Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Atatürk: Fall of the Ottoman Empire About this episode On the 19th of May, 1919, an Ottoman general stepped ashore at the Black Sea port city of Samsun. This marked the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence, and ultimately the end of the Ottoman Empire. The man's name was Mustafa Kemal, the soldier, statesman and reformer who would create the Republic of Turkey out of the rubble, and become its first president.
Dan is joined by Marc David Baer, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He talks us through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the man who became known as Atatürk.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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1:29 Dan Snow? Hi folks. In this repeat episode of the podcast, I thought we'd look back at a very important figure in the history of the Middle East, well, and Europe, and a very important set of events, and that is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its defeat after centuries. During those centuries, it had, for much of that time, dominated the Balkans. It had dominated the Middle East. And its collapse, its partition, the internal upheavals of the 1920s while they echo to this day. It's such important context what's going on right now in present day Israel, Palestine, Syria and Turkey itself. For this, I spoke to Mark David Beyer. He is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
2:13 Dan Snow? He taught me through the life of the key figure in this period, the life of Mustafa Kemal, known later as Ataturk. He was a soldier, he was a statesman, he's a visionary, reformer, founder, the first president of the Republic of Turkey. It's thanks to him that Turkey exists as it does today. After the First World War, the imperial powers thought they might keep going, they thought they might partition not just the Ottoman Empire, but this last chunk of it as well, the bit we now call Turkey. He's also the man who modernized the country's legal and education systems. He insisted on the adoption of European customs, of norms, down to the way that people dress. He's also the man who encoded modern Turkish identity and DNA, a man who was bitterly
2:56 Dan Snow? opposed, for example, to Kurdish national aspirations. He was happy to employ violent methods against the Kurds and that has remained a feature of Turkey's policy towards those Kurds ever since. He's revered, he's despised, he's one of those vital men that emerged from the shambles of the First World War to shape the course of nations and peoples and regions. We're still living in their world, folks. So here we go. This is our episode on Ataturk and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey. Enjoy.
3:45 Speaker 02 And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
3:51 Dan Snow? Mark, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
3:53 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me again.
3:55 Dan Snow? I think the greatest weirdest coincidence or irony in the history of the entire world is that the Ottomans and the Habsburgs go down in the great Gotterdamerung together, clasped in an embrace after centuries of existential warfare against the other. It's such a weird turn of events.
4:15 Speaker 03 And they were replaced by much smaller, much less important countries as well.
4:20 Dan Snow? Indeed, the aftermath of both of those empires has been troubling and remains violent and contested right until the present day. Tell me about the Ottoman Empire. We know a lot about Armistice Day, 1918, 11th November in Germany. Austria has a reasonably precipitous kind of hard end to the war. Does the war end as neatly, if that's the right word, as precisely in the Near East, the Middle East?
4:43 Speaker 03 If we look at the Middle East, we see a very diverse landscape. On the one hand, the Ottoman Empire is completely devastated. The Ottomans suffer some of the highest casualty rates of any combatant in the First World War in terms of proportion of population. There have been genocides perpetrated by the Ottomans. There have been breakouts of epidemics. There have been mass casualties of Ottoman soldiers. I believe one in four Ottoman soldiers, 800,000 men, were killed and another 800,000 Ottoman soldiers were wounded. The population, as I mentioned, suffered also from hunger, also from occupation.
5:23 Speaker 03 And at the end of war, the Ottoman Imperial capital of Constantinople, or Istanbul, is occupied and much of the empire is also occupied, whether it be by the Greeks, the Italians, the French or the British. If we look at the Middle East, we see the British have taken over parts of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine and Iraq.
5:47 Dan Snow? And actually, that's the important difference. So Vienna isn't occupied, Berlin isn't occupied. So the Ottomans experienced defeat in the First World War in a more complete way, do they?
5:57 Speaker 03 And because of this, there are individuals in the empire who are looking for a new political order. Now, today in Turkey, they like to talk about how already at the end of empire, there were intellectuals and soldiers who were proponents of a new Turkish nation.
6:16 Speaker 03 But when we go back to 1918, that's not the case. In 1918, there were a number of figures who were still trying to figure out how best to save the empire. The Ottoman Empire itself had faced generations of thinkers and statesmen who also were trying to figure out, how do we hold this giant empire together? Well, in 1918, it's more or less collapsed, so new thought is going to enter into the picture.
