The History of Turkey 2nd Edition - Douglas A Howard 2016 PDF

THE
HISTORY OF
TURKEY
ADVISORY BOARD
John T. Alexander
Professor of History and Russian and European Studies,
University of Kansas
Robert A. Divine
George W. Littlefield Professor in American History Emeritus,
University of Texas at Austin
John V. Lombardi
Professor of History,
University of Florida
THE
HISTORY OF
TURKEY
Second Edition
Douglas A. Howard
The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations

Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling, Series Editors
Copyright © 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Howard, Douglas A. (Douglas Arthur), 1958– author.

Title: The history of Turkey / Douglas A. Howard.
Description: Second edition. | Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, 2016. |
Series: The Greenwood histories of the modern nations | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049611| ISBN 9781440834660 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781440834677 (EISBN)
Subjects: LCSH: Turkey—History.
Classification: LCC DR441.H69 2016 | DDC 956.1—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049611
ISBN: 978-1-4408-3466-0
EISBN: 978-1-4408-3467-7
20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper
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For my sisters, Catherine, Susan, and Lisa
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Series Foreword
by Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Timeline of Historical Events xix
Turkish Spelling and Pronunciation Guide xxv
1 Turkey Today 1
2 Ancient Anatolia 23
3 The Turkish Conquest of Anatolia, 1071–1517 33
4 Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire, 1517–1789 45
5 The Late Ottoman Empire, 1789–1908 59
6 Revolution and War, 1908–1923 75
7 The Early Turkish Republic, 1923–1945 93

viii Contents
8 Multiparty Democracy, 1945–1960 117
9 Military Intervention and the Second

Republic, 1960–1980 135
10 The Military Republic, 1980–1993 159
11 Corruption and Disaster, 1993–2002 175
12 Justice and Development, 2002–2012 187
13 Gezi Park: Turkey Since 2012 201
Notable People in the History of Turkey 219
Glossary 235
Bibliographic Essay 245
Index 255
Series Foreword
The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series is intended

to provide students and interested laypeople with up-to-date, concise,
and analytical histories of many of the nations of the contemporary
world. Not since the 1960s has there been a systematic attempt to pub-
lish a series of national histories, and as series editors, we believe that
this series will prove to be a valuable contribution to our understand-
ing of other countries in our increasingly interdependent world.
At the end of the 1960s, the Cold War was an accepted reality of
global politics. The process of decolonization was still in progress, the
idea of a unified Europe with a single currency was unheard of, the
United States was mired in a war in Vietnam, and the economic boom
in Asia was still years in the future. Richard Nixon was president of
the United States, Mao Tse-tung (not yet Mao Zedong) ruled China,
Leonid Brezhnev guided the Soviet Union, and Harold Wilson was
prime minister of the United Kingdom. Authoritarian dictators still
controlled most of Latin America, the Middle East was reeling in the
wake of the Six-Day War, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was at
the height of his power in Iran.
Since then, the Cold War has ended, the Soviet Union has vanished,
leaving 15 independent republics in its wake, the advent of the com-
puter age has radically transformed global communications, the rising
x Series Foreword
demand for oil makes the Middle East still a dangerous flashpoint, and
the rise of new economic powers like the People’s Republic of China
and India threatens to bring about a new world order. All of these de-
velopments have had a dramatic impact on the recent history of every
nation of the world.
For this series, which was launched in 1998, we first selected nations
whose political, economic, and socio-cultural affairs marked them as
among the most important of our time. For each nation, we found an
author who was recognized as a specialist in the history of that nation.
These authors worked cooperatively with us and with Greenwood
Press to produce volumes that reflected current research on their na-
tions and that are interesting and informative to their readers. In the
first decade of the series, close to 50 volumes were published, and
some have now moved into second editions.
The success of the series has encouraged us to broaden our scope to
include additional nations whose histories have had significant effects
on their regions, if not on the entire world. In addition, geopolitical
changes have elevated other nations into positions of greater impor-
tance in world affairs, and so, we have chosen to include them in this
series as well. The importance of a series such as this cannot be under-
estimated. As a superpower whose influence is felt all over the world,
the United States can claim a “special” relationship with almost every
other nation. Yet many Americans know very little about the histories
of nations with which the United States relates. How did they get to be
the way they are? What kind of political systems have evolved there?
What kind of influence do they have on their own regions? What are
the dominant political, religious, and cultural forces that move their
leaders? These and many other questions are answered in the volumes
of this series.
The authors who contribute to this series write comprehensive his-
tories of their nations, dating back, in some instances, to prehistoric
times. Each of them, however, has devoted a significant portion of
their book to events of the past 40 years because the modern era has
contributed the most to contemporary issues that have an impact on
U.S. policy. Authors make every effort to be as up to date as possible so
that readers can benefit from discussion and analysis of recent events.
In addition to the historical narrative, each volume contains an in-
troductory chapter giving an overview of that country’s geography,
political institutions, economic structure, and cultural attributes. This
is meant to give readers a snapshot of the nation as it exists in the
contemporary world. Each history also includes supplementary in-
formation following the narrative, which may include a timeline that
Series Foreword xi
represents a succinct chronology of the nation’s historical evolution,

biographical sketches of the nation’s most important historical fig-
ures, and a glossary of important terms or concepts that are usually
expressed in a foreign language. Finally, each author prepares a com-
prehensive bibliography for readers who wish to pursue the subject
further.
Readers of these volumes will find them fascinating and well writ-
ten. More importantly, they will come away with a better understand-
ing of the contemporary world and the nations that comprise it. As
series editors, we hope that this series will contribute to a heightened
sense of global understanding as we move through the early years of
the twenty-first century.
Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling

Indiana University Southeast
Preface
When the editors at Greenwood Press approached me to suggest

doing a second edition of The History of Turkey, the timing seemed
fortuitous. After a decade of Justice and Development Party rule, the
dizzying rate of national economic growth in Turkey had slowed to
a more sober pace, and subsequent events began to reveal some of
the obvious social costs of the boom. Meanwhile, the look of Turkish
national life, with its perpetually elevated levels of emotional energy,
uncannily resembled scenes from Turkish TV melodramas, the great
national fixation. If American public life sometimes looks like a reality
TV series, Turkish public life often looks like a soap opera.
Turkish television soap operas quickly confound American expecta-
tions of Turkey’s conservative society and Islamist-run government.
Some analysts have pointed out that the melodramatic style and fam-
ily-dominated plots of the soaps tend to reinforce traditional gender
roles and assumptions of patriarchal authority. At the same time, there
is no denying their immense popularity, and they are one of Turkey’s
most important exports of the last decade—Turkey exports more televi-
sion shows annually than any other country, except the United States.
They are wildly popular all over the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central
Asia, and the Arab World. The titillating costumes, sordid characters,
alcohol use, and premarital sex sometimes bring denunciations from
xiv Preface
religious authorities, but do nothing to dampen their appeal. And the

series can be more complex than the criticism suggests. What Was Fat-
magül’s Crime? (Fatmagül’ün Suçu Ne?) explored cultural assumptions
about rape being excused if the perpetrator married his victim. Silver
(Gümüş ), which first aired on Turkish Kanal D in 2005, was bought by
the Middle East Broadcasting Company, dubbed into Arabic, and be-
came an instant hit in Egypt. Its final episode in 2008 drew 85 million
viewers. Forbidden Love (Aş k-ı Memnu), originally a nineteenth-cen-
tury novel, reappeared as a TV serial, beginning in 2008. A Thousand
and One Nights (Binbir Gece) updates the classic Arab tale for twenty-
first century Istanbul’s construction frenzy, casting the frame story as
a dilemma between moral purity and maternal love. One of the most
successful, Magnificent Century (Muhteş em Yüzyıl), about Sultan Sü-
leyman the Magnificent (1520–1566), has been dubbed and seen in
more than 40 countries.
If Turkey’s public life exhibits similar levels of unending drama, one
reason is that frequent elections have made Turkey’s polarized politics
a constant topic of conversation. Since the publication of the first edition
of this book, Turkey’s parliamentary system of government has cycled
through four national elections, three local elections, and two national
referendums. In the past 19 months, there have been local elections (30
March 2014), a national presidential election (August 2014), and two
national parliamentary elections (7 June and 1 November 2015). Much
of the political talk on the airwaves, in the newspapers, and in pubs,
cafes and city parks has been loud and unedifying. Fights have broken
out among legislators, including fisticuffs on the floor of parliament
twice in one week in February 2015. And this is on top of true national
calamities, including the Gezi Park protests of the summer of 2013, the
Soma mine disaster of May 2014, the mass crush of refugees fleeing the
Syrian civil war, and the violence brought to Turkey as that war spilled
over the border in the summer of 2015.
Another reason for the ceaseless high drama is the outsized person-
ality of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who won office in the August
2014 election. Erdoğan previously led the government as prime minis-
ter for nearly all of the 12 years of Justice and Development Party rule,
and prior to that, he was Mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. Opin-
ionated, outspoken, and controversial, in over 20 years of public life,
Erdoğan has proven himself without peer as an aggressive and savvy
Turkish politician. One prominent Turkish daily newspaper keeps a
running clock on its website that lets viewers know exactly how many
seconds, minutes, and hours have passed since President Erdoğan’s
last public pronouncement.
Preface xv
Although personally offended at the way history was presented in

The Magnificent Century, President Erdoğan, like most citizens of Tur-
key, watched the show. And he is not alone among viewers in see-
ing Turkey as the modern descendant of proud historical forbears. An
outstanding (or comical, depending on one’s perspective) example oc-
curred during a state visit by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the State
of Palestine. The visit was one of the first opportunities to exhibit the
controversial new presidential palace in Ankara. President Erdoğan
descended the palace’s magnificent central staircase flanked by 16 cos-
tumed guards wearing battle dress to represent 16 allegedly “Turkish”
empires that stretched across Eurasia for much of medieval history.
The Republic of Turkey has, however, comparatively recent origins
within comparatively small borders. Turkey was established in 1923
in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, after the War of Independence freed
the country from foreign domination. The first president of Turkey,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, directed the reconstruction of the Turkish
economy and Turkish society until his death in 1938, through the au-
thoritarian means of a single-party state. After World War II, Turkey,
threatened by the Soviet Union and the descending Iron Curtain, was
drawn into the new alliance system being built by the United States.
During the Cold War, Turkey held the ironic position of a military-
dominated parliamentary democracy with a planned economy in the
NATO alliance. Like the other countries of Eastern Europe, once the
Cold War was over, Turkey abandoned central planning, turned to-
wards the global market, and began reckoning with the legacy of its
authoritarian past.
This book sets the dramatic public life of the modern country of
Turkey within the context of the long history of Anatolia and Eastern
Thrace. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to Turkey’s current geographic,
economic, and political circumstances. Chapter 2 briefly presents the
ancient history of these lands, from the late Paleolithic age to the Seljuk
Turkish victory over Byzantine armies at Manzikert (1071). Chapters
3, 4, and 5 describe the Turkish conquest of Anatolia and the imperial
rule of the Ottoman sultans. The Young Turk revolution, War of Inde-
pendence, and early years of the republic are the subjects of chapters 6
and 7. Chapters 8 and 9 cover Turkish multi-party democracy up to
the military coup of September 12, 1980. The effects of military rule
are discussed in chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 12 is devoted to the Jus-
tice and Development Party years. The final chapter looks at the Gezi
Park protests and Turkish life since. The main theme is the legacy of
Atatürk, the great twentieth-century leader whose presence is still felt
in everyday life all around Turkey.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors at Greenwood Press, especially Kait-

lin Ciarmiello and series editors Frank Thackeray and John Findling,
for the timely opportunity to write this revised, second edition of The
History of Turkey.
My colleagues and friends in the History Department at Calvin Col-
lege have been a steady source of encouragement and have offered
fresh ways of seeing things from the perspective of interested outsid-
ers to Turkey. My chairman, Will Katerberg, gave me strong support
as I took on the project. A research trip was funded by the Calvin Col-
lege faculty travel fund. Friends in Turkey happily lent their experi-
enced observations. Erdem Çıpa of the University of Michigan made
available to me some recent publications to which I would not other-
wise have had access. Through former Calvin College president Gay-
len Byker, I met three outstanding tourism professionals, Ender Tan,
Orhan Sezener, and Lale Deniz, who have befriended several groups
of Calvin College undergraduates and answered their and my many
questions tirelessly and with passion, humor, and critical insight. I am
grateful both for their good-natured professionalism and their deep
faith in human goodness.
I owe many thanks to my wife Sandy, my traveling partner in life, for
her love and graciousness. Our son Steven gave me a place to stay on
xviii Acknowledgments
recent visits to Istanbul, his residence for several years. I am indebted

to him for his eyewitness accounts of the Gezi Park protests of 2013.
He also read and gave generous feedback on parts of the manuscript.
Finally, I would like to thank my father, my late mother, and my sisters
(to whom this book is dedicated), for many cherished memories of life
in the beautiful country and among the beautiful people of Turkey.
Timeline of Historical Events
9600–8000 Göbekli Tepe in use

b.c.e.
6500 b.c.e. Founding of Çatal Hüyük
1700–1200 Hittite kingdom
b.c.e.
750–600 b.c.e. Phrygian state in central Anatolia; Urartu in eastern
Anatolia
550–334 b.c.e. Persian Achaemenid empire
334–333 b.c.e. Alexander the Great in Anatolia
13 c.e. Augustus Caesar’s Deeds written
50–60 c.e. St. Paul’s missionary journeys
312–314 c.e. Conversion to Christianity of Emperor Constantine and
of King Trdat the Great
325 Council of Nicaea
640 Arab invasion of Armenia
1071 Battle of Manzikert
xx Timeline of Historical Events
.
1078 Iznik (Nicaea) made capital of Turkish Anatolian state
1097–1099 First Crusade
1176 Battle of Myriokephalon
1204 Fall of Constantinople in Fourth Crusade
1219–1236 Reign of Alauddin Kaykubad, Seljuk Turkish ruler in
Konya
1243 Battle of Köse Dağ, Mongols defeat the Seljuks
1300 Defeat of Byzantine forces by Osman
1327 Orhan captures Bursa
1330–1331 Ibn Battuta in Anatolia
1395 Ottoman province of Anadolu organized
1402 Tamerlane defeats Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at the Battle
of Ankara
1402–1411 Ottoman interregnum, and civil war and reconquest of
Anatolia
1453 Fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) to Ottoman Sultan
Mehmed II
1466–1478 Reign of Uzun Hasan, Akkoyunlu ruler
1507 Shah Ismail invades Anatolia
1514 Battle of Çaldıran, Ottoman Sultan Selim I defeats Shah
Ismail
1516–1517 Sultan Selim I conquers the Ramazanoğlu state in Cili-
cia, and also Syria, Egypt, and Arabia
1520–1566 Reign of Sultan Süleyman Kanuni
1578–1590 War with Iran in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Caucasus
1630–1672 Evliya Çelebi’s career of travels
1656–1703 Köprülü era of grand vezirs
1699 Treaty of Karlowitz
1768–74 War with Russia; Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca
1789–1807 Reign of Sultan Selim III
1808–1839 Reign of Sultan Mahmud II
1826 Destruction of the Janissaries; Bektashi order banned
Timeline of Historical Events xxi
1832 Egyptian invasion of Anatolia; Ottoman armies de-

feated at Konya
1839–1876 Tanzimat era of reforms
1864 Provincial reorganization
1869 Promulgation of the Mecelle code
1875 Bosnian peasant revolt breaks out; Serbia and Montene-
gro declare war on Ottomans
1876–1909 Reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II
1876 First Ottoman constitution; first Ottoman parliament
elected
1877 Parliament prorogued and constitution suspended by
Sultan Abdülhamid
1877–1878 Russo-Turkish war
1878 Congress of Berlin
1881 Creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration;
Birth of Mustafa Kemal in Salonika
1889 Formation of the Committee of Union and Progress in
Paris
1896 Armenian massacres
1908 Young Turk Revolution; Ottoman constitution restored;
parliament elected
1908–1923 Second constitutional period
1909 Counterrevolution suppressed
1912–1913 First and Second Balkan Wars; CUP coup in Istanbul led
by Major Enver
1914–1918 The Great War
1915 British military landing at Dardanelles repulsed; depor-
tations and genocide of Armenians
1918 Syria, Palestine, and Iraq severed from the Ottoman
Empire
1919 May: Mustafa Kemal Pasha lands at Samsun
July–September: Nationalist congresses at Erzurum and
Sivas; adoption of the National Pact
1919–1922 Turkish War of Independence
xxii Timeline of Historical Events
1920 August: Treaty of Sèvres

1923 July: Treaty of Lausanne
October 29: Declaration of the Republic of Turkey
1924 April: Ratification of the Constitution of the Republic
1925 Kurdish revolt of Sheikh Said
November: Law banning the fez
December: International calendar and clock adopted
1927 October: Mustafa Kemal’s six-day speech at the RPP
congress
1928 November: Romanized alphabet adopted
1934 First five-year plan adopted
Family name law adopted; women receive the suffrage
. .
1938 November 10: Death of Atatürk; Ismet Inönü becomes
second president of the republic
1940 Village Institutes opened nationwide
1942 Capital tax
1950 Democrat Party wins landslide victory in national elec-
tions; Celal Bayar elected third president of the Repub-
lic; Adnan Menderes becomes prime minister
1952 Turkey joins NATO
1959 Republic of Cyprus declared as an independent state
Turkey applies for associate membership in EEC
1960 May: Junior officers seize power in Turkey’s first mili-
tary coup; form National Unity Committee (NUC)
1961 June: New constitution adopted in a national referen-
dum; beginning of Second Republic
September: Former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes
and other Democrat Party leaders executed
1963 December: First Cyprus war between Turkish and Greek
Cypriots
1967 November: Second Cyprus war between Turkish and
Greek Cypriots
1971 March: Military forces Demirel’s resignation in the Coup
by Memorandum
Timeline of Historical Events xxiii
1973 October: CHP wins post-coup national elections; Bülent

Ecevit becomes prime minister; Fahri Korutürk becomes
sixth president of the republic
1974 Coup in Cyprus; Turkish invasion
1978 PKK founded in Ankara by Abdullah Öcalan
1980 September 12: Turkish military coup, constitution sus-
pended, parliament closed
1982 November: National referendum on new constitution;
Kenan Evren elected seventh president of the republic;
beginning of third republic
1983 November: Motherland Party wins national elections;
Turgut Özal becomes prime minister
1989 November: President Kenan Evren retires; Turgut Özal
becomes eighth president of the republic
1993 Death of President Turgut Özal; Süleyman Demirel be-
comes ninth president of the republic
1994 April: Welfare Party wins local elections, including may-
orships in Istanbul and Ankara
1995 December: Welfare Party wins national elections
1996 June: Necmettin Erbakan becomes prime minister
November: Auto accident at Susurluk brings to light ex-
tensive government corruption scandal
1997 February: In the “Post-modern coup,” military forces
Prime Minister Erbakan to agree to measures limiting
influence of Islam in public life
December: European Union rejects Turkey’s bid for
membership
1998 November: Prime Minister Yılmaz resigns amid charges
of corruption; Bülent Ecevit becomes prime minister
1999 February: PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan captured
April: Democratic Left Party of Bülent Ecevit wins na-
tional elections
August: Massive earthquake strikes northwestern Tur-
key; more than 17,000 people killed
December: EU readmits Turkey to candidate status
xxiv Timeline of Historical Events
2000 May: President Süleyman Demirel retires; Necdet Sezer

becomes 10th president of the republic
2001 Financial crisis and collapse of the Turkish lira
2002 November: Justice and Development (AKP) wins parlia-
mentary majority
2003 March: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan becomes prime minister
2005 January 1: Implementation of the new Turkish lira
Failure of the Cyprus unity referendum
2006 Turkish EU accession talks suspended
2007 January: Assassination of journalist Hrant Dink
July: AKP reelected to parliamentary majority; Abdullah
Gül becomes president
2008 First Ergenekon indictments made public
2010 May: Turkish humanitarian flotilla attacked in interna-
tional waters off Gaza coast
2011 AKP wins a third term with parliamentary majority
2012 Trial of Kenan Evren for 1980 military coup
2013 May–June: Protests in Gezi Park and other locations
October 29: Opening of the Marmaray subway train
under the Bosphorus, between European and Asian
Istanbul
2013–2014 PKK settlement process and cease-fire
2014 August: AKP victory in local elections; Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan becomes president
Autumn Siege of Kobani
2015 June: AKP loses its parliamentary majority in national
elections
November: AKP regains its parliamentary majority in
new national elections
Turkish Spelling and
Pronunciation Guide
Modern Turkish uses a modified Roman alphabet of 29 letters, pro-

nounced approximately as follows:
A, a a, as in father
B, b b, as in bad
C, c j, as in joke
Ç, ç¸ ch, as in chimney
D, d d, as in dad
E, e e, as in egg
F, f f, as in final
G, g g, as in gallon
Ğ, ğ “soft g,” in eastern dialects this is a gh, but in the standardized
Istanbul dialect, it is softened. It elongates the previous vowel,
something like the slur of the i in singing the first word of the
song “Silent Night.”
H, h h, as in hello
I, ı an unrounded back vowel, something like the io in the second
. syllable of cushion
I, i i, as in pit
xxvi Turkish Spelling and Pronunciation Guide
J, j, like the French j, or the s in measure

K, k k, as in kind
L, l l, as in lament
M, m m, as in mother
N, n n, as in never
O, o o, as in obey
Ö, ö, like the German ö in König
P, p p, as in pine
R, r flap r, as the tt in batter
S, s s, as in son
Ş, ş, sh, as in shimmer
T, t t, as in time
U, u u, as in put
Ü, ü, like the German ü in Bücher
V, v v, as in vote
Y, y y, as in yellow
Z, z z, as in zebra
1
Turkey Today
TURKEY AND THE TURKS

High on a bluff overlooking the city of Ankara, the capital city of
Turkey, stands the final resting place of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first
president of the Republic of Turkey and one of the most important
world figures of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine that Tur-
key could exist in quite the way it does today without Atatürk. He
is everywhere in Turkey. Every town prominently displays a sculp-
ture or a bust of Atatürk, he appears on coins and paper currency,
and a photograph or painting of him hangs in all government and
most private offices. Signs quote his speeches, and his face appears
on flags and neckties and computer and cell phone backgrounds.
Some people wear his signature in tattoos. It is unlawful to publicly
demean Atatürk, and the day of his death is commemorated annu-
ally on November 10 with a nationwide period of silence lasting two
minutes, during which all activity, including even traffic, comes to a
complete halt.
2 The History of Turkey
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, photographed in Novem-

ber 1918, after the Armistice. Among his deco-
rations are the Order of Osmaniye, the Order
of Mecidiye, the Imtiyaz Medal, the Iron Cross
of the German Empire, and the Gallipoli Star.
(Keystone/Getty Images)
Atatürk’s mausoleum, called Anıtkabir, or “The Memorial Tomb,”

is much more than a mere tomb. It is a national shrine; there, the epic
events of the nation’s founding are commemorated; there, the nation
comes together in honoring the memory of those times. Standing in
the middle of Ankara, in the middle of the country, Anıtkabir sums up
the nation. Its Hall of Honor is one of three almost ubiquitous national
symbols, the others being the Turkish flag—a white crescent and star
on a red background—and Atatürk’s bust.
The mausoleum is immense, entirely covering the hillside, im-
pressing visitors into respectful silence. It is approached by a long
drive guarded on either side by stone lions. Its stones were quarried
from sites all over Turkey. A huge, rectangular central court, paved
in white stones, is surrounded on three sides by a peristyle hall. The
Turkey Today 3
The Hall of Honor at Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, in Ankara. (Ozge Elif Kizil/
Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
empty court directs the gaze of visitors toward the Hall of Honor at
one end, raised above wide steps. On both sides, the steps are flanked
by limestone bas-relief murals depicting episodes in the story of
the national struggle. Excerpts from Atatürk’s speeches are quoted
in inscriptions. The Hall of Honor itself is a stately modernist tem-
ple with square pillars. Inside is a simple room with a marble box,
which stands over the crypt containing the remains of Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk. Outside again, visitors stroll between rows of Hittite lions
down a long, straight, stone-paved wing off the main courtyard. The
vision is pulled outward at this point, over the edge of the hillside, to
Ankara, spread out in the basin below, to Anatolia, and to the heart of
the nation itself.
Perhaps better than anything else, Ankara epitomizes both the new-
ness and the antiquity of Turkey. Although its roots reach back before
the classical age, in a sense, the city itself has, like the country, emerged
out of the momentous changes brought by the violence and suffering
of the First World War. Turkey established its separate destiny through
a bloody war of independence (1919–1922). In those years, General
Mustafa Kemal led a movement of national resistance to an imposed
peace settlement that would have divided Anatolia into foreign-
occupied zones. Before that, Ankara was a provincial city of perhaps
75,000 people, but the nationalists made it their headquarters and, in

1923, the capital of the new Republic of Turkey. Today, Ankara is a
metropolis of more than four million people.
The ancient town of Ankara became the capital of the new country
of Turkey for many reasons, not least because it was not Constan-
tinople, the old Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman imperial capital. But
also, Ankara lay in the midst of Anatolia and stood for the nation’s
reoriented memory and symbols. It was no longer the recent Otto-
man imperial past, but the ancient Anatolian past and the new na-
tion and the future, that mattered. In one sense, Ankara was an apt
reminder that Turkey’s past is older than the fallen empire; it is as old
as history itself. In another sense, Ankara is brand new, a city where
one had not existed before. Ankara is a republican city. The house of
parliament is there, as are the headquarters of government depart-
ments, the embassies of foreign nations, the presidential palace, and
Anıtkabir.
The city’s ancient layers date from before the Romans. The citadel
dominates the city center. A favorite destination for courting couples
and skateboarders, it stands on a clifftop reached only by walking
through a poor neighborhood that used to be a slum. From the citadel,
another high point can be seen, not far away, where a Roman temple
and the shrine of a Turkish saint occupy the same space. The saint is
Haji Bayram Veli, a mystic of the fifteenth century. On one wall of the
temple, there is a lengthy Latin and Greek inscription—the best known
copy of a decree of Augustus Caesar. The decree, known as “The Deeds
of the Divine Augustus,” was written about AD 13. According to the
Roman historian Suetonius, the original was inscribed on bronze tab-
lets to be permanently deposited in Augustus’s own mausoleum. The
final paragraph of the decree states that the Senate and the people of
Rome bestowed on Caesar Augustus the title “Father of My Country.”
This is the title recalled in Mustafa Kemal’s family name, Atatürk, “Fa-
ther Turk,” the father of his country.
The modern Turkish nation was founded on a common sense of
Turkishness. Yet that identity, though shared by most, is indeed not
shared by all citizens of the nation. About three-fourths of the current
population of 78 million speak Turkish as a first language and identify
themselves as Turks. The national identity also rests in a shared sense
of community among the citizens of the country, formed out of ties
not just of language and ethnicity, but of geography and of culture,
including religion. As in most countries, the ongoing conflicts, nego-
tiations, agreements, and compromises concerning these elements of
Turkey Today 5
identity and belonging have given rise to the most important episodes
of modern Turkish history.
THE TURKISH LANGUAGE

Turkish is a language of the Turkic group of the Altaic language
family. Striking characteristics of Altaic languages are vowel harmony,
agglutinative morphology, absence of grammatical gender, and subject-
object-verb syntax. The language family hypothesis suggests that these
common elements are the result of common descent from an ancient
parent language.
The Altaic family of languages spoken around the world today
emerged in historical records in the Central Eurasian steppe in late
antiquity. By early modern times, Altaic languages had spread across
Afro-Eurasia, from the Danube basin and the Nile Valley to the Pacific.
Turkish spoken in Turkey today is a dialect of the southern, or Oghuz,
branch of the Turkic family and is more or less mutually intelligible
with other Oghuz Turkic languages, especially Azerbaijani and Turk-
men. It is more distantly related to Tatar, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uygur, and
other Turkic languages. Besides Turkic, the Altaic language family is
usually said to include the Mongol languages and Manchu-Tunguz.
Many linguists today also argue that Korean and even Japanese ought
to be included as branches within an expanded “macro-Altaic” lan-
guage family.
Thus, it is noteworthy that although Turkey is frequently defined as
part of the “Middle East,” Turkey, if it is defined by linguistic criteria,
has a primary language completely unrelated to the other major lan-
guages of the Middle East. Arabic and Hebrew belong to the Semitic
language family; Persian (Iranian), Kurdish, Greek, and Armenian
(as well as the Slavic languages of southeastern Europe), are all Indo-
European. Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, sometimes popularly
linked with Turkey, do not belong to the Altaic, but to the Uralic lan-
guage family, whose possible relationship to the Altaic group is highly
debated.
Turkish is not the first language of all citizens of Turkey. An espe-
cially important non-Turkish language in Turkey is Kurdish, which is
spoken by approximately 15 to 25 percent of the population—estimates
vary widely. Kurds form a majority of the population in some south-
eastern provinces and a significant minority in many large cities.
Kurdish is spoken in two main dialects in Turkey, Zaza and Kirmancı.
Most Kurds in Turkey also speak Turkish. Besides Kurdish, other
non-Turkish languages spoken by minorities in Turkey include Arme-

nian, Greek, and Romani, the language of the very sizable (number-
ing perhaps half a million) Gypsy or Roman population of Turkey. The
numbers of current speakers of Armenian and Greek in Turkey are not
large, but the importance of these populations for the history of Turkey
is considerable.
THE REGIONS OF TURKEY

A second element of the shared identity of the nation is rooted in the
land of Anatolia and its distinct regions, cultures, and customs. The
English term Anatolia and the Turkish term Anadolu derive from
the Greek word Anatole, meaning “rising, the quarter of the sunrise,
the East,” or in other words, “the land of the rising sun.”
Anatolia appears at first glance to be a single geographic unit, a pen-
insula bounded by the Black Sea on the north, the Aegean Sea on the
west, and the Mediterranean Sea on the south, with a high central pla-
teau surrounded by mountains. At closer inspection, however, Anato-
lia contains at least seven distinct regions. Each has a different climate,
as watching the TV weather forecast in Turkey will clearly show. Each
also has distinct agricultural and industrial products, cuisines, local
artistic styles and folk traditions, and regional dialects of spoken Turk-
ish. Even within these regions, great variety can be found. Local loy-
alties may still tie residents to a village, a town, a valley, or a set of
hills. A local area may be recognized throughout Turkey by a variety
of cultural artifacts, for its type of roasted meat (kebap), for example,
or for a typical design or color used in its woven carpets or woolen
stockings, or for its folk dances or music. At the same time, the nation’s
growth propels the development of a homogeneous, national Turkish
economy, language, historical tradition, and culture, even a popular
culture of national movie stars, rock bands, fashion trends, and soccer
and basketball leagues.
The plateau of central Anatolia, of which Ankara (population
4.5 million) is the main city, extends from the mountains and river val-
leys of the Aegean coast to the mountains of the Anti-Taurus range in
the east. This semiarid plateau, its elevation gradually increasing from
about 2,000 feet in the west to about 4,000 feet in the east, is broken
by basins such as the Konya plain and the marshes of the Tuz Gölü
(Salt Lake) and by massifs and unusual volcanic rock formations such
as those in the Cappadocian valleys. The climate is continental, with
hot dry summers and cold snowy winters. Parts of the plateau receive
less than 10 inches of rainfall annually. The main crop grown on the
Turkey Today 7
plateau is wheat, although irrigation makes barley, corn, fruits, pop-

pies, beets, and tobacco cultivable. Much land on the plateau is also
devoted to the grazing of cattle and sheep and goats. Copper has been
mined in Anatolia since antiquity, and today, the plateau also produces
other important minerals, such as bauxite, chromium, manganese, and
sulfur. Besides Ankara, other major cities of central Anatolia include
Konya (population 1.2 million) in the south, Kayseri in the southeast,
and Eskişehir in the northwest.
Not even geographical identification with the land of Anatolia, how-
ever, is shared by all Turkish citizens. The land area of Turkey is 300,947
square miles (779,452 square kilometers), about the size of the state of
Texas. Approximately 3 percent of this land area lies not in Anatolia, but
in eastern Thrace, in the Balkan Peninsula of Europe, separated from the
rest of Turkey by water. This is the famous waterway—the Bosphorus
Straits, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles Straits—that leads from
the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea. In the southeastern tip of the Balkan
Peninsula, Turkey also borders Bulgaria and Greece. Edirne, at the con-
fluence of the Maritsa and Tunca Rivers, is the major urban center in
this heavily cultivated, grain-growing region. The fact that this portion
of Turkey lies in Thrace has led to the observation that Turkey straddles
Europe and Asia, symbolically having a foot in each and literally bridg-
ing the two at the Straits. This geographical observation leads some to
suggest that culturally too Turkey’s heritage is ambiguous, having roots
in both Europe and Asia. Attempts to define what exactly is meant by a
“European” culture and what is meant by an “Asian” culture turn out
not to be easy, and the geographic reality on which it is based is itself
somewhat artificial, since Europe is nothing but the western part of the
great Eurasian landmass. The issue of geographic and cultural identity,
however, is real enough and forms part of the story of Turkish history.
The distance across Turkey, from the Maritsa River in the west, where
Turkey borders Greece and Bulgaria, to the southeastern corner, where
Turkey, Iran, and Iraq come together, is approximately 1,000 miles “as
the crow flies” or about the same distance from Des Moines, Iowa, to
the Chesapeake Bay. The north-south distance between the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean Sea is about 450 miles, about the same as from
Chicago, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee.
The Marmara region of northwestern Anatolia is dominated by the
Straits, by the city of Istanbul, and by the heavily industrialized cor-
ridor running along the eastern shore of the Sea of Marmara. The cli-
mate of the Marmara region is temperate. Istanbul, the largest city in
Turkey with a population of more than 12 million, is the former capital
of the Ottoman Empire and, before it, of the Byzantine Roman Empire
and remains today a cosmopolitan city at the center of national, com-

mercial, and cultural life. Kocaeli is a major port and industrial center.
The Kocaeli valley and the Bursa plain are rich agricultural areas, pro-
ducing olives, nuts, fruits, and tobacco. Bursa (population 1.8 million),
Turkey’s fifth largest city, is significant for its manufacturing and as a
historical center.
The Aegean region of the western coast has been a heavily popu-
lated, richly agricultural area since antiquity and is today the most
densely populated region of the country. İzmir (population 2.8 mil-
lion), the main port of this region, is Turkey’s third largest city and a
major manufacturing center. The climate is Mediterranean, having hot,
humid summers and mild, rainy winters. A series of parallel mountain
ranges running east to west, broken by the broad valleys of the Gediz
and the Greater and Lesser Menderes Rivers, the region produces cere-
als, citrus, and other fruits, cotton, and tobacco. Its numerous classical
sites and beautiful beaches make the Aegean coastal area significant in
the tourism industry.
The Mediterranean region of the south consists of the Taurus Moun-
tains and the coastal plain, which is quite narrow or nonexistent in the
western half of the region, where the mountains run right down to the
sea and then widens out into the Çukurova plain (Cilicia) in the east-
ern part of the region. The Taurus, a formidable mountain chain reach-
ing 6,000 to 9,000 feet, is rugged and sparsely populated. In the coastal
plain, the climate and the vegetation are nearly tropical; temperatures
exceed 100° Fahrenheit in the summer, and palm trees and cacti are
prominent, especially in the east. Winters are mild and wet. A variety
of fruits, including grapes, bananas, and figs, grow here, as well as
barley, wheat, and rice, and in the Çukurova plain, cotton. A few large
cities are to be found along the coast, including Mersin, an important
Mediterranean port, and Antalya, important in the tourism industry.
The Çukurova is an agrarian plain whose main city is Adana (popula-
tion 1.7 million) on the Seyhan River, Turkey’s fourth largest city. Two
rivers whose sources lie in the Anti-Taurus range, the Seyhan and the
Ceyhan, wind a flat route across the Çukurova to reach the Mediterra-
nean. Mountainous Hatay Province, with its chief city, the major port
of İskenderun, occupies Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean shore.
Eastern Anatolia is a relatively sparsely populated, mountainous
area stretching from an area east of Sivas and Kayseri to the borders
of Georgia and Armenia in the northeast and of Iran, Iraq, and Syria
in the southeast, the region known as Kurdistan. The only major city
in the region is Erzurum (population 386,000). Agriculture, especially
cereals, and grazing are important industries. Virtually all of Turkey’s
Turkey Today 9
iron ore is mined at Divriği, between Sivas and Erzurum. Winters in

eastern Anatolia are harsh, summers short and mild. The waters of
Lake Van, Turkey’s largest lake, lie at an elevation of more than 5,000
feet. The highest peak in Turkey, the volcanic cone called Ağrı Dağı, or
Mt. Ararat, and the headwaters of two great rivers, the Tigris and the
Euphrates, are situated in this region.
In southeastern Anatolia, the mountains gradually give way to roll-
ing hills that form the northernmost segment of the Jazira plain. Wheat
is the main crop grown on this relatively dry plain. Turkey’s modest
production of crude petroleum comes mostly from the Batman area.
The Tigris River flows through Diyarbakır, the major city of this re-
gion, and the Euphrates flows by the town of Birecik as both rivers
descend toward their ultimate destination in the Persian Gulf, some
six or seven hundred miles to the southeast. Several dams interrupt
the flow of the rivers, the largest being the great Atatürk Dam on the
Euphrates, northwest of Urfa.
The Black Sea region of the north, from just west of Zonguldak to
Rize, consists of the heavily forested northern slopes of the Pontic
ranges, which reach as high as 13,000 feet at points in the east, and a
narrow coastal plain. Two major Anatolian rivers, the Sakarya and the
Kızılırmak, and several minor rivers break the long mountain chains
to empty into the Black Sea. Zonguldak is a center of coal mining and
heavy industry, but the Black Sea is a prosperous agrarian region,
supporting a relatively heavy agricultural population and numerous
important towns. The tobacco of the Samsun area is famous. Around
Trabzon, hazelnuts are prominent. The Rize area produces most of
Turkey’s tea, easily the nation’s most popular drink.
RELIGION IN TURKEY
An important ingredient in the shared national cultural identity is
religion. Turkey has no official state religion, except the secularism de-
clared in Article 2 of the constitution, “The Republic of Turkey is a
democratic, secular, and social state, governed by rule of law . . .” In
some respects, allegiance to the nation has taken on appearances of
a civic religion in Turkey, shown through veneration of its symbols,
respect for its sainted historical figures, especially Atatürk, and obser-
vation of the cycle of national holidays, especially October 29, the an-
niversary of the declaration of the republic. As has already been seen,
his mausoleum functions as a national shrine.
Yet the religion of the vast majority of Turkish citizens is Islam. Turk-
ish citizens differ in the importance they place on religious belief and
practice, the amount of attention they give to religious observances,

and the role they might ideally give religion in the public life of the
nation. This issue remains at the front of the ongoing public discus-
sion of Atatürk’s legacy, the meaning of the Turkish revolution, and
the future of the country. Large numbers of Turkish people, perhaps
the majority, are religiously devout and to some degree observant, at-
tending prayers at the mosques, particularly on Fridays, making an
effort to keep the Ramadan fast, and keeping the various holy days.
Very sizable groups are not religiously observant, however, especially
in the major urban centers.
Among Muslims, the majority in Turkey is Sunni, but a large minor-
ity, an estimated one-fourth to one-third of the entire population, is
Alevi. Aleviism is a religious tradition that has some things in common
with Shiism—specifically, veneration of the holy family of the Prophet
Muhammad—though Alevis do not typically identify themselves pri-
marily as Shiites, many not even as Muslims. Besides Sunni Muslims
and Alevis, approximately 100,000 Turkish citizens are Christians and
about 25,000 are Jews. An important historical Jewish community is
the Spanish Jews of Istanbul, descendants of those who fled the Span-
ish Inquisition in the late fifteenth century. The landscape of Turkey,
moreover, contains significant remains of the cultures of all three of
these great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—
as well as of earlier paganism.
THE ECONOMY OF TURKEY

Despite certain vulnerabilities, the economy of Turkey is built on
fundamental strengths. Defined as “newly industrialized” and as an
“emerging market,” Turkey’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $799.5
billion in 2014 was ranked 18th in the world by IMF, World Bank, and
United Nations statistics. It was the fastest growing economy in Eu-
rope, with annual growth rates of 9.2 percent in 2010 and 8.5 percent in
2011, but growth slowed to 2.9 percent by 2014. Turkey’s population of
about 78 million people is growing at a rate of about 2 percent annu-
ally. Turkey has a large labor force with a literacy rate above 98 percent
for persons aged 15–24, according to World Bank statistics. Over half
of the labor force works in the services sector, 27.2 percent works in
industry, and 22.7 percent works in agriculture. The unemployment
rate nationally is around 10 percent (slightly lower for males, slightly
higher for females) in 2014–2015. And while Turkey conducts most of
its trade with OECD countries (EU countries, led by Germany, are Tur-
key’s biggest trading partners), the country’s location gives it relatively
Turkey Today 11
easy access to emerging regional markets in the Middle East, North Af-
rica, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, central Asia, and the Caucasus.
The 2011 Population and Housing Survey, carried out by the Turkish
Statistical Institute (TurkStat) alongside EU member countries, gives
an excellent picture of Turkish society, using a large sampling size
(2.5 million households or 13.5 percent of the whole) from all 81 prov-
inces. The average size of the household in Turkey is 3.8 persons, but
this varies widely across the country. The size of households in two
eastern provinces (Şırnak and Hakkari) is over seven, while that of three
western provinces (Çanakkale, Balıkesir, and Eskişehir) is under three.
Turkish households live in modern dwellings, over 97 percent hav-
ing running water. More than 20 percent live in buildings less than
10 years old, hinting at the great importance of the construction in-
dustry in the recent Turkish economy. Almost half the population
(48.6 percent) live in buildings of four or more floors, including
23.1 percent in high-rise apartments of six or more floors—but more
than two-thirds of people own their own homes. Thus, the typical liv-
ing situation in Turkey is that a family lives in its own flat within a
building where most other people also own their apartments.
Agriculture accounts for just under 10 percent of GDP. Leading prod-
ucts are cereals, beets, tobacco, and tea, both for domestic consumption
and for export. Exports of Turkish agricultural products have tripled
since 2000, and since 2008, only India, China, and Ukraine exceeded
Turkey’s rate of growth in agricultural exports. Turkey accounts for
80 percent of global exports of hazelnuts. The center of world hazelnut
production is the Turkish Black Sea coast from Giresün to Trabzon.
Turkey is the world’s leading exporter of flour and ranks third in pasta
exports. Turkey also is the world leader in exporting sunflower oil and
raisins and ranks high in the export of dried apricots and figs.
Turkish industry is fed by ample supply of domestic raw materi-
als. The manufacturing sector works off a robust identity based on
recognizable, traditional products, especially cotton cloth, leather
goods, cigarettes, carpets, and ceramics. Cotton, grown in the İzmir
area and in Çukurova, supplies Turkey’s textile industry. Yet in terms
of exports, Turkey’s leading domestic product for industrial export is
automobiles, especially vans, trucks, and buses. With over a million
vehicles exported, Turkey’s auto industry ranks seventh in Europe,
and Turkey also exports vehicle parts. Turkey has very little of its own
petroleum, yet the oil industry is important both for piping and refin-
ing. Two lengthy oil pipelines cross eastern Turkey, one the Kirkuk-
Ceyhan pipeline and the other the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Four
refineries process imported crude both for re-export and for Turkish
consumption. Other major national industries are metals, cement, and

stone. Turkey is the world’s leading exporter of iron bars, cement, and
marble and alabaster. Travertine too is exported from the unique natu-
ral wonder of Pamukkale.
The main weaknesses of the Turkish economy are its low level of
domestic savings and resulting dependence on foreign investment
for continued growth, and its high current accounts deficit, which is
fifth highest in the world. Its public debt, falling steadily since the cri-
sis of 2001, remains high at about one-third of GDP. Agriculture and
services account for the substantial portion of Turkish GDP, but these
are comparatively modest in income and investment potential and
are highly competitive. Along with the rest of Eastern Europe, Turkey
after 1989 made the transition from its founding principles, a heavily
state-directed, planned economy focused on import substitution, to an
export-oriented, free market economy. The plan had not borne much
fruit yet when a political crisis in 2001 caused financial collapse. An
injection of IMF funding and structural reforms brought stability and
a decade of rapid growth. Turkey weathered the world economic crisis
of 2008 with a brief recession. (The government budget deficit, which
ballooned to over 5 percent of GDP in 2010, fell back under 2 percent of
GDP two years later.) Yet Turkey’s circumstances leave it vulnerable to
exchange rate volatilities and to both economic crises beyond its own
borders and political crises at home that make investors skittish, such
as the Syrian war and refugee crisis.
The keys to overcoming its weaknesses are to address underlying
structural issues, such as education, gender discrepancies, and income
inequality. For example, according to the 2011 TurkStat survey, the
employment rate in Turkey was 64.1 percent for males but only 23.1
percent for females. Although literacy is high, a large part of the Turk-
ish population receive only a grade-school education even after the
improvements of the twenty-first century, and this problem is much
more pronounced for females. Although income inequality has fallen
in Turkey in the last few years, it is still the third worst of the 34 coun-
tries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), above only Mexico and Chile. The wealthiest 10 percent Turks
earn 25 times what the poorest 10 percent earn.
Turkey’s economic success since 2001 has resulted in a surprising re-
versal of its usual labor migration. Whereas from the 1960s until 2000,
Turkey was well known for the numbers of laborers who emigrated
to find work in Europe, especially Germany, today it is a destination
for immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. From
2007–2011, over 200,000 German-born Turks migrated back to Turkey.
Turkey Today 13
Two percent of Turkey’s population is of foreign birth. And this is to

say nothing of the 2 million Syrian refugees who have entered Turkey
since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011. In 2013, parliament
created a General Directorate of Migration Management in an effort to
make a coordinated and standardized approach to this human influx.
Visa and residence permit procedures were revised, including imple-
mentation of the e-visa system, and it was the first Turkish legislation
to deal with asylum.
Finally, tourism continues to be a strong sector of the economy and a
significant source of hard currency. The political and economic stabil-
ity after 2002 resulted in a boom in tourism, from 12.9 million visitors
in 2002 to almost 35 million in 2013. Visitors came mostly from other
European countries, led by Germany, Russia, and the United King-
dom, but more than one million each also came from Bulgaria, Georgia,
Iran, and the Netherlands. The historical city of Istanbul is the num-
ber one destination. The classical cities of the Aegean region, particu-
larly the remains of Troy and the spectacular ruins of ancient Ephesus,
are also favorites. The Aegean and Mediterranean beaches and the
unusual natural rock formations of the Cappadocian valley in central
Anatolia also attract thousands of visitors. The Turkish government
has set ambitious goals to reach 50 million annual visitors by 2023, the
100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. To reach this, much in-
vestment is put into site development, marketing, and promotion of
Turkey as a holiday destination, and transportation infrastructure has
been developed. For example, almost 90 percent of roads in Turkey are
now paved, a figure that has skyrocketed since 2000, when it was just
over 40 percent.
TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS

The expressway system in Turkey is also expanding, covering over
2,000 kilometers. The Trans-European motorway E80 runs east-west
across the country. It is a four-lane expressway from Edirne to Ankara
and a well-maintained highway across the Anatolian plateau east of
Ankara, reaching the Iranian border at Ağrı via Sivas, Erzincan, and
Erzurum. An expressway also connects Eskişehir to Ankara, another
connects İzmir to Aydın in western Turkey, and in the south, another
stretch reaches from west of Adana to east of Şanlıurfa. Projected ex-
pansions will connect Istanbul to İzmir and Ankara to Adana. Turkey
ranks only 64th globally in per-capita automobile ownership, with 233
cars per 1,000 people. (By comparison, the United States has 809 vehi-
cles per 1,000 people, fourth after the two city-states of San Marino and
Monaco and Liechtenstein.) Long-distance travel in Turkey is typically

done by bus. Dozens of private bus companies carry travelers to every
conceivable destination in Turkey. All along the routes, both express-
ways and major and minor highways, a truly extensive network of
bus stations serve travelers with transfer desks, restaurants, and rest
facilities.
Most Turkish cities have organized mass transit networks, usually
in the form of bus systems. Several municipalities, including Istanbul,
Ankara, İzmir, Adana, and Bursa, have light rail metro systems. Istan-
bul’s is the most extensive, with bus, trolley, light rail, and subway serv-
ing the city, besides the ferry traffic along and across the Bosphorus. In
1973, the first bridge across the Bosphorus opened; since then, another
Bosphorus bridge has given Europe and Asia vastly improved connec-
tions across this international waterway. A third Bosphorus bridge is
under construction. All this threatens to squeeze out a uniquely Turk-
ish transportation institution in major metropolitan areas, the dolmuş.
This “stuffed” taxi system provided service between fixed points in a
city on an as-needed, regular schedule and gave employment to scores
of transportation entrepreneurs.
Additionally, 54 commercial airports and about 11,000 kilometers
of rail lines serve Turkish freight and passenger needs. About a dozen
of the airports connect to international destinations year-round, and
another 10 operate international terminals in season. In addition to
Turkish Airlines, several budget airlines compete on domestic routes.
Direct rail lines link Turkey with Bulgaria, with Iran, and with Syria.
Although the Turkish railway system is a national monopoly owned
by the state, important state monopolies over other communications
systems, including air transport, ended in the 1980s.
Over 50 daily newspapers are published in Turkey, as well as nu-
merous weeklies, biweeklies, and monthlies. The leading mass circula-
tion daily papers are, without exception, based in Istanbul. The leading
dailies are Milliyet (The Nation), Hürriyet (Freedom), Sabah (The Morn-
ing), and Cumburiyet (The Republic). The latter, established by Atatürk
in 1924, was the first daily newspaper in the republic. Virtually all
newspapers have well-known editorial perspectives, supportive of
the government or the opposition. Several Turkish dailies have online
English editions, including Hürriyet, Sabah, Cumhuriyet, and Zaman.
The news agency Anadolu Ajansı was founded by Atatürk in 1920 as
the official voice of the state. The first radio broadcast in Turkey oc-
curred in 1927. The state public broadcasting company, Turkish Radio
and Television (Türk Radyo Televisyonu, TRT), was established in 1964
and began television broadcasts from a station in Ankara in 1968. Once
Turkey Today 15
satellite television dishes appeared in the early 1990s, the constitution

was amended to allow private radio and television companies. These
now number in the hundreds.
Turkey ranks quite low on the World Press Freedom index of Report-
ers Without Borders, 149th out of 180 nations. Despite constitutional
guarantees of freedom of the press, print and broadcast journalists
and companies encounter obstacles in the form, first, of a very broad
government definition of “terrorist activity,” and second, of an infor-
mal, socially enforced conformity. Although there is no prepublication
censorship of the press in Turkey, the government restricts publication
of material deemed a national security concern and prohibits insults
to the president, parliament, and government ministries and institu-
tions. The problems are somewhat mitigated by internet usage, but per
capita, this is only around 50 per hundred persons, rather modest com-
pared to the typical 80 or more per hundred in most of Western Europe
and North America. On the other hand, figures from 2012 showed Tur-
key was the seventh most Facebook-addicted country.
EDUCATION
Twelve years of schooling are now compulsory in Turkey, four in pri-
mary school, four in middle school, and four in high school—popularly
known as the 4+4+4 system. Since this system is still rather new, it is
difficult to determine whether it has achieved its stated goals to address
low overall performance in international assessment data. For example,
in the Program for International Student Assessment (2009), Turkey
ranked 32nd of 34 OECD countries in scientific literacy. The situation is
improving—although 42 percent of Turkish 15-year-olds scored below
basic competency levels in mathematics and 32 percent in reading;
these figures showed improvement over previous years. The data from
Turkey show a greater-than-average gap between the performance of
children of high socioeconomic status and those of the lowest levels
and a stronger-than-average correlation between socio-economic status
and performance. Segregation of schools by socioeconomic status, even
though usually informal, exacerbates the problems.1
National discussion of educational reform in Turkey is inseparable
from national discussion of religion. Middle and high schools of re-
ligious education, called İmam-hatip schools, flourished in the 1980s
and early 1990s but were deeply contentious. They were scaled back
beginning in 1997 but received fresh support when the AKP govern-
ment was elected in 2002. They enroll an estimated 10 percent of stu-
dents attending high schools. Further debate surrounds the test-prep
or “cram” schools known as dershane. Hundreds of these privately

run schools give additional instruction to students in after-school and
weekend courses. Part of the reason the dershanes are so popular is the
enormous test pressure Turkish students face. Stressful national tests
determine which high schools students attend. And the promise, in
turn, of admission to a quality university also rests heavily on perfor-
mance on nationally standardized tests.
The most prestigious universities offer education in English (with
humanities courses being taught in Turkish) for small numbers of the
top students. Two-thirds, over half of Turkey’s 170 universities, are less
than fifteen years old, as the Higher Education Council (Yüksek Öğretim
Kurumu or YÖK) continues to work to expand access to higher educa-
tion. Turkey’s best universities are much older. Boğaziçi University
in Istanbul, which became a university in 1973, is the continuation of
Robert College, founded in 1863. Istanbul University opened in 1900 as
the Ottoman Darülfünûn and was reorganized in 1933. Istanbul Tech-
nical University was formed in 1944 from a school whose origins go
back to the naval technical academy established in 1773. Middle East
Technical University was one of four new universities founded in the
1950s. Ankara University was organized in 1946 from several smaller
faculties, all founded in the republican era. Several excellent and pres-
tigious private universities have opened since the 1980s, including Bil-
kent University (Ankara, 1984), Koç University (Istanbul, 1993), and
Sabancı University (Istanbul, 1999).
SPORTS
Republican Turkey placed such emphasis on sports and recreation
that Atatürk declared May 19 to be Youth and Sports Day, a national
holiday. National programs are coordinated by a General Directorate of
Youth and Sports, which for a time during the 1970s became a cabinet-
level government ministry.
Football (soccer) is the favorite sport of Turkey. In 2002, the Turkish
national team qualified for the World Cup (the first time since 1954) and
had an exciting run. Reaching the semifinals, Turkey lost 1–0 to even-
tual champion Brazil. In the consolation game, Turkey’s Hakan Şükür
intercepted South Korea’s opening kickoff and took the ball in for a goal
in 10.8 seconds, the fastest goal in World Cup history. Turkey won the
match 3–2 for a third-place finish. In subsequent years, however, the na-
tional team has not succeeded in making it out of the qualifying round.
Professional soccer is well developed in Turkey, with three leagues
operating. The top league is the National League, now called the Spor
Turkey Today 17
Toto Super League. It has eighteen teams competing, the three bot-
tom teams dropping down one level each year to be replaced by three
teams promoted from the First League, the level below. The season
runs from October to May, each team playing 34 matches. “The Big
Three,” three powerful Istanbul teams, have won 51 out of 58 cham-
pionships since the founding of the league in 1959. (Of the other
seven years, six were won by Trabzonspor, all in the nine-year period
1976–1985, and Bursaspor won in 2009–2010.) The “Big Three” all have
national followings, their team colors instantly recognizable nation-
wide. Galatasary wears yellow and red uniforms, Fenerbahçe blue
and gold, and Beşiktaş black and white. In figures collected by bily-
oner.com, a Turkish online betting platform, 35 percent of those sur-
veyed, men and women, were Galatasaray fans and 34 percent were
Fenerbahçe fans. Beşiktaş ran a rather distant third, polling 19 percent
nationally. The fan profiles are part of popular Turkish lore of social
class difference, and fan hooliganism is not uncommon. Galatasaray
was founded by students at Galatasaray academy, Fenerbahçe arose in
Kadıköy on the Asian side of Istanbul, and Beşiktaş in the Bosphorus
suburb of that name on the European side. Hence, as some observers
put it, Fenerbahçe is the team of the privileged; Galatasaray is the team
of the intellectuals; and Beşiktaş is the team of the minibus drivers—
the underdogs.
As for other sports, Turkey has participated in the Olympic Games
since 1936. Turkey owns a strong international reputation in wrestling
and in weight lifting, winning a number of Olympic medals in these
sports. In the past two decades, the Turkish National Olympic Com-
mittee has made an effort to bring the summer Olympic Games to
Istanbul, so far unsuccessfully. They have submitted bids to the Inter-
national Olympic Committee and worked to update and improve ath-
letic, residential, and press and communications facilities in the city.
THE GOVERNMENT OF TURKEY

The Turkish constitution of 1982 specifies that the Turkish state is a
republic, a “democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule
of law.” Sovereignty is vested “without reservation or condition” in the
Turkish nation. The nation exercises its sovereignty through author-
ized organs of legislative, executive, and judicial power for the consti-
tutional purposes of safeguarding the independence and integrity of
Turkey, insuring the peace and prosperity of individuals and society,
removing obstacles that restrict individual freedoms, and promoting
the conditions for the citizens’ material and spiritual existence. The
Turkish government can be understood as the interrelated activities of

these judicial, legislative, and executive branches. It is a parliamentary
democracy, headed by a prime minister and a president, with an inde-
pendent court system.
The Judicial Branch

Turkey has a centralized legal system with three kinds of courts—
judicial, military, and administrative. Judicial courts cover ordinary
criminal and civil law, with courts of first instance and courts of appeal
organized by district. The supreme court of judicial courts is the Court
of Cassation. Professional judges hear all cases and decide the verdicts;
there is no jury system. Administrative courts have jurisdiction over
civil administration and taxation. The Council of State is the supreme
court of the administrative courts. It hears disputes over administra-
tive legislation and may, when requested by the prime minister or
council of ministers, render an opinion on draft legislation. The mili-
tary courts have jurisdiction over the personnel of the armed forces.
Judges and prosecutors are appointed by a High Council of Judges
and Prosecutors. The independence of the Turkish court system de-
pends largely on how this body functions. Its president is the minister
of justice, which is a cabinet level position and hence a political office,
and the Undersecretary of Justice is also a member. There are twenty
other members of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, four
appointed by the President of the Republic, three chosen by the Court
of Cassation from its membership, two by the Council of State from its
membership, one from the Judicial Academy, seven from the judicial
court personnel by its judges and prosecutors, and three from the ad-
ministrative court personnel by its judges and prosecutors.
A Constitutional Court functions as the court of judicial review,
holding final jurisdiction over the constitutionality of laws and decrees
and deciding cases of individuals who apply to it when their rights and
freedoms have been violated. It also is the court that might ban political
parties and acts as a criminal court for government officials accused of
violating their duties. The seventeen seats in the Constitutional Court
are filled from specific judicial bodies, as appointed by the President of
the Republic and parliament for 12-year, non-renewable terms.
The Legislative Branch

Legislative power in Turkey is exercised through a unicameral na-
tional parliament, called the Büyük Millet Meclisi, the Grand National
Turkey Today 19
Assembly. The 550 seats in parliament are filled by national elections

held every four years, or more often under certain circumstances. Each
of the 81 provinces of Turkey makes up a legislative district and sends
at least one representative to parliament, according to the size of the
population.
Nationally organized political parties contest the elections, submit-
ting a slate of candidates in each electoral district and winning seats
based on the D’Hondt method of proportional representation: The
seats in each electoral district are distributed to the parties in propor-
tion to the percentage of the popular vote received. All Turkish citizens
20 years old and older have the right to vote (except prisoners, military
cadets, and men performing their obligatory military service). Political
parties must be truly national in scope; they are required to have an
organization in every province and in two-thirds of the municipalities
of each province. Party success depends moreover on national appeal,
since parties failing to receive 10 percent of the popular vote nationally
receive no representation in parliament.
The constitution gives parliament the power to supervise a Council
of Ministers and authorizes it to issue laws, to approve the budget of
the republic, to print money, to declare war, to ratify international trea-
ties and agreements, to confirm death sentences passed by the courts
and to proclaim amnesties and pardons, and to exercise other respon-
sibilities such as are outlined in the constitution. Parliament meets in
the House of Parliament in Ankara. It opens session each year on Sep-
tember 1 and may be in recess for a maximum of three months in a
legislative year.
The Executive Branch

Executive power in Turkey is exercised primarily by the presi-
dent of the Republic (Cumhurbaşkanı) and the Council of Ministers of
parliament.
The president of Turkey is the head of state, elected by popular
vote for a single term of seven years. The current president, Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, is the 12th president of Turkey and the first elected
by popular vote after a constitutional amendment of 2007 (previously,
presidents were elected by a two-thirds majority of parliament). The
president calls new elections for parliament, summons parliament to
meet, and delivers the opening address on the first day of the legis-
lative year. He appoints the prime minister and accepts his resigna-
tion, appoints and dismisses ministers on the Council of Ministers at
the proposal of the prime minister, and may call and presides over
meetings of the Council of Ministers when he deems it necessary. He

promulgates laws, may issue and sign decrees that carry the force of
law in accordance with the decisions of the Council of Ministers, may
return laws to the parliament for reconsideration, and may appeal to
the Constitutional Court for the annulment of laws that he deems un-
constitutional. The president receives foreign ambassadors, appoints
ambassadors from Turkey to other countries, and ratifies and prom-
ulgates international treaties. He appoints members of the Constitu-
tional Court and one-fourth of the members of the Council of State,
the Chief Public Prosecutor, and Deputy Chief Public Prosecutor of
the High Court of Appeals, and members of the Supreme Council of
Judges and Prosecutors.
As parliament’s representative on the Supreme Military Command,
the president appoints the Chief of the General Staff, calls and presides
over meetings of the National Security Council, and proclaims states
of emergency or martial law. He appoints members of the Military
High Court of Appeals.
The president also manages a General Secretariat of the presidency;
he appoints members and the chair of the State Supervisory Council, a
body that investigates and inspects public bodies, organizations, and
institutions, labor unions, professional associations, and the like; and
the president appoints members of the Higher Education Council
and university rectors.
The head of the party with the largest number of seats in the parlia-
ment becomes prime minister (Başbakan) and is invited by the president
of the republic to form the Council of Ministers, subject to his approval
and that of the parliament. Among the 26 departments headed by the
Council of Ministers are the Ministries of Justice; National Defense;
Foreign Affairs; European Union Affairs and Chief Negotiator; Econ-
omy; Finance; Interior, Family, and Social Policy; Environment and
Urban Planning; Development; Food, Agriculture, and Animal Breed-
ing; Forestry and Water Works; Energy and Natural Resources; Youth
and Sports; National Education; Customs and Trade; Transport, Mari-
time Affairs, and Communications; Culture and Tourism; Labor and
Social Security; Science, Industry, and Technology; and Health.
As in most countries, the constitutional structure of government
does not fully account for the actual operation of the political system.
The American Constitution, for example, says nothing about political
parties or congressional committees, but it would be virtually impos-
sible to understand the working of the American system of govern-
ment without awareness of those institutions. Similarly, in Turkey, it is
crucial to be aware of the existence of political parties and of informal
Turkey Today 21
but powerful networks of political patronage, both personal and asso-

ciated with political parties, to understand the operation of the Turkish
system of government.
The political parties currently represented in parliament (as of the
elections of November 2015) are the Justice and Development Party
(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, abbreviated AKP), headed by Ahmet
Davutoğlu; the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi,
CHP) headed by Kemal Kılçdaroğlu); the Nationalist Action Party
(Milli Hareket Partisi, MHP); and the People’s Democratic Party
(Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), headed by Selahattin Demirtaş and
Figen Yüksekdağ.
THE MILITARY
The Turkish armed forces include the army, navy, and air force, as
well as the gendarmerie and coast guard, and Interior Ministry secu-
rity forces, which in wartime are put under army and navy command.
Additionally, there is a separate Special Forces Command, known as
the “Purple Berets,” for their caps. The heads of the army, navy, air
force, and Special Forces Command form the Turkish General Staff.
The Chief of the General Staff reports directly to the Turkish prime
minister. The Turkish military is a large force, the second largest in
NATO, with about half a million military personnel on active duty and
another half million on reserve. Military service is required of all male
citizens, who serve varying terms of about twelve months, depending
on their educational status. The Turkish military budget is about 2 per-
cent of GDP (2014 World Bank figures), the NATO target.
Recent reforms in Turkey have restricted the role of the military in
politics and strengthened the control of civilian elected officials over
the military through the National Security Council, in keeping with
the Copenhagen Criteria. The National Security Council of Turkey is a
consultative body with a majority of civilian members and is chaired
by the president of the republic. Its members include the prime min-
ister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and the interior, the
chief of the general staff, and the commanders of the army, navy, air
force, and gendarmerie. The Turkish military has played a complex
and ambiguous political role in Turkish public life since the found-
ing of the republic. Most Turkish presidents, beginning with Mustafa
Kemal himself, have been former career military officers, but the four
most recent presidents, Turgut Özal (1989–1993), Süleyman Demirel
(1993–2000), Ahmet Necdet Sezer (2000–2007), and the current presi-
dent, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (elected 2014), have been civilians. On
three occasions, in 1960–1961, in 1971–1973, and in 1980–1983, the

Turkish army has taken over control of the government by coups
d’état and on a fourth occasion, in 1997, forced the resignation of the
prime minister.
The central issues of modern Turkish history continue to be the
meaning of the Turkish revolution and the legacy of Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk; the relationship between the military and civil society; and
the role of religion in public life. The origins and development of these
issues in the history of the Turkish nation will be examined in the
chapters that follow.
NOTE
1. Nihan Köseleci Blanchy and Aytuğ Şaşmaz, PISA 2009: Where Does
Turkey Stand? (Istanbul: Sabancı University, 2011).
2
Ancient Anatolia
In Turkey, as elsewhere, the study of ancient history is inseparable

from the politics of the modern nation. The modern nation grew up
alongside the academic study of antiquity, and nations and their lead-
ers have always been keenly interested in the potential uses of ancient
history for modern purposes. It is no coincidence that during the 1870s,
while Heinrich Schliemann conducted his celebrated excavations at
the site of Troy, searching under Ottoman soil for the oldest layers of
European civilization, the Ottoman Empire was fighting a war for its
survival and European statesmen were planning the empire’s political
destiny. During the next three decades, the discovery of the previously
little known Hittite civilization of Anatolia slowly became public at
the same time as Ottoman patriots and expatriates grappled with the
meaning of their Turkishness and secretly planned the destiny of an
independent Turkish nation.
When the Turkish republic was founded in the 1920s, its first presi-
dent, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, harnessed this study of Anatolian antiq-
uity to the project of building a national consciousness, concocting and
forcing on the public and universities alike fantastic theories about the
relationship between the nationalist Anatolian present and the ancient
Anatolian past.
PREHISTORIC ANATOLIA
The Anatolian plateau has been inhabited by human societies since
the late Paleolithic era. Discoveries at Göbekli Tepe, a site in eastern
Turkey near Şanlıurfa, are transforming our understanding of this pe-
riod. The remains at Göbekli Tepe date back to almost 12,000 years
ago. The most remarkable are many circles of enormous T-shaped
stones, each about 20 feet tall and weighing nearly 20 tons. They were
quarried and then levered out of solid rock, in single blocks, with flint
tools, and dragged about a hundred meters, where they were set up.
Klaus Schmidt, head of a German archaeological team that excavated
Göbekli Tepe until his untimely death in 2014, interpreted the site,
which shows no sign of habitation, as a ritual center. Göbekli Tepe’s
close proximity to several very early sites of grain cultivation helped
lead Schmidt to the conclusion that it was the need to maintain the rit-
ual center that first encouraged the beginnings of settled agriculture—
the Neolithic Revolution.
Turkey today is home to some of the oldest Neolithic sites in the
world. The recent construction of the Marmaray metro tunnel under
A figure of a predator on one of the T-shaped

megaliths at Göbekli Tepe. (Vincent J. Musi/
National Geographic Creative/Corbis)
Ancient Anatolia 25
the Bosphorus in Istanbul led to the discovery of a Neolithic village

dated to 6000 BCE, almost five thousand years earlier than any pre-
viously known settlement on the site of Istanbul. But Turkey was al-
ready well known for its Neolithic history. At the end of the last glacial
age, three human cultural zones developed in southwestern Eurasia.
One of these was in the Zagros Mountain region; a second was along
the eastern Mediterranean coast in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. The
third was in Anatolia, on the plateau north of the Taurus Mountains.
The earliest datable excavated settlements there are a group of agricul-
tural villages, the oldest of which, Hacılar, dates from before 7000 BCE.
Hacılar, however, was inexplicably abandoned after about a thousand
years, and the main center of Neolithic culture in Anatolia developed
instead at Çatal Hüyük. This spectacular settlement, discovered in 1961
southeast of Konya, dates from approximately 6500 BCE. Covering
32 acres, Çatal Hüyük is one of the largest and richest Neolithic settle-
ments ever found. It is a town of contiguously built houses and other
structures made of sun-dried mud brick. Grain agriculture formed the
basis of its economy. Luxury items such as obsidian mirrors, daggers,
and smelted lead and copper jewelry testify to its prosperity and social
complexity. Its numerous shrines contain plaster wall reliefs, painted
murals, and male, female, and animal cultic figurines. The religious
attention of the community seems to have been directed toward com-
memoration of control over the natural forces, thereby ensuring pros-
perity through the hunt, through agriculture, and through fertility.
Ironically, considerably less is known of the 3,000 years of Anato-
lian history that followed Çatal Hüyük. Hacılar was reoccupied after
about 5500 BCE, during the Chalcolithic period, and beautiful pottery
was produced there. A walled fortress was found at Mersin, dating to
about 4500 BCE, bridging the Chalcolithic period, when copper and
stone tools predominated, with the early Bronze Age. The oldest lay-
ers at Troy also date from this period. But the next extensive architec-
tural remains come from the middle Bronze Age. These include the
second level of Troy as well as Alaca Hüyük, east of Ankara on the
central plateau. There, a royal cemetery containing 13 richly supplied
tombs was discovered, dating to approximately 2400 BCE. During this
time, Anatolia was inhabited by a people called the Hattians and was
known by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians as the Hattian land. The
Hittites, who later built a kingdom in central Anatolia, got their name
because they were known as “kings of the Hattian land.” The Hattian
language, which is unrelated to other known languages, survives only
in fragments, but Hattian culture left a deep impression on subsequent
layers of Anatolian history.
THE HITTITES
Sometime before 2000 BCE, diverse tribes of people speaking Indo-
European languages began migrating into Anatolia. Some of the mi-
grants established city-states in former Hattian cities. Indeed, recorded
history in Anatolia begins with a collection of clay tablets, the business
records of an early Assyrian commercial colony, uncovered in a Hat-
tian city—modern Kültepe, east of Kayseri—that had been taken over
by Neshite immigrant kings. The new Neshite rulers borrowed the cu-
neiform writing system of the Assyrian merchants and began keeping
their own records. The discovery in 1906 of an archive of more than
10,000 tablets at Boğazköy showed that the new rulers, the Neshites,
were the same kings whom the Egyptian Amarna documents called
simply “Kings of the Hattian Land” and whom the Old Testament re-
ferred to as Hittites.
Boğazköy, or Hattusas, where the archive of tablets was found, was
the capital of a large central Anatolian kingdom in which Hittite kings
gradually displaced the rulers of the old Hattian cities. The age of the
Hittite kingdom corresponds to the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia, about
1700 to 1200 BCE. The Hittite kingdom was not the only state in Anatolia
at the time. The Hittites shared the plateau with Luwians and Palaians,
other contemporary Indo-European immigrants; between the Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers, the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni controlled the
southeast and threatened the central plateau. Around 1600 BCE, the
Hittite kings took Aleppo and Babylon, ending the dynasty of Ham-
murabi. The most powerful Hittite king, Suppiluliumas (1375–1346
BCE), conquered western Syria, took Carchemish, and defeated the
Mitanni. After Suppiluliumas, the Egyptian pharaohs contested Hittite
control of Syria until the Hittites defeated them at the Battle of Kadesh
(1286 BCE). A narrative description and artistic depictions of this bat-
tle survive, as do copies of the peace treaty reached afterward between
Pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite king Muwatallis, the oldest known
peace treaty. (One is on display in the Archaeological Museum in Is-
tanbul.) The Hittite kingdom collapsed, however, around 1200 BCE,
victim of a political system that left it unable to tie its vassal states to
a centrally conceived imperial project and unable to solve the great
disparity of wealth between a few major cities and the comparatively
impoverished countryside.
AFTER THE HITTITES
Migrations of new Indo-European peoples from southeastern Eu-

rope had already begun by the time the Hittite kingdom fell. Several
Ancient Anatolia 27
centuries of warfare, invasion, and political uncertainty followed, in

which apparently no substantial urban settlements existed in the for-
merly Hittite country. Egyptian documents speak of the depredations
of the “Sea Peoples,” but obviously not all the migrations were on the
seas. The Trojan War also belongs to this time of troubles.
When reliable records become available again, around 750 BCE, a
Phrygian state existed on the Anatolian plateau made up of two con-
federations of cities, one in the west centered at Gordium and the other
in the east, at what is today Kayseri. The most impressive Phrygian
monument is a mausoleum known as the Tomb of Midas, the rock fa-
cade of which has a niche for the mother goddess Cybele. The cult of
the mother goddess, which reconfigured elements of indigenous re-
ligious fascination with control of the physical environment and the
forces of nature into potent and original new forms, dominated life in
Phrygian central Anatolia.
In the southeast, between Cilicia and the Euphrates, contemporar-
ies of the Phrygians included a group of cities ruled by “neo-Hittite”
kings: Carchemish, Zincirli, and Malatya. In the river valleys of the
Aegean shores, Greek migrations had begun around 1000 BCE. At
first, these settlements were poor agricultural villages with single-
room, mud-brick houses. By the seventh century, these eastern Greek
settlements grew more prosperous, expanding northward along the
coast, and took the lead in building a powerful Greek civilization in
the Aegean.
At the same time, a great state appeared in mountainous eastern
Anatolia with its capital near Lake Van. This was Urartu, a kingdom
perhaps descended from that of the Hurrians. Its culture was strongly
influenced by Assyria. Tribal federations of Urartians are mentioned
in Assyrian documents as early as the thirteenth century BCE, and the
Assyrian kings describe numerous campaigns in the eastern Anatolian
mountains. By the eleventh century, an Urartian state structure existed.
At its largest extent, Urartu covered all of eastern Anatolia north of the
upper Tigris-Euphrates region, including large parts of Transcaucasia.
The Urartian kingdom lasted until the final years of the seventh cen-
tury, when its northern cities were raided by semi-nomadic Scythian
tribes from central Eurasia and the Medes, who had destroyed Assyria
in 612 BCE, expanded northward into Anatolia. At this time, the Arme-
nians appear. The Greek historian Herodotus (480–420 BCE) wrote that
the Armenians were a branch of the Phrygian kingdom. By Herodo-
tus’s time, Armenia was a province of the Persian Achaemenid empire.
In the trilingual inscription left by the Persian king Darius I at Behistun
(495 BCE), two of the sections call the region Armenia, while in the old
Babylonian section, it is still called Urartu.
When the Phrygian state in central Anatolia disintegrated about

650 BCE, raided by Cimmerian nomads, the new state of Lydia
absorbed much of its western portions. The powerful Mermnad
dynasty ruled Lydia at the city of Sardis in the Meander valley.
Neighbors of the Lydians were the Lycians, whose capital was Xan-
thos in southwestern Anatolia, and the Carrians. The Lydian and Ly-
cian languages are Indo-European; the undeciphered Carrian script
resembles these and Phrygian and Greek, suggesting that Carrian
may be Indo-European as well. Herodotus wrote that the Carrians,
however, considered themselves natives of Anatolia. The Lydian
and Lycian languages too preserve numerous non-Indo-European
elements of the indigenous Hattian. All three of these cultures can
be considered a reassertion of the ancient, indigenous culture of the
Hattian cities of Anatolia.
Lydia was a powerful state where, according to Herodotus, coins
were first used. The Halys River (the Kızıl Irmak) became the rough
boundary between Lydia and Median Armenia. In the middle of
the fifth century, Lydia’s greatest king, Croesus, clashed with Cyrus,
founder of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty that displaced the Medes.
In 547 BCE, Cyrus raided eastern Anatolia, and the two generals fought
indecisively. Cyrus, however, surprised Croesus by pursuing his army
and catching the Lydians when they had begun to demobilize. Cyrus
captured Sardis, including the citadel, and western Anatolia submitted
to the Persians. Sardis became the center of Persian administration in
Anatolia. Native states survived along the Black Sea and in various
temple city-states.
HELLENISTIC ANATOLIA
The Persian invasions of Greece, which form the subject of Hero-
dotus’s book, aimed to root out Balkan support of the revolt of the
Anatolian Greek cities. The Greeks repelled the Persians and liber-
ated the Aegean coast of Anatolia. The majority of the Anatolian
interior remained under Persian rule until the campaigns of Alexan-
der the Great a century and a half later. The vacuum left by Alexan-
der’s victories over Darius III at the Granicus River (334 BCE) and
at Issus in Cilicia (333 BCE), the collapse of the Persian Empire, and
Alexander’s death was filled by several new states. Along the Ae-
gean, the Greek cities evolved into states with fiercely independent
civic traditions. Thriving commerce grew on the bedrock of a slave
economy, funding a prodigious scholarly and scientific achievement
Ancient Anatolia 29
that mapped out the work of the next thousand years throughout
the Mediterranean basin. In the north, native Anatolian states ruled
the Black Sea coast and the Marmara, while the kingdom of Armenia
emerged in eastern Anatolia. The bulk of Anatolia formed several
provinces ruled by the Seleucid dynasty in Iraq, but the tendency for
these to evolve into independent kingdoms is illustrated by the case
of Pergamum, which became a powerful state by the middle of the
second century BCE.
The sudden disappearance of the Persian Empire and the conquest
of virtually the entire Middle Eastern world from the Nile to the Indus
by Alexander the Great caused tremendous political and cultural up-
heaval. Working out vague notions of the fundamental commonality
of the human spirit, summed up in the ideal of the “brotherhood of
man” attributed to Alexander himself, statesmen throughout the con-
quered regions attempted to implement a policy of Hellenization. For
indigenous elites, this amounted to the forced assimilation of native
religion and culture to Greek models. It met resistance in Anatolia as
elsewhere, especially from priests and others who controlled temple
wealth. More important than the superficial impact of official policy
was the growing popularity among Greek settlers and in the estab-
lished Greek cities of religious movements, whose roots lay in tradi-
tional Anatolian religions, and of philosophical ideas that responded
to the profound sense of personal moral dislocation caused by Alex-
ander’s erasure of established political boundaries. The spreading cult
of the Anatolian mother goddess is perhaps the best example of this
religious movement. Cybele’s association with the untamed power of
the wild attracted Greeks and, even more, Romans, in whose hands
her cult was transformed into an immensely popular mystery religion
focused on rites of fertility that resemble those of older Greek god-
desses like Demeter.
Rome became involved in Anatolia by aiding Pergamum in repel-
ling the Seleucids in the early second century BCE. When the child-
less king of Pergamum bequeathed the kingdom to Rome, Pergamum
became the core of the Roman province of Asia. Thereafter, the slow
advance of Roman authority in Anatolia seemed irresistible, as one
kingdom after another capitulated. The kings of the Black Sea coast,
especially the great Mithridates Eupator, held out until subdued by
Pompey in the middle of the first century BCE. Armenia was con-
tested between Rome and the Parthian kingdom centered in Iran,
with Rome working to keep it as a client state. The inscription of Au-
gustus’s Deeds in the temple at Ankara publicly marked the Roman
ascendancy in Anatolia.
CHRISTIAN ANATOLIA
Even though Jesus of Nazareth was a Palestinian Jew, it is readily
apparent in the Acts of the Apostles that important growth of the early
Church took place on Anatolian soil. This was due to the work of Saul
of Tarsus, the Cilician Jew who became St. Paul. The earliest Christian
literature consists of the letters written by St. Paul from Anatolia to con-
gregations of Christian converts whom he met on several missionary
journeys. One ancient stream of Christian tradition has it, moreover,
that the Virgin Mary traveled to Anatolia in the care of St. John, living
out her life in Ephesus, the greatest Roman city in Anatolia. Anatolian
Christians became thoroughly involved in the liturgical and theologi-
cal discussions and debates that occupied the early Church. Roman
imperial control of western and central Anatolia provided the emper-
ors, beginning with Constantine who converted to Christianity in the
early fourth century, the economic and popular authority to direct the
development of Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical organization.
The Church councils of Nicaea (325 CE), Ephesus (431 CE), and Chal-
cedon (451 CE), all held under Roman imperial authority in Anatolia,
guided the formulation of orthodox expressions of basic Christian
teachings. The Christianization of the Roman citizenry transformed
the empire into the Body of Christ, the physical representation of
Christ in the world, and the Roman emperor into Christ’s living image.
Roman authority, however, as well as Roman orthodoxy, faced chal-
lenges east of the Kızıl Irmak, where the Armenian King Trdat the
Great had converted to Christianity about the same time as Constan-
tine. Constantine moved the imperial center eastward and built Con-
stantinople, formerly called Byzantium, an old Eastern Greek colony
at the Straits, as a new Roman capital. In the fourth and fifth centuries,
the western provinces of the Roman Empire were lost to Germanic
warlords. In the east, a settlement was reached between Constantino-
ple (Istanbul) and the new Persian Sassanian dynasty in 387 CE, divid-
ing Anatolia into spheres of interest. Armenia, which flourished when
the imperial powers in the Aegean and in Iran were comparatively
weak, resisted the imperial orthodoxy of the creeds honed in Church
councils in western Anatolia and adhered to monophysitism, which
stressed the divine nature of Christ over the human.
The victory of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius over Sassanian Persia
in the early seventh century CE led to attempts to compromise over
the creeds, but these negotiations became moot when Muslim Arab
armies both defeated Byzantium and toppled the Sassanian dynasty
a few years later. In 640, the Arabs invaded Armenia, taking Dvin. In
Ancient Anatolia 31
return for tribute, Armenia retained considerable autonomy under

Arab rule. Although Arab armies also invaded western Anatolia and
besieged Constantinople in the eighth century, the Taurus Mountains
became a fairly stable boundary between Christian Anatolia and
Muslim Syria. In Anatolia itself, the tenth and early eleventh centuries
saw the gradual encroachment of the Greek and Orthodox west upon
the Armenian and monophysite east, particularly during the reign of
the Byzantine Emperor Basil II (976–1025 CE), the high point of Byz-
antine power. It was in this context that the Greek term Anatolia began
to be used to refer to the whole of the peninsula between the Black,
Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas.
After the death of the great Bagratid Armenian ruler Gagik (990–1020
CE), the Byzantine system of themes or provinces, developed earlier
in the western seaboard and plateau, was extended to parts of Arme-
nia. Under this system, rural estates were given to cavalry soldiers in
return for the obligation of military service. In this way, Anatolia pro-
vided the Byzantine Empire with a deep reserve of manpower, and the
population of Anatolia bore a heavy burden of taxation for the support
of the imperial military.
By the end of the first Christian millennium, Anatolian Greeks were
aware of the great antiquity of their land. They thought of themselves
as Romans, heirs of the empire of Augustus in an unbroken continuity
with the past. But at the end of the eleventh century, Anatolia entered
another period of great upheaval. By the end of the twelfth century,
European writers would begin to call the Anatolian plateau Turchia.
3
The Turkish Conquest
of Anatolia,
1071–1517
The metamorphosis of Anatolia into Turkey happened not suddenly

but gradually, over a period of several centuries. It began with Turkish
raids in eastern Anatolia in the mid-eleventh century, before the great
Turkish victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, and continued
through intermittent conflict and stability. After Manzikert, Turkish no-
mads migrated into Anatolia and settled, the Byzantine Empire weak-
ened and receded in stages, and several Muslim Turkish states were
established on the plateau. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth cen-
tury set in motion a second wave of Turkish migrations, and Turkish
princes founded a number of new states in western Anatolia. The uni-
fication of Anatolia was completed through the campaigns of Sultan
Selim I of the Turkish Ottoman dynasty in the early sixteenth century.
Nor were these isolated events. The Turkish settlement and conquest
of Anatolia was an aspect of a long and immensely significant period
of world history. In the centuries between 1000–1750 CE, the core of
the Afro-Eurasian landmass was ruled by royal dynasties of Turks and
Mongols whose origins lay in the steppes of central Eurasia. Though
known by diverse names and titles—the Yüan dynasty in China, the

Ilkhans of Iran and Iraq, the Mughals of India, the Safavids of Iran,
the Uzbeks, Karakhanids, and others in Turkestan, the Seljuks and
then the Ottomans in Anatolia, and many others—all were speakers
of Turkish or Mongol languages and were heirs of a cultural lineage
traced to the proud semi-nomadism of the steppe. Their armies were
the most powerful and their societies the most sophisticated and ad-
vanced of the world at the time.
THE TURKS
The Turkish raids in eastern Anatolia in the eleventh century be-
longed to a larger migration of southern or Oghuz Turks that began in
central Eurasia in the tenth century. Tribes of Oghuz and other Turks
began converting to Islam and migrating into Khurasan from the re-
gion east of the Caspian Sea. In 1055, armies of the powerful Turkish
Seljuk tribe entered Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Empire and seat of
the Islamic caliphate, the office of political and religious leadership of
the Islamic world. Though they kept a member of the Abbasid dynasty
on the throne as caliph, Seljuk commanders dominated the caliphate
in Baghdad for three generations—under Tughrul, the conqueror of
1055, his nephew Alp Arslan (1063–1072), and Alp Arslan’s son Malik
Shah (1072–1092). Becoming rapidly settled and taking on the imperial
culture of this ancient center of Islamic civilization, the Seljuk rulers
of Baghdad encouraged the more restive Turkish tribal groups, often
referred to as Turkomans or Turkmens, to continue raiding the Arme-
nian and Byzantine provinces of Anatolia.
THE BATTLE OF MANZIKERT

AND TURKISH MIGRATION
After the death of the emperor Basil II in 1025, the Byzantine Em-
pire was slowly consumed by a political struggle between the imperial
administration and Greek nobility in the capital city, Constantinople,
and the military governors of the Anatolian provinces. As raids by
Turkoman tribes in the east continued, Byzantine generals summoned
large numbers of their troops to the struggle in the west, leaving the
interior of Anatolia only sparsely defended. The city of Ani in Armenia
fell to the Turks in 1065. Kayseri was sacked in 1067. On August 19,
1071, Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was captured and his armies an-
nihilated by the Seljuk army of Alp Arslan in a pitched battle at Man-
zikert, east of Lake Van. Byzantine eastern defenses collapsed and the
The Turkish Conquest of Anatolia, 1071–1517 35
interior of the Anatolian plateau lay virtually defenseless before the

