Excerpted from Turkey: A Country Study, Paul M. Pitman III, ed. (Washington, D. C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 1987)
World War I
As the two European alliance systems drew closer to war in 1914, Enver's pronounced pro-German sympathies, shared by many in the military and bureaucracy, prevailed over the pragmatic neutrality proposed by Talat and Cemal. No formal commitment was made to aid Germany in the event of war, nor was the tilt toward Germany at first obvious. German General Otto Liman von Sanders had been appointed inspector general to supervise the retraining and reequipping of the Ottoman army after the Balkan wars, but a British admiral held a parallel position in the Ottoman navy, and orders for warships--including two dreadnoughts--had been placed with British shipyards. Germany had been pro-Ottoman during the Balkan wars, but Constantinople had no outstanding differences with either Britain or France in the summer of 1914. In guiding his government toward alignment with Germany, Enver was able to rely on Ottoman fear of the traditional enemy, Russia, the ally of Britain and France.
On August 2, 1914, Enver concluded a secret treaty of alliance with Germany that allowed the Ottoman Empire to remain neutral until provocation could be found to bring it into the war on the side of the Central Powers. General mobilization was ordered the next day, and in the next weeks concessions granted to foreign powers under the capitulations were canceled. But it remained for Germany to provide the casus belli.
Two German warships--the battleship Goeben and the heavy cruiser Breslau--that had been caught at the start of the war in a neutral Ottoman port were turned over to the Ottoman navy. In October they put to sea with German officers and crews and shelled Odessa and other Russian ports while flying the sultan's flag. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on November 5, Britain and France the next day. Within six months, the Ottoman army of 800,000 men was engaged in a four-front war.
Disregarding Liman von Sanders' advice, Enver launched an ill-prepared winter offensive in 1914-15 against the Russians in the Caucasus, vainly hoping that an impressive demonstration of Ottoman strength there would incite an insurrection among the tsar's Turkish-speaking subjects. The operation was bungled, and a Russian counteroffensive inflicted staggering losses on Ottoman forces, driving them back to Lake Van.
During the campaign in eastern Anatolia, assistance was given to the Russians by the Armenians, who saw them as liberators rather than invaders. Armenian units were also part of the Russian army. Enver convinced himself that an Armenian conspiracy existed and that a generalized revolt by the Armenians was imminent. During the winter months of 1915, as the shattered Ottoman army retreated toward Lake Van, a massive deportation of as many as 2 million Armenians was undertaken in the war zone. It shortly degenerated into a massacre, as the Turks descended on Armenian villages or slaughtered refugees along the road. The most conservative estimates put the number of dead at 600,000, but other sources cite figures well over 1 million. The situation of those Armenians who survived the march out of Anatolia was scarcely improved under the military government in Syria. Others managed to escape behind Russian lines. The episode occasioned a revulsion in Western Europe that had its effect in the harsh terms originally meted out by the Allies in the postwar settlement. It also left a legacy of bitterness among Armenians that was still manifested seven decades after the event in hostile activities against Turkish representatives in various parts of the world.
In the spring of 1915, the Allies undertook naval and land operations in the Dardanelles that were intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war with one blow and to open the strait for the passage of supplies to Russia. Amphibious landings were carried out at Gallipoli, but British Empire forces, vigorously opposed by forces commanded by Atatürk, were unable to extend their beachheads. The last units of the expeditionary force were evacuated by February 1916, and Atatürk was hailed as a national hero.
In Mesopotamia the Ottoman army defeated a British expeditionary force that had marched on Baghdad from a base established at Basra in 1915. The British mounted a new offensive in 1917, taking Baghdad and driving Ottoman forces out of Mesopotamia. In eastern Anatolia, Russian armies won a series of battles that carried their control west to Erzincan by July 1916, although Atatürk, who was then given command of the eastern front, led a successful counteroffensive that checked the Russian advance. Russia left the war after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The new government concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers in March 1918, under which the Ottoman Empire regained its eastern provinces.
Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, the sultan's regent in Mecca and the Hijaz region of western Arabia, launched the Arab Revolt in 1916 supported by British supplies and advisers, of whom T.E. Lawrence was to become the best known. In October 1917, British forces in Egypt opened an offensive into Palestine that took Jerusalem by December. After hard fighting, British and Arab forces entered Damascus in October 1918. Late in the campaign Atatürk succeeded Liman von Sanders in command of Turkish forces in Syria and successfully withdrew many units intact into Anatolia.