6:38 Dan Snow? Let's talk about that collapse. So the Ottoman Empire in 1914, it stretches into the Balkans and what we now call Caucasus, Central Asia, what we used to describe as the Middle East, into Arabia, Syria, Palestine, technically, I suppose, into North Africa in some ways. How realistic was that bits of that could be saved? Why do we end up with the rump of what we call Turkey today? Were those other bits just lost? Were there local nationalist movements? Were the European empires keen to peel them off? What were they thinking in late 1918 that they might be able to salvage from this disaster?
7:08 Speaker 03 Well, the empire was occupied. The army was defeated. The population was devastated. But there were a number of men who were Arab, who were Kurdish, who were Turkish, who were Muslim of other backgrounds, who, like I mentioned before, they wanted to save the empire. And so they began to coalesce in what is today Central and Eastern and Northern Turkey. And they sought a way to expel the foreign occupying powers, but also to create almost a Muslim-only empire. In their understanding of the world in 1918, only the Muslims would be loyal to the empire. They still wanted to have a caliph. They still wanted to have a Sultan.
7:52 Speaker 03 They wanted to have an empire. But this was not going to be the empire, the multicultural, multi-religious empire of the past. This was going to be an empire made up of those Muslims in Anatolia, maybe Northern Syria, Northern Iraq, who were willing to cobble together a Muslim proto-state.
8:12 Dan Snow? The Proto State bit is so interesting because is this a sort of sorting that you see in the 20th century? This is a big multinational empire. To us, that might look slightly more attractive than what followed, but slightly kind of rambling and lots of autonomy and lots of communities living within it. Is this them saying, right, to survive in this new world of these nation-states, which seem to be quite uniform? There's a state that's conscripting people and rather efficient at running the place and it helps everyone's got the same sort of political outlook and the same sort of religious outlook. Is this the Ottoman Empire trying to turn itself into something that they think can survive the next century?
8:45 Speaker 03 Well, I think what had changed was the ideology at the centre. Now, bear in mind that the empire wasn't really run by the Sultan in its last decade. From 1913 to 1918, it was run by a triumvirate of revolutionaries. These were radical men who set up practically a dictatorship. They cancelled basically all legal rights of all citizens. These were the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. And Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha and Jamal Pasha had pretty much abandoned the idea that all peoples of the empire could continue to live together. Again, these are the men who engaged in ethnic cleansing, if not massacres of Greeks.
9:27 Speaker 03 The Ottoman Greek population was expelled in the hundreds of thousands from the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1914 and then in the early part of the First World War. And these men, Talat Pasha, who was interior minister and then prime minister, he was the one who determined that the Armenian population had to be destroyed. So there was a change of ideology at the top. There were then these massive demographic changes. So the empire itself in 1918, if we take away all the parts that have been cut off by the British and others, is much less religiously diverse than it had been.
10:02 Dan Snow? Talk to me then about this new generation of thinkers and particularly perhaps one man, Kemal Ataturk, who interestingly comes from what we now think is today is Greece.
10:12 Speaker 03 Mustafa Kemal was similar to a whole generation of young men who were trained in these new academies, academies of war and other academies. The medical academy was very influential. These were new academies set up under late Ottoman reforming leaders in 19th century to develop a new generation of officers, but also professionals and technicians who could carry the empire into the new century. And Mustafa Kemal was one of these men who benefited from these new schools in the Balkans. He does come from Tescaloniki today. Then he was also educated in Istanbul. He's like his generation, these young men, again, they want to save the empire. They see something's going wrong.
10:57 Speaker 03 Mustafa Kemal would be a military hero. There were a number of heroes, he was one of them. He became famous especially during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and 1916. This was one of the great successes of the Ottoman army during the First World War. The Allies' intent was to land at Gallipoli and then go on to Constantinople and then quickly knock the Ottomans out of the war. So they could turn their efforts or keep their efforts in the West. But the Ottomans, led by Mustafa Kemal, he was a colonel at the time, who famously told his troops basically to die and died, they did in large numbers, but managed to keep the British and French and New Zealanders and Indian troops at bay so that they withdrew.