Turkish bands.
Turkish armies swept across central Anatolia. After more than a
century of resisting the slow Byzantine encroachment, the Armenian
strongholds of the east and southeast now fell to the Turks, and the
mainstream of Armenian life was pushed southward. The Byzantines
conceded central Anatolia to the Turks, deciding to try to hold the Ae-
gean and Marmara coasts. In 1078, just seven years after Manzikert,
the Turkish chieftain Süleyman entered Nicaea (İznik) unopposed,
proclaiming the city as his capital. His effective authority reached the
shores of the Bosphorus, where he began assessing dues on commer-
cial traffic. The semi-nomadic warriors who were his troops began
calling him the sultan of what had become, in effect, a Turkish state in
western Anatolia. The borders of this state were only vaguely defined,
and in the east, the leaders of a rival warrior clan, the Danishmends,
were more powerful. The Danishmends held the northerly fortified
points on the two main commercial routes to Iran, via Ankara, Sivas,
and Erzurum. An Armenian state briefly revived in Cilicia, which at-
tempted to control the other main route in cooperation with the Dan-
ishmends and other Christian princes in the cities of the Euphrates
region. In 1084, however, Süleyman marched across Anatolia and
seized Cilicia and Antioch. Süleyman fell in battle against Malik Shah,
the new Seljuk ruler in Baghdad in 1086, while besieging Aleppo in
northern Syria. After Malik Shah died in 1092, the situation remained
quite fluid. While the Seljuk Empire in Iraq and Iran slowly disinte-
grated, the Seljuk tribes in Anatolia became independent.
At the same time, the spiritual revival gripping Christian Western
Europe culminated in the Crusades. Armies of Christian knights an-
swered the call, first issued by Pope Urban II in 1095, to take up the Cross
of Christ and liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Among the many
factors that lay behind this Western Christian movement, the Seljuk
coup in Baghdad and subsequent Seljuk conquest of Mosul, Aleppo,
Damascus, and Jerusalem was one. Byzantine weakness in the face of
the Seljuk advance was another. On their way to Jerusalem in 1097–
1098, armies of the First Crusade recaptured Nicaea and defeated a
combined Seljuk and Danishmend force at Doryleum, pushing the
Turks back on to the plateau. The crusaders established a kingdom at
Edessa (Urfa) and took Antioch. In 1176, the Seljuk ruler Kılıç Arslan II
ambushed the Byzantine armies at the pass of Myriokephalon and
destroyed them, confirming Turkish control of the Anatolian plateau.
Crusading armies used the main highway across Anatolia through-
out the twelfth century, but the Seljuks remained in control of it. The
greater impact of the Crusades on Anatolia came with the blow to Byz-
antine power caused by the catastrophic sack of Constantinople and
the seizure of the Byzantine throne by knights of the Fourth Crusade in
1204. For the next 57 years, until 1261, Constantinople and the south-
ern Balkans were ruled as a crusader kingdom.
THE SELJUK SULTANATE OF ANATOLIA

The first 40 years of the thirteenth century were a period of rela-
tive prosperity in Anatolia. Equilibrium prevailed between the Seljuk
kingdom of Konya, in control of most of the plateau, and the Byzantine
kingdom of Nicaea. The Seljuk kingdom is usually called the Sultan-
ate of the Seljuks of Rum, in order to distinguish it from the empire of
the “Great” Seljuks in Iraq and Iran. Anatolia was known as the land
of Rum, or Rome, to the Turks. The Seljuk state reached its apogee
under the legendary Alauddin Kaykubad (1219–1236). Eastern Anato-
lia was divided between the Danishmends and several other Turkish
kingdoms.
The Seljuk ruler was called a sultan, a term meaning a ruler whose le-
gitimate authority was granted by the caliph in Baghdad, the ultimate
leader of the Islamic world empire. The structure of Seljuk government
remained uncomplicated. The army was the fundamental institution
of the Seljuk state. The ruler was above all a military commander,
and the main state officials and his advisors were army officers. The
Seljuk army consisted of the fighting men of established Turkish war-
rior families and clans who were given fiefs and paid out of the land
tax on the agrarian cultivators. To these soldiers were added troops
recruited from the subject population. In keeping with the practice of
military slavery familiar to them from the larger Islamic world, the
Seljuks recruited military slaves from the Christian peasant popula-
tion of Anatolia and forcibly converted them to Islam. Turkish clans
had themselves first made their mark in the Islamic world as military
slaves of Muslim rulers.
Although the actual number of Turkish warriors and other migrants
who entered Anatolia in the late eleventh century must have been
rather small in comparison to the total population of Anatolia, their
influence was paramount. Large numbers of people had been killed
in warfare or had died as a result of disease and starvation that ac-
companied the warfare. Thousands more had been displaced, fleeing
their homes for the safety of the mountains or, in western Anatolia,
the coastal regions outside Turkish control. The repetition of violence,
as towns, fortifications, and whole regions changed hands and back
again over the course of the twelfth century deepened the impact of
these events. The majority of the population throughout Anatolia
probably remained Christian. Along the Aegean and Marmara coasts
and around Trebizond on the Black Sea, Greek and, in certain cities in
the southeast, Armenian Christian rule still held sway. But most of the
interior of Anatolia was now ruled by Muslim states. In some areas,
the proportion of the Muslim population was large, and everywhere,
the Christian population began the slow process of integration into a
new Muslim Anatolian society.
In addition to the defeat of Byzantine Greek and Armenian states,
the Turkish conquest also meant the destruction of the authority of the
Christian Church and its institutions. As a millennium before Chris-
tian churches had been built on the sites of pagan temples to demon-
strate the victory of Christ over the idols, so now, sounding the call
to prayer from Armenian and Greek churches marked the subordina-
tion of Christianity to Islam. Christianity and the Church survived
but was no longer the religion of the realm. At the level of symbol
and public rhetoric, the victory of Islam over Christianity in Anatolia
was made unmistakable. The new Muslim states confiscated Church
land and property, granting much of it to Islamic monastic orders of
monks called dervishes or organizations of the Islamic learned hier-
archy, ulema. At the same time, the Muslim and Christian communi-
ties of Anatolia did not live entirely separate existences. Interaction
of Muslims and Christians—including intermarriage—at all levels of
society, from the peasantry to the family of the sultans, was ongoing.
The new Muslim rulers willingly aligned themselves with Christian
states and intermarried with their rulers. Several Seljuk sultans had
Christian mothers.
Urban life was slowly transformed by the presence of immigrants
and the new Muslim craft and commercial guild associations they
formed. The life of these associations revolved around the work and
production of the craft, mystical religious devotional exercises and rit-
uals of the members, overseen by masters called akhis, and the main-
tenance of simple public welfare facilities such as hospices. Mystical
Islam had a far-reaching impact on Turkish life in Anatolia through
these guild associations and through the related institution of the mys-
tical orders and their lodges. Members of mystical orders became the
main vehicles for the spread of popular Islam in Anatolia and the grad-
ual conversion of its population.
Muslim artists and mystics, preachers and scholars, merchants and
scribes flocked from neighboring lands to Konya, which developed
into a rich cultural center. Alauddin’s palace was there, built of stone,
and the largest stone mosque in the country, as well as several leading
Islamic colleges, or medreses, and a major market. Spreading abroad
from Konya, along the commercial highways that were its true source
of wealth, fortifications, inns known as caravanserais, and mosques
were built in an increasingly identifiable Anatolian style.
THE MONGOLS AND AFTER

Once again, the fragile political equilibrium of Anatolia was upset by
events whose origins lay in central Eurasia. Armies of semi-nomadic
horsemen, this time led by the Mongols and their great chieftain and
general Chinggis Khan, began campaigns of conquest. After plunder-
ing the old Muslim kingdoms of the Ferghana valley and the eastern
Caspian region, Mongol armies invaded southern Russia in 1237 and
Hungary in 1241. In late 1242, they entered eastern Anatolia. The Mon-
gols utterly destroyed the Seljuk Turkish armies at Köse Dagh, east of
Sivas, on June 26, 1243. Sivas and Kayseri were sacked and pillaged.
Anatolia was reduced to the status of a tributary province under the
rule of Hülegü, the grandson of Chinggis Khan, who sacked Baghdad
in 1258 and put to death the last Abbasid caliph. Hülegü’s dynasty,
known as the Ilkhans, ruled Iraq and Iran until 1335, its effective power
reaching to the upper Tigris and Euphrates regions of eastern Anatolia.
The Mongol depredations set in motion a second major wave of
Turkish nomadic immigration into Anatolia, whose impact was as dra-
matic as the first a century and a half earlier. Thousands of Turkoman
warriors and refugees poured westward into Anatolia, spreading out
in raids over the plateau and into regions beyond Seljuk control. This
pressure, combined with Seljuk political weakness, made the second
half of the thirteenth century a period of renewed Turkish conquest.
Several new Turkish principalities, or emirates, appeared in Cilicia,
along the Mediterranean coast, and even in the heavily populated,
agrarian coastal regions of the Aegean and Marmara. This was the
Byzantine heartland, which had resisted Turkoman migration and set-
tlement since the time of the Crusades. The new immigrants injected
a fresh vitality into Anatolian Muslim society. They emphasized their
Turkishness and the political and social traditions of the grassy steppes
of Central Eurasia. Writers like Yunus Emre began creating literature
in Turkish. The lively epics of the Oghuz Turks—the Oghuzname, tales
of the legendary ancestor Oghuz, and the collection of legends about
the hero Dede Korkut—were committed to writing at this time.
The Mongol conquests and social upheavals they brought were also
expressed in religious feeling. As in Western Europe, also in Anatolia,
the Mongol violence seemed to herald the end of the world order and
evoked apocalyptic visions. A millennial movement called the Baba’i

rebellion broke out in the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin in eastern Ana-
tolia. The lives of two Anatolian saints were intertwined with the Mon-
gol conquests and mass migrations of peoples. One was Celaleddin,
called Mevlana in Turkey and usually known as Rumi in Europe and
North America today. Rumi’s family was from Balkh, in Afghanistan.
Uprooted by the Mongol advance, they migrated westward to settle
eventually in Konya. There, Rumi met a mysterious holy man named
Shams of Tabriz and underwent a deep spiritual transformation. He
wrote voluminous poetry and music and taught many disciples. His
most famous work is the Mesnevi, an epic poem of six volumes that is
one of the world’s great spiritual classics. Rumi’s students and disci-
ples established a mystical order called the Mevlevis that followed the
teachings of the master. His mausoleum in Konya is still a site of pil-
grimage for thousands of Muslims. Much less is known with certainty
about the other Anatolian saint associated with the Mongol era, Haji
Bektash. He is the subject of a saintly biography, and his teachings are
the foundation of another stream of mystical devotion. He too is bur-
ied on the Anatolian plateau, in a village near Kırşehir.
The Turkomans in general articulated an active, syncretistic piety
that emphasized mystical experience and the sacred aura of holy men,
relics, and shrines. Popular preachers drew followings, and dervish
cells and lodges flourished. They used the idiom of gaza, the sacred
struggle against unbelief, to describe their relations with neighboring
Christian states. Turkoman chieftains built claims of legitimacy upon a
combination of military prowess—particularly as gazis, warriors carry-
ing on the sacred struggle in battle against the Christian Byzantines—
and personal piety shown by close relationships with holy men and
their dervish orders. The Turkoman chieftain Karaman established the
earliest of the new emirates that displaced a formerly Christian state,
defeating the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. After the collapse of the
Mongol Ilkhanate in Iran and Iraq in 1335, the emirate of Karaman
made Konya its capital, staking a claim as the true successor of Seljuk
greatness. The emirate of Germiyan, founded in 1283 at Kütahya, con-
trolled the Aegean coastal region. In the years around 1300, several
more Aegean and Mediterranean emirates appeared, including Aydın
in the Meander (Menderes) River valley, Menteşe around Muğla, and
Hamid at Antalya.
THE OTTOMANS
When the famous Moroccan scholar and world traveler Ibn Battuta
reached Anatolia in late 1330, he was conscious of being at the frontier
of the great Muslim world. Landing at Alanya and coming inland at

Antalya, he visited Konya and traveled across the plateau via Kay-
seri to Sivas, Erzincan, and Erzurum, and back. Then he made a tour
of the Aegean region, visiting successively the emirates of Menteşe,
Aydın, Saruhan, Karasi, and Balıkesir, lodging in guild hospices,
enjoying the hospitality of the akhis, meeting the local rulers—all of
whom he referred to as sultans—and surveying local commercial and
religious life.
Ibn Battuta arrived at Bursa, seat of the Ottoman emirate, in No-
vember 1331. He described Sultan Orhan of Bursa as “the greatest of
the kings of the Turkomans and the richest in wealth, lands and mili-
tary forces.” Orhan was the son of Osman Bey, the Turkoman chief of
Söğüt in Bithynia who had achieved fame by besieging Nicaea and de-
feating the imperial Byzantine forces sent against him at Baphaeon in
1301. Orhan captured Bursa in 1327 and Nicaea in 1331, a few months
before Ibn Battuta’s arrival. In his published travelogue, Ibn Battuta
reported, “Of fortresses he possesses nearly a hundred, and for most
of his time he is continually engaged in making the round of them,
staying in each fortress for some days to put it into good order and
examine its condition. It is said that he has never stayed for a whole
month in any one town. He also fights with the infidels continually
and keeps them under siege.”1 The victories of Osman and Orhan
against the neighboring Byzantine Empire, their successful projection
of the gazi image of sacred warfare for the expansion of Islamic rule,
and the attractiveness of Bursa as a commercial center combined to
draw frontier adventurers and warriors, fortune seekers, merchants,
preachers, and teachers to the Ottoman sultanate in the first half of the
fourteenth century. It was said that Osman had dreamed a marvelous
dream, in which the moon had risen from Sheikh Edebali’s bosom and
come to rest in his own, and from it a large tree grew. The sheikh, Os-
man’s companion and advisor, had interpreted it as a prophesy of a
kingdom grown from his and Osman’s descendants and had married
his daughter to the prince.
While absorbing small, neighboring Turkish emirates in northwest-
ern Asia Minor, Orhan inevitably became deeply involved in Byzan-
tine politics. He cemented an alliance with the Byzantine usurper John
Cantacuzenus in his struggle with the rival Byzantine Palaeologus dy-
nasty by marrying John’s daughter Theodora. The sultan of Saruhan,
allied with the Empress Anne, raided Bulgaria and Thrace and plun-
dered the outskirts of Constantinople. After 1346, Orhan and his suc-
cessors, his son Murad and Murad’s son Bayezid, concentrated on the
problem of the Byzantine succession while simultaneously contending
with rival Turkish princes in western Anatolia, who were understand-

ably troubled about the growing strength of the Ottoman state. In-
tervening on behalf of Cantacuzenus, Orhan sent his son Süleyman
across the Dardanelles to take Tzympe in 1352; two years later, he cap-
tured the fortress of Gallipoli. When the Serbian King Stefan Dushan
died in 1355, no significant Balkan power remained to confront the
Turkish advance. Just before Orhan’s death in 1361, Murad took Adri-
anople (Edirne) in eastern Thrace, key to the great European highway,
transferring his residence there. When Murad destroyed a combined
Macedonian and Serbian army at the Maritsa River in 1371, Emperor
John V Palaeologus was forced to pay tribute, thereby making the
Byzantine Empire a vassal of the Ottoman sultan. The first Ottoman
province, called Rumelia, was established in Thrace and southern
Bulgaria.
In the 1380s and 1390s, the Ottomans conquered most of the Balkan
Peninsula and central Anatolia in piecemeal fashion. Nish in Serbia
fell, Salonika on the Aegean, and Sofia and all Bulgaria north of the
Balkan Mountains as far as the Danube. In these years, Murad also
fought in Anatolia, intervening in the region of Amasya and defeat-
ing an army from Karaman. In 1389, Murad destroyed a coalition of
Balkan princes at the Battle of Kosovo and then lost his life to an as-
sassin in the aftermath. In the next five years, his son Bayezid subju-
gated the Muslim emirates of Aydın, Saruhan, Menteşe, Germiyan,
Hamid, and Kastamonu, which were organized into the second Otto-
man province, Anatolia. Building a fort on the shores of the Bosphorus,
he began a blockade of Constantinople. The fate of the Byzantine city
seemed sealed with Bayezid’s crushing victory against a Crusader
army at Nicopolis in 1396. With the defeat of the independent king-
dom of Sivas in 1398, ruled by Sultan Burhaneddin, and the annexa-
tion of Karaman, Bayezid’s realm extended from the Danube to the
Euphrates.
The appearance of a grave new threat in eastern Anatolia, however,
not only saved the city of Constantinople, but abruptly ended the Ot-
tomans’ drive toward empire at the point where it seemed certain to
succeed. Another charismatic military genius, Timur, or Tamerlane as
he is known in Western literature, unified the Turkic nomad armies
to create the last of the great steppe empires, stretching from central
Asia to the Black Sea and claiming the Mongol mantle of the Ilkhans.
Timur conquered Iran and Iraq and sacked Delhi in 1398. Bayezid met
utter defeat at the hands of Timur’s forces in the Battle of Ankara in
1402 and was himself taken prisoner. Resentment of Bayezid’s moves
toward centralization of authority, including raising a slave army and
beginning the registration of both agricultural lands and nomadic

herds, drove the Anatolian Turkish beys Bayezid had so recently de-
feated into the arms of the central Asian conqueror.
THE OTTOMAN RECOVERY AND THE

UNIFICATION OF ANATOLIA
Timur returned to the Turkish emirs their former lands and divided
the patrimony of Osman among the several sons of Bayezid. But re-
markably, in a period of less than 20 years after the death of Timur, the
Ottoman sultanate recovered from complete defeat and dismember-
ment to regain its position as the leading power of western Anatolia
and the Balkans. In eastern Anatolia, two powerful Turkoman states,
known as the White Sheep (Ak Koyunlu) and the Black Sheep (Kara
Koyunlu), succeeded the Ilkhans.
Even before Timur’s death, the sons of Bayezid began a civil war
over the Ottoman domain. The European neighbors supported who-
ever appeared to be weakest at a given moment, while the rival Ana-
tolian emirates worked to prevent a centralized Ottoman realm. For a
time, there seemed to be the possibility of a partition between the Euro-
pean and Anatolian halves of the kingdom, a conclusion that probably
would have doomed both. By 1413, however, Bayezid’s son Mehmed
defeated his brothers and successfully reunited the Ottoman domain.
The kingdom Sultan Mehmed bequeathed to his son Murad II when
he died in 1421 was not yet the same kingdom as Bayezid had lost to
Timur 19 years earlier, but the danger of its disappearance had receded.
Against the many forces favoring the breakup of the Ottoman
realm during this interregnum, the sons of Bayezid could call on a
reservoir of strengths that ultimately held it together. The prestigious
reputation of the Ottoman dynasty was not completely ruined by
Timur. Most important, perhaps, Murad I and Bayezid had created
a powerful central army, including a standing force of slave soldiers
and a reliable body of Turkoman cavalry whom they settled on lands
controlled by the Ottoman sultanate. Another factor in the Ottoman
recovery was the absence of a truly equal adversary. This Ottoman
army was stronger than that fielded by any of the Anatolian emirs
and stronger than any conceivable configuration of forces in the Bal-
kans, where the Ottomans had already decimated the traditional mil-
itary nobility. The exception to this was Hungary, which led a series
of wars with the Ottomans between 1421 and 1448, especially under
the leadership of the great General János Hunyadi. All of these even-
tually failed, however.
Sultan Mehmed II completed the Ottoman recovery with the con-

quest of Constantinople. The Byzantine capital fell to the Ottoman
guns on May 29, 1453. The city was in any case no longer what it once
had been, its population mostly having fled and its economic circum-
stances severely reduced by blockade. The Turks are often said to have
changed the name of Constantinople to Istanbul, but this is not really
true. The Ottomans still used the name Constantinople on coins and
documents and in official correspondence, right down to the twentieth
century. At the same time, they also called it Istanbul or Stambul, as
did its Greek residents. The word Istanbul probably derives from the
Greek phrase Eis tan poli, meaning “[to] the city.” Constantinople was
not formally renamed Istanbul until the 1920s, by a law of the Turkish
republic.
The conquest of Istanbul strengthened the position of the Ottoman
Turks in an emerging world war over control of the products and trade
routes of the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean commercial nexus at
the end of the fifteenth century. Mehmed the Conqueror set about vig-
orously repopulating and rebuilding the city, which now would once
more become an imperial city and a world city. By the time Sultan
Mehmed II took Istanbul, most of Anatolia had been under Muslim
Turkish rule for more than four centuries. Even the still heavily Greek
and Christian Aegean coastal regions had become accustomed to the
authority of Muslim sultanates after more than 150 years. During the
long reigns of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (1451–1481) and his son
Bayezid II (1481–1512) and the short reign of his grandson Selim I
(1512–1520), the Ottoman leadership formed and developed institu-
tions of state that supported powerful military forces that eventually
won this war.
For the Ottoman Empire, this war was really several wars fought
simultaneously. One aspect of this war involved a conflict with Venice
in the Aegean and Mediterranean that led to the Ottoman conquest of
the Peloponnesus (the Morea) and Euboia. This was related to a sec-
ond aspect of the war in the central and eastern Balkans and the Black
Sea. Several campaigns were fought there, a Muslim Turkish client
state was created in the Crimea (the Crimean Khanate), and strenuous
efforts were made to prevent Hungarian incursions into the Balkans
south of the Danube-Sava line. A third aspect of the war involved
competition with several Anatolian Turkish emirates for control of the
routes leading across eastern Anatolia. This part of the conflict abated
somewhat with the Ottoman defeat of Karaman (1468) and the death
of Uzun Hasan, the great sultan of the Akkoyunlu state of the Euphra-
tes region (1478).
A fourth aspect of this world war comprised a conflict with Venice

and with Mamluk Egypt over the overland trade routes through Ci-
licia to Aleppo and Damascus and the Mediterranean ports of west-
ern Syria. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I won this war by defeating the
Turkoman messiah Shah Ismail at Çaldıran and invading Syria. He
seized Cilicia from the Muslim Ramazanoğlu dynasty, thus fully uni-
fying Anatolia under Ottoman rule, and took Aleppo in 1516. He went
on to defeat the Mamluks at Marj Dabik in Palestine, took Cairo in
January 1517, and completed his stunning victory over the centers
of Islamic civilization later that year with the conquest of Mecca and
Medina.
The final dimension of this war was religious, involving a conflict
between the Ottomans and a new religious movement that appeared
suddenly in the person of the aforementioned Turkoman messiah Shah
Ismail. Shah Ismail was simultaneously a scion of three Turkoman
Muslim dynasties and one Christian and also the spiritual heir of a
heterodox mystical order centered at Ardabil in Azerbaijan. Recog-
nized as the messiah as a small child, he rolled to political power on
a wave of fervent devotion and military victory, including the capture
of Tabriz in 1501 and Baghdad in 1508. Sultan Selim and the Ottoman
dynasty defended what it considered orthodox Sunni Islam against
this new movement. In perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the war
for the Ottomans, Shah Ismail promoted and supported religious and
political rebellion all over Anatolia and the Caucasus. Sultan Selim,
forcing his aging father Bayezid II to abdicate in 1512, violently sup-
pressed these rebellions of the partisans of Shah Ismail with mass ex-
ecutions. In a massive campaign into Azerbaijan, Selim defeated Shah
Ismail in the epic Battle of Çaldıran in August 1514.
NOTE
1. In the translation of H. A. R. Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D.
1325–1354, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
pp. 451–452.
4
Anatolia and
the Ottoman Empire,
1517–1789
The conquests of Sultan Selim I brought all of Anatolia under Ottoman

rule and transformed the Ottoman Empire into a world power strad-
dling the ancient trade routes between the Mediterranean Sea and the
Indian Ocean. The Ottoman sultan had acquired a large number of
new Muslim subjects in southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa
and now controlled the great shrines of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusa-
lem, and the most important pilgrimage routes. The balance of the em-
pire’s identity gradually shifted as the former regional sultanate of the
Balkans and Anatolia came to terms with its position of leadership in
the Islamic world.
The area which would later form the Republic of Turkey was di-
vided into several provinces in the Ottoman system, as the Ottoman
dynasty governed through its provincial administrative structure and
its relationships with notable persons and families in the provinces.
Eastern Thrace, including the city of Edirne, was part of the oldest and
most important Ottoman province, the province of Rumelia, stretch-
ing across the southern Balkan Peninsula. The Ottoman province of
Anatolia was smaller than the area thought of as Anatolia today. It in-
cluded the Aegean and Marmara coastal regions, the northern moun-
tains bordering the western Black Sea, and the western and north
central parts of the peninsula, reaching as far as the city of Ankara. The
province of Anatolia was divided into several districts called sanjaks,
many of which were formerly independent principalities, including
Saruhan, Karasi, Aydın, Menteşe, Hamid, and Tekke. In the sixteenth
century, the central government of the Ottoman Empire extended its
fiscal and military reach, both through the incorporation of the vari-
ous regions of Anatolia into a unified imperial economy and through
the extension of the Ottoman central bureaucratic apparatus. During
the later seventeenth century, Anatolian notables forced a gradual re-
vision of the central government’s approach to provincial administra-
tion, capitalizing on new situations and manipulating the instruments
of Ottoman political and economic control to their own advantage.
As for the remainder of modern Anatolia, the area east of Ankara,
with the cities of Sivas and Amasya, made up the province of Rum.
The eastern Black Sea coast formed a province centered on the ancient
city of Trabzon. Heavily Armenian and Kurdish eastern Anatolia was
divided into the province of Kars in the northeast, the province of
Erzurum, and the province of Rakka in the southeast. Two formerly
independent principalities became the Ottoman provinces of Karaman
and Dulkadir in central Anatolia, while Adana and the Cilician plain
fell into the province of Aleppo. In Diyarbakir province, the Ottoman
dynasty reached a special arrangement whereby the Kurdish tribal
chieftains maintained autonomy in exchange for tribute and acted as
an important Sunni bastion against the propaganda of the Safavids,
the dynasty founded by Shah Ismail in 1500.
THE OTTOMAN ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

The nostalgic view that became popular among later Ottoman
writers—that under Selim’s successor Sultan Süleyman I (1520–1566)
the Ottoman Empire reached an apogee of power and success, a
golden age—was an idea championed by Süleyman already in his own
lifetime. Believing that in his reign Ottoman society could epitomize
the Islamic world order, Süleyman consciously projected a public per-
sona that emphasized his role as a just and wise monarch. Although
in Western lore he came to be known as Sultan Süleyman the Mag-
nificent, in Turkish, he is known as Kanunî, Süleyman the Lawgiver.
Under Süleyman’s rule, jurists codified much earlier Ottoman legal
material and worked to lay the legal foundation of important Otto-
man political, military, social, and economic institutions. The corpus
Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire, 1517–1789 47
of decrees of the sultan, the kanuns, regulated the institutions of the

empire and were the law of the land. Some of these laws concerned
matters outside the explicit jurisdiction of Islamic sacred law, the sha-
ria, but others synthesized Islamic law and imperial decrees and gave
a place to custom too. Thus, secular law and sacred law coexisted with
customary law in the Ottoman Empire, as indeed in all Islamic states.
The Ottoman system of Sultan Süleyman was built upon centuries
of development within several intersecting traditions: the Turkish her-
itage of the steppe empire, the Islamic theological tradition, the Per-
sian and Byzantine imperial traditions, and the first two centuries of
Ottoman law and experience in Anatolia and the Balkans. The Otto-
man Empire was a dynastic state. In Ottoman political theory, the
territory of the Ottoman Empire belonged to the state by right of con-
quest by the victorious ruling dynasty. The sultan governed the state
as a trust from God, as the shepherd of the flock of God, through his
family, his advisors, and his household servants. In a certain sense,
the government of the empire was regarded as an extension of the sul-
tan’s own household. The sultan’s immediate palace household op-
erated from a personal treasury, funded partially out of the sultan’s
share of the fruits of conquest. The categories of state service—the
Inner Service or Enderun, the Outer Service or Birun, and the provincial
administration—corresponded to the physical layout of the courtyards
of the imperial palace of Topkapı at Istanbul. The servants of the sultan’s
household went out from the palace to become the state officials who
staffed the highest levels of the Ottoman imperial military and admin-
istration. The soldiers of the various corps of the sultan’s palace guard
and militia comprised the most highly trained divisions of the Ottoman
military. As the ruling class of the empire, the sultan’s extended house-
hold of state servants paid no taxes, serving society and living off its
revenues. These state servants were the sultan’s slaves, his kuls.
The sultan’s palace and the harem were closely regulated arenas
where the delicate and crucial business of preserving the dynasty was
managed, where the work of communicating its attributes and vision
was undertaken, and where issues concerning the nature of that work
were debated. The women of the dynasty played a significant role in
these matters. Moving away from the pattern of fathering children by
slave concubines, as earlier sultans had done, Süleyman married and
remained faithful to one woman, Hurrem Sultan. Hurrem and Süley-
man established a new model of the royal family, in which the sultan’s
favorite concubine exercised considerable political influence by resid-
ing in the palace, advising the sultan, and forming political alliances
with important statesmen. In subsequent generations, the mothers of
reigning sultans became the most powerful political personages in the
royal household, managing not only the political and financial affairs
of the palace officials, but also the sexual dimension of dynastic politics.
In the Ottoman system, the sultan’s servants were legally slaves,
many of them children taken from Christian villages in the Balkans.
In doing this, the Ottomans adapted to their own circumstances a tra-
ditional system of elite military slavery practiced in numerous Mid-
dle Eastern Islamic states, including the Seljuk sultanate, for centuries
before them. The Ottoman version of the system, called the devşirme,
was an extraordinary levy on the Christian peasants of the Balkans.
The children taken became slaves, but slaves of the sultan who could
not be resold. The system was intended to create an Ottoman ruling
class whose loyalty was owed entirely to the dynasty. Muslim peas-
ant families were exempted, according to Ottoman writers, because
their loyalty might be compromised by their links to provincial family
networks. The slave boys were sent to Anatolia, where they converted
to Islam and learned Turkish before being brought back to Istanbul.
There, they enrolled in the palace educational system and passed
through a series of grades based on their ability. Many graduates of the
system entered the Janissary corps, the famous infantry of the Ottoman
military. The more able pupils stayed at the palace, receiving addi-
tional training before entering palace service or being transferred to
administrative and military posts in the provinces.
The highest governing body in the empire was the imperial council
or divan, a cabinet-like group of men appointed directly by the sultan.
It directed the political, judicial, financial, and administrative func-
tions of government, meeting regularly in a room in the palace. The
council was headed by the grand vezir, a military commander with
great administrative acumen. The rest of the council included the
governors-general (beylerbeyis) of the two greatest provinces, Rumelia
and Anatolia, who held the rank of vezir; the two high military judges,
the kadıaskers of the provinces of Rumelia and Anatolia; the empire’s
two highest financial officers, the head treasurers; the Commander of
the Janissary Corps; the Admiral of the Fleet; and the Chancellor, who
led the bureaucracy and whose responsibility it was to affix the sul-
tan’s signature to documents.
Rumelia and Anatolia, the provinces closest to Istanbul, were the
provinces most fully integrated into the Ottoman administrative
model. The empire stationed many of its central administrators there.
The governor, a senior military commander appointed from Istanbul,
who was a slave and a graduate of the palace educational system, ran
the province through his personal household in coordination with the
provincial council and its scribal personnel. The provincial bureaucracy
existed mainly to administer the Ottoman provincial army, which

provided more than one-third of the total Ottoman fighting strength.
Made up of garrison forces and a provincial cavalry, this army formed
the link between the Ottoman imperial system and the countryside.
In many cases, it represented the physical survival of an older local
Turkish military class. They gave their military service in exchange for
the right to collect the tax revenues of rural estates called timars. The
revenue of each timar was determined by a periodic detailed cadastral
survey of the land and its expected production, carried out by Otto-
man chancery officials in coordination with local authorities. The re-
sults of the survey and the names of the Christian and Muslim peasant
cultivators and their tax assessments were recorded in registers and
filed in the provincial capital and in Istanbul. The state handled peti-
tions and complaints from peasants and disputes concerning claims
on timar revenues, through written communication between central
and provincial officials. In these affairs, the Ottoman central govern-
ment displayed an attitude of flexibility and a willingness to negotiate
within bounds defined by the practical requirements of its local mili-
tary force.
THE OTTOMAN ECONOMY

The theoretical principles undergirding the Ottoman administrative
system, that the Ottoman realm was ruled by the sultan as a trust from
God, that all land belonged to the state, and that the state functioned as
an extension of the sultan’s household, had direct relevance for the op-
eration of the Ottoman economy. Economic activity increased the power
and wealth of the state, which acted to distribute its benefits to all.
The Ottoman economic system aimed broadly to maximize imperial
prosperity and wealth by military conquest and by efficient methods
of revenue extraction. It stressed the benefit of imperial prosperity to
all sectors of society and saw the state’s role as winning control of rev-
enue sources and organizing collection and redistribution. The state
itself and its servants were exempted from taxation. In the Ottoman
Empire, imperial wealth was acquired through support of the agrarian
economy, small scale urban industry and trade to ensure the supply of
commodities for the local market.
Revenues of the agrarian economy supported the provincial cavalry
force. In the manner of feudal lords but regulated by the state, the Otto-
man timar holders collected the rural dues from Muslim and Christian
peasant families along a graduated scale. The timar system also had
the benefit, for the state, of decentralizing collection of a significant
source of revenue, relieving the central treasury of the burden of col-

lecting it, and preventing removal of currency from the local economy.
The same was true of another important revenue source, the canonical
poll tax levied on non-Muslims living in towns and cities. Collection of
this tax was typically farmed out by auction to local investors; the bulk
of it stayed in the province and was recycled into the local markets.
A system of revenue contracting (mukataa) was commonly em-
ployed for urban revenue sources such as the poll tax, customs du-
ties, and state monopolies like salt and metal mining. At the heart of
the Ottoman urban economy was a set of economic and social insti-
tutions established by charitable foundations with the support of the
state. These urban centers, called imarets, typically grew up around a
mosque and included markets and other public services such as roads,
bridges, water works, and caravanserais, inns, and hostels for trave-
lers. The Islamic charitable trust (vakıf ) provided the legal financial
basis of these complexes. A vakıf was a registered trust in which the
revenues from a source were earmarked to the support of a specified
charitable purpose and thereby became tax exempt. A charter defined
the purpose and conditions of the vakıf, spelled out its management
structure, and appointed its trustees. The charter also provided for the
salaries of employees out of the income of the trust, as well as day-to-
day maintenance and supplies. Vakıfs supported not only the great
public architecture visible in Ottoman cities—mosques, markets, mau-
soleums, bridges, baths, fountains, and the like, but they also lay be-
hind such establishments as soup kitchens, dervish lodges, hospitals,
libraries, seminaries, scriptoria, gardens, and calligraphy and other
works of art. Any citizen had the right to create a vakıf trust out of
personal income sources. Common people too, women as well as men,
endowed trusts, sometimes for purposes as simple as the fees of a pro-
fessional chanter to recite the Qur’an over the founder’s grave.
Urban industries were organized through guild associations. Guild
activities reached far beyond the strictly economic or industrial. It
purchased and ensured the supply of raw materials, set produc-
tion levels and prices, and regulated quality control. It provided for
the families of its members through systems of what we would call
workmen’s compensation and insurance and functioned as a banking
institution, taking deposits, extending credit, and investing in such
projects as long-distance trade. It investigated infractions and negoti-
ated disputes. The guild’s connection to a religious order—its liturgy,
places of worship, and leadership—infused the guild community with
a deeply spiritual character. Guild organization characterized urban
economic activity among Muslim and non-Muslim (Christian and
Jewish) communities alike. These confessional communities tended to

live within separate quarters in Ottoman cities, but the quarters were
organized in a similar fashion, with churches, synagogues, or mosques
as the center point. The communities came together in the markets and
in other state institutions.
The Ottoman conquest unified the Anatolian commercial economy
by integrating it with international markets across its great caravan
trade routes. While Istanbul became the largest market and the focal
An Ottoman miniature painting of the fes-

tivities surrounding the circumcision of Prince
Mehmed, 1582. The procession of the weavers’
guild is depicted in a parade in the hippodrome
in Istanbul. Visible in the background is the pal-
ace of Ibrahim Pasha, and in the foreground the
Walled Obelisk, the Serpent Column, and the
Egyptian Obelisk of Thutmose III. (DeAgostini/
Getty Images)
point of commerce in the Ottoman Empire, Bursa remained the com-

mercial center of Anatolia. Merchants usually reached Istanbul from
Bursa by sea, via Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara. At Istanbul, the
routes from Europe converged, the overland route by way of the great
highway through Edirne, Sofia, Nish, Belgrade, and Buda, and the sea
route by way of the Straits. Merchants could also reach the Aegean and
Mediterranean from Bursa through a land route to the increasingly
important port of İzmir. A road leading through Eskişehir and across
the Anatolian plateau via Ankara, Tokat, Erzincan, and Erzurum con-
nected Bursa to Tabriz, Iran, central Eurasia, and the overland routes
to East Asia. At Tokat, this road was joined by one from Istanbul via
İzmit and Bolu. The main trunk of the other great route across Ana-
tolia went by way of Konya, taking merchants and travelers through
the Cilician Gates to Adana and Aleppo. At Aleppo, this route then
connected western and central Anatolia to the pilgrimage route via
Damascus to Jerusalem, Medina, and Mecca on the one hand and, by
way of the upper Euphrates, to Baghdad, the Persian Gulf, and the
Indian Ocean on the other. A southern route to Tabriz via Birecik and
Diyarbakir also branched off from Aleppo.
The Ottoman trade strategy was to create regional customs zones
around the main urban commercial centers and permit goods to cross
only on the official trade highways, which passed through these cus-
toms centers. The state collected duties on all merchandise once in
the customs center of each zone. Duties were essentially value-added
taxes on the value of the commodity itself, as estimated by state of-
ficials in the customs centers, and not on commercial transactions. In
the crucial customs zones on the borders of the empire, therefore, the
duties amounted to a tax on imports and exports. In this way, the
Ottoman Empire could maximize its profits from international trade
while not discouraging the movement of goods within regional mar-
ket systems. This Ottoman trade strategy gave European merchants
the incentive to seek alternate international routes for the Indian trade
in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the Ottoman
Empire effectively monopolized the traditional routes between the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The “capitulations,” Ottoman
grants of commercial privileges to merchants of European states be-
ginning with France in 1536, should thus be understood in the context
of utter Ottoman domination of commerce between the Danube and
the Persian Gulf and between the Nile and the Caucasus Mountains
after 1517.
Besides Indian spices, the most significant international merchan-
dise carried on the Ottoman trade routes were raw silk from Iran,
textiles from Europe, especially Florentine woolens, and coffee from

southern Arabia and eastern Africa. The most valuable homegrown
Ottoman commodities included silk cloth manufactured in Bursa, the
center of the Ottoman silk industry; mohair from Ankara; fine cotton
cloth; rugs, hides, furs, rhubarb, bees wax, and musk.
THE SYSTEM STRAINED

Süleyman’s system underwent modification in a long period of in-
cessant warfare that strained the resources of the state while bringing
only limited material rewards. The wars coincided with a serious dy-
nastic crisis and socio-cultural conflict. After a period of transition, a
new internal equilibrium emerged that restored Ottoman prosperity.
Warfare began with Iran in 1578 over control of the trade routes in
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Transcaucasia. This war lasted from 1578 to
1590. A “Long War” of indecisive sieges against the Habsburg Empire
in Hungary and east central Europe followed between 1593 and 1606.
The eastern war was renewed when the Safavids took Baghdad and
ended when Sultan Murad IV recaptured the city in 1638. Peace with
Iran was secured in a treaty in 1639 that held for nearly a century. Yet
conflict continued first in Eastern Europe and then for nearly 20 years
on Crete. The last stronghold finally capitulated and the Ottomans
conquered the island in 1669.
From the death of Mehmed III (1603) until the accession of Süley-
man II (1687), seven sultans took the throne, five of whom were minors
and the other two mentally unbalanced. The prolonged dynastic infir-
mity encouraged an already existing tendency towards factionalism
at court. The factions, in turn, expressed and played out prominent
social and cultural tensions within Ottoman society at large. One way
this happened was that the Janissary corps and palace troops in Istan-
bul exercised a dominant role in imperial politics. Another way was in
military rebellions led by notables in the provinces, especially Rum,
Karaman, and Syria. The pattern was established when Sultan Osman II
was assassinated in a Janissary revolt in Istanbul in 1622, and a pro-
vincial governor in Erzurum rebelled and marched on the capital. A
different outcome resulted at a grave moment during war with Ven-
ice in 1656, when desperate palace officials, led by the Queen Mother,
handed the grand vezirate to the octogenarian Mehmed Köprülü. He
immediately installed a military dictatorship and restored order, ex-
ecuting hundreds of rebels. Köprülü established a dynasty of grand
vezirs, who effectively ruled the empire for the remainder of the sev-
enteenth century.
The tensions had both social and religious dimensions. The Otto-
man elite associated with the Istanbul palace tended to be from the
Balkans, especially Bosnia and Albania, and frequently of slave ori-
gin. The provincial rebels, on the other hand, were often from east-
ern Anatolia or the Caucasus and were often ethnically Georgian or
Abkhazian; one was Kurdish. A few were of slave origin, but many
were free-born Muslims. The warlords recruited and funded their own
military forces, using them to bring pressure on Istanbul. They dem-
onstrated the tactical obsolescence of the provincially based timariot
cavalry and, consequently, the need for a reassessment of the entire
Ottoman approach to provincial finances and governance. The war-
lords and their forces clashed with imperial Janissary troops who were
stationed in the provinces, whose power in state tax contracting was
resented by local financial interests. Ottoman authorities in Istanbul
alternately suppressed the rebellions by force and negotiated compro-
mises with the leaders, gradually recognizing the need for adjustment
of the empire’s provincial structure.
Additionally, there was a clash of religious values. The easterners
often adhered to a rigorous and narrowly defined Sunni Islam and
scorned the looser practice and piety of the urban centers in the em-
pire’s western provinces. Not only that, but many Bosnians and Al-
banians were Bektashis, as was the entire Janissary corps. Bektashi
Islam had always been suspect to the strictly orthodox. Over the dec-
ades since Sultan Selim’s conquests, a great many adherents of Shah
Ismail and his mystical messianism had gradually formed a kind of
Bektashi-Alevi synthesis throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. In the
1630s, Mehmed Kadızade, a charismatic Sunni preacher, inveighed
against the lax religious discipline of Sufis, Bektashis, and others. In
his sermons, he won huge acclaim from the crowds, popularizing the
fundamentalist writings and teachings of an earlier Ottoman theolo-
gian, Mehmed Birgivi (d. 1573). The Kadızade backers drew the ire
of establishment Ottoman Muslims. When Mehmed Köprülü became
grand vezir in 1656, one of his first victims was a Kadızade demagogue
whom he banished to Cyprus. The movement reached its peak in the
reign of Sultan Mehmed IV, who appointed a Kadızade follower as
court chaplain.
In the last years of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman armies ex-
perienced defeat at the hands of the Austrian Habsburgs in the failed
second siege of Vienna (1683). Another long war followed, in which
Hungary was permanently lost to Ottoman control in the Treaty of
Karlowitz (1699). Yet the war and the Köprülü decades also saw the
gradual emergence of a new economic and political equilibrium in the

empire, which held for most of the eighteenth century.
CONSOLIDATION OF A NEW OTTOMAN MODEL