Ottoman resistance was exhausted. Early in October, the war government resigned, and the Young Turk triumvirate--Enver, Talat, and Cemal--fled to exile in Germany. Mehmed VI (reigned 1918-22), who had succeeded on his brother's death in July, sued for peace through a government headed by liberal ministers that signed an Allied-dictated armistice at Mudros on October 30, 1918. Allied warships steamed through the Dardanelles and anchored off Constantinople on November 12, the day after the end of the war in Europe. In 4 years of war the Ottoman Empire had mobilized 2.8 million men, of whom 325,000 were killed in battle. In addition, more than 2 million civilians, including both Turks and Armenians, are believed to have died from war-related causes. Talat and Cemal, who were held responsible for the deportation of Armenians and ill-treatment of refugees, were assassinated by Armenian nationalists in 1921. The following year, Enver was killed while fighting the Bolsheviks in Turkestan.
Atatürk and the Turkish Nation
Atatürk returned to Constantinople at the end of the war, his military reputation untarnished by the defeat of the empire that he had served and his perceptions about the course of the war borne out by events. Revered by his troops and the object of adulation by the Turkish masses who had little understanding of the reforms that he proposed for the country, Atatürk soon emerged as the standardbearer of the Turkish nationalist movement.
Born in Salonika in 1881, Atatürk was the son of a minor government official in a city where the Turks outnumbered the Greeks. His ardent Turkish nationalism dated from his early days as a cadet in the military school at Monastir (in present-day Yugoslavia) during a time of constant conflict between Ottoman troops and Macedonian guerrillas, who attacked the Turkish population in the region. Fascinated by European history, the young Mustafa Kemal adopted Napoleon as his personal model and idealized Western political, social, and cultural values, which later, as his country's leader, the mature Atatürk would seek to impose on Turkey.
Following graduation from the military academy in Constantinople, Atatürk held various staff positions and served in garrisons at Damascus and Salonika, where he became involved in nationalist activities. He took part in the coup that forced Abdül Hamid II's abdication in 1909. Atatürk organized irregular forces in Libya during the war with Italy in 1911 and subsequently held field commands in the two Balkan wars (1911- 13).
Between commands in 1917, Atatürk toured German lines on the Western Front and concluded that the Central Powers could not win the war against the Allies. In a report written at the end of the year, Atatürk urged the strategic withdrawal of Ottoman forces from the non-Turkish parts of the empire in order to concentrate manpower and resources on the defense of the Turkish heartland. Publication of the report led to his temporary recall by Enver, who greatly mistrusted Atatürk's influence in the army. Assigned to a post in the war ministry after the armistice, Atatürk quickly recognized the extent of Allied intentions toward the Ottoman Empire.
Plans for Partitioning Turkey
Allied troops--British, French, Italian, and a contingent of Greeks--occupied Constantinople and were permitted under the conditions of the armistice to intervene in areas where their interests appeared to be threatened. During the war, the Allies had negotiated a series of agreements that outlined not only the definitive dismantling of the Ottoman Empire but also the partitioning among them of what Turkish nationalists had come to view as the Turkish homeland. According to these agreements, Russia was at last to be rewarded with possession of Constantinople and the straits, the prize that the tsars had coveted for 200 years, as well as eastern Anatolia as far south as Bitlis below Lake Van. France and Italy were conceded portions of Anatolia, and Britain had promised Smyrna to Greece--although it had already been awarded to Italy--to sweeten the negotiations that preceded Greek entry into the war in 1917. Other arrangements, such as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, concerned the disposition of the Arab provinces.
The Bolshevik government had given up Russian claims when it made its separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, but Britain, France, Italy, and Greece all pressed their respective claims at the Versailles Conference in 1919. All agreed with the provisions of United States President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points that called for an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan, but it was not clear how the Allies would implement the clause providing that the Turkish-speaking nation "should be assured of a secure sovereignty."
Although the United States was never at war with the Ottoman Empire, diplomatic relations had been severed when the former went to war with Germany in April 1917. The United States became involved with the Turkish question at Versailles, however, and at one point the British prime minister David Lloyd George proposed an American mandate over Anatolia.