11:41 Speaker 03 So he was a war hero there, but he also served in many military campaigns from the beginning of the 20th century until that Gallipoli campaign. He served in the Balkan Wars, he served in Libya, he served in Syria. So he was one of a generation of men, trained with new strategies, trained in foreign languages, trained under German military instructors to fight the new battles of the 20th century.
12:09 Dan Snow? But he was politicized. Whilst he was climbing the ranks and being one of the best young soldiers in the empire, it seems that he was engaging in political discourse, even resistance.
12:19 Speaker 03 He and some other men had set up a patriotic union of sorts when he was stationed in Damascus. And this was again, to modernize, to save the empire, to save it from foreign occupation and to go against the, what they thought the corrupt and authoritarian Sultan. So he also joined the Committee of Union and Progress. Again, this at first secret organization that sought from the 1880s to topple Abdulhamid II, the authoritarian, really the last strong Ottoman Sultan. The CUP did manage to overthrow him finally in 1909. And Ataturk, as he was later called Mustafa Kemal, was always part of that effort.
13:02 Dan Snow? Were there competing ideas about how best to strengthen Turkey and prevent these foreign occupations and the empire falling apart? I mean, were there ideas around adopting a more conservative religious approach or modern secularism? Where was he and his colleagues coming from?
13:14 Speaker 03 Well, secularism would come later. No matter the individual beliefs of Mustafa Kemal or Talat Pasha or Enver Pasha, they actually promoted Muslim unity, unity among Muslims. It's very difficult for us not to read back into the past, the republican secularism and nationalism of Turkey after 1923. But if we stick to our time period, that wasn't yet the compelling idea. We can also see that this is a generational struggle. So these were young officers, again, educated in new ideas in these European-instructed academies, who were trying to not only overthrow the Sultan, but also to overthrow the old
13:57 Speaker 03 general, the old fuddy-duddies that they thought were not waging proper military campaigns.
14:03 Dan Snow? And I suppose he witnessed those old generals at their worst. I mean, he witnessed before Gallipoli, at the end of the other wars you mentioned, before the First World War, the very important precursor wars, arguably, which led to the First World War in the Balkans. He would have seen incompetence, poor leadership, he'd have seen the empire and those old generals at their worst.
14:20 Speaker 03 In the Balkan Wars, the Ottomans lost tremendous amount of territory. The Ottomans lose the first Balkan War in 1912, 1913, to a number of southeastern European countries, which had once been under Ottoman rule. And this was quite a threat. They almost lost the city of Edirne. Well, they lost it, they conquered it back in the next Balkan War. Edirne was from the 14th century, it was the second Ottoman capital, the first Ottoman capital in Europe before Constantinople. But the biggest problem was that they would lose Salonika, today in Greece, Tesloniki. This was not only Mustafa Kemal's birthplace, but this was also more or less the birthplace of the Committee of Union and Progress and some of the most progressive and radical
15:05 Speaker 03 revolutionaries. So they lose their homeland. So this is also another reason why, after 1918, they focused really, for the first time, on Anatolia and northern Iraq and northern Syria, because they've literally lost their homeland in southeastern Europe, which had been the Ottoman homeland for 500 years or more. So what they have left in 1918 is the centre. Just about the centre of Anatolia. So this is after 1918, they begin to focus more on what would become Turkey. But again, in 1918, they're uniting Muslims to fight off the foreigners and the remaining local Christians.
15:47 Dan Snow? This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up.
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18:41 Speaker 04 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
19:20 Dan Snow? You've mentioned Gallipoli before, but we should say he was wounded. Actually, was he wounded or did he have a bit of shrapnel in his uniform?
19:26 Speaker 03 Well, the stories about Mustafa Kemal are great. I mean, I've seen the pocket watch that supposedly stopped the bullet that shot him when he was at Gallipoli. But apparently, he was also wounded in the eye when he, I don't know, retook Adirna in the Balkan campaign. So he suffered a number of wounds. But there's no question that he was a fearless military officer and that he caused his men to sacrifice their lives for him.
19:49 Dan Snow? And he even won victories over the Russians, didn't he? In 1916, after Gallipoli, on that other forgotten front of the First World War between Turkey and Russia.