The financial roots of this new equilibrium lay in a system of lifetime
contracts for the collection of state revenues. The system evolved dur-
ing the unsuccessful war as an extension of the practice of tax farming.
The war depleted the central treasury, but instability in the country-
side discouraged investors in the prevailing system of short-term
revenue farming. In any case, that system was dominated by local Jan-
issaries and elites connected to Istanbul. According to historian Ariel
Salzmann, the lifetime revenue contract, or malikane system, by con-
trast, attracted leading investors back to state finance by offering them
the right to collect taxes at fixed rates for their lifetime, promising lit-
tle state interference. The contracts could be divided into shares and
held jointly by several investors. Shares could be traded or publicly
auctioned separately when the holder died. Winning bidders paid the
central treasury an advance, registration fees, and annual remittances,
receiving in return an exclusive government charter. In the event, Is-
tanbul elites still dominated the most lucrative contracts, but provin-
cial interests did well by cultivating connections with family members
and business partners in Istanbul. Non-Muslims were not permitted
to bid, yet they participated in the system as lenders and guarantors.1
In this way, the Ottoman central authorities responded to pressure
coming from state officials in the bureaucracy, military, and Islamic
ulema hierarchy, essentially agreeing to share power with these coali-
tions of elites, many of whom had or cultivated provincial connections.
These elites distributed the profits and other benefits of their positions
to their own personal retinues and clients. Although the central gov-
ernment remained closely involved with the bidding process, it faced
obvious risks. Major imperial projects that required large financial
outlays—such as wars—now required negotiation with powerful coali-
tions of interests whose cooperation was secured by offering incentives
for their investment and participation. The system worked well but
did not provide much room for the central government to maneuver in
times of crisis. And the potential, at least, existed for regional elites to
invest in military technology in order to pose a direct challenge to the
Ottoman central authorities. During most of the eighteenth century,
this did not happen, because provincial leaders preferred to cooper-
ate with the central government in return for armed protection, seeing
greater probability of success in joint action. No regional leaders yet

possessed the moral and spiritual authority to challenge the prestige
of the Ottoman dynasty, now more than 400 years old. But later, pow-
erful regional centers arose in Egypt, in Iraq, and in the Balkans, lay-
ing the seeds of local political and economic autonomy. Salzmann has
shown that in spite of risks, the state derived benefits from the new fis-
cal arrangement. The Ottoman central government built and renewed
long-term ties of patronage and loyalty with local elites. Using local
notables, the empire could more successfully invest in and compete for
revenues associated with the important maritime commerce. And by
solidifying relations and links of patronage with leading figures in the
commercial and religious establishment, the dynasty acknowledged a
firmer grounding in Ottoman society. Naturally, the revised political
order brought the end of certain prominent Ottoman institutions, in-
cluding the devşirme levy of children and the periodic fiscal surveys of
the provinces, tools for the functioning of the former system.
The reorganized Ottoman army performed with mixed success in
the first half of the eighteenth century. Russia posed the most seri-
ous threat to the Ottoman order. The efforts of Tsar Peter the Great
to consolidate Russian control of the steppe zone south of the Urals
brought him into conflict with the Ottoman client state in the Crimea
in the 1690s. This, and an interest in competing for the wealth of the
rapidly developing world economy of Atlantic, Mediterranean, and
Indian Ocean commerce by way of the Black Sea, motivated Peter to
attack the Ottoman Empire in 1710. At Pruth the next year, the Ot-
tomans handed him an embarrassing defeat. But the threat did not
go away. Shrewd Ottoman diplomacy in another war with Russia and
Austria in the Balkans between 1736 and 1739 brought a stable peace
to the northern frontier for a generation, but when Catherine the Great
(1762–1796) took the throne, she adopted an aggressive stance.
Alarmed by Russian actions in Poland in the 1760s, the Ottomans
declared war in 1768 after a Russian incursion across the border in
Moldavia. The war turned into a total catastrophe for the Ottoman
Empire, as Russian troops occupied Bucharest and the Danubian Prin-
cipalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in early 1770 and advanced to-
ward Bulgaria. The Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty of Küçük
Kaynarca. By this agreement, the Ottomans ceded several forts on the
Sea of Azov, giving Russia a landing on the Black Sea. The Crimean
Turkish principality, an Ottoman client state for two centuries, though
nominally independent, fell under Russian dominance. The Ottoman
monopolization of commerce on the Black Sea ended. Russian ships
were permitted free access to the Black Sea, including passage through
the Straits at Istanbul; and Catherine claimed vague rights of protec-

tion of Orthodox Christians in the Balkans.
The war showed that the Ottoman logistical system was incapable
of supporting and supplying the large army needed for late eighteenth
century European combat. Serious Ottoman statesmen began to recog-
nize the limitations of the decentralized Ottoman fiscal system and to
plan for its reform. Even more, the war decisively demonstrated that
the era of world history when Afro-Eurasia was under the hegemony
of Turkish and Mongol dynasties rooted in the semi-nomadic culture
of the central Eurasian steppe was over. The fall of the Safavid dy-
nasty in Iran earlier in the century and the simultaneous collapse of
Mughal authority in India heralded a new order. In this new, global
order, Imperial Russia would dominate Eurasia, and transoceanic em-
pires based in northwestern Europe would bring the commerce of the
Indian and Atlantic Oceans into their own coffers.
NOTE
1. Ariel Salzmann, “An Ancient Regime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and
Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics
and Society 21 (1993), pp. 393–423.
5
The Late Ottoman Empire,
1789–1908
The Ottoman Empire survived when several European powers pos-

sessed clear military advantages over it. The empire’s European rivals
often supported independence movements of the Ottoman Empire’s
subject peoples, while at the same time developing clear economic
interests in maintaining the empire. The Ottoman Empire was run by
active and creative statesmen who were fully aware of both its strengths
and its weaknesses; it possessed a vibrant and developing economy,
and its cultural production was attuned to the empire’s place in the
world and in history. The threat posed by Russia, in the Balkan Penin-
sula and in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, provided the incentive
for a series of fiscal and administrative reforms intended to strengthen
the Ottoman military. The repercussions of these measures were felt in
every area of Ottoman life during the nineteenth century.
SULTAN SELIM III AND THE NEW ORDER

Catherine the Great completed the Russian conquest of the Crimea
with the Russian victory of 1774 and the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca,
eliminating the Crimean khanate and bringing the Russian Empire to the
shores of the Black Sea and confirming these victories by another Rus-
sian victory in 1792. From this point on, the Ottoman relationship with
Russia revolved around two closely related issues. The first was Russian
strategic interest in the Black Sea, including naval and commercial ac-
cess to the Aegean and Mediterranean through the Straits at Constan-
tinople, and political interest in the eastern Balkans and the Caucasus.
The second was Russian claims of primacy within Orthodox Christian-
ity. Based on their own controversial interpretations of provisions in the
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Russian statesmen claimed a vague right to
intervene on behalf of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
At the same time, Russian military success against Ottoman armies
in the last third of the eighteenth century piqued the interest of some
Ottoman statesmen in the “Russian model” of military modernization.
Beginning with Peter the Great (1682–1725) and continuing with Cath-
erine the Great (1762–1796), the Russian state had increasingly adopted
and manufactured European-style military technology, deployed it
in newly organized central armies using European-style tactics, and
financed it through a variety of new taxes. Sultan Selim III, who took
the Ottoman throne in 1789, immediately began reforming the Otto-
man army along these lines.
At first, these steps stressed the need for closer inspection of the
existing army corps, including the Janissaries, for promotion through
merit, for regular drill, and attention to discipline. Soon, however, Selim
introduced a basic organizational distinction between the administra-
tive and military aspects of command, appointing separate officers for
each. He began efforts at expanding recruitment by demanding the
service of sons of the corps. He built new barracks and made efforts to
keep the provincial timar forces under arms throughout the year. The
artillery and mining corps underwent more thorough reorganization.
The old naval engineering school was expanded, and in 1795, a paral-
lel school of army engineering was created. The imperial naval arsenal
was expanded and provincial arsenals opened and began building a
large number of modern ships. New army and navy medical schools
trained doctors and surgeons for military medical service. The Otto-
man Empire opened foreign embassies in the major European capitals
of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin.
Yet these moves were insufficient to prepare the empire’s military
for the possibility of renewed conflict with Russia or another European
adversary. In 1794, therefore, Selim III created two entirely new institu-
tions, a new army corps called the “New Order” Army (Nizam-ı cedid)
and a “New Fund” Treasury (İrad-ı cedid) to finance it. Manned by
The Late Ottoman Empire, 1789–1908 61
Sultan Selim III sat for this portrait by the Ot-

toman Greek painter Konstantin Kapıdağlı in
about 1803. The sultan is seated in the palace
audience chamber with his tuğra, or formal sig-
nature, framed above him on the wall. Kapıdağlı
was commissioned for a series of portraits of past
Ottoman sultans, but plans were cancelled after
Selim was deposed. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Turkish peasant conscripts, the New Order Army was organized along
European lines, trained in European tactics, given European-style uni-
forms and weapons, and commanded by European experts, not only
French but also British and German. Expansion to three corps brought
the total strength to 22,685 men and 1,590 officers by the end of 1806.
The New Fund Treasury became the instrument of a fiscal transfor-
mation of the Ottoman central state. All lifetime tax franchises over
5,000 kurush in value were allocated to it at the death of their holders.
The contracts were taken over by the state, renegotiated, and bid out on
a short-term basis to qualified applicants. The program drew intense
criticism from various sectors of Ottoman society, who saw in it the
dismantling of the revenue contracting system from which they ben-
efited. Over the past century, provincial elites and state officials alike,
including the Janissaries, had built powerful financial portfolios and
used them to significantly reformat the relations of power between the
central government and its provinces. The opposition of this financial
class to the new force and the new treasury was often expressed in a
religious idiom—the uniforms of the New Order Army, for example,
were attacked for violating traditional Islamic dress codes. Yet resent-
ments were not narrowly religious, but also directed at the financial
and political implications of the sultan’s initiatives.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat of the Habsburgs and landing at the
Nile delta in 1798 brought a new war. A hastily arranged triple alliance
of Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire succeeded in defeating
Napoleon—who left his army and returned to France—and in driv-
ing the French from Egypt in 1801. During and after this war, pow-
erful provincial strongmen challenged Ottoman authority, including
Ali Pasha of Canik, along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia; Muham-
mad Ali in Egypt; Ali Pasha of Janina in Albania and western Thrace;
Pasvanoğlu Osman Pasha around Vidin in Bulgaria; and Tirsinikli
İsmail Agha in eastern Bulgaria and eastern Thrace. In 1804, a local
Serbian Christian notable, Kara George, revolted against the regime of
the Ottoman Janissaries in Belgrade. All had provided indispensable
service to the Ottoman war effort in their locales and resisted central
government interference in their financial and political affairs.
Selim III faced dangerous circumstances in his efforts to field an
army and finance another war with Russia, caused by Napoleon’s con-
quests, in 1806. Debased currency and inflation contributed to a dete-
riorating situation, and in May 1807, a Janissary auxiliary force outside
Istanbul assassinated a New Order Army officer and marched on the
city. Reactionary Muslim leaders and aggrieved state officials leaped
to the forefront of the rebellion. When conciliatory gestures failed on
May 29, 1807, Selim III abdicated in favor of his cousin Mustafa IV.
In July 1808, Balkan strongman Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha defeated the
rebels and overthrew Mustafa IV in a coup d’état with the intention of
returning Selim III to the throne. But Selim was murdered in the palace
before his rescuers could save him, and instead, Bayraktar Pasha brought
to the throne the young prince Mahmud II, the brother of Mustafa IV
and the lone surviving male member of the Ottoman dynasty.
SULTAN MAHMUD II AND

THE END OF THE OLD ORDER
After the assassination of the coup leader Bayraktar Pasha in late
1808, Sultan Mahmud II reached a rapprochement with the leading
provincial magnates and state officials, allowing them to preserve their
privileged positions in the restored financial order. Between 1808 and
1812, the young sultan kept scrupulously to this agreement, assuring
the loyalty of these powerful men. The war with Russia ended in 1812;
Muhammad Ali, the strongman in Egypt, was accommodated; and the
Serbian revolt won a degree of autonomy for a Serbian principality in
the central Balkans in 1815.
Thereafter, Mahmud II practiced what he had learned from the po-
litical mistakes of Selim III. He spent several years carefully building
alliances with lesser notables and state officials in the capital and in
Anatolia, whose interests lay in circumventing the monopolistic prac-
tices of the large tax franchise holders. He appointed personal allies
to key positions in the ulema hierarchy, the imperial bureaucracy, and
the military. Throughout the next decade, he staged a series of cam-
paigns, first in western Anatolia and then in the Balkans, using force
of arms to intimidate recalcitrant notables into submission. The Chris-
tian and Muslim notables of east and southeast Anatolia and of Cilicia
and the Kurdish chieftains resisted central government interference
for nearly another half century. Mahmud carefully chose the moment
to crush the entrenched financial and political power of the old order.
A Greek uprising broke out in 1821, arousing the sympathy of many
Western Europeans, who imagined Greece as the birthplace of what
they saw as peculiarly European ideals of human dignity, rationalism,
and freedom, and Turkish authority as the archetypal tyranny. When
the Ottoman military experienced difficulty against the Greeks in 1825,
Mahmud II called on Muhammad Ali of Egypt to extinguish the rebel-
lion. The revolt seemed over with the Ottoman victory at Missolonghi
in 1826. Mahmud now revived the New Order Army of Selim III,
though he was clever enough to name it instead the Trained Victorious
Army of Muhammad. In doing so, he aligned himself with liberal Is-
lamic scholars and leaders who saw no incompatibility between Islam
and modern science and technology.
The anticipated rebellion of the Janissaries came 10 days later. Mah-
mud turned his heavy artillery on the Janissary mob that assembled be-
fore the palace, decimating their ranks. He bombarded and destroyed
their barracks. A decree issued the same day abolished the corps al-
together, and a mopping up operation captured any that chanced to
escape. The venerable Janissary corps was finished. The diverse sepa-
rate corps of the Ottoman military were unified into a single command
under a serasker, a commander in chief. At the same time, the Bektashi
order of dervishes and its network of houses, the spiritual and social
sustenance of the Janissary community, was shut down. Its property
and assets were confiscated by the central treasury. Old lodges were
torn down, newer lodges were turned over to orders deemed more
acceptably orthodox. Bektashi spiritual leaders were arrested. Many
were executed and others sentenced to instruction in “proper” Islam

by approved ulema. The destruction of the Janissaries became a purge
and persecution of the Bektashis and like-minded Alevis throughout
the empire.
The Sunni ulema organization did not entirely escape. It was reor-
ganized as a government department under the ultimate control of the
Sheikhulislam, the top religious authority in the empire and an ap-
pointee of the sultan. Trust properties (vakıf) were brought under the
central control of a government directorate (later a ministry). This was
the first step in a century-long effort to tap this vast source of wealth,
which as perpetual endowment was protected by law from taxation
and formed the immediate financial and economic basis of religious
and social life in the Islamic world.
Like Selim III, Mahmud was motivated primarily by the need to
equip and finance a modern army, but the changes went beyond the
specifically military. The revival of the New Order Army was accom-
panied by a revival of the New Order Treasury, this time named the
Treasury of the Victorious. A variety of new and reorganized revenues
were earmarked for the new treasury, including a set of new duties
named the Holy War Taxes (Rüsumat-ı cihadiye). In 1831, he ordered a
census of the entire empire outside of Egypt and Arabia to identify the
sources of manpower and revenue for the central treasury. Mahmud
took some initial steps toward rationalizing the central government
bureaucracy, dividing the responsibilities of the office of the grand
vezir into several departments, which became proto-cabinet minis-
tries. He also restructured the palace service in such a way that in years
to come, it began to take on the look and function of a palace secre-
tariat, directing the entire state apparatus under the sultan’s immedi-
ate authority. In 1831, the Ottoman government began publishing an
official gazette, Takvim-i Vekayi (Calendar of Events), the empire’s first
newspaper in Turkish, as an instrument of communication with state
servants and the literate among its subjects. Three years later, a regular
postal service was established within the provinces.
THE ERA OF THE TANZIMAT

A reforming decree of the Ottoman central government, the Rose
Garden (Gülhane) Decree of 1839, became a landmark of administra-
tive, social, and economic policy in the empire. The nearly 40-year pe-
riod beginning with the issuing of the Rose Garden Decree is referred
to as the era of the Tanzimat, the “Reorganization.” The reforms were
strengthened with the Reform Edict of 1856. Provincial life was deeply
affected by the Land Law of 1858 and the Provincial Law of 1864. New
penal, commercial, and civil codes were issued, culminating in the
Mecelle (1869–1876). The climax of the reform movement was the first
Ottoman constitution, promulgated in 1876. The period ended with
the suspension of the constitution and the forced exile of its author by
Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1878.
Tanzimat decrees aimed to articulate principles for the conduct of
administrative reform of the Ottoman government, establish the ongo-
ing commitment of the Ottoman government to economic and social
development, and win continued Western European economic and
political support. Political initiative for the changes in this era typi-
cally lay less with the sultans—Abdülmecid (1839–1861), Abdülaziz
(1861–1876), Mustafa IV (1876), and Abdülhamid II (1876–1909)—than
with the leading officials of the Ottoman civil bureaucracy, the “men
of the Tanzimat.” Hence, the term Sublime Porte is often used as a syno-
nym for the Ottoman government in this era. The term was a trans-
lation of Bab-ı Âlî, the name of the building where the offices of the
Ottoman administration were housed, as contrasted with the palace,
the residence and offices of the sultan.
During the Tanzimat era, the civil bureaucracy almost completely
eclipsed both the Islamic ulema and the leading military officials to
provide leadership for the empire. In an age calling for visionary
thinking to meet new and unprecedented challenges, their obsolete in-
tellectual preparation seemed to leave the ulema paralyzed. The weak
performance of the Ottoman military in the 1820–1830s showed up in-
adequacies not only of military administration, but also of officer train-
ing, which would take two generations to remediate. In wars of the
1870s, Ottoman armies could defeat weaker Balkan states and achieve
limited success for a time against the Russian army; yet it was not until
the turn of the twentieth century that a vibrant officer corps reemerged
in the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Reşid Pasha, a young career admin-
istrator who had served as ambassador to Paris, led the Council of
Justice. This body, a creation of Mahmud II, was continually revised,
enlarged, and its scope broadened until it evolved into a Ministry of
Justice. Its leaders were the men of the Tanzimat, who spearheaded
the reform movement in its initial phase. Mustafa Reşid Pasha served
as grand vezir six times before his death in 1858 and he or one of his
protégés, Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, held the powerful post of foreign
minister continuously until 1871, except for a brief period in the 1840s.
The Tanzimat reorganized provincial government and revenue col-
lection. Taxes were simplified and collected by government officials.
A system of conscription for the Ottoman army was initiated. Tax-farming,
contracting, and franchising were abolished, though in practice they

died slowly due to a shortage of trained officials. Experimentation
with ways of improving central control of the provinces—including
a brief trial of a representative provincial council in 1845—continued
until 1858. The state sponsored the building of factories for the produc-
tion of military supplies and clothing. General conscription of males
began.
The overall aims of the Tanzimat, whether to strengthen Ottoman
society as a whole or to invigorate an Ottoman Muslim political re-
vival, seemed ambiguous from the start. The Rose Garden Decree
guaranteed the life, property, and honor of all Ottoman subjects and
the equality of all before the law, regardless of religious affiliation.
The ambiguity can be seen in two of the Tanzimat’s great statesmen,
Reşid Pasha and Cevdet. Reşid titled the 1840 penal code kanun, evok-
ing the classical Ottoman ideology of the parallel authority of Islamic
and sultanic law and responded to a question about the relationship
of the civil code to Islamic holy law by saying, “This has nothing to do
with sharia.” Cevdet represented a slightly different strain of Tanzi-
mat thinking. His interest was precisely in the integration of faith with
various aspects of imperial life. Under Cevdet’s authorship, the Mecelle
was a codification and rationalization of Islamic law for imperial pur-
poses. It lay the foundation of all subsequent Ottoman, Turkish, and
Middle Eastern legal reform.
The Tanzimat reforms made explicit the equality under the law of all
Ottoman citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims. Yet the ambiguous status
of non-Muslims, under simultaneous official toleration and unofficial
state discrimination, continued. To cite one key example, the poll tax
on non-Muslims was abolished and non-Muslims were made subject
to military conscription. Yet they could pay an exemption fee, which
became essentially the equivalent of the old poll tax. Muslims had no
such option, and the Ottoman military remained a Muslim military.
Both the Ottoman government and the non-Muslim religious lead-
ers found it to their advantage to cooperate in the drive to centralize
authority. During the Tanzimat, previously informal community struc-
tures were institutionalized as millets, national communities divided
along religious lines. The millet leaders related to the state and its
officials through the semiautonomous institutions whose existence
now was codified. There was freedom of worship; the sacred texts were
copied, read, and studied; weddings, baptisms, and funerals were con-
ducted; and the like. Christian and Jewish communities in the major
cities operated their own schools and courts of law. These communi-
ties or millets were organized only very loosely at the empire-wide
level, and Christian and Jewish communities in the far-flung corners

of the empire evolved with a fair degree of independence and some
regional variety, establishing their own set of traditional rules and re-
lationships with local Ottoman officials and Muslim community lead-
ers. At the same time, Tanzimat leaders sought to curb the authority
of the often obscurantist high clergy within the Greek and Armenian
Christian millets in particular and to bolster the power of lay leader-
ship. They hoped to encourage a broadly Ottoman loyalty among all
subjects of the empire, Muslim and non-Muslim.
Tanzimat economic policy aimed to integrate the Ottoman lands
with the emerging world capitalist system. Jews and urban Christian
merchants were generally in the best position to benefit from Tanzi-
mat economic liberalization. They had the available assets to invest in
foreign trade as well as the best business contacts, both in the empire
and abroad, and the best access to foreign capital. Additionally, they
manipulated the Capitulations to their advantage. The Capitulations
were a set of agreements between the Ottoman government and for-
eign commercial communities reached at various times during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. They granted privileges such as tax
exemptions and low tariffs, allowing foreign merchants to fall under
the legal jurisdiction of their own consuls rather than the Ottoman
courts. During earlier centuries, when the Ottomans were a dominant
power, the foreign merchants were few in number and the scope of
their commercial activities limited. It caused the Ottoman government
little harm to make such arrangements. In the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, however, the power relation shifted in favor of the
foreign merchants and the European governments behind them. They
exploited the old agreements to build powerful financial enterprises
in Ottoman lands outside the reach of Ottoman officials and extended
their treaty rights of extraterritoriality and tax exemption to their local
Ottoman Christian and Jewish clients. In this way, a very large number
of non-Muslim Ottoman citizens conducted business outside the con-
trol of Ottoman law.
Some Muslim communities in the empire perceived that official
policy favored Ottoman non-Muslims and began to resent the relative
prosperity of their Christian and Jewish neighbors. Demoralized by the
poor performance and defeat of the “victorious armies of the Prophet”
in wars with non-Muslim powers, many Ottoman Muslims began to
emphasize the Islamic character of the empire. Ottoman Christians,
finding nationalist ideas and literature everywhere the topic of discus-
sion and faced with the increasing hostility of the Muslim communi-
ties, became especially attracted to nationalism. Even in the majority
Muslim regions of the empire, they came to sympathize increasingly

with the national aspirations of their coreligionists in the Balkans. Ot-
toman Jews, by contrast, found little attraction in nationalism.
THE TANZIMAT AND WAR

The Tanzimat reforms brought central control of the Ottoman prov-
inces and broke the back of the regional notables and strongmen. The
Law of Provinces of 1864 built a compromise of centralization and local
control, reorganizing the provinces hierarchically as vilayets under the
full control of a vali or governor. Each vilayet contained several sub-
ordinate sanjaks or districts, each district contained a number of kazas
or counties, each county was made up of several nahiyes or townships,
and each township contained numerous villages. The governors were
assisted by local general assemblies, composed of representatives,
both Muslim and non-Muslim, from each sanjak. Four vilayets piloted
the new provincial order beginning in 1865, among them the reconfig-
ured province of Erzurum in northeastern Anatolia.
Eastern Thrace and Anatolia, the territory which would later com-
prise the Republic of Turkey, was divided into about 18 new provinces.
The independent sanjak of İzmit bridged both sides of the Bosphorus,
and Biga became another independent sanjak along the southern Mar-
mara coast, while Thrace on both sides of the Maritsa, together with the
Gallipoli Peninsula, comprised Edirne province. The Anatolian vilay-
ets included Hüdavendigar, centered on the city of Bursa; Aydın in
the Menderes Valley; Ankara, Kastamonu, Konya, and Sivas in central
Anatolia; Trabzon along the eastern Black Sea coast; Erzurum, Van, Bit-
lis, and Diyarbakır in the east; and Adana in Cilicia. The towns of Maraş
and Urfa were part of the vilayet of Aleppo. The great lords of southern
and southeastern Anatolia, who had in cooperation with the Armenian
clergy successfully held out against the imperial campaigns of Mah-
mud II in the 1820s, were now brought to heel. Using a combination of
intimidation backed by force, conciliation through the offer of imperial
service, and imperially funded public works projects such as swamp
drainage, Ottoman armies finally incorporated Cilicia and the south-
eastern steppes into the new provincial system between 1865 and 1876.
Three Tanzimat era wars deeply affected these provinces. The first
was a war between the Ottoman central government in Istanbul and
the most powerful provincial strongman, Muhammad Ali, the gover-
nor of Egypt. Muhammad Ali had cooperated with Istanbul in putting
down the Greek rebellion, but after a series of frustrations, Muham-
mad Ali turned on the sultan. He sent troops into Syria in 1831 under
the command of his son Ibrahim to claim what Mahmud II had prom-
ised him in return for his aid in the Greek rebellion. In 1832, the Egyp-
tian armies took all of western Syria and Cilicia and crossed the Taurus
Mountains into the Anatolian plateau. At Konya, in December 1832,
they defeated the main Ottoman army and took the grand vezir pris-
oner. The road to Istanbul lay open before them, but peace was reached
through foreign mediation. Russia came to the assistance of Sultan
Mahmud II, forcing Muhammad Ali to withdraw across the Taurus.
For the remainder of the century, British and French policy concerning
the “Eastern Question,” to use their term, aimed to prevent Russian
domination of east central Europe.
The second and third wars of the Tanzimat era both broke out
over European issues. The Crimean War (1853–1856), ostensibly about
control of the Christian shrines of Jerusalem, was really a war over
this balance of power in Europe. This war was fought not just in the
Crimean peninsula, but also in the Danube basin and in the Caucasus.
A coalition of French, British, and Ottoman armies defeated Russia.
The war created the first modern refugee crisis, as thousands of Mus-
lim families, including Tatars, Chechens, Abkhazians, and others from
the Crimea and the Caucasus flooded into the Ottoman lands. The
Ottoman authorities set up a Department of Tribes and Refugees, the
first of its kind in the world, to handle the human disaster and settle
the refugees in Anatolia. In the 1860s, national unifications in Roma-
nia, Italy, and Germany, and the creation in response of the Austro-
Hungarian Dual Monarchy once again upset the European balance of
power. When the Vienna stock market crashed in 1873, financial panic
spread across Europe and North America, ushering in a depression.
The result in the Ottoman Empire was the almost simultaneous Ot-
toman government default on its foreign debt and a peasant revolt in
Bosnia brought on by collapse of the wheat market. Disastrous agricul-
tural harvests in Anatolia produced widespread famine and migration
of villagers to the cities.
Ottoman authorities were unable to suppress the revolt in Bosnia,
which was aided by sympathetic Serbian and Montenegrin volunteers.
In April 1876, Ottoman officials discovered a conspiracy of Bulgarian
nationalists. The Bulgarian rebels slaughtered many Turks, and in
response, Ottoman forces committed shocking atrocities, murdering
several thousand Bulgarians. On May 30, Sultan Abdülaziz was over-
thrown and replaced by the liberal Murad V. Weeks later, Serbia and
Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman ar-
mies rather handily defeated them, opening the way to Belgrade, but
the war dragged on until the spring of 1877. Once it was settled, Russia
promptly declared war. In Anatolia, Russian troops occupied Batum,

Kars, and Ardahan. In Thrace, Edirne fell in early 1878, and the Otto-
mans were forced to sue for peace.
The Treaty of Berlin dramatically changed the Ottoman Empire.
The empire’s territory in Europe was significantly diminished. Only
Macedonia, Thrace, and Albania remained under Ottoman control.
Elsewhere, several mostly hostile, expansionist states were created.
Bulgaria became independent north of the Balkan Mountains, with its
capital at Sofia. South of the Balkan Mountains, Eastern Rumelia was
created as a semiautonomous province with a Christian governor, to
be chosen by the Ottoman authorities with the approval of the Euro-
pean powers. Montenegro’s independence was formally recognized,
as was that of Serbia and Romania. Austria-Hungary occupied the
Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and won the right to
administer the sanjak of Novi Pazar, northeast of Montenegro. Russia
kept the eastern Anatolian provinces of Batum, Kars, and Ardahan.
In a separate agreement, the Ottoman Empire ceded the island of Cy-
prus to Great Britain. In large parts of these regions, anti-Turkishness
became an element of national ideology, and the continued existence
of Turkish or Muslim minorities within the national boundaries was a
source of discomfort.
Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the
Balkan states flooded across the Ottoman border in Thrace or made
their way to Istanbul. In Bulgaria especially, the war produced a human
disaster. Nearly half the 1.5 million Muslims, mainly Turks, living in
prewar Bulgaria were gone by 1879. An estimated 200,000 had died
and the rest became permanent refugees in Ottoman territory. Some
of these were Crimean exiles driven from the Russian Empire in the
previous generation. An estimated one-third of the Muslims of Bos-
nia and Herzegovina died or fled. Most of the much smaller Muslim
populations of Serbia and Montenegro left those countries. With the
loss of the Balkan territories and the influx of Muslim refugees, Mus-
lims now constituted the great majority of the population of the Otto-
man Empire—approximately 75 percent of the total. Geographically
and demographically, the center of the Ottoman Empire had shifted
to Anatolia.
THE REIGN OF SULTAN ABDÜLHAMID II

In the midst of the international crisis that was shortly to lead to
war with Russia, in August 1876, Murad V was deposed due to mental
incompetence, and the comparatively unknown Sultan Abdülhamid II
acceded to the Ottoman throne. That fall, the Ottomans promulgated

a constitution and rejected the peace settlement the European powers
attempted to dictate.
The Ottoman constitution of 1876 arose from ideas expressed by a
small group of dissidents critical of the Tanzimat’s free trade liberal-
ism, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and perceived inattention to Is-
lamic tradition. Prominent among the dissidents, called as a group the
Young Ottomans, was the journalist and poet Namık Kemal. Having
read widely in French and English enlightenment literature, he brought
together Islam and constitutionalism in a system of political philoso-
phy that made use of the ancient notion of an ideal Islamic community
governed by the meşveret, or “consultation,” of the prophet and his
closest followers in the interpretation of the word of God. To the Young
Ottomans, constitutional liberty and Islamic holy law were not only
compatible, but mutually reinforcing.
The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 guaranteed personal liberty and
the rule of law. Although it provided for a bicameral parliament, a num-
ber of clauses actually preserved the unrestricted authority of the sul-
tan. The constitution became law only by his decree and did not deny
his right to continue to rule by executive order. His ministers initiated
bills to be considered by the parliament, and the sultan kept veto power
over its acts. He could exile any person deemed a threat to the security
of the empire. Abdülhamid soon used this clause to exile Midhat Pasha,
the constitution’s author. And the sultan could dissolve the legislature
without setting a date for new elections, which he also soon did. Sultan
Abdülhamid II had little intention of becoming a constitutional mon-
arch. Within a year of the first elections in December 1876, Abdülhamid
dismissed parliament and suspended the constitution indefinitely. Par-
liament did not meet for the remaining 30 years of his rule.
It might at first appear that Sultan Abdülhamid was opposed to
modernization and reform, but this was not the case. His reign repre-
sents the culmination of the Tanzimat by summing up the nineteenth-
century Ottoman effort at modernization through authoritarian reform
from above. Abdülhamid continued the policies of bureaucratic cen-
tralization and rationalization begun by the early Tanzimat reformers,
but now the reins of power became increasingly concentrated in the
sultan’s own hands. The palace secretariat achieved a dominant posi-
tion over the Ministry of the Interior, so that Abdülhamid personally
ran the empire from his own household. The most important areas of
modernization during his reign were, not surprisingly, in education
and communications. There was no unified system of education in the
Ottoman Empire at this time. Several overlapping systems existed,
including public schools, a military academy system of schools, pri-

vate schools run by the millets, the Islamic system of mosque schools,
and medrese seminaries, schools operated by foreign missionaries,
and secondary technical schools such as an agricultural school, a vet-
erinary school, a school of industrial arts, and the like. Abdülhamid’s
contribution came in the expansion of the public school network, par-
ticularly at the primary level, which Ali Pasha had laid out on paper
in 1869. And it was under Sultan Abdülhamid II that the first Ottoman
university, the Darülfünûn in Istanbul, opened in 1900.
The miles of paved roads in the empire quadrupled between 1858
and 1904, although the total was still quite small. Distances covered
by telegraph lines more than doubled between 1882 and 1904, and
the volume of mail carried by the postal network more than doubled
between 1888 and 1904. Telephone service and electricity were intro-
duced, but the sultan’s personal fears prevented its spread beyond
small quarters of Istanbul. Railroads showed the biggest communica-
tions advance of all. Railroad building progressed very slowly after
its start in the 1850s, and by 1888, there were only 1,780 kilometers of
operational track laid in the empire. In Anatolia, these were limited to
a line between İzmit and Haydarpaşa Station, on the Bosphorus shore
opposite Istanbul; a line between Bursa and Mudanya; and a line from
İzmir up the Menderes Valley. But in 1888, the Ottoman government
contracted with the Deutsche Bank for the extension of the Istanbul-
İzmit line through Ankara, Adana, and Aleppo to Baghdad and the
Persian Gulf. The railroading boom took off in the Ottoman Empire.
By the end of Abdülhamid’s reign, the total length of track laid in the
empire had tripled. After 1888, the railroad industry became the most
important sector of foreign investment in the Ottoman economy.
Abdülhamid, however, was paranoid. He built up a vast network of
spies, whose reports he collected and read by the thousands. His secret
police was notorious. In public, this aspect of Abdülhamid’s person-
ality was expressed in the regime’s obsession with image. Historian
Selim Deringil has shown that Abdülhamid perfected the use of impe-
rial ceremonies and symbols and public representations and demon-
strations as a means of communicating the power of the Ottoman state
both to its citizens and to its international rivals.1 Ironically, his arming
of the Hamidian Regiments, units of Kurdish irregulars who carried
out brutal killings and massacres of thousands of Christian Armeni-
ans in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s, probably irreparably damaged his
reputation abroad.
A main feature of the regime’s construction and manipulation of its
image consisted in emphasizing Sultan Abdülhamid II as caliph of the
Muslims. The Ottoman sultans inherited the title when Sultan Selim I
conquered Egypt in 1517. The sultans had occasionally made rhetori-
cal use of the title, but for most of the Ottoman centuries, it was more
or less taken for granted that the Ottoman sultans held the caliphate.
In a world increasingly overrun by powerful European Christian em-
pires, possession of the caliphate allowed Abdülhamid to stake a claim
for the rightful place of the Ottoman Empire as the legitimate repre-
sentative of Islam on the world stage. And in an empire whose popula-
tion now had a strongly Muslim majority, it had potential as a unifying
imperial ideology.
THE OTTOMAN DEBT

During the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, the financial situation of
the Ottoman Empire was dire as a result of its overwhelming level of
foreign debt. The Ottoman Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century was obviously not a poor country. Once a slow recovery from
the depression of 1873 began, in the last years of the nineteenth cen-
tury and first years of the twentieth, the Ottoman economy prospered
as never before. The unfettered laissez-faire policies of the Tanzimat
were reined in through the imposition of moderate import duties and
protective trade restrictions, under which both manufacturing and
agriculture experienced a significant boom between 1881 and the be-
ginning of World War I in 1914. The Ottoman default of 1875 came
as a consequence of the persistently inadequate Ottoman methods of
revenue assessment and collection and overly ambitious loan policies
followed by European banks.
The Ottoman debt problem dated back to 1854, when the empire
contracted its first loan with European creditors shortly after the be-
ginning of the Crimean War. In the next 20 years, the Ottoman debt
soared to 21 billion kurush. The main investors—the French and after
them the British and then the Germans—channeled most of the capital
through the Imperial Ottoman Bank, shares of which were held by Eu-
ropean financial institutions. In the empire, the government used the
money especially to modernize the army and the navy, which reached
respectable standards by the time of the war with Russia in 1877–1878.
The general staff was reorganized, conscription comprehensively en-
forced, and new equipment and weaponry purchased.
After a time, the majority of the money, however, went simply to
service the debt itself. Interest on the debt consumed 1.4 billion kurush
annually, more than half the entire 1876 Ottoman budget. Through
negotiations during the next five years, Abdülhamid’s government
handed over to its European creditors a substantial percentage (about

one-third) of the Ottoman economy. In 1881, the Ottoman Public Debt
Administration (PDA) was created for the purpose of administering
the empire’s debt repayment. This European administrative bureau
eventually employed about 5,000 people—more than the Ottoman
Ministry of Finance. It collected and administered the revenues of
whole provinces, certain state monopolies, and a host of other taxes
and duties. After satisfying overhead costs, these revenues were as-
signed to the service of the Ottoman debt. The PDA operated more
efficiently than did the Ottoman finance ministry and succeeded in
improving the process of revenue collection. The PDA also served
as the broker for additional foreign loans contracted by the Ottoman
government.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman central gov-
ernment had largely succeeded in recovering control of administra-
tion of the provinces that remained to it, and it had used this control
to direct a strong program of economic development. The purpose of
arming, outfitting, and staffing a modernized military to defend itself
had mostly proved successful. The Ottoman army defeated Greece in
a brief war in 1897, and although it was not in the same league as the
major military powers of Western Europe, it could confidently expect
to perform well in a war against its most likely adversaries, the Bal-
kan states, and even Russia if the war were of short duration. In the
first years of the new century, however, its most ominous weaknesses
stemmed from the domination of the economy by foreigners and non-
Muslim minorities and the tight control of the civil bureaucracy and
the senior officer corps by an aging and eccentric sultan.
NOTE
1. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitima-
tion of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
6
Revolution and War,
1908–1923
In July 1908, junior officers of the Ottoman Third Army in Macedonia

and Second Army in Edirne mutinied, demanding restoration of the
1876 Ottoman constitution. The Young Turks who revolted were mem-
bers of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Their rebellion
and the revolution it began completely altered the modern history of
Turkey.
THE REVOLUTION OF THE YOUNG TURKS

The Committee of Union and Progress had been formed in Paris in
1889 by Ottoman émigrés opposed to Sultan Abdülhamid’s regime.
The committee was among a diverse group of dissidents known there
as Jeunes Turques or “The Young Turks.” Two major schools of thought
emerged at Young Turks congresses, held in Paris in 1902 and 1907. One
group supported Ahmet Rıza, the son of a member of the first Otto-
man parliament who published a journal in French and Ottoman called
Meşveret, “Consultation,” with the motto “Order and Progress.” They
envisioned a secular nation of Turks pursuing modern European ideals
of scientific advancement and rational progress. They advocated nation-

alist economic policies and opposed European intervention on behalf of
Armenians in the empire. The other group was broadly Ottoman and
advocated economic liberalism, decentralization, and free enterprise.
They saw the introduction of foreign capital into the empire as a means
of economic development and aimed for cooperation with the European
powers to protect the rights of non-Muslims. They wanted a unified,
multinational and multireligious empire and expressed a greater sym-
pathy for the role of Islam in a modernized empire. One of their spokes-
man was Prince Sabahettin, a member of the Ottoman dynasty who had
fled the empire, arriving in Paris in 1899 with his father and brother.
Secret opposition cells also formed in the empire’s major cities and
particularly among army officers in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Damascus, and
other places but with little contact or coordination among themselves or
with Armenian opposition groups. In Salonika, a group called the Otto-
man Freedom Society (Osmanlı Hürriyet Cemiyeti) was formed in 1906.
The deft administrative leadership of Mehmet Talat, the chief telegraph
clerk in the post office of Salonika, and the work of Major Enver, an
officer in the Third Army there, brought greater coordination of small
groups scattered throughout Macedonia. This group established contact
with the Ahmet Rıza group of émigrés in Paris, adopted its name, and
quickly became the center of the opposition within the empire.
In the summer of 1908, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Edward VII
of Britain met to settle the Macedonian question. The CUP members
among the Ottoman officer corps in Macedonia, seeing in this meeting
the potential for the dissolution of the empire, decided that the time
for action had come. Majors Enver and Niyazi, refusing a summons to
Istanbul, fled instead to the hills with their troops, demanding the res-
toration of the Ottoman constitution. Efforts to suppress the rebellion
failed, the mutiny spread, and the Third Army threatened to march on
Istanbul. The sultan capitulated to the rebels’ demands.
In spite of their victory and the enthusiasm it generated, the Young
Turks did not want to depose the sultan or overthrow the government
directly, but preferred to manipulate politics from behind the scenes.
Acutely aware of their own weakness in numbers and organization,
they also recognized the formidable reputation of Sultan Abdülha-
mid. The CUP, though well organized in the southern Balkans, was
not especially strong elsewhere in the empire. Concentrating on its
delicate relationships with members in the other provinces as well as
with other opposition groups, the CUP prepared for elections to the
first parliament of the new era, to be held in December 1908. In these
elections, the CUP faced the only one organized opposition party,
the Ottoman Liberal Party of Prince Sabahettin.
Revolution and War, 1908–1923 77
The CUP won a sweeping victory, with the Ottoman Liberal Party
winning only one of the 288 seats. Ahmet Rıza was elected speaker. But
the CUP victory galvanized the conservative opposition. In February
1909, the grand vezir Kâmil Pasha challenged the committee by dismiss-
ing two of its cabinet ministers. The CUP engineered a parliamentary
vote of no confidence, forcing the grand vezir’s resignation. The anti-
Unionist opposition groups then mounted a press campaign against the
committee. The anti-Unionist discontent was diverse. There were Young
Turk liberals who preferred the ideas of Prince Sabahettin and there
were religious conservatives, including many lower-ranking ulema and
dervish order leaders who claimed that the revolution had overturned a
sharia regime. Other opponents of the CUP included unemployed civil
servants, who had found themselves the unfortunate victims of public
sector budget cuts, and career soldiers, who resented the new emphasis
on academy training and new tactics and technology. The anti-Unionists
had almost nothing in common except their opposition to the CUP.
Demonstrations broke out at the funeral of Hasan Fehmi, a slain
anti-Unionist editor. On the night of April 12, 1909, members of the
Muhammadan Union, an extremist religious organization, provoked
an armed uprising among troops of the First Army in its Istanbul gar-
rison. Crowds of people joined the troops in the public square in front
of parliament, demanding “restoration” of the sharia, and dismissal
and banishment of unionist ministers and officers. Overly confident of
their strength, the liberals had probably instigated the revolt but, seri-
ously underestimating the intensity of religious resentment of the new
order, found themselves unable to control or direct the unrest. Promi-
nent Unionists went into hiding or fled. Demonstrations and violence
broke out elsewhere in the empire; in Adana, thousands of Armenians
were killed in a brutal anti-Christian pogrom.
In Macedonia, still the center of the CUP strength, the Unionists re-
grouped. Units of army regulars, led by the respected commander of
the Third Army, Mahmud Şevket Pasha advanced by rail to positions
outside Istanbul. On April 24, 1909, Mahmud Şevket Pasha’s “Action
Army” occupied the capital. Parliament deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II,
replacing him with his brother Mehmed V Reşad. Public executions
finished the attempted counterrevolution by mid-May.
THE YOUNG TURKS AND OTTOMAN