The terms of a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire were worked out by the Allies in April 1920 at San Remo and were embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres that was concluded by the Allies in August. The treaty honored the wartime agreements made by the Allies (see fig. 8). In addition, France was given a mandate over Lebanon and Syria (including what is now Hatay Province in Turkey), and Britain over Iraq and Palestine. Eastern Thrace up to the Çatalca line as well as Smyrna and its hinterland were to be occupied by Greece, with the final disposition of the territory to be decided in a plebiscite. The Treaty of Sèvres was never enforced as such, however, because events in Turkey soon rendered it unworkable.
The sultan was kept under custody by the Allies to ensure the cooperation of an Ottoman administration, which had effective jurisdiction only in Constantinople and part of northern Anatolia, while they disposed of the rest of what had been his empire. In the meantime, a Turkish nationalist movement was being organized under Atatürk's leadership to resist the dismemberment of Turkish-speaking areas. Atatürk had been sent to eastern Anatolia as inspector general, ostensibly to supervise the demobilization of Turkish forces and disposition of supplies but more particularly to get him out of the capital after he had expressed opposition to the Allied occupation there. Upon his arrival at Samsun in May 1919, Atatürk proceeded to rally support for the nationalist cause and to recruit a nationalist army. Guerrilla warfare against the government gradually grew to fullfledged campaigns against the Greek army that threatened to involve the other Allied occupation forces.
The nationalists sought to ensure the greatest amount of legitimacy for their activities and to involve as many Turks as possible in the struggle. In July 1919, a nationalist congress met at Erzurum with Atatürk presiding to endorse a protocol calling for an independent Turkish state. In September the congress reconvened at Sivas. Although the delegates voiced their loyalty to the sultan, they also pledged to maintain the integrity of the Turkish nation. The congress adopted the National Pact, which defined objectives of the nationalist movement that were not open to compromise. Among its provisions were the renunciation of the Arab provinces; the principle of the absolute integrity of all remaining Ottoman territory inhabited by a Turkish Muslim majority; a guarantee of minority rights; the retention of Constantinople and the straits; and rejection of any restriction on the political, judicial, and financial rights of the nation.
Negotiations continued between the nationalist congress and the Ottoman government, but to no avail. Atatürk resigned from the army when relieved of his duties. The naming of a chief minister in Constantinople considered sympathetic to the nationalist cause brought a brief improvement in their relations, however, and the Ottoman parliament, which met in January 1920, approved the National Pact. In reaction to these developments, Allied occupation forces seized public buildings and reinforced their positions in the capital. Numerous nationalist leaders were arrested and sent to Malta for detention, and parliament was dismissed.
Allied actions brought a quick response from the nationalists. In April they convened the Grand National Assembly in Ankara in defiance of the Ottoman regime and elected Atatürk its president. The Law of Fundamental Organization (also known as the Organic Law) was adopted in January 1921, proclaiming that sovereignty belonged to the nation and was exercised for it by the Grand National Assembly.
During the summer and fall of 1919, with authorization from the Supreme Allied War Council, the Greeks occupied Adrianople, Bursa, and Smyrna, where a landing was effected under cover of an Allied flotilla that included United States warships. No Turkish opposition was offered, and the Greeks had soon moved as far as Usak, 175 kilometers inland from Smyrna.
Military action between Turks and Greeks in Anatolia in 1920 was inconclusive, but the nationalist cause was strengthened the next year by a series of brilliant victories. Twice--in January and again in April-- smet Pasha defeated the Greek army at Inönü, blocking its advance into the interior of Anatolia. In July, in the face of a third offensive, the Turkish forces fell back in good order to the Sakarya Nehri, eighty kilometers from Ankara, where Atatürk took personal command and decisively defeated the Greeks in a twenty-day battle.
An improvement in Turkey's diplomatic situation accompanied military success. Impressed by the viability of the nationalist forces, both France and Italy had withdrawn from Anatolia by October 1921. Treaties were signed that year with the Soviet Union, the first European power to recognize the nationalists, establishing the boundary between the two countries. Already in 1919 the Turkish nationalists had cooperated with the Soviet Union in attacking the newly proclaimed Armenian republic. Armenian resistance was broken by the summer of 1921, and the Kars region was occupied by the Turks. In 1922 the nationalists recognized the Soviet absorption of what remained of the Armenian state, and Atatürk announced that there was no longer an Armenian minority in Turkey.