19:57 Speaker 03 Yes, he had a great reputation amongst soldiers and officers. But because he would become the single ruler of the nation-state of Turkey, we always focus on him. Also because of his own propagandizing for himself and the way people in Turkey were taught about him. But again, back in 1918, there were a number of men, there are a number of other people who also could have donned the mantle of the leader of the resistance against the foreign occupying armies in what was left of the empire.
20:25 Dan Snow? So this great soldier ends up in 1918, I think his final posting was to Syria, where the catastrophe had overtaken Ottoman forces in that part of the Arab world. Constanto, Istanbul has got foreign occupied. So what does our man do? Is he a resister from the beginning?
20:41 Speaker 03 Well, he's actually sent by the Sultan. Again, the Sultan is still in office, although he's doing the bidding of what the British and the occupiers want. He's seen as a traitor by a lot of the people in the empire. So he actually sends Mustafa Kemal to the east to inspect the army. But Mustafa Kemal uses this pretext to join up with all these other CUP, Committee of Union Progress, men who are organizing a resistance movement across central and eastern Anatolia. So they're already active, the local Committee of Union and Progress activists, politicians and so on. They're already out there organizing, rearming, preparing, again, a resistance.
21:22 Speaker 03 And so Mustafa Kemal steps into that and from 1918 to 1922, he's able to rise to the top of all those movements who will coalesce around him. Now, he does a lot of dirty tricks. In Turkey, someone once proudly, they said, you know, the Germans had Hitler, the Russians had Stalin, the Italians had Mussolini, we still have our Ataturk. You know, he's one of these brutal 1930s dictators, but he eliminates his opposition. So there are other people in Central Asia, there are Islamists, for example, who want to create an Islamic state. He crushes them, his troops will fight against them. There also are other men like him.
22:03 Speaker 03 For example, Enver Pasha, who was one of the leaders of the empire from 1913 to 1918. gathers an army in what would become southern Russia and wants to enter with his army into Anatolia to fight. And Mustafa Kemal doesn't let them. There are also a communist out there. And Mustafa Kemal will basically put them all in a boat in the Black Sea and sink the boat, killing the entire Communist Party leadership. But with a series of maneuvers, he's able to rise to the top of the resistance movement. And that resistance movement will call itself the Defense of Rights Committees. And so they'll have congresses, they'll elect leaders, they'll pass platforms, and they'll begin to say, this is an empire made for Muslims. Christians are not part of it.
22:48 Dan Snow? It's so odd, because the heart of the empire, you've still got a Sultan, have you, sitting there in Istanbul, issuing edicts, telling him to stop doing what he's doing?
22:55 Speaker 03 You still have a parliament as well. So you have a government in Istanbul, which has a weak army, which has no authority, really, in Anatolia. So these resistance fighters, whatever we want to call them, they are going to find a religious figure, the Mufti of Ankara, who will denounce the Sultan as a traitor and say that anyone who captures him can kill him. The Sultan, for his part, in Istanbul, in Constantinople, will have the Mufti of Istanbul, a religious figure, the Sheikh of Islam, declare Mustafa Kemal as a traitor, and anyone who captures him can kill him. So we've got these dueling Muslim politicians. But the Sultan, by his actions, really has discredited himself in the eyes of most of his Muslim subjects
23:39 Speaker 03 by this point. Also, the Allies have declared in 1920 the division of what was left of the Empire into different spheres of influence. Then they allow the Greek army, which occupies Izmir on the west coast, to actually move into Anatolia to make this occupation real. So you have an actual occupying army. And at this point, 1920 to 1922, where Mustafa Kemal and his men will launch successful campaigns against that occupying army.
24:10 Speaker 03 And eventually defeat the Greeks, they reach as far as eighty kilometers southwest of Ankara. So they're moving quite rapidly across. But Mustafa Kemal's men will be able to resist them, defeat them, capture their commander and expel them from Anatolia while burning the city of Azmir and expelling all of its Greek population as well.
24:30 Dan Snow? And for people, this is worth just quickly pausing, I suppose, because there might be some modern resonances. I mean, the Greeks, were they trying to carve out an empire in this part of Asia Minor, based on the fact that it had been part of the Greek world back in classical antiquity, thousands of years before? Was this claim based on their, well, their historical possession of this ground?
