Turkey In Focus - Discover Turkey: Experience the Best of Turkey - page 679

Meanwhile, a Greek force pushed out from İzmir, intent on using Turkish disorder to
realise their megali idea (great idea) of re-establishing the Byzantine Empire. They soon
took Bursa and Edirne and pushed towards Ankara. This was just the provocation that
Mustafa Kemal needed to galvanise Turkish support. The two sides clashed at the battles
of İnönü and Sakarya before the Turks savaged the Greeks at Dumlupınar. The Greeks re-
treated in panic towards İzmir, where they were expelled from Anatolia.
Mustafa Kemal emerged as the hero of the Turkish people, realising the dream of the
'Young Turks' of years past: to create a modern Turkish nation state. The Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923 undid recent humiliations and saw foreign powers leave Turkey. The
borders of the modern Turkish state were set and the Ottoman Empire was no more.
Dynamic Republic
The Turks consolidated Ankara as their capital and abolished the sultanate. Assuming the
newly created presidency of the secular republic, Mustafa Kemal's energy was apparently
limitless in pursuing his vision of placing Turkey, devastated after years of war, among the
modern, developed countries of Europe.
The Atatürk era was one of enlightened despotism. Atatürk established the institutions
of democracy while never allowing any opposition to impede him. Although he worked
tirlelessly for the betterment of his people and country, one aspect of the Kemalist vision
has caused ongoing fallout: the insistence that the state be solely Turkish. Encouraging na-
tional unity made sense, considering the nationalist separatist movements that had bedev-
illed the Ottoman Empire, but in doing so a cultural existence was denied the Kurds.
Within a few years a Kurdish revolt erupted in southeast Anatolia, beginning the fighting
that continues today.
The desire to create homogenous nation states on the Aegean also prompted population
exchanges between Greece and Turkey: Greek-speaking communities from Anatolia were
shipped to Greece, while Muslim residents of Greece were transferred to Turkey. It was a
melancholy episode, bringing great disruption and the creation of ghost villages, vacated
and never reoccupied.
In Atatürk's zeal for modernisation, everything from headgear to language was scrutin-
ised and reformed. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Turkey adopted the Gregorian calen-
dar (as used in the West), reformed its alphabet (adopting the Roman script), standardised
the Turkish language, outlawed the fez, instituted universal suffrage and decreed that
Turks should take surnames.