The final drive against the Greeks began in August 1922 with a battle referred to in Turkish sources as the Battle of the Commander in Chief. In September the Turks moved into Smyrna, where thousands were killed during the ensuing fighting and in the disorder that followed the city's capture. Greek soldiers and refugees, who had crowded in Smyrna, were taken away by Allied ships.
The nationalist army then concentrated on driving remaining Greek forces out of eastern Thrace, but the new campaign threatened to put the Turks in direct confrontation with Allied contingents defending access to the straits and in Constantinople, where they protected the Ottoman government. French forces pulled out from their positions on the straits, but the British seemed prepared to hold their ground against the advancing Turkish nationalists. A crisis was averted when Atatürk accepted a British-proposed truce that brought an end to fighting in the region between the Turks and the Greeks and also signalled that the Allies were unwilling to intervene on the side of Greece. In compliance with the Armistice of Mundanya, concluded in October, Greek troops withdrew beyond the Maritsa River, allowing the Turkish nationalists to occupy territory up to that line. The armistice accepted a continued Allied presence on the straits and in Constantinople until a comprehensive settlement could be reached.
At the end of October 1922, the Allies invited both the Ankara and the Constantinople governments to a conference at Lausanne, but Atatürk was determined that the nationalist government should be the only spokesman for Turkey. The action of the Allies prompted a resolution by the Grand National Assembly in November 1922 that separated the offices of sultan and caliph and abolished the former. The assembly further stated that the Constantinople government had ceased to be the government of Turkey when the Allies seized the capital. In essence, the assembly had abolished the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed VI went into exile on Malta, and his cousin, Abdülmecid, was named caliph.
Turkey was the only power defeated in World War I to negotiate with the Allies as an equal and to influence the provisions of the peace treaty. Ismet Pasha was the chief Turkish negotiator at the Lausanne Conference that opened in November 1922. The National Pact of 1919 was the basis of the Turkish negotiating position, and its provisions were recognized in the treaty concluded by Turkey in July 1923 with the Allied powers. The United States participated in the conference but, because it had never been at war with Turkey, did not sign the treaty.
The Treaty of Lausanne recognized the present-day territory of Turkey with two exceptions: the Mosul area and Hatay Province, which included the port of Alexandretta (present-day Iskenderun). The boundary with Iraq was settled by a League of Nations initiative in 1926, and Iskenderun was ceded to Turkey in 1939 by France in its capacity as League of Nations mandatory power for Syria. Detailed provisions of the treaty regulated use of the straits. General supervisory powers were given to the Straits Commission under the League of Nations, and the straits area was to be demilitarized after completion of the Allied withdrawal. Turkey was to hold the presidency of the commission, which included the Soviet Union among its members.
The capitulations and foreign administration of the Ottoman public debt, which infringed on the sovereignty of Turkey, were abolished. Turkey, however, assumed 40 percent of the Ottoman debt, the remainder being apportioned among other former Ottoman territories. Turkey was also required to maintain low tariffs on imports from signatory powers until 1929. The Treaty of Lausanne reaffirmed the equality of Muslim and non-Muslim Turkish nationals. Turkey and Greece agreed to a mandatory exchange of their respective Greek and Turkish minorities with the exception of some Greeks in Constantinople (hereafter referred to as Istanbul) and Turks in western Thrace.
On October 29, 1923, the Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey. Atatürk was named as its president, Ankara as its capital, and the modern state of Turkey was born.
On assuming office, Atatürk initiated a series of radical reforms in the country's political, social, and economic life that aimed at rapidly transforming Turkey into a modern state (see table B). For him, modernization meant Westernization. On one level, a secular legal code, modeled along European lines, was introduced that completely altered laws affecting women, marriage, and family relations. On another level, Atatürk urged his countrymen to look and act like Europeans. Turks were encouraged to wear European-style clothing. Atatürk personally promoted ballroom dancing at official functions. Surnames were adopted: Mustafa Kemal, for example, became Kemal Atatürk, and smet Pasha took Inönü as his surname to commemorate his victories there. Likewise, Atatürk insisted on cutting links with the past that he considered anachronistic. Titles of honor were abolished. The wearing of the fez, which had been introduced a century earlier as a modernizing reform to replace the turban, was outlawed because it had become for the nationalists a symbol of the reactionary Ottoman regime.