24:48 Speaker 03 It was. And it was also based on the fact that you still had a large Greek population in western Anatolia, of course. But by 1922, that population is largely expelled. And by 1922, Mustafa Kemal and his men are able to actually launch a parliament well by that point. And so the parliament in Istanbul basically abolishes itself. And finally, in 1922, these resistance fighters have become a, you know, a very consolidated political movement with a parliament of their own in Ankara. And they actually abolished the Ottoman Dynasty, which had been around since the end of the 1200s. In 1922, they basically put the last Sultan, Mehmed VI, on a British battleship, and he sails away to Malta. And
25:32 Speaker 03 the dynasty is outlawed from returning, any member of the dynasty.
25:36 Dan Snow? It's an extraordinary story. And presumably because of these Greeks living on the coast of Anatolia there, Asia Minor, who were seen to have foreign sympathies, because of, I suppose, what the Arabs who'd risen up during the war, this new Turkey, as you pointed out, this was a place where minorities would not be sort of tolerated as they once had been.
25:55 Speaker 03 Well, that's the thing. And what we forget is that, again, from 1918 to 1922, Mustafa Kemal and his officers and his soldiers are Turks and Kurds and Circassians and Chechens and Arabs. All these different Muslims trying to save the empire. When the Turkish Republic is declared in 1923, we will begin to see a change such that within a couple of years, by 1925, in fact, this new Republic of Turkey is going to turn its back on all those Muslim elements that help establish it. So already in 1925, we see warfare against Kurds. There'll be massive, massive Kurdish uprisings from 1925 to 1938, when Mustafa Kemal passes away.
26:39 Speaker 03 And these are met with some of the first usage of aerial chemical warfare and aerial bombing. And in fact, one of the airports in Istanbul today is called the Sabiha Gökçen Airport. This is named after one of Atatürk's foster children. He adopted over a dozen orphans. Many of them were probably victims or parents had been victims of the Armenian genocide. So he adopts this young woman Sabiha Gökçen. She becomes Turkey's first airline pilot and also one of the first fighter pilots. And she drops bombs on rebelling Kurds. So the point is, is that the place we know today as Turkey becomes very Turkish soon after the republic is established in 1923,
27:21 Speaker 03 which is not something that many people could have predicted even a year earlier.
27:25 Dan Snow? We're going to come on to that. I just want to quickly finish off the Greeks who are attacking deep into Anatolia. A military victory he probably would have put up there with Gallipoli, who was managing to drive those Greeks out of Asia Minor completely and inadvertently, toppling David Lloyd George, the mighty David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, from his job as well.
27:42 Speaker 03 Well, not only that, but the Battle of Sakarya, where it took place, 80 kilometers southwest of Ankara. This was a great victory. And again, Mustafa Kemal, he has a lot of opponents today in Turkey, but no one would deny that he was a great military leader. And he was able to, again, rally his men to accomplish great things for their side. No one would deny that. But also, of course, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's husband. The reason he ends up in Britain was also because of the defeat of the Greek army. Prince Philip was, of course, Greek or let's just say from a royal family that was ruling Greece. And his father was a defeated general who was going to be lynched or court martialed and executed. But the British managed to bring him and his son Philip out of the country and the rest is history.
28:27 Dan Snow? So the very brief Greek empire that's extended right into Asia, as Alexander's had once done, comes to an end, takes with Prince Philip and the British Liberal Party and David Lord George's leader. And how quickly then does he manage to capture Istanbul? How long before his territory represents what is effectively today we'd recognise as modern Turkey?
28:46 Speaker 03 Another campaign they launched was in the east. So in 1918, there was a fledgling Armenian Republic that was established. And one of the first campaigns of Mustafa Kemal was actually east, to keep the Russians and their Armenians out of Anatolia. Once that was accomplished, then they turned west and they could kick the Greeks all the way out. And don't forget also that the treaty that gave birth to the modern Republic of Turkey was a treaty of Lausanne in Switzerland. And this treaty stipulated what was called at the time a population exchange between the new Republic of Turkey and Greece. And population exchange, we today would call it ethnic cleansing. So basically, well,
29:27 Speaker 03 the numbers are in dispute, but very large numbers of Greeks from Anatolia were expelled, with the exception of Istanbul and some islands. In exchange, Muslims in Greece were expelled from Greece and sent to Turkey. So again, this was another separation of the populations that would make it very difficult for Muslims in Greece or Orthodox Christians in Turkey to prosper. This was in 1923 and 1924.
