are his picnic basket and his suitcase complete with barometer.

Amasya, Sivas and Erzurum Congresses

From Samsun, Mustafa Kemal headed for the lovely inland town of Amasya to hold the first of a series of planning meetings. While there’s no museum to commemorate this in Amasya, visitors who arrive on June 21, the anniversary of the event, will be greeted with a display of folk dancing in the main square. In Sivas, the building where the rebels gathered on Sept. 4 now houses the Ataturk Congress Museum with their photos resting on the old-fashioned wooden school desks that were used during the meeting. Finally, in Erzurum you can visit a wooden house just north of Cumhuriyet Caddesi in which Atatürk stayed on several occasions.

Ankara becomes the capital

In 1923 one of Atatürk’s first decisions as victor in the war was to move the capital of his new Turkish Republic from İstanbul to Ankara. Here on Cumhuriyet Bulvarı you can visit the building that housed the First National Congress, which convened for the first time in April 1920 while the war was still in progress, and the rather grander building that housed the Second National Congress, a work of Vedat Tek that was constructed in 1924 and served as the seat of government until 1960.

The Hat Law

Once installed as president, Atatürk embarked on a whirlwind program of reforms that included the switch from writing Turkish in Arabic lettering to the use of the Latin alphabet, as commemorated by a monument on the waterfront in Kadıköy in İstanbul, and the closure of the dervish lodges. (Several are now being rebuilt, including the very impressive Yenikapı Mevlevihanesi at Merkezefendi in İstanbul.) One of the most dramatic changes came in 1925 when the wearing of fezzes became illegal; the small Archeology Museum in Kastamonu commemorates the first proclamation of the event and displays photographs of Atatürk and friends in their new Westernized headgear. Incidentally, the monument to Atatürk in Kastamonu’s main square is one of the finest in the country. (There’s another especially striking one in Uşak in western Anatolia.)

Traveling Turkey

During the course of his presidency Atatürk was an inveterate traveler, and few parts of the country failed to receive a visit from the great man. Many of the houses in which he stayed have been maintained as museums, generally open to the public free of charge. Although the exhibits are usually a rather predictable collection of photographs and memorabilia labeled only in Turkish, several of the houses are worth visiting for the sake of their architecture. Finest of them all is probably the Atatürk Köşkü in Trabzon, a lovely whitewashed wooden house in a pretty garden high above the town that was built in Crimean style. However, there are also interesting Atatürk houses in Alanya, Bursa, Hacıbektaş, İzmir, Kayseri and Mersin. The Çelik Palas Hotel in Bursa also boasts a gorgeous marble hamam that Atatürk had installed especially so that visitors to his house nearby would be able to avail themselves of a Turkish bath.

Atatürk’s death

In October 1938, Atatürk was dining with friends on the presidential yacht, Savarona, when he was taken ill. He was conveyed to the nearby Dolmabahçe Palace, where he eventually died, on Nov. 10. Since then, every clock in the palace has been stopped at 9:05, the precise moment of his death, as recorded rather movingly in pencil on the desk diary of Celal Bayar, later the country’s third president, which is on display in the Second Congress Building in Ankara. Visitors to İstanbul can usually see the Savarona moored between Ortaköy and Kuruçeşme, while every tour of Dolmabahçe Palace now includes a visit to the room in which Atatürk died and where his unexpectedly narrow bed is draped with the Turkish flag.

Final resting place

Atatürk’s body was conveyed to Ankara, where it initially lay in state in the building that now houses the Ethnography Museum, near the Opera House that had been one of his favorite refuges. Here visitors can inspect a collection of photographs of the crowds that gathered to mourn as the coffin passed by. In 1941 an international competition to design a more suitable final resting place for the father of the Turks was won by Emin Onat and Orhan Arda. Their masterpiece, the Anıt Kabir in Ankara, is now one of Turkey’s most visited sites, with virtually every Turk at some time in their life walking along the path lined by imitation Hittite lions that leads to the vast memorial. The heavily guarded marble cenotaph above Atatürk’s actual tomb is very much the centerpiece, although there’s also a small museum where you can find out more about the life and times of this most important of all Turks.

Atatürk Congress Museum, Sivas

The room in which Atatürk died, Dolmabahçe Palace

The steamship Bandırma, Samsun

Atatürk Köşkü, Trabzon

The First National Congress