The ideological foundation for Atatürk's reform program became known as Kemalism. Its main points were enumerated in the Six Arrows of Kemalism as republicanism, nationalism, populism, reformism, etatism, and secularism. These were regarded as "fundamental and unchanging principles" guiding the republic, and, as such, they were written into its constitution. The principle of republicanism was contained in the constitutional declaration that "sovereignty is vested in the nation" and not in a single ruler. The nation-state supplanted the Ottoman dynasty as the focus of loyalty, and the particularism of Turkish nationalism replaced Ottoman universalism. Displaying considerable ingenuity, Atatürk set about reinventing the Turkish language and recasting Turkish history in a nationalist mold. The president himself went out into the park in Ankara on Sunday, the newly established day of rest, to teach the Latin alphabet adapted to Turkish as part of the language reform (see Language Reform: From Ottoman to Turkish , ch. 2). Populism encompassed not only the notion that all Turkish citizens were equal but also that all of them were Turks. What remained of the millet system that had guaranteed communal autonomy to other ethnic groups was abolished. Reformism legitimized the radical means by which changes in Turkish political and social life were implemented. Etatism, or statism, emphasized the central role reserved for the state in directing the nation's economic activities. This concept was cited particularly to justify state planning of Turkey's mixed economy and large-scale investment in state-owned enterprises. An important aim of Atatürk's economic policies was to prevent foreign interests from exercising influence on the Turkish economy.
Although all of the Kemalist reforms were unsettling to traditionalists, it was the exclusion of Islam from an official role in the life of the nation that shocked Atatürk's contemporaries most profoundly, and discontent continued to focus on the regime's secularist policies long after the other reforms had been generally accepted (see Secularist Reforms; Retreat from Secularism , ch. 2). The abolition of the caliphate ended any connection between the state and religion. The religious orders were suppressed, religious schools closed and public education secularized, and the seriat revoked, requiring readjustment of the entire social framework of the Turkish people. Despite the protest that these measures provoked, however, Atatürk conceded nothing to the traditionalists.
In 1924 the Grand National Assembly adopted a new constitution to replace the 1876 constitution that had continued to serve as the legal framework for the republican government. The 1924 constitution vested sovereign power in the Grand National Assembly as representative of the people, to whom it also guaranteed basic civil rights. A unicameral body elected for a four-year term by universal suffrage, the assembly exercised legislative authority, including responsibility for approving the budget, ratifying treaties, and declaring war. The new constitution did not provide for an impartial judiciary to rule on the constitutionality of laws enacted by the assembly, but rather empowered the elected legislature to alter or defer judicial decisions.
The president of the republic was elected for a four-year term by the assembly, and he in turn appointed the prime minister, who was expected to enjoy the confidence of the assembly (see table 3, Appendix). Throughout his presidency, repeatedly extended by the assembly, Atatürk governed Turkey essentially by personal rule in a one-party state. The Republican People's Party ( RPP--see Glossary) was founded in 1923 by Atatürk to represent the nationalist movement in elections and to serve as a vanguard party in supporting the Kemalist reform program. Atatürk's Six Arrows were an integral part of the RPP's political platform. By controlling the RPP, Atatürk also controlled the assembly and assured support there for the government he had appointed. Atatürk regarded a stage of personal authoritarian rule as necessary for securing his reforms before entrusting the government of the country to the democratic process.
Nevertheless, opposition existed. Specific misgivings about Atatürk's personal dominance took early form in a grouping of his old associates called the Progressive Republican Party. Some also felt that Atatürk was carrying the reform program too far, too fast. Atatürk was willing to experiment with a multiparty system, and in November 1924 he replaced Inönü as prime minister with Fethi Okyar, who represented the new party.
Scarcely had this experiment begun, however, when an uprising broke out that quickly spread throughout the Kurdish region in southeastern Turkey. Although sometimes characterized as an expression of Kurdish nationalism, the revolt was led by a hereditary chief of the Naksibendi dervishes, who had been disbanded as part of Atatürk's secularist reforms. He and other dervish leaders urged their Kurdish followers to overthrow the "godless" government in Ankara and restore the caliph. Atatürk recalled Inönü to the prime minister's office in March 1925 and rushed legislation through the Grand National Assembly that provided emergency powers to the government for the next four years. Special courts with summary powers were established, and the Progressive Republican Party was outlawed. Meanwhile, the Turkish army swiftly extinguished the revolt.
