Death Rattle of an
Empire –
Birth Pangs of a
Republic
Resonant Themes in Turkish History
Mixed Messages: Chania, Crete
2
Themes
• Towards the Republic
• Founding the Republic
• The population exchange
• Political consequences
• Musical consequences
• Modernisation and westernisation
• Language reform, literacy and Education
• Music and Dress
• Securing and mythologising the Republic
• The Republic today
3
Towards the Republic
• Survival?
• Balkan wars; lost territories, lost identities, new identities, population movements
• Creating and conflicting identities:
• Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, Westernism, Socialism
• Since 19th century Tanzimat, new language of identity at centre of politics.
• Changes in military, political life and social life, from dress codes to education to
protect and sustain the Empire.
• Impact of First World War
• Armenian question and repercussions
• Something genuinely new was necessary to construct a nation state.
• What? How?
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Towards the Republic
• The rise of Ataturk in the First World War
• Gallipoli
• The fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1919
• The Greek invasion, 1919-1922
• the ‘Asia Minor catastrophe’
• Treaty of Sevres (1920)
• Carved up Ottoman lands
5
Sevres Syndrome
• Turkish war of independence
• Repulsion of the Greek invasion and rejection of Sevres
• Sevres Treaty signed by Ottoman delegation (but never by Sultan).
• Duality of political leadership: who represents Turks/Turkey?
• Ankara rejected it from the very beginning
• Still born Treaty increased resistance to occupation
• Never implemented but Sevres left a legacy in Turkey
• Sevres left a notorious legacy in Turkish collective memory as a symbol
of defeat and capitulation.
• ‘Sevres mentality’ is to see every demand from the outside as a threat
to integrity of Turkey.
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Treaty of Lausanne (1923)
• Resolved boundaries of the Ottoman successor state in a territory
bigger than that agreed for Turkey in never implemented Sevres.
• Established Turkey as a sovereign geo-political entity.
• Confirmed the triumph of ‘resistance’ and of war-torn (for decades)
people.
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The one and indivisible republic?
8
Founding the Republic
• Sultanate abolished in 1922
• Following Treaty of Lausanne, Republic of Turkey founded 1923
• Ankara chosen as capital
• Republic as unitary state
• Republic as Turkish state
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The Population Exchange
• Military defeats, lost territories. Events of late 19th century paved way for big
waves of migration within and outside territory that later became Turkey.
• Around two million Muslims migrated to Anatolia territories lost to Russia, Austria and
Greece
• Balkan Wars created another wave of migration, this time including a reverse direction
of Christian refugees.
• When Anatolian resistance drove the Greek army out of Anatolia most western
Anatolian Greeks fled.
• Fear of reprisal
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The population exchange
•
•
•
•
Why?
Who?
Where?
How?
• Treaty of Lausanne (1923)
• Criterion = religion, not language
• Consequences
• Economic
• Social
• Political consequences
• Precedent
• Musical
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Twice a stranger’
• Asia Minor’s Greek-Orthodox community, including the
Karamanlıs of central Turkey and the Pontic Greeks of the
Black Sea, left for Greece.
• Turkish-Muslim community of Western Thrace stayed in
Greece
• Cretans to Cunda and elsewhere
• Greek-Orthodox communities of Istanbul and the Aegean
islands of Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos)
exempted from the exchange.
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Küçükkuyu
‘In commemoration of exchanges on both shores’
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The Population Exchange
• Exchange affected Asia Minor Greeks and Turkish-Muslim
communities differently since Turkey and Greece were at “at
different stages of nation-state formation” (Ç. Keyder, in
Hirschon, 2003).
• Asymmetrical: added c25% to Greek population and c5%
• Parts of Greece became overcrowded and parts of Turkey
seriously underpopulated
• Greek planning laws
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Population exchange: Rebetika
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_nOoZCGtd8&index=5&li
st=RDUaR1vKSV-dI
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cPbCXWGJMo&list=RDU
aR1vKSV-dI&index=8
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A busy time
• 1924: Abolition of caliphate
• 1924: Muslim sabbath, Friday, dropped in favour of Sunday.
• 1924: The Ministry for Islamic law (Shariat) and pious foundations (vakıfs) abolished =
Islam stripped of state backing.
• 1924: Religious seminaries (madrassa) shut down; religious high Schools placed under
authority of Ministry of Education.
• 1924: Presidency of Religious Affairs
• 1925: Sufi dervish lodges closed.
• 1925: Fez declared illegal. New law required men to wear western-style hats.