29:53 Dan Snow? And that's the same time, as you said, they're clamping down on the Kurds. So again, this multi-ethnic empire is transforming into a, well, what it wants to be a kind of homogeneous Turkish state.
30:04 Speaker 03 It became a single party, single ruler nation-state. And the aim of the nation-state, with the revolutionary reforms passed by Mustafa Kemal's party, those defence committees, defence of rights committees, were converted into the single political party, the Republican People's Party. So this party then passed a number of revolutionary steps that would make Turkey Turkish. So the Kurdish language was outlawed, for example. And they changed the alphabet. So Ottoman script is written in a Persianified Arabic script from right to left, but they substitute that with the Latin alphabet. For years, they had language committees that got rid of Arabic and Persian words
30:48 Speaker 03 and replaced them with either neologisms in Turkish, or simply took German and French words and made them Turkish. So there was this very radical policy of making Turkey more like France, turning away from the East, turning away from Islam. It was a very radical secular republic, turning away from the public expression of religion. This had a high cost, though, because, again, there were a number of rebellions by Kurds who were suppressed, but also by religious Muslims, who also were suppressed. One reform that everyone remembers is the so-called hat reform. So Mustafa Kemal decreed that men had to wear hats with brims, right? Because the idea is that would prevent a man from praying.
31:32 Speaker 03 So the fez was outlawed, because that doesn't have a brim, and you can still wear it in a mosque and so on. It may seem silly to us, okay, he's making men wear hats. And there were very few hats available in Turkey at the time. You see pictures of men going around with women's hats, because they have brims. But joking aside, hundreds, as many as 600 men, were executed for defying the ban on religious headgear.
31:56 Dan Snow? And it closes religious schools and breaks up religious brotherhoods. But weren't a few of them going, hang on, mate, I thought this is what we were fighting for? Where did the radical secularism kind of come from? And it doesn't sound like it was there at the beginning particularly.
32:08 Speaker 03 Well, no, it's a package. I mean, Mustafa Kemal is taking the French ideas of the French Revolution and applying them in a more radical way, perhaps even in France. Making sure that people dress the same, people are dressed as citizen, they won't have any names that will display any kind of hierarchical belonging. He's abolishing, really, the ability to be different. Everyone has to be a Turkish-speaking, Turkish-thinking, Turkish-educated citizen. And like I said, there's a whole basket of goods that goes along with being a citizen.
32:39 Dan Snow? And fascinatingly, so it's not the victorious allies who topple the caliphate, the Ottoman family, which has ruled over much of this part of the world since at least the 16th century. It is this revolutionary movement from within Turkey itself.
32:53 Speaker 03 So in 1922, or even before that, they separated the function of the Sultan from the Caliph. So the Sultan is the secular leader, the Caliph is the symbolic religious leader. And for centuries, those two positions had been fused in one man, in the Ottoman Sultan. But what Mustafa Kemal and his fellow revolutionaries did was they separated the two. So the Sultan became just a Sultan. Then when he was expelled in 1922, there was a Caliph. But then in 1924, the New Republic abolished the Caliphate and expelled the Caliph. So this caused backlash in Turkey itself, but also throughout the Muslim world, especially in British South Asia.
33:37 Speaker 03 There was a lot of opposition to Turkey because it abolished this symbolic Sunni religious office.
33:42 Dan Snow? He dies in 1938, but the system, the state that he built, I mean, 20th century is a time of upheaval. I mean, it was pretty enduring.
33:49 Speaker 03 It wasn't until 1950s, when a lot of these radical changes began to be dialed back. So, for example, in Mustafa Kemal's time, they began to recite the call to prayer, not in Arabic, but in Turkish. And this wasn't popular. But the point was, they also translated the Quran into Turkish so that people could understand it in their native language. They did everything they could to strip the country of its Islamic past and its Ottoman past. But from the 1950s, with the generational change, the Turkish Republic began to reconnect with its Ottoman and Islamic forbears.
34:26 Dan Snow? And we have just seen, in the last few months, the president of Egypt converting the great mosque in Istanbul back into a mosque from a museum. So that process is ongoing.