POLITICS, 1909–1913
Between the suppression of the counterrevolution in April 1909 and
the final Ottoman defeat in World War I in October 1918, the Young
Turks instigated a reform of the Ottoman regime. These years may be
divided into two distinct periods, before and after January 1913. Before
that date, the political position of the CUP was weak. In January 1913,
the CUP staged a coup and took over control of the machinery of gov-
ernment. From this point forward, they attempted a thorough transfor-
mation of Ottoman society from the top down. Historians such as Erik
Jan Zürcher have stressed that many of the political, economic, and
social measures initiated by the CUP during this period anticipated the
reforms enacted later under the republican regime of Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk.1 The Young Turks were ultimately unsuccessful because they
were handicapped by the enormous burden of the Ottoman debt and
because they fought World War I on the losing side.
A series of measures consolidated the constitutional regime. The au-
thority of the sultan was restricted to appointing the grand vezir and
Sheikhulislam, and the palace budget was scaled back. Only a vote
of no confidence could dissolve parliament, and that now had to be
followed by timely elections. Parliament made laws and contracted
treaties. Restrictive new laws on rights of assembly, organization, and
the press were enacted. In economic policy, the government initially
followed a classic liberal approach in order to improve the position of
the empire in the hopes of attracting additional foreign loans. Laws on
ownership, association, and commerce were modernized, and tariffs
and other barriers removed in favor of free trade. Agricultural policy
favored the large landholders; modern machinery and infrastructure
were available, inducements were offered for investment, and no ef-
forts were made toward land redistribution. Measures to improve the
efficiency of tax collection helped increase revenues, and budget cuts
were achieved by eliminating many positions in the bureaucracy, in-
cluding the army. Organized labor was discouraged. It therefore came
as a disappointment when the British and French governments re-
jected looser loan arrangements sought by the Ottomans in 1910. The
Young Turks turned to a more willing German government to contract
the loan on better terms.
The international situation of the empire deteriorated steadily after
1908. The Young Turk government found itself in a perpetual state
of crisis from the moment of the revolution in 1908. In October 1908,
Austria-Hungary annexed the Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Her-
cegovina that it had occupied since 1878. At the same time King Fer-
dinand of Bulgaria declared independence from the empire. In the
following years, the Young Turks dealt with the revolt of Imam Yahya
in Yemen, with recurrent unrest among nationalist Albanians in Ko-
sovo and Montenegro, and with the Italian occupation of both Libya
and the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea.
Disaffected by the general drift of the CUP policy, a group of depu-

ties led by a Colonel Sadık Bey left the CUP to form a new party. Its
platform declared support not only for democratic institutions but also
for “preserving general religious and national ethics and morals,” and
the maintenance of historic Ottoman traditions, specifically the “sa-
cred rights of the Caliphate and Sultanate.” A radical secularist group
of the CUP responded to this conservative declaration, forming the
Progress Party. The local by-elections in December 1911 brought all of
the latent anti-Unionist opposition out into the open, becoming seri-
ous contests in which true opposition candidates ran against and de-
feated mainstream CUP members. But the CUP leadership shrewdly
dissolved parliament in January and called general elections for April
1912. The CUP rigged these elections and won 269 of 275 seats.
A group of young officers headed by Colonel Sadık now conspired
against the CUP. Calling themselves the “Savior Officers,” they forced
the cabinet to resign in July 1912. Their government, however, suc-
cumbed to foreign policy difficulties. The ease with which Italy had
imposed its will on the Ottomans had not gone unnoticed in the Bal-
kan states. Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance in the
spring of 1912, secretly agreeing to divide Macedonia. A Balkan coali-
tion was constructed, involving Serbia and Bulgaria, and Montenegro
and Greece. On October 8, the First Balkan War commenced with a
Montenegrin attack on the Ottoman Empire. Bulgarian troops quickly
reached the outskirts of Istanbul. As the Bulgarian and Greek armies
laid siege to Edirne, the Ottoman government floundered. On Novem-
ber 8, 1912, Salonika, home of the CUP and birthplace of the Young
Turks revolution, fell to the advancing Greek army. By the beginning
of December when an armistice was arranged by Britain, France, Ger-
many and Russia, all that remained of the Ottoman Empire in Europe
were four besieged cities: Istanbul, Edirne, Scutari, and Janina in Al-
bania. This was the situation when on January 23, 1913, a group of
the CUP officers led by Major Enver Bey burst into the room where
the cabinet was believed (wrongly) to be discussing the surrender of
Edirne, shot Nazım Pasha, the Minister of War, and forced the resigna-
tion of Kâmil Pasha at gunpoint.
THE CUP IN POWER

Having seized control of the empire, the CUP set itself to resolv-
ing the crisis and directing Ottoman government and society toward
a modern transformation. This they did during the next several years
while in an almost continual state of war. The officers turned once
more to Mahmud Şevket Pasha. As grand vezir and Minister of War

he resumed the war, but was compelled to sue for peace when on
March 26 Edirne fell to the Bulgarians. In the Treaty of London, signed
on June 10, 1913, Istanbul and its immediate environs remained in
Ottoman hands, but all the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was lost. Bul-
garia kept the city of Edirne. A few days later, gunmen assassinated
Mahmud Şevket Pasha in Istanbul.
The ink had hardly dried on the signatures of the peace treaty before
the erstwhile allies fell to quarreling over the fruits of their conquest.
The Macedonian issue resisted easy resolution and was further com-
plicated by the problem of the independent Albania the peace confer-
ence had created. Seeking compensation, Greece and Serbia came to a
mutual understanding and received Turkish help in forcing a revision.
Bulgaria, rejecting the Serbian and Greek ultimatum and refusing a
Russian offer of mediation, launched the Second Balkan War with a
preemptive attack on Serbia at the end of June 1913. In this war, the
Bulgarians, incapable of contending with Greece, Serbia, Romania,
and the Ottoman Empire simultaneously, suffered a disastrous defeat.
On July 20, the Ottoman army, led by Major Enver Bey, successfully
reconquered Edirne and recovered eastern Thrace.
In Istanbul, where the recovery of Edirne was greeted with relief, the
CUP faced the task of governing with a hardened attitude. The com-
mittee now came out into the open as a true political party. A powerful
group of about 50 men, including certain cabinet ministers, provin-
cial governors, and party operatives, directed important affairs. The
grand vezir was Sait Halim Pasha. Talat, perhaps the most powerful
man in the government, became Minister of the Interior. Major Enver
Bey was promoted, made a pasha, and became Minister of War in the
new cabinet. His army rival Cemal, the military governor of Istanbul,
was also made a pasha. Enver Pasha made reorganization of the army
a high priority, appointing the German General Bronsart von Schel-
lendorf chief of staff and assigning numerous commands to other Ger-
man officers.
In 1913, the CUP began a steady movement to reduce the legal reach
of the Islamic sharia. A new civil code was enacted, and legislation
pushed through in 1917 thoroughly reorganized religious affairs. The
post of sheikhulislam was downgraded to subcabinet level, and three
ministries took over responsibility for religious institutions: the Minis-
try of Justice gained control of the sharia courts, the Ministry of Edu-
cation took over the religious colleges (medreses), and the Ministry of
Religious Foundations was created to administer vakıfs. The legal re-
forms of the previous 50 years were codified. The new CUP legislation
attempted to improve the status of women generally. In the new fam-

ily law, marriages must be conducted before a magistrate, the age of
the bride must be 18 and the groom 20, and the capacity of women to
initiate divorce was expanded. Compulsory primary school was ex-
tended to girls in 1913. Some courses at the Istanbul university were
opened to women the following year. Women participated in the new
nationalist clubs opening in many parts of Anatolia and the Balkans.
Several new popular women’s and family periodicals appeared regu-
larly, such as Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World) and Çocuk Dünyası
(Children’s World), both of which were first published in 1913. The
first women’s periodical in Turkish, Hanımlara Mahsun Gazete (Wom-
en’s Own Journal), had been published since 1895.
The Balkan Wars seemed to many Young Turks to have shown the
fruitlessness of Prince Sabahettin’s ideal of a multinational empire.
The Balkan peoples, even the Muslim Albanians, had clearly preferred
nationalist solutions to their problems over anything offered in a mul-
tinational, multireligious Ottoman Empire. In the major cities of Ana-
tolia, too, the non-Muslim businessmen and entrepreneurs had shown
sympathy for the national aspirations of the Balkan peoples. The Young
Turk regime after 1913, therefore, followed a more strongly national-
ist economic policy in an effort both to free itself from the crippling
restrictions imposed by foreign control of Ottoman finances and to
protect and encourage the emergence of a genuinely national industry.
The Balkan wars gave added thrust to a nascent Turkish nationalism
among Turkish-speaking peoples in the Balkans and Anatolia, with of-
ficial encouragement by the CUP. Under the influence of writers like
Yusuf Akçura, a Tatar immigrant to the Ottoman Empire from the
Volga region, and Ziya Gökalp, a part-Kurd from Diyarbakır, this na-
tionalism inevitably took on a broad, pan-Turkist outlook, anticipating
the unity of all Turks—in Anatolia, in southeastern Europe, even in the
Caucasus and in the central Eurasian parts of the Russian Empire—in
a single political entity. Enver Pasha subscribed to this idea and spent
the rest of his career working toward this goal. A favorite project of
Yusuf Akçura, the CUP-sponsored Turkish Hearth movement of local
civic cultural clubs also often expressed this kind of feeling. It pub-
lished a journal called Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland). It was not yet
possible to think in terms of an Anatolian Turkish nationalism because
the Turks of Anatolia were not different from the Turks still living
throughout the Balkan Peninsula.
Turkish nationalism was not the only ideology enjoying wide popu-
lar support among Turks on the eve of World War I. Islamic groups, lib-
eral as well as reactionary, actively published journals and organized
both nationally and locally. Other intellectuals and government of-

ficials advocated a wholesale westernization of the empire. Among
these, the writer and publicist Abdullah Cevdet should be mentioned
for his rather unusual atheism. “There is no second civilization,” he
had written in his journal İctihad in 1911, “civilization means European
civilization.”2 This exciting intellectual and cultural activity was not
halted by the outbreak of war in 1914 but continued right through the
war and into the postwar era.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND WORLD WAR I

World War I began with the assassination of the Austrian heir, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo on June 28,
1914. Serbia’s rejection of an Austrian ultimatum activated a complex
system of military alliances among the European powers with the re-
sult that by August 1914, much of Europe had gone to war. Austria-
Hungary, Germany, and Italy were linked in the Triple Alliance, while
Russian backing of Serbia invoked its alliance with France. Russia,
France and England formed the Entente powers. As the European
diplomatic situation deteriorated and the states of the continent slid
toward war, the Young Turk government sought an alliance with one
of the two power blocs, its paramount concern being to avoid the
kind of diplomatic isolation that it had endured in the Balkan wars of
1912–1913. France and Britain rebuffed CUP advances, having already
determined that their best interests lay in maintaining their ties with
Russia. The CUP inner circle turned to Germany, entering a secret alli-
ance on August 2, but even this did not necessarily mean that the Ot-
toman Empire would join the war. Terms of the agreement called for
German protection of the Ottoman Empire and for the continued role
of the German military mission in the event a Russian attack brought
Germany into the war.
The Young Turks stayed out of the conflict until November, when
Germany’s, and Enver’s, skillful manipulation of the celebrated inci-
dent of the ships Goeben and Breslau ended the official Ottoman neutral-
ity. German warships sent to the Straits in August 1914 to compensate
Ottoman losses of two ships Great Britain had promised but never
delivered, the Goeben and Breslau arrived at the Dardanelles, dodg-
ing and outrunning the British and French navies across the length of
the Mediterranean Sea. The Ottomans purchased them for a nominal
fee, renamed them, and ordered them against the Russian navy in the
Black Sea in early November. Russia declared war. The Ottoman dec-
laration of jihad, Holy War, followed on November 14.
Ottoman troops fought in World War I in four main theaters: in

eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, in Iraq, in Syria, and at the Straits.
Russian troops attacked in the Caucasus before the end of Novem-
ber 1914. Enver Pasha personally led a counterattack. The Ottoman
advance stalled and was halted in a devastating defeat at Sarıkamış,
where over 80 percent of an Ottoman force of 100,000 troops were lost
in January 1915. The Russians penetrated deep into Anatolia, taking
Trabzon on the Black Sea, as well as Van and Erzurum. Even after the
Russian revolution, the Russians did not evacuate these positions until
the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in 1918. During the summer of
1918, the Ottomans launched a new offensive in eastern Anatolia. In
this campaign, Ottoman troops occupied Azerbaijan, including the
city of Baku on the Caspian Sea, before they were forced to withdraw
with the war’s end.
Performing well in most engagements until about 1917, the Otto-
man armies significantly affected the outcome of the war by obliging
the Entente powers to commit thousands of troops to theaters of war in
the Ottoman Empire. Cemal Pasha was turned back at the Suez Canal
in February 1915. Returning to Syria, Cemal Pasha’s harsh administra-
tion alienated the Arabs from Ottoman rule. A second attempt to seize
the Suez Canal failed in the late summer of 1916. In June of that year
Arab irregulars under the leadership of Husayn, the Sharif of Mecca,
and his sons, attacked the Ottoman garrison at Medina. This was the
famous Arab revolt, in which T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) fig-
ured prominently. In the last year of the war, the Arab troops linked up
with the British who, pushing out of Egypt, advanced north and took
Jerusalem in December 1917. Meanwhile at the Straits, in the spring
of 1915 the British launched a full-scale invasion of the Dardanelles.
Not expecting the Ottoman defenses to hold, the Young Turk govern-
ment drew up contingency plans for an evacuation of the capital and
flight to Anatolia. To the surprise of all, however, the British offensive
withered after they had gained a beachhead. The British were forced to
abandon the project and withdraw by the spring of 1916. At the same
time, the British expeditionary force invading Mesopotamia stalled at
Kut al-Imara in July 1916. By the end of 1917, however, the position of
the Ottoman armies had declined. The Ottomans suffered heavy casu-
alties in the campaigns of the first three years of the war, especially in
eastern Anatolia. When Russia quit the war in late 1917, leaving Great
Britain as the main Ottoman adversary, Ottoman troops were not as
successful.
After the Russian exit the Ottomans fought on, hopeful that the
Central Powers would eventually win the war. The complex and
sometimes contradictory structure of diplomatic agreements the Brit-

ish had built with their allies, nearly all of which assumed the division
of the Ottoman Empire, made them, too, spurn a negotiated peace. No-
where was the situation more grave than in eastern Anatolia, where an
unparalleled human disaster began with the Russian invasion of late
fall 1914. The Ottoman armies spent the winter in Erzurum after their
counteroffensive collapsed. When spring arrived Russia resumed its
advance. Hoping that Russia would support an independent Armenia
after the war, thousands of Armenian nationalists fought in the Rus-
sian army against the Ottomans, deserted from the Ottoman army to
the Russian army, or participated in guerrilla actions behind Ottoman
lines. In response, the Ottoman authorities demobilized Armenians
and then began killing them. Beginning in April 1915, efforts by Arme-
nian communities around Lake Van to defend themselves were used
as the justification for a policy of mass deportation of the Armenian
population of Anatolia to the province of Diyarbakır that turned into
a program of mass killing. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men,
women, and children were murdered or died of disease or starvation.
The exact number of those who died is a matter of dispute, but most
historians agree it was around 800,000 to 1,000,000 people.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Turkish War of Independ-
ence that immediately followed it, Turkish statesmen typically refused
to acknowledge responsibility for the killings. Indisputable evidence
that the Ottoman government ordered the extermination of the Arme-
nians has not been found, and some of what has been purported to
be evidence has been forged. Yet it is also true that the records of the
Ottoman Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), a shadowy unit con-
trolled by the inner circle of the CUP leaders, were destroyed. It was
the Special Organization that, through local provincial party bosses,
directed the deportations and thus must be held ultimately responsi-
ble for the mass slaughter of Armenians.
Several factors—the policy of mass deportation itself, the scale of
the killings, the arrest of Armenian members of parliament—make it
difficult to escape the conclusion that at some level the atrocities per-
petrated against the Ottoman Armenians in 1915–1916 were carried
out and coordinated by Ottoman authorities. Mass deportation of Ar-
menians, from not only the war zone but from all over the empire,
seems a disproportionate and inhumane response to the problem of
Armenian guerrilla activity and terrorism. The death of close to a mil-
lion people over the course of a year seems unlikely to have resulted
merely from spontaneous outbursts of intercommunal violence, even
given the level of tension between Christians and Muslims in Anatolia.
Indeed eyewitness testimony attests to the mass murder of innocent

men, women, and children by Ottoman soldiers and irregulars under
the direct orders of Ottoman commanders.
Historian Ronald Suny and others have concluded that the Arme-
nian genocide was probably not planned in advance by the Ottoman
government. No matter the widespread negative feeling towards
Armenians, there never was any Young Turk ideology of racial or
religious superiority to Armenian Christians. It seems likely that the
Ottoman policy carried out by the Special Organization was one of a
harsh suppression and that with the removal of legal and social con-
straints against persecution, the policy turned into a drive of ethnic
cleansing, to rid Anatolia of Armenians.
Since the foundation of the republic, Turkish officials have persisted
in a denial of the genocide, downplayed the scale of the killings, and
rationalized them by reference to the brutal context of war. And some
have justifiably pointed out the similar reluctance of Serbian, Bulgar-
ian, and Greek societies to acknowledge responsibility for the atroci-
ties committed against Muslims during the Balkan Wars. In Turkey,
the republic was ethically compromised by having materially ben-
efited from the confiscated land and property of Armenians. The re-
publican leadership shared the goals and the nationalist ideology of
the Young Turks, and feared that an admission of culpability for the
genocide would jeopardize the project of nation building. In the last
decade, more honest discussions of Turkish responsibility have begun
to take place among academics and in certain corners of Turkish public
discourse.
MUSTAFA KEMAL AND THE TURKISH

NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
World War I ended for the Ottoman Empire in the armistice of
Mudros on October 30, 1918. All Ottoman troops were to be disarmed
and demobilized except for a small policing force; Entente prisoners of
war were to be freed; and German and Austrian-Hungarian military
personnel were given two months to leave the empire. The victorious
powers occupied the Straits, seized control of all rail and telegraph
lines, and claimed the right to intervene to protect the Armenians in
eastern Anatolia.
In November 1918, Sultan Mehmed VI, who had acceded to the
throne in July, dissolved parliament, determined to crush the Young
Turks whom he held responsible for the defeat of the empire. On Janu-
ary 1, 1919, he opened court martial proceedings against Enver, Talat,
and other leading Young Turk officials. His brother-in-law, Damad

Ferid Pasha, became grand vezir, a position he was to hold for much of
the next two years in several different cabinets, and adopted a stance
of cooperation with the conditions of the armistice in order to gain a
reasonable peace settlement.
Nearly two years passed before the Entente statesmen finally con-
cluded a peace treaty, the Treaty of Sèvres, for the Ottoman Empire.
Preoccupied by the problem of the peace terms with Germany and
believing the Ottomans must at any rate accept a dictated peace, the
allies put off as long as possible the difficulties of sorting out their
contradictory promises to one another about the postwar disposal of
the Ottoman lands. They hoped, moreover, that under the aegis of the
League of Nations, the United States would accept a mandate over
Istanbul and the Straits and over the six provinces of the empire in
which the heaviest concentrations of Armenians lived. But U.S. Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson was unable to deliver American support to the
League of Nations or to take responsibility for a mandate in former
Ottoman territory.
In contrast to the attitude of the sultan’s government, most of
Anatolia resisted domination by the Entente authorities from the be-
ginning. Already in the winter and spring of 1919, an embryonic re-
sistance movement formed in Anatolia, consisting of local councils
and partisan fighting units. These were helped by last-minute efforts
of Enver and Talat to ship out supplies and armaments before they
fled the country, and by the existence of plans laid earlier during the
Dardanelles campaign. A national guard called Karakol, founded by
the CUP leadership just prior to the end of the war, supervised gue-
rilla activities and the foundation of local “Societies for the Defense
of Rights,” and helped smuggle Unionist operatives out of Istanbul.
But the movement was without strong leadership. In a decision that
was to be momentous for Turkish history, the heads of the Karakol
group contacted Mustafa Kemal Pasha. In Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later
known as Atatürk, the Turkish nationalist resistance found a leader of
extraordinary gifts.
Born in Salonika in 1881, Mustafa Kemal graduated from the War
College in Istanbul in 1904. While in Damascus in 1906, he founded
a secret opposition group. Transferred to the Third Army in Macedo-
nia in 1907, he joined the CUP and took part in the army revolt that
produced the Young Turk revolution, as well as the “Action Army” of
Mahmud Şevket Pasha. He served in Libya in 1911 and in the Balkan
Wars, after which he was posted to Sofia. Thought to belong to the
party of Cemal Pasha, his relations with Enver Pasha were strained,
and he was not brought into the government after the January 1913
CUP coup. During World War I, he gained distinction for his valor at
Gallipoli and was promoted to brigadier and pasha. In the last months
of the war, as commander on the Syrian front, he supervised the Otto-
man retreat from Syria. Karakol approached him because of his unas-
sailable integrity, his commitment to the CUP, and because he had no
personal links to the wartime policies of Enver and Talat Pashas.
At the same time, the sultan’s government requested that he go to
Anatolia to enforce the demobilization and disarmament of the Ot-
toman troops there, in accordance with the conditions laid down in
the Mudros armistice. He was assigned to eastern Anatolia with the
title Inspector of the Third Army and given broad authority. While he
prepared for this mission, in May 1919, the Entente powers permitted
the Greek army to land at İzmir to enforce the armistice in western
Anatolia. Greek troops seized the opportunity to begin an invasion of
western Anatolia.
Landing in the Black Sea port of Samsun on May 19, 1919, Mustafa
Kemal Pasha went to Amasya and immediately contacted the lead-
ers of the local nationalist groups in eastern Anatolia by telegraph. In
particular, he established a good working relationship with Brigadier
Kâzim Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army based in Erzurum. In
collaboration with Kâzim Pasha, Mustafa Kemal and two staff officers,
Hüseyin Rauf Bey and Refet Bey, composed and distributed a memo-
randum to the nationalist groups in eastern Anatolia. Dated June 21,
1919, this “Amasya Declaration” emphasized the peril of the nation,
denounced the capacity of the sultan’s government to defend it, and
called on the nation to come to its own defense. A national congress
was summoned to meet in Erzurum in July. Before that meeting took
place, on July 5 the sultan’s government, suspicious of his activities,
recalled Mustafa Kemal to Istanbul. On July 8, alarmed at the lack of
a response, the sultan relieved him of his command. Without an offi-
cial command, the basis of Mustafa Kemal’s authority evaporated, but
Kâzim Pasha’s unflagging support assured him his position.
At the Erzurum congress, which opened on July 23 and continued
in session until August 17, 1919, the delegates drafted the first ver-
sion of a document that came to be known as the National Pact. A
short document of six articles, it declared that the nation would be
independent, without foreign mandate or protectorate. It renounced
claims over former Ottoman territories except where Turks predomi-
nated. Within these boundaries, foreign powers and citizens would
not hold extraterritorial rights, and minorities would not receive spe-
cial privileges. The nation would accept assistance from any power not
having imperialistic designs. A second national congress convened in

Sivas three weeks later, between September 4, 1919 and September 11,
1919. Here the delegates, endorsing and expanding the Erzurum dec-
laration, absolved the sultan of blame for the current national crisis
and blamed the sultan’s advisors instead, especially the grand vezir
Damad Ferid Pasha. Sounding a more revolutionary tone, the dele-
gates threatened armed resistance to the Entente plans. Already in con-
trol of telegraph communications in Anatolia, the nationalists moved
to master the print media, publishing a newspaper called İrade-i Mil-
liye, “The National Will.”
Meanwhile in Istanbul, where details of the peace terms had leaked
out and where it was obvious these would be unacceptable to the Turk-
ish population, a British occupation was anticipated. At public rallies
and meetings of literary and patriotic clubs, there was ongoing agita-
tion against foreign influence and the Greek invasion and in support of
the nationalists. Nationalist orators, among them the novelist Halide
Edib Adıvar, addressed a mass rally in Sultan Ahmet Square in early
June. Karakol actively recruited and worked at sending assistance to
the nationalists. The city was swollen with hundreds of thousands
of refugees from Anatolia and from the Balkans, where new national
states were forcing out Muslim populations. Relief workers began to
contend with the seemingly inextricable confusion, reuniting families,
making determinations about custody of minor orphans, transporting
demobilized soldiers, attending disabled war veterans, and the like.
In the elections held for the first postwar Ottoman parliament, sym-
pathizers with the nationalist movement won a majority of the seats,
among them Hüseyin Rauf and Dr. Adnan Adıvar, husband of the
novelist. Moving the headquarters of the nationalist resistance to the
Anatolian town of Ankara in December, Mustafa Kemal urged the new
parliament to convene there, but a majority of the deputies disagreed.
The legitimately elected government of the nation, they wanted to
stay in Istanbul until the Entente powers forced them to close down.
Parliament opened in January 1920. In mid-February it adopted the
National Pact. On March 16, 1920, the British army occupied Istanbul.
Numerous nationalists were arrested, while others went into hiding
or made their way to Anatolia to join the nationalists. Parliament pro-
rogued itself on April 2. Damad Ferid Pasha denounced the nation-
alists as “false representatives of the nation,” and the sheikhulislam
pronounced them enemies of the faith, making their death a duty of
Muslims. In April, a small army was raised to fight the nationalists,
and in May, Mustafa Kemal was convicted of treason in absentia by a
court martial and sentenced to death. Over the course of these weeks,
meanwhile, 92 members of the elected Ottoman parliament fled to An-

kara, where they joined the 32 regional representatives of the Societies
for the Defense of the National Rights, constituting the first nationalist
parliament (Büyük Millet Meclisi, Grand National Assembly).
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

On August 10, 1920, the government of Sultan Mehmed VI signed
the Treaty of Sèvres, whose provisions had been anticipated for
months. The Ottoman Empire became a small principality in north-
western Asia Minor with the city of Istanbul as its capital. All the Arab
lands were lost. The city of Mosul in the eastern Jazira plain fell into
the British mandate of Iraq, and the port of İskenderun (Alexandretta)
and its environs, into the French mandate of Syria. Anatolia was di-
vided into several new states and spheres of influence under the con-
trol of the Entente powers. Italy was awarded southwestern Anatolia,
and France was given Cilicia and the city of Adana. Greece won most
of western and northwestern Anatolia and all of Thrace. The Straits
were internationalized. The treaty made Kurdistan an autonomous
province under Ottoman suzerainty, with the possibility of petitioning
the League of Nations for independence after one year. The six eastern
Anatolian provinces, where the main part of the Armenian popula-
tion had lived, were added to independent Armenia, which had first
emerged as one of three successor states to the short-lived Transcauca-
sian republic in spring 1918, after Russian control of the region had col-
lapsed. The Ottoman advance during that last summer of the war had
briefly interrupted its independence, but it quickly reappeared when
the Ottomans withdrew.
Not only was the Treaty of Sèvres completely unacceptable to the
nationalists, but by the time it was signed, even some of the parties
to its provisions realized it would be impossible and undesirable to
enforce. After negotiations with the Bolshevik government in Russia
broke down, nationalist armies under Kâzim Pasha advanced from Er-
zurum to Sarıkamış at the end of September 1920. This advance, and
the Bolshevik coup against the Armenian government in Yerevan, fin-
ished the possibility of an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia.
France and Italy had already begun seeking an understanding with
the nationalists. British public opinion refused to consider military ac-
tion against the nationalists in order to impose the peace terms. The
exception, it quickly became apparent, were the Greeks, whose Prime
Minister Venizelos persuaded the British to allow them to enforce the
treaty.
Twice in the first four months of 1921, Greek armies advanced to-
ward the critically important railroad juncture of Eskişehir, on the di-
rect route to Ankara in northwest Anatolia. On the first occasion, on
January 10, nationalist armies led by İsmet Bey defeated the Greeks
and halted their offensive at İnönü, just west of Eskişehir. During these
four months, the international situation shifted slightly in favor of the
nationalists. Venizelos lost an election in Athens and fell from power,
and Damad Ferid Pasha too was forced to resign. A conference called
by the British in London to begin revising the peace treaty quickly
broke up without much progress when the Greeks refused to cede ter-
ritory in Anatolia. The Greeks renewed hostilities, but on April 7 were
stopped once again at İnönü by İsmet Bey. Both the French and the Ital-
ians, however, concluded separate arrangements with the nationalists,
agreeing within a few days of each other in March 1921 to withdraw
from their designated spheres of influence in Anatolia in return for
future economic concessions. The negotiations with Russia bore fruit
at length in a treaty of friendship with the Bolsheviks.
These successes bought precious time for the nationalists, who also
were engaged in critical discussions of the nature of their regime. The
Ankara parliament passed, after considerable debate and disagree-
ment, a Law on Fundamental Organizations in January 1921, the first
article of which declared, “Sovereignty belongs without reservation
or condition to the nation.” The rebel regime, it asserted, “rests on the
principle that the people personally and effectively directs its own des-
tinies.” And the assembly took full legislative and executive authority
in its own hands, declaring itself the national parliament, “the only
true representative of the people.”
The Turkish people now faced a defining moment, if they were in
fact as well as in word to direct their own destiny. The Greek army
mounted another offensive in the summer of 1921. This time, the
Greeks captured the important towns of Afyon-Karahisar and Kü-
tahya, and finally Eskişehir. As the Ankara government prepared to
flee, it granted extraordinary authority to Mustafa Kemal, who as-
sumed personal command of the army, for three months. In a bloody
two-week long battle fought in August and September 1921 on the Sa-
karya River 50 miles southwest of Ankara, the nationalist forces led by
Mustafa Kemal won the war. Greek forces continued to occupy west-
ern Anatolia, including Eskişehir, for another year, until they were de-
feated by Mustafa Kemal at Afyon-Karahisar on August 22, 1922, and
again outside İzmir a week later. As the Greek armies withdrew from
İzmir, much of the city burned. An armistice was signed on October 11,
1922, at Mudanya, on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara.
A month later, the peace conference met at Lausanne, Switzerland.

İsmet Bey, the hero of İnönü, led the Turkish delegation and proved to
be an effective spokesmen for the nationalists, steadfastly insisting on
the full ramifications of their victory. The Lausanne treaty, finally con-
cluded in July 1923, affirmed the Turkish nationalist military victory.
The Straits remained demilitarized and internationalized, under the
jurisdiction of an international Straits Commission, but the Turkish
nationalists regained eastern Thrace and all of Anatolia. The treaty
provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece
and Turkey. Although Turkey agreed to accept about two-thirds of
the Ottoman debt, the Capitulations were gone forever, and of the de-
feated forces of World War I, Turkey alone paid no war reparations.
Although they had lost World War I, their organization and the loy-
alty they had built for the concept of the nation enabled the Young
Turks in the end to reverse the verdict of the war and the peace set-
tlement of Sèvres. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the
Turks won Turkish sovereignty over Turkish territory.
NOTES
1. Eric Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union
and Progress in the Turkish National Movement (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984); see
also the same author’s Turkey: A Modern History (London and New York:
I. B. Tauris, 1993), pp. 97–183.
2. Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1961), 231.
7
The Early Turkish Republic,
1923–1945
After the victory in the War of Independence and the signing of the
Treaty of Lausanne, Mustafa Kemal Pasha enjoyed tremendous pres-
tige as the national hero, the victor, the Gazi. But the new nation faced
enormous human problems of refugees and displaced people, of an
economy crippled by war, and the breakdown of political institutions.
It also faced profound disagreements about how to proceed under the
circumstances.
In The Turkish Ordeal, her memoir of the War of Independence, nov-
elist Halide Edib remembered a dinner meeting with Mustafa Kemal
in the days after the victory outside of İzmir, in late August 1922. As
Mustafa Kemal greeted her, she felt in his voice and in the shake of his
hand “his excitement—the man with the will-power which is like a
self-fed machine of perpetual motion.” She urged him to rest, now that
the war had been won, but he spoke darkly of those who had opposed
him. Halide Edib replied, “Well, it was natural in a National Assem-
bly.” But he answered, “Rest; what rest? . . . No, we will not rest, we
will kill each other.”1
Novelist and political activist Halide Edib, ca.

1920s. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via
Getty Images)
A member of Mustafa Kemal’s inner circle of advisors, Halide Edib

had been active in the Young Turks movement since 1908. She and
her husband, the prominent scholar Dr. Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar, a
member of the postwar Ottoman parliament of 1920, had escaped to
Anatolia to join the nationalists. Her popular novel of the independ-
ence war, Ateşten Gömlek (Shirt of Fire), was serialized in newspapers
during the last months of the struggle and subsequently published as
a book. In her attitude toward the role of Islam in public life as well as
in other matters, she differed with many in the nationalist movement.
She and her husband left Turkey in 1925 and, other than one brief visit,
returned only after the death of Mustafa Kemal.
FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLIC

When the delegates took their seats in parliament on August 23,
1923, the first major action they took was to ratify the Treaty of Laus-
anne. Then they fell to fighting each other, as Mustafa Kemal had fore-
seen. The first clash came almost immediately over the issue of what
manner of state the new nation would be. Throughout 1920–1922, the
Ankara parliament debated extensively two questions: the political
The Early Turkish Republic, 1923–1945 95
orientation of the movement and the nature of its future regime. Two
broad groups coalesced. The “Westernists” wanted to accept foreign
assistance and even a mandate. They wanted to retain the sultanate
and caliphate in a democratic Islamic order. The “Easternists” took a
more radical approach, advocating the complete autonomy of the na-
tion and the sovereignty of the people in a secular “people’s democ-
racy.” Eventually, this group became the core of what Mustafa Kemal
called the “People’s Party.” The Westernists established what was at
the time usually referred to simply as “the second group.”
These debates brought to a head the question of the position of the
sultan and caliph. To do away with the House of Osman after more
than 600 years of continuous rule, to abandon completely the politi-
cal tradition of the Ottoman Empire, was unthinkable for many in the
nationalist movement. The idea of a republic was associated in their
minds with revolution, radicalism, and godless, secularized Western
culture. Mustafa Kemal tirelessly emphasized that sovereignty be-
longed to the people. By signing the Treaty of Sèvres, the sultan had
betrayed the nation, agreeing to forfeit its sovereignty to foreigners.
Now the people had risen up and, under the direction of their elected
national representatives, won sovereignty for themselves through suf-
fering and arduous struggle. As the discussion in parliament dragged
on, Mustafa Kemal showed he was not above using intimidation. In-
terrupting a lengthy disquisition about the origins of the caliphate,
he stood on a desk and declared, “Gentlemen, sovereignty has never
been given to any nation by scholarly disputation. It is always taken
by force and with coercion.” He threatened that heads might roll, but
that national sovereignty would be won. Parliament voted to abolish
the sultanate the same day. The sultan did Mustafa Kemal the favor of
fleeing under British protection in November 1922. Parliament then
deposed him and raised his cousin Abdülmecid to the throne, but as
caliph only, with the understanding that the office would have no po-
litical authority. The parliament saw the caliphate as analogous to the
papacy, an office of spiritual leadership of world Muslims.
With the sultanate gone, however, many in parliament tried to vest
the caliphate with political power, aiming to make the new nation an
Islamic state by this means. The delegates came to an impasse over
formation of the cabinet. Mustafa Kemal Pasha found an opportune
moment to suddenly propose that, to solve the problem of the caliph’s
political authority, a fairly simple amendment of parliament’s Law of
Fundamental Organizations would suffice—“Turkey is a state gov-
erned by a republican form of government.” The delegates were taken
by surprise, and many important figures of the War of Independence
who would probably have opposed the move as premature were not
even in Ankara at the time. The oldest member of the assembly, Ab-
durrahman Şeref, who was the last holder of the office of historian
of the Ottoman Empire and first president of the Ottoman Historical
Society, rose to address the delegates. “One hundred years of the Turk-
ish transformation is giving birth to a child,” he announced. “Are we
afraid to spell his name? Let us face it: it is Republic!”2 Parliament de-
clared the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923.
The next spring, parliament, at Mustafa Kemal’s urging, abolished
the caliphate and at the same time abolished the Ministry of Religious
Endowments and the office of Sheikhulislam, giving their responsi-
bilities to the newly created Directorate of Religious Affairs and Gen-
eral Directorate of Religious Foundations. It closed the sharia courts,
unifying the system of public justice, and shut down the mosque col-
leges, the medreses, unifying the system of public education. The Law
on the Unification of Education placed religious secondary education
under the Ministry of Education in Ankara, which organized a rela-
tively small number of schools for mosque liturgists and prayer lead-
ers. As for religious higher education, the medrese at the Süleymaniye
Mosque in Istanbul was reorganized as a new Faculty of Divinity at
the Istanbul Darülfünûn.
Parliament ratified all these changes in the republican constitution it
passed on April 20, 1924. In response, however, 32 deputies broke with
the People’s Party caucus in parliament, forming the first opposition
party. These deputies included well-known heroes of the War of Inde-
pendence, led by Hüseyin Rauf and Kâzim Pasha. They called the new
party the Progressive Republican Party, prompting the People’s Party
to change its name to the Republican People’s Party.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his allies in parliament had effectively
crushed the Islamic ulema by removing the financial basis of their
power and eliminating the institutions through which they worked.
The significance of this victory can hardly be overemphasized for the
subsequent history of the Turkish republic. The single most important
potential challenger to the legitimacy of the republican regime, the po-
tential of an Islamic state based on an interpretation of the sharia, had
been crippled. In addition, parliament had accepted the reality that
Turkey was no longer a world power. Many found this ruinously de-
moralizing. They had clung to the caliphate as a way of maintaining a
position for Turkish Islam in the world that salved the defeat of the Ot-
toman Empire in World War I. But Mustafa Kemal and his allies faced
the difficult reality squarely. Just as they would have no delusions
about a great empire of the Turkic world, as Enver Pasha had dreamed
of, so they would not entertain fantasies of world leadership in the
religious realm. The frontiers of Turkey were to be at the limits of the
Turkish-speaking population of Anatolia and eastern Thrace, and no
institution, no idea, would be permitted to compete with the sover-
eignty of the people.
This kind of Anatolian Turkish nationalism was an almost entirely
new phenomenon, arising, in 1919 at the earliest, with the Greek in-
vasion and the threat of the partition of Anatolia. Until that time, the
Turks of Anatolia and eastern Thrace could not have thought in terms
of an Anatolian Turkish nationalism, because they were not different
from the hundreds of thousands of Turks living in the Balkan Penin-
sula and northern Syria. Beginning in 1919, when so many of those
Turks found themselves refugees in Anatolia or eastern Thrace and
when a permanent division was drawn between the Bolshevik state
in eastern Anatolia and the British and French mandates of Iraq and
Syria, respectively, on the one hand, and the state partitioned at Sèvres
on the other, and when the independence of the Turks of Anatolia was
threatened by foreign invasion, only then did the conditions arise in
which a peculiarly Anatolian Turkish nationalism could flourish.
This raised the question of the Kurds, about 20 percent of the popu-
lation of the country in 1923. They had for the most part supported
the nationalists. Mustafa Kemal himself had made statements promis-
ing some measure of autonomy for the regions in the southeast where
large Kurdish populations lived, but these had fallen by the wayside
in the months since the victory over the foreign invaders had been
won. The abolition of the sultanate and the caliphate drove a wedge
between the Turkish nationalists and the mostly conservative Sunni
Muslim Kurds. The laws passed by parliament in 1924 forbidding
publications in Kurdish made the chasm between the two groups
yawn even wider. A Kurdish revolt erupted in February 1925, led by
an influential sheikh of the Nakshibendi dervish order, Sheikh Said.
The rebellion was expressed in a powerful religious idiom, calling
for restoration of the caliphate and rule by the sharia. The Alevis of
Anatolia, including Kurdish Alevis, were suspicious of the Islamic
state envisioned by the Sunnis. They tended to support the more radi-
cal Turkish nationalists’ conception of a secular republic, anticipating
that it would provide a measure of protection against the religious
prejudices of the Sunni majority, whether Turkish or Kurdish.
In parliament, Prime Minister İsmet quickly pushed through a Law
on the Maintenance of Order, giving the government extraordinary
authority for a period of two years. The opposition group argued

that the law would allow the banning of any group or publication
deemed a threat to national security. Their worries turned out to be
well-founded. Under cover of the law, the government established
“Independence Tribunals,” one in Ankara and one in the east, where
the rebellion was strongest. Through the arrest of 7,500 people and the
execution of 660, the Independence Tribunals played a significant role
in the suppression of the rebellion. The rebellion ended fairly quickly
with the capture and arrest of Sheikh Said on April 27. He was con-
victed by the Independence Tribunals and executed in June 1925.
The Independence Tribunals also snared the most important Islamic
thinker of the republican era, Said Nursi (1873–1960), called Bediüzza-
man, “Wonder of the Age.” An ethnic Kurd and Islamic modernist, in
his writings, Said Nursi mapped out an accommodation between the
ideas of constitutional democracy and individual liberty and religious
devotion. Nursi had developed good relationships with the Young
Turks, and during the war years, he spoke out against authoritarian-
ism and economic and political backwardness. He developed ideas of
a modern Islamic consciousness that rejected obscurantism, embraced
scientific and technological development, and envisioned an impor-
tant role for religious belief in public life. He was disappointed by the
general trend toward secularism in the constitutional discussions and
legislation since the declaration of the republic. The Independence Tri-
bunals had no proof of his involvement in the Sheikh Said rebellion. To
the contrary, Nursi had strongly advised its leaders against the rebel-
lion. Indeed, during the War of Independence, the nationalist leader-
ship had wooed him, brought him to Ankara, and given him an official
welcome in the assembly in November 1922. Nursi, however, was
wary of the materialist, revolutionary wing of the nationalist group
and declined offers of a position in the government. The Independence
Tribunals sentenced him to internal exile in western Anatolia.
After a conspiracy to assassinate Mustafa Kemal was uncovered be-
fore his visit to İzmir in the spring of 1926, the government turned the
Independence Tribunals on all its enemies during the next two years,
using them to suppress even the loyal opposition. All major national
newspapers except Cumhuriyet (The Republic, Istanbul) and the offi-
cial Ankara daily Hakimiyet-i Milliye (The National Sovereignty) were
closed and their staff arrested for publishing stories that compromised
national security. The Progressive Republican Party was closed and all
of its leaders were accused of collaborating in the conspiracy and ar-
rested for treason. Several of the most prominent heroes of the War of
Independence—Kâzim Pasha, Ali Fuad, Refet—were released under
public pressure, but other men who had worked closely with Mustafa
Kemal were executed. Hüseyin Rauf and Adnan Adıvar escaped only
because they were out of the country at the time.
THE GREAT REFORMS, PHASE ONE:

SECULARIZATION
The Republican People’s Party now moved swiftly to consolidate
its hold on the nationalist enterprise. In two phases, in the 1920s and
the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal and his allies brought massive changes to
Turkish life. Renewing the Law on the Maintenance of Order, in the
three years between the summer of 1925 and the fall of 1928, they en-
acted a series of measures to secularize Turkish public life. This intense
legislative activity was furthered by the election in September 1927 of
a strongly Kemalist parliament. The great reforms were the work of
what had become essentially a one-party state.
The canonical tithe tax, crucial to the power of the local notables who
collected it, was abolished. Soon, the dervish houses were permanently
closed, their ceremonies and liturgy banned, and their distinctive dress
outlawed. Mustafa Kemal also attacked two other important symbols
of politicized Islam: the fez and the veil. The campaign against these
articles of clothing had the effect of permanently politicizing dress in
the Republic of Turkey. The fez, a red felt cap, had a history of only
about 100 years in the Ottoman Empire. In that relatively short time,
it had become a tenacious symbol of conservative, religious-minded
people. The veil, and by extension the long black outer shawl called a
çarşaf, with which conservative women covered themselves in public,
had come to symbolize the subordinate status of women in the ideol-
ogy of reactionary Islamic politics.
Touring Anatolia during the summer of 1925 wearing a western-type
billed cap, Mustafa Kemal ridiculed the fez as the headwear of a barba-
rous, backward people. He publicly denounced the veil, pointing out
that it was a foreign innovation and that Turkish village women had tra-
ditionally worn a scarf wrapped around their hair, but no veil. In these
speeches, Mustafa Kemal repeatedly exhorted the nation to make use
of all its human potential, including women. The nation was made up
of “two kinds of human beings, called men and women,” and needed
the involvement of both to progress. Mustafa Kemal’s own wife, Latife,
to whom he was briefly married between 1923 and 1925, became an
outstanding public example of a modern woman. In November 1925,
parliament passed a law requiring men to wear hats and outlawing the
wearing of the fez, but they stopped short of banning the veil. The veil
never was completely outlawed in Turkey, but its use in public build-
ings and events was prohibited by parliament at a later time.
In 1926, parliament adopted a new civil code explicitly repealing
Islamic holy law, a new penal code based on the Italian code and a
commercial code based on the German code. This affected family rela-
tions and especially improved the legal status of women. It made the
legal age of marriage 18 for males and 17 for females and required that
all marriages be performed by a magistrate. Polygamy and divorce
by renunciation of the wife were both outlawed. Of course, the actual
practice of Turkish families changed only slowly, and, for example, in
eastern and central Anatolia, polygamous marriages were contracted
for many years after this. But the impact of the new code should not
be underestimated. Its author, Mahmud Esad, wrote that a modern
society was an organized, rational society, and the modern nation was
based on a rational social order. Mustafa Kemal believed that world
history told the story of the progressive advance of human civilization.
In the twentieth century, European civilization led that advance. If Tur-
key desired to be a civilized country, it must leave its past behind and
follow the example of human progress set by Europe. The capstone
of this transition was laid when, on April 5, 1928, parliament deleted
the phrase “the religion of the Turkish state is Islam” from the con-
stitution. The constitution did not yet state that Turkey was a secular
state—that was to come in 1937—but the intent of these reforms was
clearly to secularize the social order of the new nation.
Two more great changes completed the first phase of the great re-
forms. These brought transformations of time and of history. On
December 26, 1925, the day after Christmas, parliament adopted the in-
ternational 24-hour clock and the Gregorian calendar. Time itself would
be measured according to the standard accepted by the advanced na-
tions of the world. The Western calendar, based on the Christian era of
the incarnation of Jesus Christ, replaced the Islamic calendar, based on
the foundation of the Muslim community with the Prophet Muham-
mad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. And finally, perhaps the most
radical change of all: In the last two months of 1928, the Arabic script
was abandoned in favor of the Roman. The new Turkish alphabet con-
tained 29 letters and was entirely phonetic. During the late summer
and early fall, the indefatigable Mustafa Kemal went on the road, intro-
ducing and ceaselessly promoting the script, beginning on an August
evening at Gülhane Park in Istanbul, where he demonstrated the new
letters to his audience on a blackboard set up on an easel.
He and the commission offered two main arguments for the new
script. The Arabic script, they asserted, was ill-suited to the Turkish
language. This was of course true: The orthography of Arabic, a Semitic
language, relied on consonants arranged in groups and offered only

three symbols for writing vowels. Many of its phonemes were foreign
to Turkish and thus the written symbols for them had no relevance.
These difficulties were not unusual—most world languages only more
or less fit the scripts used to write them. Another argument for the
alphabet change was that a phonetic alphabet would aid in raising lit-
eracy among the Turkish population. This probably was true also, but
the low level of literacy in Turkey could hardly be blamed on the use
of the Arabic script. The Arabic script had adequately served written
Turkish for about a thousand years. For most of these centuries, few
people anywhere in the world, including in Europe, had believed it
necessary or good to educate common people. Low levels of literacy
were more the result of the absence of a system of national public edu-
cation and the belief that such a system was unnecessary.
The advantage in script reform was historical and cultural. Use of
the Arabic script had identified the ancient Turkish tribes migrating in
southwestern Asia as belonging to the Islamic civilization, the great-
est civilization of that age. In the twentieth century, adoption of the
Roman script would identify the modern Turkish nation as belonging
to the Western European civilization, the greatest civilization of this
age. By this one break, the modern Turkish nation totally renounced
its past and embraced its revolution. Not learning the Arabic script, its
children would not learn the Islamic tradition, indeed, would be un-
able to read its greatest literary monuments. The children of the Turk-
ish revolution would also be unable to read the documents produced
by the Ottoman Empire only a few years before.
THE NATIONAL ECONOMY

Turkey required a fundamental economic reconfiguration, as Mustafa
Kemal himself recognized in an economic congress held at İzmir in
February 1923. At the outset, the economic circumstances of the coun-
try were grim.
Demographic historians estimate that 20 percent of the Muslim
population of Anatolia, about 2.5 million people, died during the pe-
riod between 1912 and 1923. In the eastern Anatolian combat zones,
in the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum, 40 percent of the Muslim
population died. The deaths of Anatolian Armenians, something on
the order of 800,000 to 1,000,000 people, and Anatolian Greeks, about
300,000, must be added to the numbers of Muslims. Besides these
deaths, the population of Anatolia was transformed by refugees. Refu-
gees from the Balkans first arrived in Anatolia in great numbers after
the Crimean War. According to statistics of the Turkish Ministry of the
Interior, more than 400,000 new Muslim refugees came to Anatolia be-
tween 1912 and 1920. During the same time, hundreds of thousands of
Armenians and Greeks left Anatolia. Greek refugee statistics of 1928 list
more than 900,000 Greeks who fled Anatolia for Greece between 1912
and 1923. In the brutal compulsory exchange of populations agreed to
in the Treaty of Lausanne, another 190,000 Greek Orthodox residents
of western Anatolia—virtually the entire remaining Greek population
of the region—were uprooted from their homes and forcibly moved to
Greece, while about 355,000 Turkish residents of Greece—virtually all
the Turks of Greece outside of western Thrace—were uprooted from
their homes and forcibly moved to Turkey.
The result of all this left Turkey with about 30 percent fewer peo-
ple than it had before the Balkan wars, and it was a far less ethnically
diverse country. There remained only two major population groups:
Turks, forming about 80 percent of the total population, and Kurds,
who made up most of the rest. Only in the major cities like Istanbul
and İzmir did sizable populations of Jews and Christian Greeks and
Armenians continue to live. The Republic of Turkey was about 98 per-
cent Muslim, two-thirds to three-fourths of whom were Sunnites and
the rest Alevis.
The economic meaning of the catastrophe was unambiguous. Tur-
key contained an even more rural population than before the war, and
its productive industry was devastated by the exodus of the Armenian
and Greek population. Compared with a 1912 population of about
17.5 million, the first republican census (1927) counted 13,648,000 per-
sons, and only 52 towns and five cities with a population of more than
10,000—Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Adana, and Bursa. An Ottoman in-
dustrial survey of 1915 had listed 284 industrial establishments em-
ploying more than five workers, about half of which were in Istanbul
and all the rest in İzmir or western Anatolia. Eighty-five percent of
the capital behind these establishments had been Jewish, Greek, Ar-
menian, or foreign. The Young Turks had not been unaware of this
situation. They had abolished the capitulations immediately on their
entry into World War I in 1914 and had taken measures during the war
years to encourage the development of a Muslim industrial and busi-
ness class. This class, especially among large landowners in Anatolia,
also received an unintended boost from the circumstances of war—
shortages of and speculation on key commodities and legal and illegal
manipulation of personal relations with government officials who ran
the railroads and other communication lines. But the numbers of peo-
ple in this group of Anatolian Muslim entrepreneurs was exceedingly
small in 1923.
After 1923, the economic policy of Turkey unfolded into two chron-
ological periods. During the first period, from 1923 until about 1930,
the state followed a policy of actively supporting private enterprise
in an open economy. During the 1920s, the aim of economic policy
was to create conditions in which an indigenous entrepreneurial and
business class could develop. The Turkish lira, made equivalent to
100 kurush, was established as the national currency. Tariffs were kept
low and investment by foreign capital was encouraged, especially in
partnership with Turkish firms. About one-third of the firms estab-
lished in Turkey in the decade of the 1920s were partnerships between
Turkish merchants and foreign investors. In 1927, the Law for the
Encouragement of Industry allowed the transfer of state land to pri-
vate citizens for the purpose of building or expanding an industrial es-
tablishment; these industries received numerous tax exemptions, state
subsidies, and a discount on rates for transportation by sea and rail.
State monopolies were awarded to firms involved in the development
of new industries. Monopolies were established for the production,
import, or export of sugar, tobacco, oil, alcohol, matches, explosives,
and other commodities.
Policymakers reconsidered these approaches in the 1930s. The ef-
fects of the Great Depression deepened the effect of problems rooted
in the peculiarly Turkish situation. The first payment on the Ottoman
debt, the bulk of which was shouldered by Turkey in 1929, had a rip-
pling effect in a monetary crisis. After delivery of another installment
in 1930, the government suspended payment on the Ottoman debt.
During 1929–1930, the Turkish state shifted to a policy of protection-
ism and import substitution in trade policy. The collapse of agricultural
prices during the depression caused peasants to go dangerously into
debt, and industrial wages stagnated. Government economic policy
suffered fierce criticism, which occasionally became violent.
Hoping to release some of the political pressure in a constructive
manner, Mustafa Kemal permitted an opposition political party. Fethi
Bey, exiled to the Turkish Embassy in Paris in 1925, returned in Septem-
ber 1930 with Mustafa Kemal’s blessing to create the Free Republican
Party. But Mustafa Kemal was evidently unprepared for the massive
popular support the new party received. Thousands attended politi-
cal rallies as Fethi Bey toured Anatolia, and some industrial workers
went out on strike. The opposition party was hastily shut down in
November. In December, in the Aegean town of Menemen, a Nakshi-
bendi dervish sheikh named Mehmed proclaimed himself the Mes-
siah and provoked an uprising, demanding restoration of the caliphate
and rule by the sharia. When the local gendarme commander went to
arrest him, Dervish Mehmed attacked and killed him, and the crowds
paraded the severed head through the streets on the end of a pole.
Taken aback by the violence, once again, Mustafa Kemal went on the
road with his advisors, traveling extensively in Anatolia in the fall and
winter of 1930–1931 and viewing firsthand the economic damage and
the plight of the masses of peasants and workers. Out of their discus-
sion of this experience and observation of the apparent weaknesses of
the Western capitalist economies and the comparative strength of the
Soviet economy of the time, there emerged a new economic strategy
of massive state investment in industrialization, i.e., etatism. They did
not attack or discourage private enterprise. The state intervention and
centralized economic planning of the 1930s were intended to supple-
ment the struggling private sector in the development of national in-
dustrial capacity, not replace it.
Turkish etatism developed out of several new or existing investment
banks, which were organized as joint stock companies with specific
industrial or economic objectives. The Agricultural Bank, a central
government institution since 1888, had already been reorganized in
this way in 1923, shares being proportionately distributed to its dis-
trict offices. Its purpose after 1926 was to provide agricultural credit
at the village level. It was taken over again by the state in 1937 and
assigned the revenues of a fixed percentage of the land tax and of
0.5 percent of the national budget. The Ottoman Bank, owned by Brit-
ish and French interests, was closed in 1931 and nationalized as the
Central Bank of Turkey (Türkiye Merkez Bankası). The Business Bank
(İş Bankası) was formed in 1924 as a semi-public savings bank and
given the mission of developing the Zonguldak coal mines. The Turk-
ish Industry and Mining Bank was reorganized as Sümer Bank, with
the same objective of financing industrial expansion. One more such
institution, the Eti Bank, was established in 1935 for the purpose of
developing the mining and power industries. An important feature of
these enterprises was their location all over the country: by decentral-
izing industrial production, the Turkish state hoped to avoid the social
problems of rapid migration of villagers to a few industrial centers.
These state economic enterprises, and the government monopolies on
communications—telephone, telegraph, post, railroads and, begin-
ning in 1933, the state airline—were directed by government planners
who prepared the first five-year plan for adoption by parliament in
1934. Two more five-year plans followed, 1937–1942 and 1946–1950.
Over time, these state-owned enterprises (SEEs) came to dominate
the Turkish economy, but this was probably not the intention of eco-
nomic planners. Through political patronage, the government officials
and former military officers who staffed the bureaucracy of the new
republic, seeing the opportunity to create and build state-sponsored
personal fiefdoms, seized control of the SEEs. Taking advantage of
the tax exemptions, state subsidies, and low-interest capital, and the
priority in scarce resources, foreign exchange, and trained personnel
they enjoyed, these officials and officers turned the SEEs increasingly
against private sector competition. Private enterprise survived, not
least because of the built-in inefficiencies of the heavily bureaucratized
state economic enterprises.
THE GREAT REFORMS, PHASE TWO:

TOWARD A NATIONAL CULTURE
Establishment of the Turkish nation produced a period of intense
reflection on the meaning of the republican revolution—and hence, the
meaning of history—and the place of the individual in society. The
nation, it seemed, had to rediscover itself, as all nations do, as an an-
cient people reborn. The diverse parts of Anatolia and eastern Thrace
now united in the Republic of Turkey had not heretofore considered
themselves part of a single community. They had paid little attention
to what they held in common. The history of Çukurova differed mark-
edly from the history of the Menderes Valley, for example, and the
history of the Menderes Valley appeared little like the history of Kars
or the eastern Black Sea coast. Now the nation needed to uncover its
heritage as a nation, identify its common heroes, and determine its
common values. Directed increasingly through the apparatus of the
one-party state, and by the vision of Mustafa Kemal, these issues dom-
inated the scientific, literary, and artistic activity of the later 1920s and
1930s. Between the Republican People’s Party congress of May 1931
and the end of 1935, Mustafa Kemal and his allies took a series of steps
that deepened the reach of the revolution.
Like all new nations birthed through revolution and war, early re-
publican Turkey was selective in its remembrance or appropriation of
the past. Fascinated with the new findings on Anatolian antiquity and
keen to the prospects of linking it to the emerging national identity,
Mustafa Kemal founded the Turkish History Research Society to en-
sure that ongoing research furthered the needs of the republic. At a
historical congress held in Ankara in 1932, he set out the agenda of the
new society. Anatolia, homeland of the new Turkish nation, had been
a Turkish land since antiquity, he theorized. It had been first settled by
the Sumerians and the Hittites, whom he claimed as Turkic peoples that
had migrated from the central Eurasian steppes, carrying with them
the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Scholarly re-

search, according to Mustafa Kemal, should focus on these and related
topics and should aim to fully describe the antiquity of Turkish history.
In linguistics, for example, the new theory asserted that Turkish was
the primeval human tongue from which all others were derived. In
anthropology, craniological studies were carried out to demonstrate
that Turks belonged to the Caucasian race. The society, renamed the
Turkish Historical Society in 1935, published the results of research
based on these ideas. The theories were largely abandoned by schol-
ars after the death of their champion, but they made a deep and last-
ing impression on Turkish life. Generations of Turkish schoolchildren
grew up reading them in textbooks. They communicated to pupils and
citizens a sense of pride in a Turkish identity, a suspiciousness about
the recent Ottoman past, and an antidote to persistent Western stereo-
types and prejudices about Turks and Turkey. Gradually, the scientific
research generated by the nationalist theory also disproved its major
tenets, establishing along the way a genuinely Turkish scholarly tradi-
tion in disciplines such as biology, anthropology, historical linguistics,
archaeology, and the like.
A Turkish Language Society was also created in 1932, alongside the
historical society, by order of Mustafa Kemal. The language society was
tasked with creating a national language. Publication in languages other
than Turkish was forbidden; the Turkish language would be cleansed
of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and grammatical constructions and
from the conceptual categories of the Islamic intellectual tradition;
and the dialects of Turkish spoken in the different regions of Turkey would
be melded into a national idiom. Language society officials expended
a concerted effort in the following decades identifying and eliminating
foreign words and constructions in Turkish and finding substitutes,
either in Turkic languages past and present or by creating neologisms.
So successful were they in this task that literature produced even in the
early republican era—the constitution, for example, or the speeches of
Mustafa Kemal—are unintelligible to the current generation of native
Turkish speakers. They must be translated into contemporary Turkish.
In this great labor, the power of the mass media was effectively har-
nessed by Mustafa Kemal. In his speech opening parliament in 1935,
he referred to the importance of radio broadcasting (begun in 1927 in
Istanbul) in the dissemination of a national culture. In 1936, the au-
thority to broadcast was made a government monopoly. Inevitably, the
literary and intellectual elite of Istanbul dominated the development
of the national language, and the Istanbul dialect overwhelmed the
regional Anatolian speech patterns to become the national idiom.
Turkish reformers calling for a true Turkish religious renewal had

advocated the use of Turkish in Islamic liturgy and texts for decades.
Mustafa Kemal had failed to convince the poet Mehmed Âkif, author
of the national anthem, to undertake the translation of the Qur’an into
Turkish, for which parliament established a translation fund. Now,
however, he encouraged the use of Turkish for mosque prayers and
Friday sermons and, amid much controversy, for the call to prayer. The
mosque liturgy remained in Arabic, but the call to prayer began to be
done in Turkish and was made compulsory in 1941.
Mustafa Kemal was plainly interested in laying the intellectual
foundations of the new nation. In May 1933, parliament passed a law
reorganizing the Darülfünûn into Istanbul University, the first univer-
sity in the republic. The faculty of the former institution was purged to
resemble a body more sympathetic with Mustafa Kemal’s notion of the
role of an institution of higher learning in national life. It was to remain
the only university in Turkey until the founding of Istanbul Technical
University, created from the School of Advanced Engineering in 1946,
and of Ankara University in 1946.
The decision to grant female suffrage and to adopt family names
belongs to this phase of the reforming movement. In women’s suf-
frage, Mustafa Kemal fulfilled the commitment, made in his speeches
of 10 years before, to employ all the human resources of the nation. He
pushed through parliament a bill granting women the right to vote
and to hold office, and in the 1935 elections, 17 women won seats in
parliament. All Turkish citizens 22 years of age and older now had the
right to vote.
In 1934, the Turkish state required that all citizens adopt and regis-
ter family names. Until this time, Turkish families followed traditional
Muslim naming practices. A person was given only a single name at
birth. This name might be supplemented later in life by a second name,
perhaps suggested by the father’s name, by place of birth, by a dis-
tinctive personal characteristic, or the like. A number of potentially
useful administrative advantages might be imagined from a system
of family names that could be readily alphabetized, but the change
fit other important national purposes as well. Requiring authentically
Turkish names—names derived from Arabic or Persian roots were not
permitted—reinforced the national and even ethnic identity rather than
religious identity. By means of this very potent and at the same time
very intimate symbol, the state effectively linked the personal destiny
of its citizens with that of the nation. In 1935, the Turkish parliament
bestowed on Mustafa Kemal the family name Atatürk, “Father Turk.”
İsmet Pasha became İsmet İnönü in honor of the two victories won
there during the War of Independence. Kâzim Pasha became Kâzim

Karabekir.
In both literature and music, early republican artists followed
three important trends. Some created works in genres originating
in modern Europe—the novel, surrealist poetry, symphonic orches-
tral compositions, and the like. Others explored the potential of an-
cient and medieval Turkish artistic forms, including the poetry of the
fourteenth-century mystic Yunus Emre and the pre-Islamic heroic epic
of Dede Korkut. Still others began publicizing the popular genres of
the Anatolian folk tradition, such as the ribald and anti-ulema humor
in the stories of the folk wit Nasreddin Hoca, the coarse vulgarity
of the shadow theater character Karagöz, the repertoire and instru-
ments of Anatolian folk music, and the tradition of the dueling min-
strels like the blind and illiterate genius Âşık Veysel. In both literature
and music, the genres of the Ottoman court, such as divan poetry, art,
music, and Qur’an recitation, were decidedly out of fashion. Certain
genres of the immediate Ottoman past did survive. Popular singers
still performed in the cabarets of Istanbul, somewhat neglected now
as attention shifted to activities in Ankara. Not a few women singers
attracted a following, thanks partly to the emerging recording indus-
try in Istanbul, including Safiye Ayla, who became the most famous
singer of her generation.
The nationalist objectives, to define and shape a national identity
and character, were expressed in two other major Turkish institutions
in the 1930s, the Halkevleri, or People’s Houses, and the Village Insti-
tutes. The People’s Houses were a weakly concealed Republican Peo-
ple’s Party replacement for the old Turkish Hearths founded by the
Young Turks. These were local clubs where literature, political ideas,
manufacturing and agricultural improvements, and other issues could
be discussed by those attending the meetings. They played an impor-
tant role in the development of popular democratic loyalties during
the Young Turk era but were closed in 1930 because they functioned
perhaps too well as a forum for debating the political and economic
program of the regime. Less than a year later, the People’s Houses
opened to great fanfare. By 1940, more than 4,000 People’s Houses
were operating. Through their activities, the People’s Houses and their
village-level counterparts, the People’s Rooms, worked to communi-
cate to the citizens the mission and values of the nation as advanced
by the regime. The Village Institutes grew out of the literacy drive that
followed introduction of the new script. In 1935, Mustafa Kemal gave
the German-trained educationist İsmail Hakkı Tonguç permission to
develop a new strategy for education in the Anatolian countryside.
The program went nationwide in 1940. The Village Institutes provided

rural Anatolian boys and girls a five-year secondary educational pro-
gram in a boarding school, where they received a complete education
and learned a skill, such as carpentry or midwifery. The graduates
were expected to go out to villages, where they would become school-
teachers of other village youth, emphasizing modern techniques of ag-
riculture and home industry and seeking to inculcate the fundamental
ideology of the republic.
Much of the population resented the Village Institutes and they, to-
gether with the People’s Houses, fell casualty to the political liberaliza-
tion of the late 1940s and 1950s. Tonguç was accused of being a leftist
and a communist; ironically, leftists also denounced Tonguç and the
Village Institutes as agents of the single-party state. The Turkish state
underestimated the depth of animosity toward the regime and did not
adequately understand its sources. Much of the Anatolian peasantry
mistrusted the republic for its secularization, which it interpreted as ir-
religious and godless. And the republic had disappointed peasants by
its failure to consistently follow through on what they really wanted,
which was land redistribution and relief from the power of landlords.
In addition, the Village Institutes were implemented by Atatürk’s suc-
cessor İsmet İnönü, whose wartime administration incurred a reputa-
tion for inflexibility and heavy-handedness.
THE DEATH OF ATATÜRK

After an illness diagnosed as cirrhosis of the liver, Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk died on November 10, 1938. It is impossible to overstate his
profound legacy to the Turkish republic.
The political system of the republic is often summarized by the term
Atatürkçülük, or “Kemalism.” A definition of Kemalism might begin
with the ideological statement of six “fundamental and unchanging
principles” Mustafa Kemal outlined in the Republican People’s Party
(CHP) platform of 1931. It stated that the CHP is “republican, nation-
alist, populist, étatist, secularist and revolutionary.” These Six Arrows
guided the party in the second phase of the great reforms and in 1937
were incorporated into the constitution of the republic to define the
basic principles of the Turkish state. The first three principles did not
generate much controversy. “Republicanism” meant that the people
exercised sovereignty through elected representatives in parliament,
the national assembly, to which no power in the state was superior.
“Nationalism” meant the principle of the existence of the Turkish peo-
ple forming the Turkish republic on Turkish soil, united by a common
Turkish national culture. “Populism” referred to government based on

the faith of the Turkish people. The state belonged to all the people,
regardless of sex, religion, or education level.
The last three terms were more contentious than the first three.
“Étatism” meant the economic policy of state investment adopted by
the CHP in the 1930s. It was not universally accepted as a basic prin-
ciple of Turkish nationhood. “Secularism” has been interpreted vari-
ously by those at different points on the Turkish political spectrum.
The principle referred to administrative control of religious institu-
tions by the state and the removal of official religious expressions
from public life, but also implied freedom of religious practice and
conscience within these bounds. “Revolutionism” gives the sense of
an ongoing openness and commitment to change in the interests of the
nation. More conservative people understand the Turkish İnkilapçılık
to convey something closer to “reformism.”
But a political movement is only partially described by its ideol-
ogy. Kemalism was also an attitude and a way of life. It has sometimes
been called the state religion of the tepublic. It was perhaps especially
an attitude toward history, which emphasized the virtues of the new
as opposed to the old. This attitude is a basic intuition of modernity,
growing out of the revolutionary soil that nurtured the modern ages,
and is a feature of all revolutions. In Turkey, it manifested itself in a
typically modern confidence or faith in the progress of the Turkish na-
tion and the role of the Turkish state, its army, its officials in guiding
that progress, and a certain historical forgetfulness.
Kemalism also meant a devotion to Atatürk that sometimes re-
sembled a personality cult. This is exemplified in the cultic status of
Atatürk’s image and of his sayings, especially his Address to Turkish
Youth of 1935 and his famous six-day speech delivered to the Republi-
can People’s Party congress in October 1927. Emphasizing the leading
role in the events of the speaker, Mustafa Kemal himself, the speech
purported to be a history of the Turkish revolution to that point. For
generations of Turkish citizens and historians both in Turkey and out-
side Turkey, it has been accepted as a kind of sacred text.
Finally, Kemalism may be seen as a perspective on the Turkish na-
tion from the point of view of the new city of Ankara. Mustafa Kemal
carried an antagonistic attitude toward the Ottoman past and an am-
bivalence toward the old city of Istanbul. He left Istanbul for Samsun
and the revolution in May 1919 and did not return to Istanbul until
July 1927, eight years later. Ankara had little to offer in the way of
entertainment or culture to compare with the coffee shops, cabarets,
concerts, and nightlife of Istanbul. But for Mustafa Kemal, Ankara
also was without the ponderously orthodox piety, the elitist snobbery,
and the pretensions to world influence of Istanbul. Ankara’s austerity

seemed suited to the monkish dedication demanded of the nation’s
founders.
During his presidency, Atatürk occasionally found Istanbul’s sym-
bolism useful. He introduced the alphabet in Gülhane Park. He called
the meetings of the newly founded historical society and language so-
ciety in Istanbul in 1932. He had a bronze sculpture of himself placed
on Saray Point in 1926, the first statue of a Turk erected anywhere
in the country. He placed an imposing monument to the republic in
the center of Taksim Square, in the formerly foreign and Christian-
dominated Beyoğlu commercial quarter, and supervised its develop-
ment as a modern, secular rival to the ancient Hippodrome and its
imperial mosques and palaces. Ironically, Atatürk died in the Dolma-
bahçe Palace in Istanbul, where he had lain ill. His body was returned
to Ankara, where it temporarily was placed in the Ethnographical Mu-
seum until its final resting place could be prepared.
İSMET İNÖNÜ AND WORLD WAR II

When Atatürk died, İsmet İnönü overcame a brief struggle with
other advisors to succeed him as the second president of the republic.
İnönü’s presidency was crucial to completing the work of the reforms
and consolidating the secular order. At an extraordinary party con-
gress in December 1938, the Republican People’s Party made İnönü
party chairman and bestowed on him the title “National Chief,” en-
hancing his authority in anticipation of possible challenges to the
republican regime. İnönü’s term as president was largely taken up
with issues surrounding World War II, which began less than a year
after he took office. His management of the domestic political cir-
cumstances prevented a repetition of the national disaster that had
resulted from involvement in World War I, his shrewd use of the cri-
sis forcefully ensured the maintenance of the Kemalist structure, and
his adroit diplomacy kept Turkish troops out of combat for the entire
duration of the war. None of these successes was fully appreciated at
the time.
The priority of Turkish foreign policy after 1923 had been to con-
solidate the national independence won on the battlefield and to free
the nation from the financial constraints within which the late empire
had functioned. All recognized that Turkey in 1939 was in no posi-
tion to fight another war. As the international atmosphere appeared
more threatening toward the end of the 1930s, Turkey’s statesmen ap-
proached the situation in Europe alert to the possibility of enhancing
the republic’s international position but determined to stay out of the
coming conflict. Although aware of the potential threat from the So-
viet Union, Turkey maintained good relations with the Soviets, with
whom a formal treaty had been signed in December 1925 and renewed
in 1935. Additionally, Turkey entered two alliance systems. A Balkan
conference brought reconciliation with Greece and the announcement
of the Balkan Pact in 1934 between Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, and
Turkey. Following this, Turkey concluded the Sadabad Pact in 1937,
joining Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan in a nonaggression agreement.
Turkey’s relationship with Britain and France, by contrast, was
weaker. The Treaty of Lausanne had left several issues still outstand-
ing. One was Mosul. The majority of the population of the district of
Mosul was not Arab but Kurdish, and a sizable minority of Turks lived
there. British forces had occupied the area only after the signing of the
armistice in late 1918. Yet in 1925, the League of Nations sided with
Britain in determining that the district of Mosul should remain within
the Mandate of Iraq. Turkey thus lost the oil revenues from the prov-
ince and faced the very real possibility that further Kurdish nationalist
activity in northern Iraq would act as a magnet for Kurds within the
borders of Turkey.
Turkey’s chief foreign danger in these years, however, was thought
to come from Italy. Italy had taken an aggressive position against the
Young Turks regime, seizing Libya, advocating the creation of an inde-
pendent Albania it could dominate across the Adriatic and gaining the
Dodecanese Islands. After the Treaty of Sèvres, Italy participated in the
partition of Anatolia. Although it had withdrawn when it became clear
the Turkish nationalists would force a revision of those terms, Italy still
possessed and heavily fortified the Dodecanese and, in 1939, occupied
Albania. Concern about Italy’s intentions led Turkey to request a revi-
sion of the protocol governing the Straits at Istanbul. At the Montreux
Convention of 1936, Turkey regained almost full sovereignty over the
Straits, and its relationship with Britain and France began to improve.
The convention abolished the international commission that had
governed passage of ships through the Straits since 1923 and permit-
ted Turkish refortification. Passage of commercial traffic through the
Straits remained free to countries not at war with Turkey. Restrictions
were placed on the passage of warships; when Turkey felt itself faced
with “imminent danger of war,” it could close the Straits to warships
of all nations, subject to a veto by a two-thirds vote of the League of
Nations council.
At that time, the Turkish army at peacetime strength consisted of
174,000 soldiers and 20,000 officers. It was ill-equipped, with mostly
World War I-era weapons. As war loomed in 1939, however, Britain
and France hoped that Turkey might relieve pressure on a western

front by compelling Germany to fight a war in the Balkans. President
İnönü and Foreign Minister Şükrü Saraçoğlu wanted to avoid this, but
they used it to make gains for Turkey. Through careful negotiation,
they brought the region of İskenderun, which Lausanne had given to
French Syria, back under Turkish control. In elections in 1937, the Turk-
ish majority in the region’s new parliament voted to unite with Turkey.
In 1939, the region became the Turkish province of Hatay. Two months
after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, on October 17, 1939,
Turkey signed a formal alliance with Britain and France.
Knowing they could not fight Germany, İnönü and Saraçoğlu, and
later Numan Menemencioğlu, the foreign ministers, throughout the
war resisted intense pressure to draw them into the conflict. By the
summer of 1941, the Nazis occupied much of the Balkans and held a
prevailing influence in Bulgaria and Greece on Turkey’s border. İnönü
believed that an engagement with the German army would lead to
certain defeat. In July 1941, he concluded a nonaggression pact with
Germany. He made gestures to the Germans, such as including Turkish
pan-Turkists, who were vehemently anti-Soviet Turkish fascists, in his
cabinet. İnönü also stalled the allies, begging for additional assistance
and training. In December 1941, Turkey gained American lend-lease
assistance. But İnönü aimed at all costs to avoid putting Turkey in a
position where failure in combat against a superior foe might compro-
mise the sovereignty and independence of the republic.
In the first years of the war, İnönü did not have many supporters
in Turkey. The mid-war years were difficult for Turkey. There were
shortages of basic goods, inflation, and the government, cash starved,
resorted to an extraordinary levy called the Capital Tax (Varlık Vergisi)
to raise funds. In November 1942, the parliament announced it would
levy property owners, big farmers, and businessmen who “amassed
inflated profits by exploiting the difficult economic situation but do
not pay commensurate taxes.” They would be forced to pay an amount
“commensurate with their profits and capacity.” Indeed, two groups
of people had profited enormously from the war: the mostly Muslim
owners of large rural estates and the mostly non-Muslim urban mer-
chants involved in the importing of scarce commodities. The tax lists,
prepared without formal income data but rather according to the per-
sonal estimation of local bureaucrats, divided taxpayers according to
religion: M for Muslim, G for Non-Muslim (Gayrimüslim) and later
E for Foreigners (Ecnebi), and D for Sabbateans (Dönme, literally “con-
verts”). It did not take long to figure out that this tax fell overwhelm-
ingly on the non-Muslims. Many were financially ruined.
Although no appeals were permitted, and although the Revenue

Department rejected almost all of more than 10,000 petitions, tax-
payers did exercise their constitutional right of petition. Those who
resisted were arrested and deported or sentenced to hard labor. By
the time collection of the capital tax was finally completed in June
1943, the financial world of Istanbul and western Anatolia was se-
verely shaken. İnönü admitted that almost 40 percent of what had
been so far collected had been paid by minorities and foreigners but
denied that it was any injustice, since, he said, they owned most of
the wealth. Deportees were permitted to return—without paying!—
in December, on the eve of a Cairo meeting between İnönü and
Churchill and Roosevelt. In March 1944, all remaining outstand-
ing obligations were canceled and defaults forgiven. Reparations,
however, were not made. Many historians have noted that the con-
clusion of the capital tax fiasco coincided with the defeat of Nazi
Germany. Fascist student demonstrations in May 1944 gave İnönü
the opportunity he sought to suppress the pan-Turkist movement,
whose prominent members were arrested on charges of plotting to
overthrow the government and to bring Turkey into the war on Ger-
many’s side.
At the same time, Turkish villagers had grown resentful of Kemal-
ist objectives in the countryside. The Village Institutes received strong
government support. Villagers were forced to build school buildings
and roads for schoolmasters, who often turned out to be aloof and
unsympathetic mouthpieces of the hated secularist order. Local law-
and-order police forcibly suppressed dissent. In the towns, exaspera-
tion focused on the abysmal economic conditions, on censorship of the
press, and similar restrictions on personal freedom. There was little
to suggest that the unpopular and authoritarian İnönü regime would
permit the formation of opposition parties and, eventually, free elec-
tions. In his speech at the opening of the new session of parliament on
November 1, 1944, President İnönü announced his intention to open
the regime, stating that the main problem of the state in Turkey was
the lack of a true loyal opposition. With World War II plainly in its
final months, Turkey entered the conflict on the side of the Allies in
February 1945 in order to qualify for admittance to the United Nations.
Combat involving Turkish troops having been successfully avoided,
the delicate middle way between powerful allies having been care-
fully negotiated, and the grave danger of the nation’s survival having
passed, İnönü could turn his considerable political skills to the task of
building Turkish democracy.
NOTES
1. Halide Edib (Adıvar), The Turkish Ordeal (New York and London:
J. Murray, 1928), pp. 354–356.
2. Quoted in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey
(Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), p. 456.
8
Multiparty Democracy,
1945–1960
Like the characters in Yaşar Kemal’s novel Memed, My Hawk, the ordi-
nary people of Turkey’s 40,000 villages experienced the revolutionary
changes of the 1920s and 1930s indirectly at first, by way of the tradi-
tional institutions and relationships of their village. Published in 1955
and translated into dozens of languages in the years following, Memed,
My Hawk tells the story of Slim Memed, a young boy who rebels against
the cruelty of the village chief, Abdi Agha. After wounding Abdi Agha
and killing his nephew in a violent confrontation, Memed flees to the
hills to become a bandit.
Yaşar Kemal used archetypal characters, a common human moral
sense, and symbolic imagery in Memed, My Hawk to create a story of
epic reach. The horizons of his characters’ world, however, did not
extend much beyond the fields and pastures surrounding their home
village, located in a small plateau in the Çukurova plain. When on
Memed’s first visit to a nearby town he meets an old man who de-
scribes Maraş to him and who has seen Istanbul, Memed thinks it a
fantastic thing. The world is big, Memed realizes. His village seems
suddenly to be “but a spot in his mind’s eye,” Abdi Agha “just an ant.”
Excited by this vision, Memed seeks both personal revenge against
Abdi Agha and an uncomplicated social justice, symbolized by the
burning of the thistles that choke the village land.
Villagers were not ignorant of national politics, but Yaşar Kemal’s
novel is a reminder not to exaggerate the impact of the great repub-
lican reforms and economic and social development on largely rural
Turkey. The continued strength of the traditional rural order, as de-
scribed by Yaşar Kemal, was partly a consequence of compromises
made in forging the alliance of state officials, professionals, business-
men, and rural magnates who had successfully resisted the dismem-
berment of the country after World War I. Poor economic conditions
and the growing power of the state threw the divergent interests of
these groups into sharp relief in the 1940s, and the alliance threatened
to break apart.
TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY, 1945–1950

At the end of World War II, President İnönü faced pressure to lib-
eralize the regime. The repressive authoritarianism of the Republican
People’s Party under İnönü had made people at all levels of Turkish
society desire a more open political environment. Turkey had, after all,
signed the United Nations Charter, which sought international coop-
eration in “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and
for fundamental freedoms for all.” In Turkey, martial law continued for
more than a year after the end of the war, press censorship remained
heavy, and labor organizations were almost nonexistent.
Besides this, Turkey was still an underdeveloped country. Although
heavy industrial development during the 1930s brought more than
2,000 miles of new railroads, in the whole country there were fewer
than 2,000 tractors and only about 300 miles of paved roads. Only a
handful of villages were electrified. Villagers resented the increased
state control brought by the Kemalist revolution, especially as it was
felt in increased taxation and the symbols of government-imposed
secularization.
As significant as the complaints of the numerous but comparatively
weak villagers was the bitterness of the rural landholding class. Inat-
tention to the agricultural sector meant that production remained lim-
ited and aimed mostly at local markets. Only a fraction of the potential
wealth of the nation’s agricultural industry had been realized. At the
same time, wartime price controls destroyed their profits, while taxa-
tion on agriculture hurt them. Those few who, especially in the rich
regions of the Aegean river valleys and the Çukurova plain, had made
Multiparty Democracy, 1945–1960 119
a lot of money during the war in cash crops such as cotton found their
new wealth taxed heavily.
Antigovernment sentiment also grew among two other groups in
Turkish society during and immediately after the war. State civil serv-
ants who had suffered heavily from inflation and businessmen, both
Muslim and Christian, who had carried the greatest burden of the
hated capital tax, united in opposition to the regime. Many business-
men had opposed the etatism of the 1930s and still held strong opinions
in favor of a free market approach to economic policy. Parliamentary
debate over the land redistribution law of January 1945 grew acrimo-
nious. Dissidents within the CHP sought ways of opening up the po-
litical system. Four party members, Celal Bayar, Refik Koraltan, Fuad
Köprülü, and Adnan Menderes, formally requested that the constitu-
tional guarantees of democracy be implemented. Köprülü and Men-
deres published articles in the press critical of the CHP, including in the
Istanbul daily Vatan, whose editor, Ahmed EminYalman, opened the
pages of his paper to the dissidents. Köpülü, Menderes, and Koraltan
were expelled from the CHP; Bayar resigned his membership. But in a
speech opening the session of parliament on November 1, 1945, İnönü
affirmed his intention to gradually introduce real democracy, and in
January 1946, the four dissidents formed the Democrat Party (DP).
The personalities and social positions of these men helped ensure
that their party would become a powerful national political force.
Bayar, a banker by profession, and Koraltan, an attorney, had been
CUP members and joined the nationalist resistance. Bayar had served
as prime minister from 1937 to 1939, and Koraltan had been a member
of parliament and then provincial governor. Köprülü, a deputy from
Kars, was a respected academic, the leading historian of his genera-
tion. Menderes was an attorney and cotton grower from Aydın who, as
a member of parliament, led the criticism of the land law.
The depth of the opposition expressed through the DP came as a
surprise to İnönü. Many within the CHP leadership agreed that the
economy needed to be opened to market forces and society to liber-
alization, and hence, İnönü emphasized that there was not much dif-
ference between his CHP and what the DP was advocating. There was
more than a little truth to this, but the DP acted as an umbrella under
which all who mistrusted or opposed the current government sought
refuge. It served as a way for people to voice resentments that had
been building during the war years. And DP rhetoric provided an at-
tractive description of the road to salvation for Turkey, by way of un-
fettered capitalism, at a time when the United States, victorious in the
war and possessing the most powerful economy in the world, held
enormous prestige in the underdeveloped world.
In the face of a potentially overwhelming opposition, the CHP de-

cided in an extraordinary party congress in May 1946 to call early
elections—municipal balloting for May and national polls for July
1946. The party hoped to catch the Democrats before they had time
to fully organize. The Democrats, yelling foul, boycotted the munici-
pal elections but knew they must contest the general elections if they
were to remain viable. The CHP won a resounding victory, taking
403 of the 465 seats in parliament. But the DP, barely six months old,
had made a strong showing. The next year was critical to the future
of democracy in Turkey. The victorious CHP nearly split in a battle
between orthodox, single-party etatists (led by the new party leader
and prime minister, Recep Peker) and a faction of reform-minded
members who favored an open society and a looser definition of
etatism that would permit private enterprise. Abandoning the title
National Chief that he had taken in 1938 and promising to become
a truly nonpartisan president, İnönü intervened in favor of the re-
formers. In a statement that came to be known as the “12 July Decla-
ration,” the president emphatically defended the right of the DP to
stand in opposition. Peker, forced to resign, was replaced by Foreign
Minister Hasan Saka, who had led the Turkish delegation to the UN
conference in San Francisco. It may be that İnönü was influenced by
the embryonic Turkish relationship with the United States. In March
1947, President Harry Truman had announced the beginning of aid
to Greece and Turkey in what became known as the “Truman Doc-
trine,” and negotiations soon were underway for assistance through
the Marshall Plan.
Those within the CHP who wanted to revive the nation’s economy
through market reforms now took the upper hand. The party aban-
doned the five-year plan of 1946 for a new Turkish Development Plan
embracing a market orientation. The Turkish lira was devalued to in-
crease imports, especially of heavy machinery like tractors, and to de-
velop agriculture, and Turkey became a member of the International
Monetary Fund. Implementation of the land law proceeded slowly.
In the transportation sector, investment went into an ambitious road-
building program rather than railroads. Workers were permitted to
organize trade unions beginning in 1947 (although political activity
and strikes were forbidden at first), and 239 trade unions were formed
by 1952. An independent businessmen’s organization was formed.
In other ways too, in the timeworn fashion of party politics, the CHP
moved to cut the legs out from under the opposition by adopting im-
portant elements of its program. İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, the hated direc-
tor general of grade school education who had developed the Village
Institutes, was relieved of his duties in the fall of 1946. The Department
of Education ruled that religion could be taught in public schools, and
in the fall of 1949, a Faculty of Divinity opened at Ankara University.
These policies essentially stole the Democrats’ thunder but required
that the CHP mute its emphasis on etatism and reformism and relax its
attitude toward popular Islam.
In the first half of 1948, the economy continued to perform slug-
gishly. The CHP watched as the DP benefited simply by virtue of not
being the party in power. Gradually, the situation began to improve.
The DP fell to quarreling, one group warming to cooperation with the
CHP, while the radicals, particularly those sympathetic to politicized
Islam, accused the DP leadership of colluding with the CHP and of
selling out true democracy. The radicals bolted, forming the Nation
Party in 1948. The relaxation of press censorship led to the founding
of new newspapers, including Hürriyet (1948) and Milliyet (1950). With
Yalman’s now well-established Vatan (1940), the newspapers pub-
lished a variety of critical perspectives.
Having split the opposition and co-opted its program, the CHP felt
confident of victory as the May 1950 elections approached. But ordi-
nary Turkish voters turned out in huge numbers to give the DP a stun-
ning upset. With an absolute majority (53.5 percent) of the popular
vote, the Democrats took 408 parliamentary seats to the CHP’s 69. The
Nation Party won the final seat.
POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY IN THE