A plot to assassinate Atatürk was uncovered in 1926 and found to have originated with a former deputy who had opposed abolition of the caliphate and had a personal grudge against the president. A sweeping investigation brought before the tribunal a large number of Atatürk's political opponents, fifteen of whom were hanged. As a result of the inquiry, some of his former close associates were sent into exile. This action was the only broad political purge during Atatürk's presidency. Whether there were specific connections between the Progressive Republican Party, the Kurdish revolt, and the assassination plot remained a subject of conjecture among historians. The pattern of organized opposition, however, was broken, and Atatürk's rule and the single-party state were never again seriously challenged. Another experiment with multiparty politics was made in 1930 in the form of an authorized loyal opposition party, but this effort degenerated into factionalism and was quickly ended.
Chronology of Major Kemalist Reforms
Year Reform
1922 Sultanate abolished (November 1).
1923 Treaty of Lausanne secured (July 24).
Republic of Turkey with capital at Ankara proclaimed (October 29).
1924 Caliphate abolished (March 3).
Traditional religious schools closed, seriat abolished.
Constitution adopted (April 20).
1925 Dervish brotherhoods abolished.
Fez outlawed by the Hat Law (November 25). Veiling of women discouraged; Western clothing for men and women encouraged. Western (Gregorian) calendar adopted.
1926 New civil, commercial, and penal codes based on European models adopted.
New civil code ended Islamic polygamy and divorce by renunciation and introduced civil marriage.
Millet system ended.
1927 First systematic census.
1928 New Turkish alphabet (modified Latin form) adopted.
State declared secular (April 10); constitutional provision establishing Islam as official religion deleted.
1933 Islamic call to worship and public readings of the Kuran (Quran) required to be in Turkish rather than Arabic.
1934 Women given the vote and the right to hold office.
Law of Surnames adopted--Mustafa Kemal given the name Kemal Atatürk (Father Turk) by the Grand National Assembly; Ismet Pasha took surname of Inönü.
1935 Sunday adopted as legal weekly holiday.
State role in managing economy written into the constitution.
Atatürk's foreign policy, which had as its main object the preservation of the independence and integrity of the new republic, was careful, conservative, and successful. He enunciated the principle of "peace at home and peace abroad," and this concept, necessary for the task of internal nationbuilding, became the cornerstone of Turkey's foreign relations.
By the end of 1925, friendship treaties had been negotiated with fifteen states. That year a twenty-year treaty of friendship and neutrality also was concluded with the Soviet Union that remained in effect until unilaterally abrogated by the Soviet Union in 1945. Turkey subsequently joined the Balkan Pact along with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, an action aimed at maintaining Balkan stability in the face of the increasingly aggressive policy of Italy and potential Bulgarian alignment with Nazi Germany. On the eastern flank, Turkey entered into a nonaggression treaty with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran in 1937.
Atatürk attained his greatest diplomatic success in 1936, when Turkey persuaded the signatory powers of the Treaty of Lausanne to allow Turkish control and remilitarization of the straits as part of the Montreux Convention. Under this detailed and complex document, which remained in effect in the late-1980s, merchant vessels were to continue to have freedom of navigation of the straits, but Turkey took over the functions of the international commission for registry, sanitary inspection, and toll charges. Turkey was permitted to refortify the straits area and, if at war or under imminent threat of war, to close the straits to war vessels.
Turkey After Atatürk
Atatürk's death in Istanbul on November 10, 1938, was the occasion for an outpouring of grief throughout the Turkish nation. With much ceremony, his body was transported to Ankara and placed in a temporary tomb from which it was transferred in 1953 to a newly completed mausoleum on a hill overlooking Ankara. This building has become a national shrine.
The stability of the new republic was evident in the smoothness of the presidential succession. The day after Atatürk's death, the Grand National Assembly elected his chief lieutenant, Inönü, as president. Celal Bayar, who had succeeded Inönü as prime minister in 1937, continued in that office.