34:37 Speaker 03 Well, President Erdogan, of course, as you mentioned, he reversed Adeturk's decision, which was to convert the Hagia Sophia, which had been the greatest Byzantine church in the world. In 1453, when the Ottomans conquered it, Sultan Mehmed II converted it into a mosque. Ataturk then converted it into a museum. Erdogan recently converted it back into a mosque, and it's now again a house of prayer. Again, you see this reversal of Mustafa Kemal's revolution. We haven't mentioned why he's called Ataturk, which is also part of his propaganda. So Ataturk means father of the Turks, and this was a title bestowed upon him later on in his career in the 1930s.
35:19 Speaker 03 And Mustafa Kemal himself, he gave a six-day speech in 1927. I think it was 30 hours and 30 minutes, in which he narrates the history of the Turkish nation, you can say. But it begins with him in 1919, when he lands on the shore of Anatolia, when he's sent by the Sultan as an inspector. So all of history that he wants people to remember begins with him when he comes ashore like a phoenix or almost a messianic figure. And that's when Turkish history begins, 1919, after the Ottomans, after everything that happened, it's as if they have a clean slate and he can now say a new Turkey is born that has no relation to the past.
36:02 Speaker 03 Again, this is 1927, and this is not how things really were in 1919. But this narration is what we have today, and this is why people today only think of this aspect of the country.
36:14 Dan Snow? All these years later, how can we judge Ataturk's Turkey? Has it been any more stable than its neighbours? Has it been a success?
36:22 Speaker 03 I don't know what you mean by stable, because there have been how many military coups in the country? 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997. How many uprisings have there been? This is unfinished business from the Ottoman Empire. So the Kurdish uprisings in the 20s and 30s until they're crushed. But again, from the late 60s, there's Kurdish intellectual movements from the early 1980s. There's actual military guerrilla campaigns. They continue to this day. Turkey today is still killing Kurds, not only in Turkey, but also in Syria and Iraq. So none of those questions of the end of the empire have been established. We look at Iraq today, and we look at Kurdish autonomous region.
37:05 Speaker 03 We look at Sunni Shiite warfare. We look at the influence of Iran. The United States, that hasn't been solved. We look at Palestine today. There's war between Israel and Hamas over Gaza, but of course, all of Palestine, there's violence across the land. So Lebanon was a French colony. Syria was a French colony. Syria has been undergoing an uprising since 2011, right? So I don't know how stable Turkey is then in this respect.
37:34 Dan Snow? On Twitter, the beginning of the Israel Guard, I was watching all the various takes from various people. And the thing you don't expect to see in 2024 are people nostalgic for large, transnational, multi-confessional empires. But that started to creep in, people going, hey, maybe the best solution here was in fact, the Ottoman Empire.
37:51 Speaker 03 And there are also people in Turkey who say, actually, we should rule over Jerusalem, because when we ruled Jerusalem, there was peace, which yeah, pretty much is true. But then it depends on who you ask. So then if you remember what happened to the Armenians, then you say, wait a minute, have you forgotten about what the CUP government did in the First World War? It wasn't only peace and brotherhood. There were long periods of that, but we have to look at the whole history.
38:15 Dan Snow? Well, thank you for doing that with us today. That was a tour de force. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about, well, the whole thing really, but particularly through the person of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That was great. Thank you, Mark Deverde.
38:29 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me on the show.
38:31 Dan Snow? Thank you so much for listening as always, and thanks for sticking with this podcast for so many years. If you're a long time fan, now if you are, you'll remember the days when we used to smash out seven episodes a week. You'll probably notice that we're slowly honing the craft. We're bringing you longer and frankly, better episodes. There's a lot more research that goes into them, and we're trying to focus on more of what you want as well. And that's exactly what we're going to keep doing. So from November, there's going to be a change in our release schedule. You're going to get new episodes every Monday and Thursday, if you're a subscriber, which I urge you to become, of course. And then if you are, you'll get extra bonus episodes on Fridays, too. The reason I'm doing that is I want to make sure I can put more time into the episodes I'm making for you, try and do more of those explorers, for example, when I just monologue along. People seem
39:14 Dan Snow? to like those. Thank you very much for all the reviews. As you can imagine, those take a lot of time. So with this new release schedule, I'll be able to give you more of those. Worry not, though. Downstairs history isn't changing. It's just getting better.
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