DEMOCRAT ERA, 1950–1960
In Turkey in 1950, a single-party dictatorship peacefully handed over
the reins of authority to an elected democratic government. Herein lies
the greater part of the legacy of İsmet İnönü. When the top army brass
offered to stage a coup d’état to suppress the elections and keep him in
power, İnönü declined. He would take it upon himself during the next
decade to demonstrate the meaning of “loyal opposition.” The country
received the Democrat victory with a sense of euphoria, as if national
independence had been won all over again. The elections filled parlia-
ment with younger men from a broader range of social classes and
backgrounds. The old Ottoman order was being eclipsed. İnönü had
been defeated, and Kâzim Karabekir, speaker of parliament since 1938,
had recently passed away. Parliament elected Celal Bayar president of
the republic. Adnan Menderes became prime minister, Refik Koraltan
became speaker of the parliament, and Fuad Köprülü was appointed
foreign minister.
British prime minister Winston Churchill and Turkish prime minister Adnan Men-
deres, seated together at the Turkish Embassy in London, October 14, 1952. Turkey
had joined the NATO alliance the previous winter. (Reg Burkett/Keystone/Getty
Images)
During the years 1948 to 1953, the economy grew at an average an-
nual rate of well over 12 percent and per capita real income rose at
3 percent per year. The greatest expansion occurred in the agricultural
sector. The state continued to subsidize grain production, and credit
was available through the Agricultural Bank. In May 1949, the first
consignment of Marshall Plan tractors had arrived; by 1953, more than
30,000 tractors had been imported, which farmers could purchase or
finance through the Agricultural Bank. The amount of land under cul-
tivation increased by more than 50 percent during the next decade,
and total yields swelled. The miles of paved highways quadrupled,
linking the major cities of the country in a national highway system for
the first time. Improved unpaved feeder roads made it easier to get the
farm produce to market. Thousands of newly imported trucks carried
the goods.
Overall economic growth slowed in 1954 but was still strong enough
to return the Democrats to parliament with an even stronger majority.
The CHP found itself in nearly complete disarray, without an alterna-
tive economic plan, still identified in the voters’ memories with the
repressive wartime policies of İnönü. The boom could not last forever.
The expansion had been financed with borrowed money and fueled by
splendid harvests. When the harvests returned to normal after 1953,

Turkey’s economic problems began to accumulate. Loosened import
restrictions had brought Turkey much needed machinery, equipment,
and consumer goods, but with low levels of hard currency, the country
was left with huge foreign trade and balance of payments deficits. The
decision to cover the deficits with Central Bank loans spurred infla-
tion. Sugar had to be rationed in Istanbul in December 1954, coffee
a few months later. Import restrictions returned in 1955. The govern-
ment’s aversion to central planning of any kind made Turkey’s eco-
nomic growth appear haphazard, even reckless, to foreign investors.
The United States turned down a request for new loans in June 1955,
giving only $30 million as emergency assistance to work out the im-
mediate difficulties.
While agriculture became increasingly mechanized, especially in
the advanced regions of the Çukurova and the Aegean, industrial de-
velopment proceeded more slowly, revealing some of the underlying
weaknesses of the economy. The privatization program never really
got off the ground. Few Turkish citizens had amassed savings, so there
was very little indigenous private capital. Those few who had it tended
to invest not in local industry but in import-export commerce, which
yielded quicker and higher profits. Although the number of new cor-
porations registered rose from only 6 in 1950 to 56 in 1954 and the
number of factory units doubled in the same period to nearly 5,000,
these were still very small numbers. Exceptions could be found, but the
entrepreneurial spirit, aimed at long-term development, was weak in
Turkish industry. Most investment by far still came from the state; in-
deed, the first half of the 1950s saw unprecedented levels of public
investment, in spite of the Democrats’ espousal of an anti-etatist ideol-
ogy. By far, the largest firms in Turkey were still the state economic en-
terprises, Sümer Bank, Eti Bank, İş Bankası, and the Agricultural Bank.
Perhaps the government’s goal of catching up to the level of the ad-
vanced European economies within 50 years was unrealistic—perhaps
trying to build cement plants, dams, highways all at the same time
was too much. The national education system, moreover, did not as
yet have the capacity to fully service the needs of a complex industrial
economy. General literacy had improved, but in the whole country,
there were only about 7,500 engineers and 900 architects. As criticism
of the economic failures mounted, the Menderes government passed
a repressive press law under which reporters and editors faced fines
and prison terms for publishing articles that “could be harmful to the
political or financial prestige of the state” or which were “an invasion
of private life.”
When negotiations between Great Britain, Turkey, and Greece over

the future of Cyprus broke down in September 1955, Greek nationalist
clamoring for union of the island with Greece reached a fever pitch.
Riots broke out in Istanbul and İzmir after reports that Atatürk’s birth-
place in Thessaloniki had been bombed. Evidence suggests that the
Menderes government manipulated popular resentments to divert
pressure from domestic problems. Mobs attacked Greek merchants
who were accused of hoarding. Menderes hastily declared martial
law. Ulus and Hürriyet, two prominent Istanbul dailies, were closed for
printing articles about the riots. When 10 Democrat parliamentarians
protested, they were expelled from the party. It became apparent that
the government, in its enthusiasm for the economic boom, had ignored
its social costs.
Yaşar Kemal first achieved prominence as a journalist for Cumhuri-
yet, writing sensitive analyses of the mixed impact of mechanized agri-
culture. Most Turkish farmers held small plots on which the economies
of scale possible through mechanization could not be realized. Many
could not afford the equipment anyway, even through available credit.
Circumstances encouraged these small farmers to sell to larger agricul-
tural magnates. Sharecroppers too and landless agricultural laborers
found themselves priced out of the market. This was particularly a
trend in cotton-growing areas like the Çukurova and the area around
İzmir and Aydın in the west. Some of what were to become Turkey’s
largest industrial conglomerates, like the Sabancı group and the Koç
group, had their start during this era. Haci Ömer Sabancı began in the
cotton industry in Adana in 1947. Vehbi Koç, on the other hand, who
had benefitted from abandoned Armenian property around Ankara in
the 1920s and was already established in the import-export business,
founded several manufacturing firms during the late 1940s and 1950s.
In earlier decades, the Turkish state had foreseen no permanent
exodus from the village as industrialization got underway. Wanting
to avoid creating concentrated industrial metropolises, the state de-
liberately located new industries all over Anatolia. The percentage
of the Turkish population living in urban areas remained fairly sta-
ble between 1927 (24.2 percent) and 1950 (25.2 percent). Now, how-
ever, many of the surplus agrarian laborers created by mechanization
moved to the cities in search of work, marking the beginnings of the
gecekondu phenomenon that was to be characteristic of urban growth,
especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The word meaning literally “built
in the night” refers to the makeshift shelters on the outskirts of the
major Turkish cities where people lived in squalid conditions with-
out basic communications or sanitary services. These quarters became
permanent neighborhoods around Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Adana,

and other large cities.
A few successful urban traders and businessmen accumulated tre-
mendous wealth, bought expensive imported consumer goods, and
clamored for political power commensurate with their new economic
standing. Democrat Party rhetoric, more strongly identified with free
enterprise and free expression of religious sentiment, attracted many
of these new men. Formation in 1952 of the Confederated Trade Un-
ions of Turkey, called Türk-İş for short, expressed a similar desire for
greater political participation by urban laborers. This did not yet take
an anticapitalist form. The lifestyle differences between these success-
ful entrepreneurs and the migrant peasants became evident where
they came together in the large urban areas, but in fact, the groups had
much in common, particularly conservative Islam. More ominous was
the growing resentment between the new rich and the urban poor, on
the one hand, and the traditional Republican bureaucratic, military,
and intellectual elites, on the other. Their secularist and etatist assump-
tions about national life were challenged by democratic policies, and
their state salaries did not keep up with inflation.
Led by a charismatic but intolerant prime minister and inexperi-
enced at governing, the Democrats made crucial political errors. Sus-
picious of the loyalties of Republican bureaucrats and state servants,
the Democrat Party was at the same time forced to appease the some-
times mutually incompatible demands of its own constituent groups.
A purge of the army general staff was carried out in 1950 in an effort to
discharge the top brass who had ties to İnönü. Yet fear of İnönü—the
“Pasha Factor”—still haunted the Democrat leadership. The Democrats
squandered the goodwill and potential neutrality of the university fac-
ulties toward the new regime, which intellectuals had hoped would
bring a more liberal approach to free thought and expression. New
laws aimed to balance the CHP majority among state employees and
reward the Democrats’ clients with politically influential positions, but
they compounded the tendency of politicization in the bureaucracy.
A law prohibited university faculty from political activity. Another
made faculty over age 60 or having 25 years of experience subject to
retirement—enabling a thinly disguised purge of leftist faculty. The
same law, applied to the judiciary, was used to force out CHP judges.
The Democrat party took pains to declare its support of consti-
tutional secularism. Courts dissolved the Nation Party, finding it
guilty of using religion for political purposes. After religious icono-
clasts smashed busts of Atatürk, it was the DP that made demeaning
Atatürk a criminal offense. Yet a key element of DP popularity was its
openness to a role for religion in public life after a quarter century of

anti-religious secularism. The party felt pressure from its constituency
to deliver on its implied promise of public support for the personal
religious devotion of most Turks. The Democrats closed the People’s
Houses and shut down the Village Institutes, and within weeks of their
1950 victory, the Democrats ended the 27-year ban on religious broad-
casting, instituting daily readings of the Qur’an on state radio. Regular
teaching of Islam in public schools began. More İ mam-Hatip schools,
for the training of preachers and Qur’an teachers, were opened. The
call to prayer reverted to Arabic.
DP officials had a close relationship with Said Nursi, the most im-
portant spiritual leader in Turkey. Nursi had spent the entire period
of single-party rule in internal exile and isolation, mostly in western
Turkey, when he was not actually imprisoned. He used this enforced
confinement, however, to write about spiritual freedom. Born under
empire and personally befriended by the sultan in his younger years,
Nursi had given up the pursuit of power. He grasped that the spiritual
life of Muslims took place now within national boundaries and that
fundamental religious expectations had to be rethought. Students and
disciples hand-copied his writings, which circulated in hundreds of
thousands of copies throughout the country. Given his freedom in an
amnesty after the 1950 elections, Nursi avoided direct involvement in
politics but openly supported the DP and advised its leadership.
Once Nursi’s writings were declared legal by the courts in 1956, they
were collected, edited, and published as the Risale-i Nur (Treatise on
Light). Informal household groups read and studied the multi-volume
work, as they had done secretly before it was printed. Thus did Said’s
thought and teaching become a movement—called the Nurcu move-
ment. This extraordinary spiritual classic amounts to a Qur’an com-
mentary, but unlike the traditional genre of Qur’an commentary. It was
not organized in the same way and its language was not scholarly but
aimed at an audience of literate, common readers living out their lives
in the workaday world. It interpreted the Qur’an as a lifestyle guide
for modern times. The gravest danger for modern people was that na-
tional life encouraged an unconsidered pursuit of success and materi-
alism. It left people spiritually empty, and national leaders could offer
no guidance towards inner fulfillment. Said’s views were enlivened by
an embrace of science and the circumstances of twentieth-century life
and by a sensitivity to the human experience of suffering.
More than anything, it was the end of material success that threat-
ened the DP majority. Forced into a tactical retreat from their laissez-
faire economic policy, the Democrats lost the support of disgruntled
businessmen. Intellectuals and professionals were unhappy with the

autocratic management style of Menderes and with press restrictions
after the riots of September 1955. The Democrat Party, from the begin-
ning a coalition united by hatred of the CHP, began to break apart.
Fuad Köprülü, the respected foreign ninister and one of the founders
of the DP, resigned first his cabinet post and then his party member-
ship. Dissident DP members formed the Freedom Party. In the fall of
1956, the dean of Ankara University was dismissed for delivering a
“political lecture.” Three hundred students protested and a number of
academics resigned. Junior officers in the armed forces began to con-
spire against the regime.
Discontent in the military stemmed from complicated social roots as
shown in a study by historian Feroz Ahmad.1 Since the end of World
War II, the prestige of the military career in Turkey had declined slowly.
Democratization marginalized men who were accustomed to playing
a leading role in Turkish development. Menderes, wary of the officers’
influence and almost paranoid about İnönü, made a military reformer
his first minister of defense, but opponents among the top military
brass managed to get him fired. After that, Menderes ingratiated him-
self with the generals but failed to stay informed of the circumstances
of the junior officers. Already frustrated by the rigid hierarchy of the
officer corps, these men watched their standard of living steadily de-
cline after 1953 as their salaries lost purchasing power. These very
same young officers found themselves at the forefront of rapid military
change when Turkey joined NATO in 1952. They received the techni-
cal training in engineering and the sciences critical to the operation of
a modern, mechanized military force, as they were most interested in
the new tactics relevant to the nuclear age. Travel to Europe and the
United States and, after 1955, the basing of Americans and NATO of-
ficials in Turkey gave these officers increased contact with their Ameri-
can and European counterparts, and their own situations did not stand
up well in the comparison that such contact inevitably brought.
The chastened Democrats won early general elections in October
1957 but with only 47.3 percent of the vote. In the countryside, the
Democrats were still seen as the party that supported religion, and the
memory of repression at the hands of the CHP and the police during
the 1940s was still strong. Yet the CHP, rejuvenated by a new program
emphasizing political liberties and constitutional reform, seemed fi-
nally to be back on its feet. Finding new support among intellectuals
and businessmen defecting from the Democrats, the CHP made a ro-
bust showing, winning more than 40 percent of the popular vote and
178 of the now 600 seats in the parliament to the Democrats 424. Two
months later in December, nine junior army officers were arrested for
plotting a coup.
The Menderes government struggled to regain control of the econ-
omy. Guidelines suggested by international lenders since the mid-
1950s provided the basis for their efforts, including devaluing the
Turkish lira, lifting restrictions on imports and exports, and ending
price supports and subsidies. Prices on the government monopolies
of tea, sugar, cigarettes, and liquor were raised in late 1958. Turkey
was permitted to reschedule its debt and received a further loan of
$359 million from the United States, the Organization for European
Economic Cooperation, and the International Monetary Fund. In Sep-
tember 1959, Turkey applied for associate membership in the Euro-
pean Economic Community. A partial recovery began.
Discontent among state servants, intellectuals, and others did not
diminish, however. An Istanbul University law professor was sus-
pended in 1958 for denouncing press regulations, and four Istanbul
dailies printed blank front pages to protest the state of the press. The
CHP, sensing its strength returning, went on the offensive. Menderes
foolishly ordered troops to interrupt a speaking tour by İnönü in the
spring of 1960, but when İnönü called their bluff, the embarrassed
troops backed down. Police opened fire during student protests on
April 28, killing 5 and injuring 40. Two days later, martial law was de-
clared after riots in Istanbul. Eight newspapers were closed. On May 14,
the 10th anniversary of the free elections of 1950, large crowds pro-
tested in the streets. Ten days later, a fight broke out in parliament, leav-
ing 15 members injured in the fisticuffs and flying desks. At 3:00 a.m.
on May 27, 1960, Colonel Alparslan Türkeş announced over the radio
that the armed forces had taken over the state in order to “prevent
fratricide” and “extricate the parties from the irreconcilable situation
into which they had fallen.”
REALISM IN TURKISH CULTURE

The most important currents in Turkish literature, film, and music
during this period sprang from the conviction that Turkish national
literature ought to describe the life of the whole country, village life as
well as city life, and assist in the development of the nation. While the
cities had advanced toward ideals of modernity, the villages had not
on the whole made much progress.
Many writers of this period turned their attention, therefore, to the
wretched conditions of the majority of the population who lived in
villages. Mahmut Makal, author of the celebrated exposé of village life
Bizim Köy (Our Village, 1950, published in English as A Village in Ana-

tolia), was a young Village Institute graduate who returned to teach
in the village. Schooled in the modern assumptions of the republic,
Makal described with frustration the ongoing vitality of traditional
norms in rural Turkey. This work and the early novels of Yakup Kadri
Karaosmanoğlu, especially Yaban (The Stranger, 1932), about an intel-
lectual’s alienation from the people of an Anatolian village, exerted
a strong influence on the development of realism in Turkish fiction.
Yaşar Kemal, part Kurdish and himself born in a village in the Çuku-
rova, wrote sympathetically of the social dislocations brought by
economic changes of the early 1950s, first as a journalist and then in
fiction. In Memed, My Hawk and in several other novels and in collec-
tions of short stories, Yaşar Kemal delved into the lives of characters in
remote villages of the Çukurova and the foothills of the Taurus Moun-
tains. Orhan Kemal, one of the most important novelists of the Repub-
lican era, also set his works, like Cemile (1952) and Bereketli Topraklar
Üzerinde (On Fertile Lands, 1964) in the Çukurova, typically exploring
the circumstances of the impoverished factory workers of Adana and
the former villagers who had moved to the city looking for work. Sait
Faik Abasiyanık, who published mostly short stories, wrote about the
lives of the urban underclass of fishermen, panhandlers, coffee shop
patrons, and the unemployed. Aziz Nesin was a satirist and humorist
whose characters often were simple town or city dwellers haplessly
facing petty bureaucrats, police officers, landlords, and others out to
take advantage of them.
A similar interest in the life of common people can be seen in some
of the poetry of the period, in film, and in the expanding popular-
ity of folk music among urbanized Turks and intellectuals. The 1950
collection by poet Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, Toprak Ana (Earth Mother),
comes closest to the concerns of the realist novelists. Poets of this gen-
eration adopted the colloquial Turkish of the countryside. Varlık Press
remained prominent in publishing this literature (it had published
Mahmut Makal’s Bizim Köy) and was rivaled now by Yeditepe, which
like Varlık also published its own journal.
In film, the late 1940s saw a marked shift from earlier times. This
was partly connected to government subsidies of the Turkish film in-
dustry. From an average of less than one and a half films per year,
the national film industry grew to producing an average of more than
50 films a year by the end of the 1950s, and audiences grew too. A land-
mark in the realist movement was Ömer Lütfi Akad’s Vurun Kahpeye
(Strike the Whore, 1949), based on the Halide Edib Adıvar novel. Akad
signed with Kemal Film in the 1950s. Kemal Film, a company founded
in 1922, had produced the early silent works of Muhsin Ertuğrul, a

pioneer of Turkish theater who was the only Turkish film director until
1939. The studio’s new owner, Osman Seden, a screenplay writer, also
moved into directing. With Kemal Film, Akad directed his masterpiece
Kanun Namına (In the Name of the Law, 1952). One of the most popu-
lar films of the decade was Memduh Ün’s Üç Arkadaş (1958), about a
romance between two common people.
When it comes to music, the far-reaching influence of the Village
Institutes and People’s Houses must once again be reckoned with. The
curriculum of the Village Institutes had included an introduction to
peasant music. At first, this music was interpreted to urbanites through
simplified rhythms and a polyphonized scale, on radio programs like
“Airs of the Country” (on Istanbul radio) and “We Are Learning a Folk
Song” (Ankara), but by the end of the 1950s, there was greater interest
in appreciating the original instruments and manner of performance.
THE RELATIONSHIP WITH AMERICA

By the late 1950s, Turkey’s growing relationship with the United
States not only reoriented Turkish foreign policy, but also had an
impact on domestic politics. Turkey’s membership in the OEEC and
the Council of Europe, both dating to 1949, fit the traditional align-
ments of the Kemalist republic. The enhanced American relationship
grew out of the relative weakness of Europe after the war, the gradual
withdrawal of Great Britain from imperial involvement, and the will-
ingness of the United States to take a position of world military and
economic leadership.
The relationship was shaped throughout its history by the condi-
tions of the Cold War, conditions which Atatürk could not have fore-
seen a decade earlier. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union
exerted pressure on Turkey. It demanded territorial concessions along
the Bulgarian border in Thrace and wanted revision of the Montreux
Convention governing the passage of shipping in the Straits and mili-
tary bases along the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The İnönü govern-
ment rejected these and turned to the United States for help, fearing a
Soviet attack. In response, President Harry Truman proposed the Tru-
man Doctrine, assistance to Turkey and to Greece in a speech to the
U.S. Congress on March 12, 1947. The basic idea behind the Truman
Doctrine was that without American intervention, both Turkey and
Greece would succumb to Soviet domination, leading to Soviet influ-
ence throughout the Middle East.
In May 1947, the U.S. Congress appropriated $100 million for aid to
Turkey and, by the end of summer 1947, established the Joint Ameri-
can Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JAMMAT) under the authority
of the American ambassador in Ankara. Through JAMMAT, the U.S.
Air Force provided aircraft and training to the Turkish air force and
assisted in the construction and improvement of several Turkish air
bases, which had been contracted to American industrial firms. This
military assistance was supplemented by economic assistance through
the Marshall Plan, announced in April 1948. By mid-1949, Marshall
Plan tractors began arriving in Turkey.
The İnönü government expressed immediate interest in joining the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when it was formed in
April 1949, and the Menderes government made formal application
for membership in 1950. The heavy casualties and impressive perfor-
mance of the 4,500 soldiers Turkey contributed to the United Nations
war effort in Korea generated support for Turkey’s NATO member-
ship. In February 1952, Turkey and Greece entered NATO at the same
time. When the Menderes government ratified the Status of Forces
Agreement and the Military Facilities Agreement in 1954, the way
was opened for NATO staff and American military personnel to be
stationed in Turkey. In February 1955, the United States established
the headquarters of the United States Logistics Group at Ankara. The
size of the NATO and American military forces grew rapidly. By the
end of the 1950s, several thousand American military personnel and
their families lived in Turkey under four different command struc-
tures. An air station opened near Diyarbakır and a base at the recently
completed Adana Air Field, and a NATO support squadron was acti-
vated at İzmir. Especially significant in American military planning
was the Adana Air Base, built and used jointly by the Turkish and U.S.
air forces. Renamed İncirlik Air Base in 1958, after the village where it
was located a few miles east of Adana, it housed a squadron of B-47
bombers armed with Jupiter nuclear missiles and hosted rotations of
F-100 fighter squadrons. İncirlik was used by American fighters de-
ployed during the intervention in Lebanon in 1958 and was also the
main staging location for high altitude U-2 reconnaissance flights over
the Soviet Union. An international crisis was ignited when Soviet an-
tiaircraft missiles shot down one of these planes in May 1960, dur-
ing the last days of the Menderes government, and captured its pilot,
Francis Gary Powers, alive. Powers’s plane had actually taken off that
day from a base in Pakistan, but a diversionary flight along the Soviet
border was flown from İncirlik.
It was probably inevitable that Turkey would be drawn into the

Cold War, in view of Turkey’s border with the USSR in the Caucasus
and Russia’s interest in access to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea.
The conditions of American assistance and the rationale of the Truman
Doctrine specifically deepened Turkish involvement. Yet the American
alliance was not the only element of Turkish foreign policy in the 1950s.
Turkey maintained close relations with Great Britain, joining Britain
and Greece as international guarantors of the independence of Cyprus
in negotiations that were finally concluded in 1959. Turkey also pur-
sued bilateral relations with Italy and entered relations with Greece
and Yugoslavia. Yet the American alliance heavily influenced Turkey’s
regional diplomatic position. Encouraged by the United States, the
Menderes government signed a diplomatic agreement with Pakistan
in 1954 and a mutual defense pact with Iraq in 1955. These became the
centerpiece of an interlocking set of agreements between Turkey, Iraq,
Iran, Pakistan, and Great Britain called the Baghdad Pact. After the
1958 revolution in Iraq, this alliance system was reorganized into the
Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) under American leadership.
The announcement in 1957 of the Eisenhower Doctrine, offering eco-
nomic and military assistance to countries that fought communism
and promising American protection to any Middle Eastern country at-
tacked by a communist state, solidified Turkey’s position.
The American alliance subtly affected the climate of political debate
in Turkey in the late 1940s and 1950s. Sensitivity to ideas and attitudes
associated with communism in Turkey certainly predated American
aid, but American aid exacerbated the tensions. There were occa-
sional demonstrations against communist influence, and journalists,
academics, and intellectuals accused of being communists were given
prominent trials and sometimes became targets of violence. The poet
Nazım Hikmet spent the period 1938 to 1950 in prison for his views,
after which he escaped abroad and never returned to Turkey. Another
famous incident occurred at the end of December 1947 at Ankara Uni-
versity. Charges of communism were brought against three professors,
Niyazi Berkes, Behice Boran, and Pertev Naili Boratav. After a two-
year investigation, the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but
student demonstrators demanded their resignation. A mob broke into
the offices of the university president, Şevket Aziz Kansu, who was the
brother-in-law of İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, the recently sacked director of
the Village Institutes. Kansu escaped under police escort and resigned.
As for the professors, Berkes, a sociologist, and Boratav, a folklorist,
emigrated to Canada and France, respectively, where they completed
long and influential academic careers. Boran, also a sociologist, went
on to head the Turkish Workers’ Party in the late 1960s, spent time in
prison, and died in exile in Brussels. But in the 1950s, the state, which
had persecuted communists and Islamists equally under Atatürk and
İnönü, tolerated Islamists to an unprecedented degree, while main-
taining the pressure on leftists.
Another important dimension of the Turkish-American relationship
was the growing cultural and intellectual exchange. In June 1947, Pan
American Airlines began regular service to Istanbul on its west-to-east
route, facilitating unofficial American business and cultural connec-
tions with Turkey. Representatives from the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) provided advice and assistance in the establishment of
Türk-İş in the early 1950s. In 1949, funds became available through the
Fulbright exchange program, and assistance from the American Coun-
cil of Learned Societies and government agencies like the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) enabled American
scholars and students to live and study in Turkey. Some of these ex-
changes led to research that benefited Turkey directly, including stud-
ies of Turkish communications infrastructure and business climate.
The full impact of American aid on Turkish life was complex. The
prestige that the United States enjoyed in Turkey as the main world
economic power bolstered the expectations of economic liberals. Presi-
dent Celal Bayar said in a speech that he hoped Turkey would become
a “Little America.” By 1960, the United States had provided approxi-
mately $3 billion of aid to Turkey. This gave valuable assistance to the
Turkish economy, especially to the mechanization of agriculture, and
permitted a thorough modernization and reorganization of the Turk-
ish armed forces. Except for the United States, Turkey’s active-duty
military of half a million men was the largest in NATO; it was well
equipped and had received modern training. Historian John Vander
Lippe has shown that this contributed to the continued militariza-
tion of Turkish society. By the late 1950s, some Turks charged that the
American relationship with Turkey was essentially neocolonial. They
wondered whether, ironically, American financial aid by its sheer scale
may have allowed Turkish politicians to avoid or delay some of the
vital economic reforms that it was its mission to encourage.
NOTE
1. Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950–1975 (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1977), pp. 147–176.
9
Military Intervention
and the Second Republic,
1960–1980
In several volumes of short stories published in a lengthy career that

spanned the period from the late 1940s until the late 1980s, Aziz Nesin
turned his devastating wit on Turkish society and culture. The naïveté of
his heroes is matched only by the bigotry and condescension of their tor-
mentors, who, despite their ignorance, jealously guard the puny author-
ity they hold. In the first volume of his memoirs, Nesin relates a story
of interaction between the “mansion kids,” who live in a house with a
high garden wall and have scrubbed, clean faces, and the dirty “street
kids,” who play in the alley outside the wall and pick the fruit from the
branches of a tree that overhangs the wall from the garden. Even chil-
dren could not overcome the class differences that separated them.1
Aziz Nesin’s career serves as an example of the extraordinary and
tragic politicization of differences in Turkish society of the 1950s
through 1970s. He was arrested in a sweep of leftists in December
1946 and condemned by military courts. Despite several arrests and
jail terms, he continued to publish short stories, novels, plays, and
eventually his memoirs, Böyle Gelmiş Böyle Gitmez, beginning in the

late 1960s. The title inverts the Turkish saying “The way it’s always
been, the way it’s always going to be,” making it come out, “The way
it’s always been, not the way it’s always going to be.”
THE MILITARY COUP OF 1960

The military coup d’état of May 27, 1960, was welcomed enthusiasti-
cally in Istanbul and Ankara but received with sullen disappointment
in much of the Anatolian countryside, where it was widely regarded
as an intervention against the Menderes government on behalf of
the CHP.
In spite of their declared nonpartisan objectives—to establish an
administration transcending party politics, to hold free elections, and
to return political power to the winners—the actions of the officers
over the next few months strengthened the perception. The officers ap-
pointed the Constitutional Commission, chaired by Sıddık Sami Onar
of the law faculty of Istanbul University. Another member, Hüseyin
Naili Kubalı, was a notorious critic of the Democrat Party. The Con-
stitutional Commission issued a statement justifying the coup on the
grounds that the Democrat Party had become an instrument of class
interests in Turkish society and had aligned itself with forces opposed
to the secularist principles of Atatürk’s revolution. The party was shut
down and all its parliamentary deputies were arrested.
Calling themselves the National Unity Committee (NUC), the
young officers exercised sovereignty on behalf of the nation until a
new constitution could be written, elections could be held, and parlia-
ment could resume its role. General Cemal Gürsel, the nominal leader
of the junta and chairman of the NUC, simultaneously filled the offices
of president, prime minister, and commander in chief of the armed
forces, giving him more power on paper than even Atatürk himself
had ever held. Gürsel appointed a cabinet, subject to the approval of
the NUC. General Gürsel had been chosen by the junior officers plot-
ting the coup as a sympathetic figure who could get along with every-
body, who was positioned in the military hierarchy so as to assist their
aims. Feroz Ahmad’s study, cited above, showed that the NUC was an
unwieldy group of 38 officers. The most powerful figure was the char-
ismatic Colonel Alparslan Türkeş. Like many of the new generation
of officers, Colonel Türkeş had spent time in Germany and the United
States and had served at the NATO command in Ankara. Three main
factions among the group disagreed from the beginning about com-
mon aims and principles. One faction, called the “pashas,” consisted
Military Intervention and the Second Republic, 1960–1980 137
of old-school generals who saw the purpose of the military interven-

tion as restoring civil order. To them, politics was a gentleman’s pro-
fession, and they favored a swift return to civilian rule. The second
faction differed from the first only slightly, by their interest in how
democracy could aid social and economic development. They sup-
ported a planned economy led by state economic enterprises and the
development of a welfare state. Some wanted to simply hand power
to İnönü and the Republicans, but were not necessarily hostile to the
Democrats. The third faction were junior officers who advocated fun-
damental political and social change and favored maintaining military
rule indefinitely in order to direct it from above. They were conscious
of the social and economic inequities introduced in Turkey as a conse-
quence of the boom of the 1950s. Some of them, like Colonel Türkeş,
were communitarian radicals who envisioned a nonparty nationalist
populism in the mold of Nasser’s Egypt.
A struggle for power between these factions continued for about six
months. In November, the pashas struck against the radicals, purged
the NUC and expelled 14 junior officers to exile at Turkish embassies
abroad. Türkeş was assigned to India. The pashas knew, however, that
the radicals had expressed views widespread among the junior officer
corps. With the purge, groups of conspirators once again formed, plot-
ting to seize control of the state and to bring about a complete over-
haul of the Turkish political and social system. Aware of the continued
danger of rebellion from junior officers and wanting to prevent their
economic marginalization, senior officers created two new institu-
tions, the Army Mutual Assistance Association (better known by its
Turkish acronym, OYAK) and the Armed Forces Union (AFU). OYAK
was a pension fund for retired officers, financed by obligatory salary
contributions. It swiftly developed into a powerful conglomerate with
vast holdings in the Turkish economy. The AFU, open to all officers,
provided a forum for identifying and discussing issues of common
concern, under the supervision of the top brass. The AFU acted as a
control on the NUC and as a safety valve for discontent from below, al-
lowing generals to gradually gain control over the junior officer corps.
They wanted to make certain that there would never be another mili-
tary rebellion that they themselves did not lead and direct.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC

The Constitutional Commission became deadlocked between those
who favored full democratic liberties and those who favored a return
to single-party directed development. After a purge, the commission
eventually did produce a draft, but meanwhile, a group of professors

from the Faculty of Law at Ankara University submitted a separate
draft and convinced the NUC to appoint a Constituent Assembly. The
Constituent Assembly, made up of the NUC and some politicians,
asked two neutral academics, Professors Enver Ziya Karal and Turhan
Feyzioğlu, to form the Constitutional Committee and reconcile the two
documents. This committee completed its work during the spring, and
the new constitution passed in a deeply divided national referendum
on July 9, 1961.
The constitution of the second republic introduced important
structural changes to Turkish society and government. It established
a bicameral legislature. The upper chamber, or Senate, was directly
elected for terms of six years, but members of the NUC and former
presidents of the republic became lifetime senators, and 15 others were
appointed by the president. The lower chamber was popularly elected
by a system of proportional representation. Only the lower chamber
could initiate legislation, but laws were required to pass both. The
lower chamber could override the Senate’s decisions by a two-thirds
vote. The national budget was reviewed by a joint commission of the
two chambers, but the lower chamber had the final approval. Votes
of no confidence were held in the lower chamber. The judiciary was
made independent of the legislature, and a major innovation was the
establishment of the Constitutional Court. Its 15 members were drawn
from the judiciary, parliament, university law faculties, and presiden-
tial appointments. The Constitutional Court reviewed laws and orders
of parliament at the request of specific persons or groups, including
political parties. The president of the republic would now be elected
by parliament, from among its members, for a single term of seven
years. He was to be a neutral figure, to “represent the Turkish repub-
lic and the integrity of the Turkish nation,” and his office maintained
a certain independence from the legislature. The president appointed
the prime minister, who chose the other cabinet ministers.
The new constitution enshrined certain rights and liberties and
principles not provided for in the 1924 constitution. It guaranteed free-
dom of thought, expression, association, and publication. Universities,
rather than the Ministry of Education, would hire and fire faculty mem-
bers. Freedom of the press was limited only by the need to “safeguard
national security and public morality.” The rights to collective bargain-
ing, establish unions, and strike were explicitly protected, and work-
ers had the right to social security and welfare. The right to own and
inherit private property was recognized, and the state obliged itself to
provide land for landless farmers. The state was granted power “to
plan economic development so as to achieve social justice.” Economic,

social, and cultural development would be based on and carried out in
accordance with a plan. The State Planning Organization functioned
as an advisory body under the authority of the prime minister. The
prime minister chaired the High Planning Council, the executive body
of the SPO, on which also sat three cabinet ministers.
Another new institution, the National Security Council, was formed
by law in March 1962. Chaired by the president of the republic, the
NSC was made up of the chief of the general staff, heads of the service
branches, the prime minister, and ministers of relevant cabinet minis-
tries. Its role was to advise the government on matters of national se-
curity, both domestic and foreign. Through its general secretariat and
various departments, the NSC was to gradually develop into a politi-
cal force of considerable magnitude, as greater and greater portions of
national political, social, and economic life became defined as matters
of national security.
Many of the democratic innovations of the new constitution were
welcomed by all sectors of Turkish society, but certain contentious pro-
visions were vigorously opposed by the old Democrat Party constitu-
ency, especially the clauses explicitly providing for a centrally planned
economy. Some also resented the liberal approach to workers’ rights
and to the new climate of open political debate permitted by the free-
dom of the press and association.
PARTY POLITICS, 1961–1970

The trial of hundreds of DP members and the execution of the Demo-
crat leaders during the national elections of 1961 poisoned the political
atmosphere of the second republic from the outset. The NUC com-
muted the death sentences of 11 of the 15 sentenced to capital punish-
ment, and former President Celal Bayar was spared on account of his
advanced age and ill health. But the former DP Foreign Minister and
Finance Minister were executed on September 16, and former Prime
Minister Adnan Menderes the next day, despite efforts by İsmet İnönü
and others to intervene. The military also signaled its attitude towards
religious faith when it destroyed the tomb of Said Nursi, who had died
two months before the coup. To prevent it becoming a pilgrimage site,
Said’s body was disinterred, flown to an undisclosed location near
İsparta, and reburied in an unmarked and unknown grave.2
İnönü’s CHP won closely fought elections a month after the ex-
ecution of Menderes, but the returns were troubling. The CHP took
36.7 percent of the popular vote and 173 seats in the lower chamber.
İsmet İnönü during meetings to negotiate Turkey’s first coalition government, Oc-
tober 16, 1961. The previous day, the Republican People’s Party had narrowly won
the general elections, the first since the 1960 coup. (Keystone-France/Gamma-
Keystone via Getty Images)
But between the second place Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP), sub-
scribed to by most former Democrats (34.8 percent and 158 seats),
and the New Turkey Party, a close relative of the breakaway Freedom
Party of the mid-1950s (13.7 percent and 65 seats), the old DP ele-
ment had taken 48.5 percent of the popular vote and was only three
seats shy of a majority in the lower chamber. The rightist Republican
Peasants’ Nation Party took the remaining 54 seats. Although Gen-
eral Gürsel was elected president, it was not too far-fetched to read
the election results as a repudiation of both the constitution and the
new regime. Prospects that the second republic would make any sig-
nificant headway against the country’s social and economic problems
seemed dim.
Political instability marked the next several years, as a series of
short-lived coalition governments headed by İnönü, with the support
of the army, tried to implement the constitution and oversee economic
development in the face of this stubborn opposition. In the wake of
elections that arguably vindicated the old Democrats, there was little
incentive for the Justice Party to cooperate with the government. Even
before the first cabinet could be formed, workers began demonstrating
in the streets, demanding action on the constitution’s guarantee of the
right to strike. Angry junior officers, resolutely determined to prevent
a neo-Democrat takeover, plotted another coup. Col. Talat Aydemir, a
key conspirator in the 1950s who had missed the coup due to his post-
ing in Korea, was arrested for attempting to take over the government
in February 1962. This episode brought the Justice Party to a brief rap-
prochement with the CHP, but their coalition lasted only until May
of that year. When it collapsed, İnönü formed a second coalition, this
time with the other two parties. This second coalition lasted about a
year and a half, during which time Col. Aydemir was executed after a
second coup attempt was thwarted in May 1963.
Local elections in November 1963 made it clear that the CHP no
longer had the consent of the governed. İnönü resigned and Presi-
dent Gürsel invited Rağıp Gümüşpala, head of the Justice Party, to
form a new government. Although he was unable to do so, the evi-
dent willingness of the army to consent to an administration headed
by Justice contributed to a feeling of greater optimism for the future.
.
Ismet İnönü, now 80 years old, once again cobbled together a coalition
and assumed the prime ministry. A weak union of the CHP and inde-
pendent deputies, this government managed to survive for 14 months,
mainly because throughout 1964, everyone became preoccupied with
the Cyprus issue. It too finally collapsed on a budget vote in February
1965, and the country limped to general elections in October 1965.
The principle issues dividing the parties were socioeconomic, and
thus the first casualty of the elections of 1961 had been the very re-
forms that were vital to the success of the constitution. An example of
this can be seen in the issue of state planning. After failure of the first
coalition, İnönü was forced to make concessions to the right in order to
form another. Strident opponents of planning ended up in the cabinet.
When the five-year plan went to the High Planning Council for discus-
sion, the section on agrarian reform never reached the table because of
cabinet objections, measures to make the state economic enterprises
more competitive were rejected, and the cabinet also refused to accede
to proposed tax reforms needed to finance the plan. The technical ad-
visors to the State Planning Organization resigned over the obvious
lack of political commitment to their work.
The 1965 elections, however, saw the rise of important new politi-
cal figures. One was Süleyman Demirel, new chairman of the Justice
Party. Demirel represented a new generation of Turkish politician.
Though a common man, a peasant’s son, he was a skilled orator who

spoke the language of ordinary people. He had an engineering degree
from Istanbul University and experience working with the Americans,
having lived in the United States for short periods before entering gov-
ernment service in the 1950s. He was religiously observant and con-
servative, but a secularist. Congenial and an able negotiator, he rebuilt
the coalition of industrialists, big landowners, small merchants, and
artisans and peasants that drove the DP in the early 1950s. Demirel
took the Justice Party to victory with an outright majority of the votes
and 240 seats in the lower chamber. Demirel assured the military that
he would follow his own program, independent of the old Democrats.
Crucially, he granted the generals nearly complete autonomy in mili-
tary affairs and the defense budget.
After his victory, Demirel’s biggest political problems came not
from the opposition, which had been left in disarray, but from within
his own party. Economic growth was astounding in the 1960s, almost
20 percent annually between 1963 and 1969, but lopsided, benefit-
ing a few while leaving the lives of the masses stagnant. The ineq-
uities gradually alienated some parts of his constituency, especially
the lower middle class of small urban shopkeepers and artisans. The
right wing of the Justice Party began to fragment despite Demirel’s
frequent tactical use of anticommunist and religious rhetoric. Some
of the disenchanted followed Alparslan Türkeş into extreme national-
ism. Türkeş, one of the key figures of the 1960 junta, had been exiled
abroad in the NUC purge. When he was allowed to return in February
1963, he entered politics. He joined the Republican Peasants’ National
Party and in 1965 took over its chairmanship. Under his direction, the
party took a radically nationalist and racist tone, espousing a doctrine
of what Türkeş called “the Nine Lights”: nationalism, morality, social
responsibility, scientific-mindedness, support for freedom, support for
the peasants, developmentalism, industrialization, and technology.
In 1969, the party changed its name to the Nationalist Action Party
(Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP).
Another group of Demirel’s original constituency were intrigued by
the frankly religious political rhetoric of Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan,
an electrical engineer, had been an undergraduate at Istanbul Tech-
nical University with Demirel in the late 1940s. He had taken up an
academic career and entered politics only later, through the Union of
Chambers of Commerce and Industry. He won a seat in parliament
in 1969. Erbakan gained a reputation as a maverick not only by his
outspoken advocacy of a role for Islam in public life, but also by his
tendency to intemperate remarks, as when for example he accused
Demirel of collusion with Zionists and Masons. In January 1970, Er-

bakan formed the National Order Party, the first of a series of Islamist
parties in Turkish politics. The party’s formation indicated differences
of view emerging among religiously inclined Turks who were follow-
ers of Said Nursi. After Nursi’s death, the movement evolved through
continued reading and discussion of Said’s Risale, but various inter-
pretations and inclinations took people in different directions. Erba-
kan’s career expressed the ambitions of those in the Nurcu movement
to become involved in politics more overtly.3
With its electoral loss of 1965, the CHP began a thorough soul
searching. Convinced that Demirel’s economic and social policies had
forsaken the principles of Atatürk and would ruin the common Turk-
ish peasant and worker, in the early 1960s, the young leadership of the
CHP had persuaded İnönü to adopt a “left of center” agenda for the
campaign. Many now blamed this new approach for the party’s crush-
ing defeat. For the time, İnönü continued to support the man who was
the main author of this approach, Bülent Ecevit. İnönü had brought
Ecevit into the government in the three CHP-led coalitions of 1961–1965
as Minister of Labor. Ecevit interpreted events since 1945 differently
than most in the CHP, believing that for the party of Atatürk to sur-
vive, it must shed its elitist image and trust the Turkish people to know
what was best for themselves. He understood that the voters had sup-
ported Menderes and now supported Demirel, not primarily because
those parties exploited their ignorance, but because they felt alienated
by the CHP’s smugness and because the opposition had convinced
them that its program was better. The CHP, said Ecevit, needed to win
back the common Turkish men and women, whose livelihood was di-
rectly threatened by AP economic policy. Ecevit’s “left of center” theme
drove some other disgruntled members to a break with the CHP and
to form a new party.
ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN THE 1960s