• 1925: Lunar calendar and clock dropped; Gregorian calendar/solar clock adopted
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Even busier
• 1926: Turkish Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük
• Millet Meclisi—TBMM) approved a secular civil code to
regulate marriage, inheritance, divorce, and adoption.
• 1926: the government annulled Shariat courts, declaring
Islamic law null and void.
• 1928: parliament removed from constitution declaration of
Islam as Turkey’s state religion.
• 1928: Arabic alphabet to be dropped and new, Latin-based
alphabet effective from January 1, 1929.
• Previous efforts from tanzimat onwards not very successful
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Mythologising the Turkish Republic
• Nutuk 1927
• Six day speech
• Nutuk as a performative
• Myth creation
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Kemalism as a state doctrine
• The six principles: the “six arrows,” representing
republicanism, nationalism, secularism, populism, statism, and
revolutionism.
• Most important are republicanism, nationalism, secularism
• CHP: Republican People’s Party established 1923
• Multi party system 1946
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The Shape of the Republic
• Turkish identity
• Unitary state
• Hobbesian conception of state sovereignty.
• Rejection of regionalism and autonomy.
• Minorities: e.g. Kurds and integration in Turkish Republic
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Language Reform
• A reform in alphabet:
• Persian/Arabic script ill suited to Turkish, hard to read, fiendishly difficult
to write
• A reform in language – words, spelling and grammar
• Purification of language – removal of Persian and Arabic words
• Most people could not read or write
• Mass literacy, education and language reform was a joint project
• Declaration of cultural and political westernisation
• Creating new Turkish identity
• Origins of Turkish and Turkish past
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A ‘catastrophic success’?
• Cut Turks off from their own history.
• Nobody could read their grand great parents letters, diaries
• Only trained scholars can read official Ottoman documents
and books
• Alienation
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Secularisation
• Pushing Islam out of public domain.
• Atatürk’s vision of Turkey: as a modern nation state of citizens.
• “the regime targeted a new, national, and all-inclusive identity for the
country’s inhabitants and ... having turned its back on Islam, Ankara
promoted a varied definition of the nation”
• Atatürk declared: “the people of Turkey, who have established the Turkish
state, are called the Turkish nation.”
• Atatürk stressed shared past, interests and desire to live together as factors
binding the nation together.
• Article 5 of CHP’s new by-laws adopted at the Second Congress, 1927,
stipulated that one of “the strongest links” among the citizens was
“unity in feelings and unity in ideas.”
• (Soner Çağaptay, 2006)
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Professional life and education
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Equality between the sexes
• On 17 February 1926, Turkey adopted a new civil code by
which the rights of Turkish women and men were declared
equal except in suffrage.
• In 1930, women gained the right to participate in municipal
and, in 1934, national elections.
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Women in public life
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Modern Secular Life
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Marriage, civil law and dress codes
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Reform
• Westernisation and modernisation was not new
• Dated back to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid 19th century
• However the way Ataturk exploited the opportunities
provided by the formation of the Turkish Republic was new.
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The Present
Challenges to the republic
• Neo-Ottomanism
• Pan Turkism
• Unitary state
• Autonomy
And unresolved issues with
• CHP (Republican People’s Party)
• Islam in Public Domain
• Electoral System
• 1915: Armenia and Armenians
• Kurdish autonomy and integration
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• Alaranta, T. ‘Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Six-Day Speech of 1927:
Defining the Official Historical View of the Foundation of the
Turkish Republic’ (Turkish Studies, 9: 1,115-129, 2008)
• Çağaptay, S. Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern
Turkey: who is a Turk? (Routledge, 2006)
• Clark, B. Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged
Modern Greece and Turkey (Granta, 2006)
• Hirschon, R.(ed) Crossing the Aegean: an appraisal of the
1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and
Turkey (Bergahn, 2003)
• İnalcık, H. Turkey and Europe in History (Eren, 2006)
• Kedourie, S. (ed) Turkey before and after Atatürk (Cass, 1999)
• Kili, S. The Atatürk Revolution: a paradigm of modernization
(Türkiye Bankası, 2008)
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Suggested Reading
• Lewis, G. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic
Success (Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Mango, A. Atatürk (2nd ed, Murray, 2004)
• Mango, A. Turkey: From the Sultan to Atatürk (Haus, 2009)
• Özkırımlı, U & Sofos, S.A. Tormented by History: Nationalism in
Greece and Turkey (Hurst, 2008)
• Zürcher, E.J.Turkey: A Modern History (3rd ed, Tauris, 2004)
• Zürcher, E.J. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building from
the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (Tauris, 2010)
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Suggested Reading