By the early 1970s, Turkey faced a mounting crisis, the origins of
which lay partly in the deteriorating economic conditions of the coun-
try, partly in the massive social changes that had occurred since the
1950s, partly in a loss of confidence in the Turkish state by certain
groups in Turkish society, and partly in the circumstances of the Cold
War. Demirel’s government had overseen rapid economic growth, but
the growth was very uneven, and the Justice Party steadfastly resisted
centralized planning and the structural reforms necessary for healthy
long-term growth. Because Turkey lacked sufficient native capital, the
overall purpose of economic policy was to develop national industry

through a program of import substitution. High tariffs and import
restrictions were employed to protect Turkish industry from foreign
competition, except under certain strictly controlled conditions. For-
eign firms were permitted to enter the Turkish market through joint
ventures with Turkish companies. Thus the economic expansion in
these years was fueled by imports of foreign raw materials, financed
largely by foreign loans, and came to depend on a favorable foreign
exchange situation. The emphasis was on manufacturing consumer
goods for the domestic market, rather than aiming at production for
the export market in order to build foreign currency earning.
Without central planning, this foreign capital was used inefficiently
and without regard for overall national economic and industrial pri-
orities. There were some successes. Türk Petrol, the state-owned oil
company, inaugurated a pipeline between the fields at Batman and the
southern Mediterranean port of İskenderun in 1967. The Seyhan Irri-
gation Project, a large dam project in the Çukurova that would provide
hydroelectric power, flood control, and irrigation, was begun with
funding from the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International
Development. Work on another major USAID project, the Integrated
Agricultural Services Project near Denizli in the Aegean region, began
in 1968. Turkey had finalized negotiations and joined the European
Economic Community as an associate member in October 1964, bring-
ing preferential tariffs and quotas for its agricultural products. Some
of the greatest economic successes were accomplished through joint
Turkish-foreign industrial ventures.
Turkey lacked the structural means, however, to begin amassing
native capital out of small family savings. There were few joint stock
companies and no significant private life insurance industry. The state
monopolies on alcohol, matches, tobacco, and salt continued to be
marginally profitable. The recently founded OYAK was quite success-
ful and, by the end of the decade, became a huge and diverse economic
enterprise; and the civil servant pension fund and the social insurance
agency for industrial workers were well subscribed. These and the
publicly owned banks were about the only profitable state economic
enterprises, whose collective debts doubled between 1960 and 1969.
The unbalanced growth exacerbated the impact of pressures such
as population growth and rising expectations on Turkish laborers. The
trend toward mechanization continued to push agrarian labor to the
big cities. Some workers went abroad, mostly to Western Europe. In
fact, beginning in the mid-1960s, Turkey’s most important export was
its surplus labor. These workers’ cash remittances back home increased
eightfold in one year between 1964 and 1965, becoming one of Tur-
key’s most important sources of foreign exchange.
Those who stayed home used the new freedoms granted by the con-
stitution to demand better pay and improved working conditions and
exercised their newly won right to bargain collectively and to strike.
Radicalism showed in strikes at the Zonguldak coal mines in 1965
and at Istanbul glass factories in 1966, where rank and file workers re-
jected the compromises negotiated between the administration of the
SEEs and their own union leadership. A group of unions broke from
Türk-İş to form the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions,
(Devrimci İşçi Sendikarları Konfederasyonu, or DİSK) in 1967. This federa-
tion was anticapitalist and politically activist, encouraging street dem-
onstrations to achieve political and economic objectives. Its president
was Kemal Türkler, a founding member of the Turkish Workers’ Party.
Another factor contributing to social tensions was the growing eco-
nomic importance of women, in the professions as well as in the work-
ing class. The number of practicing women physicians tripled between
1953 and 1970, and the number of women lawyers quintupled. By
1973, 5 percent of all judges and 14.9 percent of lawyers were women.
Melâhat Ruacan became the first woman elected to the Supreme Court
of Appeals in 1954. The percentage of administrators in the state eco-
nomic enterprises who were women increased from 10 percent at the
time of Atatürk’s death in 1938 to 19 percent in 1970. By 1970, nearly
one-third of the administrators in the Ministry of Education were
women. Progressive laws passed in the early 1970s prevented women
from doing certain dangerous jobs and from working extra hours at
night and prohibited night work for six months after childbirth. Work-
place nurseries and child care facilities improved. Some in Turkish so-
ciety found this increased presence of women threatening, particularly
in times of difficult economic circumstances.
As the economic growth favored some segments of the population
and hit others hard, the Turkish voting public fragmented. The con-
stitution made room for small political parties, granting them propor-
tional representation in parliament. As a consequence, Turkish public
life came to be increasingly influenced by the activities of small ex-
tremist groups of both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
The leftist Turkish Workers’ Party and the rightist Republican Peas-
ants’ Nation Party both won parliamentary representation in the 1965
elections and exerted an influence on Turkish politics beyond their
numbers. Erbakan’s National Order Party appeared in 1970.
Beginning perhaps with the universities, Turkish society gradually
became polarized between leftists and rightists, and virtually no area
of Turkish culture escaped the pervasive politicization. The prevailing

milieu in Turkish universities encouraged the free exchange of ideas.
Students formed discussion groups and “idea clubs” on university
campuses with a fascinatingly diverse array of perspectives. Political
tracts were printed and distributed; world literary classics were trans-
lated, read, and discussed; and social agendas were proposed, ac-
cepted, changed, and abandoned in an atmosphere of openness and in
anticipation of the imminent radical transformation of Turkish society.
Certain newspapers were known as leftist papers and others as right-
ist, even among the national dailies. The very language used in print
was politicized. Leftists followed the lead of the Turkish Language So-
ciety in using neologisms, while rightists tried to retain Arabic and
Persian loan words. A person could be literally identified on the politi-
cal spectrum by the vocabulary he or she used in daily speech.
Even music became politicized. The annual Istanbul Festival of Arts
and Culture prominently featured Western classical music, including
the works of Turkish composers such as Cem Mansur, and was heav-
ily attended by leftist intellectuals and state officials. The right favored
Ottoman and Middle Eastern classical music, which it associated with
the Islamic heritage. Leftists popularized Turkish folk music and often
put to music the poetry of antiestablishment figures of the past, such
as Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth-century mystic. A figure such as Zeki
Müren was almost uniquely able to appeal across the spectrum or to
transcend politics altogether. Müren was a loyal establishment artist,
introduced on state radio in 1951, yet his genre was arabesque. Ara-
besque was linked to Egypt and the Arab world and cultural conserva-
tism. In Turkey, it often expressed a resigned long-suffering that was
the antithesis of Kemalist optimism. In that first performance, listen-
ers did not know whether he was male or female. Over his very long
career, his ambiguous sexuality became an aspect of his enormous
popularity, quite a feat in a culture that regarded homosexuality as
taboo. His striking stage persona featured heavy makeup, increasingly
flamboyant costumes, and an ability to connect emotionally with his
audience in the intimate setting of small nightclubs.
Extremists of both the left and the right appeared by the late 1960s.
Many trace the origins of the Turkish left to the declaration of princi-
ples published in the new socialist journal Yön and signed by 500 intel-
lectuals in December 1961. A speech by Mehmet Ali Aybar, chairman
of the Turkish Workers’ Party, at the beginning of the national election
campaign in 1965 stressed the themes of opposition to imperialism
and American military bases in Turkey and reminded voters of the
failure of the West to support Turkey’s side in the Cyprus conflict. The
Turkish Communist Party had little influence in Turkey, but one noto-
rious leftist revolutionary group, Dev Genç, or “Revolutionary Youth,”
advocated the violent overthrow of the Turkish state. It grew from ef-
forts to make national links among the “idea clubs” of university cam-
puses and give them Marxist leadership.
Similar circumstances shaped the Turkish right. In the atmosphere
of open political exchange on the university campuses, more virulent
forms of nationalism, anticommunism, and religious devotion emerged
in the late 1960s. The main figure on the fascist far right was Alparslan
Türkeş. Although Türkeş publicly defended the Kemalist character of
his philosophy of the “Nine Lights,” the real core of his ideology was
nationalism. For Türkeş, the rights of individuals and groups must be
subordinate to the nation, whose interests were guarded by an author-
itarian state and its charismatic, above-the-law leader. He advocated a
state-controlled, national socialist economy. “Anti-nation” elements—
especially ethnic minorities—must be suppressed. Beginning about
1968, Türkeş established a paramilitary commando organization called
the Gray Wolves within the party’s youth movement, arming them
and training them at secret camps for attacks against suspected leftists.
CIVIL UNREST AND THE 1971

“COUP BY MEMORANDUM”
Demonstrations by leftist and rightist groups turned more violent
in late 1967. On the left, Americans and American interests often be-
came the targets, because they represented Turkish subservience to in-
ternational capitalism and militarism in Turkish society. On the right,
Turkish leftists and outspoken secularists were the targets. Student
protesters accused Demirel and the Justice Party of being “Ameri-
can stooges.” Demirel, chaffing at the constitutional restrictions on
executive authority, announced a government and police crackdown
on “communists.” But more than anything else, the publication in
January 1966 of correspondence between American President Lyn-
don Johnson and then-Prime Minister İnönü over the Cyprus crisis
of 1964, in which Johnson declined to back Turkey in the event of a
Soviet attack, turned public opinion dramatically against the United
States.
The numbers of American military personnel and their families sta-
tioned in Turkey peaked in 1967 at about 24,000. Their presence was
felt especially in Ankara, İzmir, and Adana. The American military
held leases for more than 30 facilities scattered throughout Ankara, in-
cluding offices, apartments, warehouses, an exchange, and a hospital.
The headquarters of the United States Logistics Group (TUSLOG) oc-

cupied two 11-storied buildings in the main Kızılay section. On the
western edge of the city at Balgat, the U.S. military owned land on
which it built schools for military dependents. A network of more than
30 distinctly colored blue buses crisscrossed the city twice daily, carry-
ing about 2,000 students to classes. İzmir was similar, though the num-
bers were not as great. At Adana, the Americans occupied İncirlik, a
large airbase separated from the city by several miles. Since not all per-
sonnel could be housed on the base, a small quarter of Adana became
known as “little America” due to the heavy concentration of American
families living there. Besides these military personnel, smaller groups
of American Peace Corps volunteers and scholars also came to Turkey.
The first group of 39 Peace Corps volunteers arrived in 1962, and 100
more joined them a year later. These young men and women lived in
small towns and in villages scattered throughout Turkey. The Ameri-
can Research Institute in Turkey, established in 1964, operated small
libraries and hostels for visiting researchers in Ankara and Istanbul. A
small number of American university teachers came to Turkey annu-
ally through the Fulbright scholarship program.
Sporadic anti-American violence broke out. In November 1966, riot-
ers attacked and stoned the U.S. consulate, the office of the U.S. Infor-
mation Agency, and the Red Cross in Adana. In October 1967, Turkish
employees at İncirlik went on strike. Anti-American demonstrations
accompanied the U.S. Sixth Fleet when it anchored for shore leave in
Istanbul. The reading room of the United States Information Agency
in Ankara was bombed.
Politically motivated violence was not only, or even mainly, directed
at foreigners. In June 1968, students seized the administration build-
ings at Ankara University, demanding reform of the examination sys-
tem and the fee structure. The following May, the rector and 11 deans
resigned over the government’s failure to enact reforms. In August
1969, about 1,500 workers occupied the iron and steel works at Ereğli,
demanding higher wages; riot police called were unable to evict the
demonstrators, who were joined by 3,000 more workers. Demirel in-
tervened and brought the issue to negotiations. In September, airport
employees went on strike. Election Day fights were reported all over
the country in October 1969. Though its share of the popular vote de-
clined to 46.5 percent in the general elections of October 1969, Justice
maintained a shaky parliamentary majority. The CHP, in the throes of
its identity crisis, slipped to 27.4 percent of the popular vote. Six other
parties won representation in the lower chamber, none above 7 percent
of the popular vote.
When Demirel presented the budget three months later, party dis-
sidents joined the opposition to defeat the motion and force Demirel
to resign in February 1970. President Cevdet Sunay, who had suc-
ceeded General Gürsel in 1966, immediately asked him to form a new
government, but his position was obviously weak. Throughout 1970,
Demirel’s government was unable to accomplish much, with all its ef-
forts seemingly confounded by growing civil unrest. DİSK, the leftist
trade union federation, organized a general strike in the Istanbul-İzmit
region in spring 1970. The CHP and Justice traded accusations of re-
sponsibility for the unrest. In August 1970, ominous news of a shake
up leaked from the Turkish general staff. In December, rightist and
leftist students clashed at Ankara University, the headquarters of the
Turkish Labor Party were bombed, and students firebombed Demirel’s
car. (The prime minister was uninjured.) A meeting of political parties’
leaders, convened by President Sunay, produced no solutions. More
than 200 students were arrested after a five-hour gun battle at Hac-
ettepe University in Ankara in February 1970, and on March 4, four
American soldiers were kidnapped and held for ransom. When police
broke into a dormitory at Ankara University searching for the Ameri-
cans, a battle broke out in which two students died. The police did not
find the soldiers, who were later released unharmed.
Finally in March 1971, the chief of the general staff and the com-
manders of the army, navy, and air force sent Demirel an ultimatum
demanding “a strong and credible government” to “neutralize the cur-
rent anarchical situation” and “implement the reformist laws envis-
aged by the constitution.” Demirel had little choice but to resign. Thus
the Turkish military seized control of the state a second time in what
became known as the “coup by memorandum.”
RETURN TO CIVILIAN RULE AND THE

NATIONAL ELECTIONS OF 1973
The generals who brought down Demirel’s government in March
1971 did not have a clear program to lead the country out of its eco-
nomic difficulties, but rather acted to forestall another coup by junior
officers. They blamed the political parties for the crisis and claimed to
want a government to implement reforms according to the 1961 consti-
tution. They neither dismissed President Sunay nor prorogued parlia-
ment. What they really wanted was a freer hand to combat terrorism
and street violence. Using martial law, the military cracked down on vi-
olent groups. Thousands of people were arrested, including leaders of
the Turkish Workers’ Party, which was dissolved, and trade unions and
numerous university professors and writers, including Yaşar Kemal.

Erbakan’s National Order Party was closed. Several newspapers and
journals were closed, especially the publications of radical leftist and
rightist organizations, but also some of the mainstream press. Even
Cumhuriyet received a 10-day suspension. The feared National Intelli-
gence Organization (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, or MİT), which succeeded
the earlier NSO in a restructuring in 1963, employed repressive means,
including torture, to extract confessions from suspects. Although the
new government made no progress on socioeconomic reform and was
forced to resign, constitutional amendments scaling back civil liberties
did pass parliament. Universities and the broadcast media lost their
autonomy, and the autonomy of the Constitutional Court was limited.
Parliament now found the advice of the National Security Council
binding. A system of State Security Courts (Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemesi,
or DGMs) was introduced, which tried hundreds of cases of national
security during the next several years.
When elections were again held in October 1973, the CHP and Bül-
ent Ecevit, who succeeded İnönü as party chairman, were surprise
winners, but without a clear majority, taking 33.3 percent of the vote
and 185 seats in the lower chamber. Demirel’s Justice Party won 29.8
percent and 149 seats. Five other parties divided the remaining seats,
including the new National Salvation Party formed by Erbakan, the
Nationalist Action Party of Alparslan Türkeş, and the Turkish Work-
ers’ Party (one seat, on the strength of 1.1 percent of the vote). Ecevit
formed a coalition with Erbakan, who shared his distrust of foreign
capital and big business, although in other respects, the two men and
their parties had very little in common. The arrangement was the first
of several coalitions that governed Turkey with diminishing levels of
success in the decade of the 1970s. Though Ecevit sought chances to
break this pattern, he never escaped it. His first opportunity came in
the form of an international crisis over Cyprus.
THE CYPRUS CRISIS

The Republic of Cyprus was created on August 16, 1960 from a
compromise between the idea of union with Greece (enosis), favored
by most Greek Cypriots, and partition of the island, favored by the
Turkish Cypriots, who made up about 18 percent of the population.
Independence, proposed by the Archbishop Makarios II of Cyprus and
accepted at length by Britain, Greece, and Turkey, meant a defeat for
powerful local guerillas led by Gen. George Grivas, a veteran of the
1921 Anatolian campaign who had fought for enosis.
The constitution was complicated. The president was Greek and

the vice-president a Turk, each elected by their respective communi-
ties and each having veto power over legislation. The legislature was
70 percent Greek and 30 percent Turkish, and seven Greeks and three
Turks comprised the cabinet. The national civil service, the national
guard, gendarmerie, and police were to be 70 percent Greek and
30 percent Turkish. Each community also elected a communal cham-
ber of deputies to govern religious, educational, cultural, and personal
matters. Archbishop Makarios was elected the first president of Cy-
prus, and Fazıl Küçük the first vice-president. Great Britain, Greece,
and Turkey became international guarantors of the “independence,
territorial integrity and security” of the Republic of Cyprus, agreeing
“to cooperate to ensure that the provisions of the Constitution shall be
respected.”
In the first months of independence, conflicts arose between the
Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots over the Turkish right to civil
service posts, over the administration of a national income tax and the
funding of the communal chambers of deputies, and over the issue
of integrated units of the national army. A dispute over the national
budget and constitutional amendments proposed by President Maka-
rios degenerated into violence in December 1963 in Nicosia, resulting
in the division of the city by a “Green Line” between the Greek and
Turkish communities. When fighting spread to other cities, Turkey pre-
pared for military intervention to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority.
A cease-fire was arranged in March 1964, and a UN peacekeeping force
arrived. In May 1964 came the Johnson letter, the U.S. president inform-
ing İnönü that he could not promise American support if a Turkish in-
vasion of Cyprus prompted a Soviet attack on Turkey. Inter-communal
warfare broke out again in November 1967. Turkish Cypriots resented
their relative poverty and economic weakness and the discrimination
and harassment they experienced at the hands of the Greek Cypriot
population. To avert war between Greece and Turkey, the military
junta in Athens acceded to Turkish demands. General Grivas was per-
manently barred from the island, 10,000 Greek troops stationed on Cy-
prus were redeployed, and the Cypriot National Guard, virtually an
arm of the Greek army, was disbanded. After the 1967 conflict, Turkish
Cypriots established the Provisional Cyprus Turkish Administration.
Despite Turkey’s insistence that it merely facilitated more efficient ad-
ministration of the Turkish community, it had the semblance of a Turk-
ish Cypriot government.
During the spring of 1974, Turkey and Greece clashed over the issue
of Greece’s claims to oil rights in the Aegean. Crowds staged public
demonstrations in major Turkish cities, and the Greek armed forces

went on alert as NATO brought Ecevit and the Greek prime minister
together for talks in Brussels in late June. Simultaneously, the Ecevit
government was acting to fulfill a campaign promise, supported by
all the Turkish political parties, to resolve a dispute with the United
States over opium production. Thus, when on July 15 the Cypriot Na-
tional Guard overthrew Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, declared eno-
sis, and installed as president the pro-enosis guerilla Nikos Sampson,
the Ecevit government faced the crisis having just gone to the brink
of armed conflict with Greece over the Aegean, having just defied the
American government over opium, and in full awareness that since
the Johnson letter, it could not count on American support even in the
event of a Soviet response.
Ecevit nonetheless moved decisively. Turkish troops landed on the
beaches of northern Cyprus on July 20 and, in three days of fighting,
occupied about a third of the island. Cities along the Turkish Mediter-
ranean coast went under blackout in anticipation of possible retaliatory
Greek bombing raids, but the fear proved unfounded. The Greek mili-
tary junta in Athens, completely discredited, collapsed, handing power
to a civilian government under former President Konstantin Karaman-
lis. A cease-fire was called and negotiations began. When talks broke
down a month later, a second military campaign secured strategic points
in the eastern and western sections of the island, as the Turkish army
permanently occupied 38.5 percent of the territory of Cyprus. There,
the Turkish Cypriots organized a “Turkish Federated State of Cyprus,”
which in 1983 became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Only
Turkey recognized its legitimacy. The Turkish public responded enthu-
siastically. “August has once again proven to be a month of victory for
Turkishness,” gushed one columnist in Tercüman, alluding to Atatürk’s
defeat of the Greek army at Sakarya in August 1921.
Turkey paid a high price for its commitment to defend the Turk-
ish Cypriot minority. It forced an estimated 50 percent increase in the
defense budget and obligated Turkey to substantially assist the new
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The affair also damaged Tur-
key’s standing in the European Community and caused a serious rup-
ture in Turkish-American relations, leaving the country diplomatically
isolated. In February 1975, the U.S. Congress cut off American mili-
tary assistance to Turkey. In retaliation, the Turkish government closed
American military installations in Turkey, keeping only İncirlik open
and only for NATO purposes and placed restrictions on American use
of Turkish ports and on American flights over Turkish air space. Agree-
ments with Germany, France, and NATO partially replaced American
assistance, but the embargo contributed to Turkey’s grave economic

position in the late 1970s.
The embargo was eased slightly in October 1975, and in March 1976,
Turkey signed a new four-year defense agreement with the American
administration. The agreement languished without the approval of the
U.S. Congress, which found it impossible to overcome extremely nega-
tive public perceptions of Turkey, fed by the political efforts of power-
ful Greek-Americans and other intangible factors. A healthy Armenian
nationalism had emerged during the late 1960s in the United States,
bringing a wider awareness of the Young Turk ethnic cleansing cam-
paigns of World War I. Extremists of the Armenian Secret Army for the
Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) killed 30 people in attacks on Turkish
diplomats around the world, especially in the United States. It is dif-
ficult to overestimate the impact of Alan Parker’s film Midnight Express
(1978), which reminded American filmgoers of the narcotics contro-
versy of a few years before. The film, a sensationalized and grossly dis-
torted adaptation of the memoir of Billy Hayes, a young American who
had been jailed in Turkey for drug smuggling, received six Academy
Award nominations,. The American bases in Turkey remained closed
until July 1978. Only then was the ban on American aid finally lifted.
THE LATE 1970s: THE COLLAPSE

OF PUBLIC ORDER
Sensing an opportunity to get free of his party’s coalition with ideo-
logical rivals, Ecevit resigned at the height of his popularity in Septem-
ber 1974. This was a serious political miscalculation. He had expected
the move to lead to new elections, elections he thought the CHP could
win by riding the wave of the triumphant Cyprus campaign. Demirel,
however, worked carefully with the leaders of the other parties to pre-
vent this. Instead of new elections and a clean majority, Ecevit’s rash
move brought legislative stalemate. For the next six years, Turkey was
governed by a series of weak and unstable coalition governments.
Independent deputy Sadi Irmak formed a government in November
that lasted three months. In March 1975, Demirel established the first of
two “Nationalist Front” coalitions. Joining Justice were Erbakan’s Na-
tional Salvation Party, Türkeş’s MHP, and another small party; Ecevit
and the CHP formed the opposition. This government held together
for more than two years. When the nation went to the polls again in
June 1977, Ecevit and the CHP won, but fell some 20 seats short of a
majority in the lower chamber. Justice ran second, and no other party
reached 10 percent. Despite this, cooperation between Ecevit and
Demirel was impossible both for ideological and personal reasons,

and the political stalemate continued while each party convinced itself
that a real majority was just an election away. The small parties held
the balance of power, and Ecevit’s efforts to form a government failed
when his minority coalition could not win a vote of confidence.
Instead, Demirel formed the second “Nationalist Front” coalition,
this time with Erbakan and Türkeş as deputy prime ministers. This
coalition unraveled rather quickly. In January 1978, Ecevit pieced to-
gether a majority when his CHP was joined by the lone deputy of
the new Democrat Party, the Republican Reliance Party’s 2 deputies,
11 Justice Party dissidents, and some independents. This patchwork
government held for a remarkable 22 months, until the end of 1979.
Under the circumstances, none of these coalitions possessed the
strength to manage the country’s critical economic problems nor could
they control the increasing political violence. An initial period of eco-
nomic expansion had followed the military coup of 1971. Some large
enterprises, which because of success during the 1950s were poised
to take advantage of foreign capital, grew tremendously during the
1960s. Keen to maintain their position, 114 industrialists and business-
men, owners of some of the largest firms in Turkey, formed the Asso-
ciation of Turkish Industrialists (TÜSİAD) in 1971 to promote private
enterprise and to lobby the government for support. But problems left
over from the 1960s became more acute, when, beginning with the
Arab-Israeli War in the fall of 1973, the cost of the imports Turkey de-
pended on rose sharply due to the quadrupling of petroleum prices.
At the end of the 1970s, this consumed about two thirds of Turkey’s
foreign currency income. Remittances from Turkish workers abroad,
the country’s most important source of foreign exchange, peaked in
1974 and then declined as a result of the same events.
By 1978–1979, there were shortages of basic commodities: butter,
kerosene, gasoline, and sugar. Inflation and unemployment, under
control in the early 1970s, climbed steadily after 1977, and civil unrest
escalated. After the 1971 military coup, the harsh crackdown on leftists
by the military and security forces began a slow spiral of offense, retali-
ation, and retribution between radical leftists, rightists, and the police,
to which there seemed to be no resolution. An extremely negative de-
velopment was Demirel’s appointment of Türkeş as minister of state in
the two Nationalist Front coalitions. Türkeş filled the ministry with his
political clients, and the police and security forces became thoroughly
infiltrated by neo-fascists loyal to him. Their violent campaign against
leftists of all kinds contributed an incalculable amount to the collapse of
public order and brought about conditions of virtual civil war by 1980.
In 1977, the first May Day celebration since the 1920s, a demonstra-
tion in Istanbul by labor unions and leftist political parties turned into
a gun battle with the police in which 39 people died and more than 200
were wounded. Leftists blamed the killing on far-right elements in the
Istanbul police force and retaliated with a wave of bombings, killing
several people in attacks at Yeşilköy airport and Sirkeci railway sta-
tion. From this point, a state of virtual war existed in Istanbul between
DİSK, the Turkish Workers’ Party, and other powerful leftist groups,
on the one hand, and the Istanbul police force, on the other. The head
of the force was wounded by gunmen in March 1978, and the deputy
prosecutor, investigating an illegal strike, was killed. In October 1978,
four members of the Turkish Workers’ Party were murdered and two
others kidnapped and slain.
Periodic clashes between far-right Sunnite Muslim groups and Ale-
vis, who typically were affiliated with the political left, expressed the
same conflict. Twelve people died in violence between rightists and
Alevis in Sivas in September 1978. In December 1978, a terrible battle
broke out in the southeastern city of Kahramanmaraş, when Sunnite
hoodlums interrupted the Alevi funeral of two murdered vocational
teachers. In five days of mayhem, more than 100 people died and thou-
sands were wounded. Ecevit, never eager to use force, declared mar-
tial law, saying that the violence represented “a rebellion against the
Turkish state.”
The disorder and violence was most pronounced on university cam-
puses. In the middle of the academic year 1974–1975, fascist students
disrupted classes at Istanbul University, leading to demonstrations
and riots that claimed one student’s life. The following year, violent
protests forced the temporary closing of four universities in Ankara
and Istanbul. The battles began to move off campus as well. A number
of attacks and killings occurred at cafés, coffee shops, and other venues
frequented by students. In October 1978, the former rector of Istanbul
Technical University was murdered. And it was at Ankara University
in 1978 that a Kurdish student named Abdullah Öcalan formed the
Kurdish Workers’ Party.
The country was slipping towards anarchy. A professor at Istanbul
University was killed in December 1979. Later that month, four Ameri-
cans returning from a NATO facility were murdered by a leftist gue-
rilla force, and nine people died in demonstrations in Ankara. Public
May Day observances were banned, but demonstrations by organized
labor continued. More clashes between Sunnis and Alevis in Çorum
left 30 people dead. Abdi İpekçi, editor of the respected Istanbul daily
Milliyet, was murdered by the young Gray Wolf terrorist Mehmet Ali
Ağca. Three weeks later, leftists killed the owner of a right-wing paper
in retaliation. An official of Türkeş ’s MHP was murdered in İzmir in
April 1980; Gün Sazak, the Minister of Customs and Monopolies in
the second Nationalist Front coalition, was assassinated on May 27,
1980; on June 17, a former CHP deputy was killed in Nevşehir. On
July 19, 1980, former prime minister Nihat Erim was assassinated in
an Istanbul suburb. Three days later, strikes by hundreds of thousands
of workers followed the murder of Kemal Türkler, founder and former
president of the leftist labor federation DİSK.
By late summer 1980, the second republic had plainly failed. The
office of the presidency remained vacant for months, because when
President Fahri Korutürk’s term expired in February 1980, parliament
was unable to elect a successor. Demirel’s economic advisor Turgut
Özal presented an ambitious austerity plan suggested by the IMF, but
the divided legislature did not have the will to take it up, let alone
the consensus required to implement the reforms. Repeated warnings
sounded that Sunnite fundamentalists were preparing to take control
of the local government in Konya by force. Kurdish separatists had
begun a war of liberation in the southeastern provinces. Sunnites and
Alevis and leftists and rightists continued their murderous confronta-
tions. The government announced that more than 2,500 persons had
died in the two-year period prior to January 1980 and at least that
many more in the first nine months of 1980.
The constitution of 1961 had restructured Turkish government and
society in important ways, but responsibility for fleshing out the de-
tails of the new structure and for implementation was given to parlia-
ment. Fulfillment of the tremendous promise for Turkish society of the
personal and political liberties outlined in the constitution depended
on fundamental economic and social reforms, including land reform,
tax reform, and reform of the system of state economic enterprises. A
major cause of the political and social degeneration of the 1960s and
chaos and anarchy of the late 1970s was the failure to carry through
these reforms. It left the Turkish economy incapable of surmounting
the enormous difficulties brought on by the world petroleum crisis
after 1973 and unable to formulate adequate revisions of the prevail-
ing political culture for the needs of an open society. Deep fissures
opened in Turkish society between those who had benefited from the
rapid and haphazard social and economic development since 1945
and those who found themselves victimized by the inflation, unem-
ployment, and urban migration it engendered; and between those who
had benefited from political liberalization and multiparty democracy
through their links of patronage with powerful officials and those who
still lived with the residue of the single-party era with its authoritarian
model of leadership, the equation of dissent with disloyalty, and party
control of state offices. Turkey’s participation in the Cold War contrib-
uted to the polarization of society, masked the sources of its problems,
and made it impossible to achieve the political consensus necessary to
adopt reforms. In the end, the nation’s armed forces, which parliament
had failed to fully subordinate to civilian rule, put an end to the second
republic.
NOTES
1. Aziz Nesin, Istanbul Boy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1977),
pp. 112–115.
2. Şükran Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 344–348.
3. M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
10
The Military Republic,
1980–1993
In the 1982 film Yol, five prisoners receive permission to visit their
families on a seven-day pass. The film follows the five men on their
road home, detailing in the experience of each of them Yılmaz Güney’s
vision of Turkish life at the beginning of the 1980s. When Yol won the
Cannes film festival award in 1982, the film and its creator gained
notoriety in Europe. The film was made under conditions of martial
law and was actually banned (with all Güney’s films) by the military
rulers in Turkey. Güney, who was part-Kurdish and a Marxist, had
served two prison terms in the 1960s. He wrote Yol while serving a
third, not for political charges, but for killing a judge in a restaurant
brawl. Güney enjoyed comparative personal freedom in prison and
continued scripting films, including Yol, until the military coup of Sep-
tember 12, 1980. He smuggled directions for filming out to Şerif Gören,
who directed the project. Later, Güney escaped from prison while on a
leave, slipping out of Turkey to France and then to Switzerland, where
he oversaw the final editing of Yol.
Güney’s almost unrelievedly grim vision takes in the full sweep of
contemporary Turkey, moving from the prison island of İmrali, in the
Marmara Sea in the country’s far west, to the little town of Sancak,
in the mountains southwest of Erzurum, in eastern Anatolia. Though
the five characters are on leave, they never seem to break free of their
prisons, sometimes socially imposed and sometimes of their own mak-
ing. The first loses his identity papers and spends the whole leave in
police detention; the second escapes across the Syrian border to join
the Kurdish resistance; the third sets the grounds for his authoritarian
marriage; the fourth torments his wife to death in vengeance for her
adultery; and the fifth dies with his wife in an honor killing. Martial
law forms part of the backdrop against which the prisoners’ stories
are told, but the men are entangled in webs of kinship relations, social
expectations and obligations, personal failings, and pure contingency.
Islam too forms part of the prisoners’ lives, but is seen neither as es-
pecially a problem nor as a solution. The film rather, like Güney’s ear-
lier work, explored universally human themes, especially the ultimate
weakness of the individual to escape the prisons of social convention
and tradition. Gender relations provide especially sensitive grounds,
as in scene after scene, the film bares the contradictions of modernity
in Turkey. In one scene, a young bride-to-be unselfconsciously admires
her husband’s eloquence as he berates her, standing on a Gaziantep
street corner in front of an equestrian sculpture of Atatürk. “Where
did you learn to talk like that?” she asks wonderingly. “In prison,” he
responds ironically. The film and Güney’s career provide very power-
ful examples of the tensions and the enduring issues in Turkish life as
the military once again took power in Turkey at the beginning of the
decade of the 1980s.
THE MILITARY COUP OF SEPTEMBER 12, 1980

During the early hours of Friday morning, September 12, 1980,
tanks rolled through the streets of Ankara, Istanbul, and other major
Turkish cities. The leaders of the major political parties, including
Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel, Bülent Ecevit, and Necmettin
Erbakan, were arrested and placed in protective custody. Alparslan
Türkeş, who nearly 20 years earlier had broken the news of the first
military coup to the nation in a radio announcement, turned him-
self in two days later. Parliament was dissolved and about 100 of its
members arrested. The constitution was suspended and martial law
imposed.
For the third time in 20 years, the Turkish military had seized di-
rect control of the state. The generals had planned the coup meticu-
lously. Two incidents on the same day in early September may have
The Military Republic, 1980–1993 161
influenced its precise timing. One was the forced resignation of the
foreign minister, which dashed Demirel’s hopes of an early national
election that might give him a strong majority in parliament. The other
was a mass demonstration in Konya, where the crowd called for Is-
lamic law and refused to sing the national anthem.
In his first radio broadcast to the nation, at 4:30 a.m., General Kenan
Evren, chief of the general staff and leader of the coup, reviewed the
political, economic, and social chaos in which the country found it-
self. His remarks were translated and reported in The New York Times
the next day. Bombings, assassinations, and street battles between
leftists and rightists had taken 5,241 lives since the beginning of the
year (more than double the number admitted by the Demirel gov-
ernment). Evren compared this to the Turkish War of Independence
(1919–1923), in which only 5,713 had died. The economy was in tat-
ters and the political system had practically ceased to function. Infla-
tion was at 130 percent and the unemployment rate 20 percent. The
country still did not have even have a president, because parliament
was unable to elect one. Paralysis threatened the very existence of
the country.
General Evren stressed that the military would return the nation to
civilian rule, but he was determined that it would not do so hastily.
Turkey’s foreign policy and economic policy would remain unchanged,
but Evren wanted a fundamental revision of Turkey’s political order.
In the first week after the coup, all political parties were closed, po-
litical activity forbidden, and the number of arrests reached several
thousand. Turkey was barred from the Council of Europe, and the Eu-
ropean Community suspended aid. NATO urged a timely return to
democracy. The coup leaders—the commanders of the armed forces—
formed the five-member National Security Council, with General
Evren as head of state, leading a 27-member cabinet composed mostly
of retired officers and state bureaucrats. Martial law commanders in
the provinces had broad administrative authority over public affairs,
including education, the press, and economic activities. In October, the
generals announced a seven-point provisional constitution giving
themselves unlimited power indefinitely. Where it did not contradict
these points, the 1961 constitution would remain in effect until a new
constitution could be written.
The reference to the Turkish War of Independence in General Evren’s
initial radio address hinted at one significant theme of this period of
military rule. The generals considered the country to have passed
through a national crisis comparable to the violent years of the War of
Independence. Kemalism had gradually been forgotten, the country
left leaderless. September 12 was to be a point of new beginnings. The

excesses of the past few years would be corrected, a new constitution
would be written, and the junta would enforce a new commitment to
Kemalism and patriotism. While the top military leadership reached
decisions by consensus, the generals deemed it important to project an
image of strong, personal leadership. General Evren’s public promi-
nence deliberately communicated this impression of an Atatürk-like
military strongman.
The generals seemed to want to reset the clock. With all political
activities banned, the leaders of the old political parties were forbid-
den to speak about politics—past, present, or future. The old political
parties were permanently dissolved and outlawed, and their archives
of the past 30 years seized—these records subsequently disappeared.
More than 700 former members of parliament and party leaders were
forbidden from participation in politics for 10 years. The regime
wanted to create a new political order. Of the former politicians, Ecevit
and Erbakan were the most insistent in defying the muzzle. Erbakan
was tried for remarks advocating an Islamic state in public speeches.
Ecevit, who returned to his original career in journalism, published a
magazine of public affairs. He was arrested more than once and even-
tually served a four-month jail term for statements critical of the mili-
tary regime.
The military regime exhibited a concern for historical interpretation
and for historical memory reminiscent of the early republican years.
Beginning in May 1981, the country celebrated the “Year of Atatürk,”
in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. A new Atatürk
cultural center was built on Taksim Square in Istanbul, academic con-
ferences were sponsored, and commemorative volumes of books
published. Numerous municipal parks, schools, and even a univer-
sity received the name “100th Anniversary.” Evren’s face alongside
Atatürk’s on banners at parades and public ceremonies linked Evren to
the national hero and connected the new military regime to the era of
the founders of the republic. The liberal 1961 constitution, which had
replaced the republic’s first constitution, was blamed for much of the
chaos of the late 1970s, the fragmentation of political parties, and the
polarization of parliament, the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities.
The army abolished Freedom and Constitution Day (May 27), an an-
nual holiday commemorating the 1960 coup.
The only person from the old regime kept on by the generals in the
cabinet formed after the coup was Turgut Özal. Özal had been the ar-
chitect of the economic austerity program announced by the Demirel
government in January 1980, as Demirel’s undersecretary and head
of the State Planning Organization. As Turkey’s principal representa-

tive in negotiations with the IMF, the World Bank, and the European
Community, Özal’s policy aimed to make Turkey competitive in world
markets by developing sectors that might be prominent exporters.
Prior to the coup, lack of a stable consensus among the major political
parties had impeded Turkey’s austerity program. The military cabinet
pledged to implement these austerity measures, naming Özal minister
for economic affairs and deputy prime minister. In this way, Turkey
under military rule began a transition that other states of east cen-
tral Europe would also face in the 1980s—Poland, Hungary, Czecho-
slovakia, and later other Eastern Bloc countries—a transition from a
centrally planned economy to one open to integration with world cap-
italist markets. Within three weeks after the coup, the IMF signaled its
support by releasing $92 million in new credits, and the United States
permitted Turkey to reschedule $350 million in debts. By the end of
January 1981, Özal had renegotiated Turkish debts totaling more than
$3 billion.
TOWARD A NEW POLITICAL ORDER

Warnings about separatist forces threatening the country’s integrity
consciously invoked historical memory. Alluding to Atatürk’s famous
“Address to Turkish Youth” that every child memorized, General
Evren spoke of enemies within and enemies without, implicitly calling
citizens to the duty of defending the nation. Some expressed a sense of
relief, expecting that near-civil war conditions Turkey had witnessed
in the late 1970s would be brought under control. This was indeed the
army regime’s top priority. Imposing a strict curfew, the army swept
the country, arresting thousands of people with suspected ties to ter-
rorist organizations. The number of arrests surpassed 100,000 in the
first eight months of military rule. The arrests went beyond suspected
terrorists to intellectuals and artists and many considered to be “so-
cial deviants.” Even Zeki Müren was silenced, banned from radio, and
forbidden to perform. Undaunted, he recorded his most influential
album, Kahır Mektubu (Letter of Grief), the next year. Another banned
singer was the transgender Bülent Ersoy, who had sex reassignment
surgery and sought legal recognition as a woman. Denied, she spent
much of the next decade working in Germany.
Spectacular acts of terrorism sometimes still made the headlines of
Turkish newspapers, as when the deputy chief of police was ambushed
by leftist gunmen in an Istanbul suburb in February 1981. Leftists also
targeted American military personnel stationed in Turkey. Armenian
terrorists of ASALA attacked targets in Turkey and killed more than

a dozen Turkish diplomats in Europe and the United States between
1981 and 1983. Overall, however, acts of political violence declined
dramatically in the first months after the coup. A general amnesty was
offered to all who voluntarily surrendered their weapons; those who
refused faced a stiff 30-year prison sentence for possession of an un-
registered weapon.
Martial law authorities attempted to be evenhanded, arresting right-
ist as well as leftist gang members. The leftist labor federation DİSK
and rightist labor federation MİSK were disbanded. In January 1981,
the army declared victory over Dev Sol, the revolutionary leftist organ-
ization. Hundreds of members of the right-wing MHP and the Islamist
MSP were arrested with their leaders, Türkeş and Erbakan. Kurdish
nationalist groups also were targeted. Open expression of Islamic po-
litical activism was suppressed. Several newspapers were closed at one
time or another for publishing articles critical of the regime, including
the respected national daily Hürriyet and the venerable old Cumhuriyet.
Prominent public trials occupied the national attention for months. By
early 1983, about 2,000 prisoners had been executed or faced the death
penalty. The trial of Mehmet Ali Ağca, who hadescaped the prison
where he was being held for the murder of Abdi İpekçi and then tried
to kill Pope John Paul II in Rome in March 1981, revealed the extent
of interactions between some extremist groups of the Turkish left and
right and organized crime both in Turkey and abroad. Ağca had once
been a member of the Gray Wolves.
The balance fell more heavily, however, against the Turkish left. The
right—secular, religious, and nationalist—survived this era in com-
parative strength to exercise a tremendous influence on Turkish poli-
tics for decades to come. What legitimate leftist movement existed in
Turkey before 1980 was completely demoralized by the army takeover
and never recovered, discredited by its association with labor and with
the Kurdish cause. The army began a crackdown on Kurdish resistance
that escalated into war by 1983. Striking workers were ordered back to
work and all union activity was forbidden. The protectionist economic
policy favored by the left against predatory multinational corporate
capitalism appeared increasingly obsolete in the 1980s. Turkish uni-
versities were soon “depoliticized” by being placed under the super-
vision of a newly created Higher Education Council (Yüksek Öğretim
Kurulu, or YÖK), and faculty members could no longer join political
parties. The military government dismissed hundreds of university
faculty in two purges aimed at the political left and took direct control
of appointing university rectors and deans. Meanwhile, the number
of existing universities was expanded from 19 to 29 in the decade of

1980s, and the right of university admission was widened, effectively
diluting the power of the old university faculties and the traditional
elite classes, whose children filled the student bodies.
After about a year, the generals named a consultative assembly of
160 members to draft a new constitution. Forty members of the con-
sultative assembly were appointed directly by the National Security
Council, and the rest were named by provincial martial law governors.
The consultative assembly presented a draft constitution in the early
fall of 1982. The first fundamental aim and duty of the state was “to
safeguard the independence and integrity of the Turkish Nation, the in-
divisibility of the country, the republic and democracy.” It emphasized
that “The Turkish state is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish.”
The most significant structural revisions were a strengthened presi-
dency and a formalized role for the military leadership. In contrast
to the 1961 constitution’s figurehead president, the new constitution
made the president guardian of the state, serving a single seven-year
term with potentially wide powers. He was charged with ensuring
“the implementation of the constitution and the steady and harmoni-
ous functioning of the state organs.” He appointed the Constitutional
Court, the military Court of Cassation, the Supreme Council of Judges
and Prosecutors, and the High Court of Appeals. He chaired the Na-
tional Security Council, which was made a permanent body with the
right to submit its views on state security to the Council of Ministers.
The Council of Ministers was required to give its views priority.
The new constitution made parliament once again a unicameral
legislature. It strengthened the cabinet over the parliament, giving
the cabinet stronger latitude in making laws by executive order, and
strengthened the prime minister as regards the other ministers. The
prime minister could fire a minister without necessitating the resigna-
tion of the entire cabinet, and the prime minister was given a new dis-
cretionary fund, outside of the parliamentary budgetary process. The
press and labor unions were put under restrictions. Unions were strictly
depoliticized, and State Security Courts would have the power to ad-
judicate strikes, lockouts, and collective bargaining disputes. The new
constitution stated that the economy of Turkey was based on free enter-
prise, with the role of the state in the economy limited to supervision—
the government lost its mandate to restrict private enterprise in the
public interest.
Voters approved the new constitution on November 7, 1982, in a
national referendum, by a majority of 91 percent. By a “temporary ar-
ticle” appended by the NSC to the draft constitution, General Evren
became president of the republic for a seven-year term. After the ref-
erendum, general elections were scheduled for November 1983. The
former political parties were officially dissolved, close to 700 former
parliamentarians and party activists were banned from the elections,
and no politicians from the pre-coup period would be permitted to
participate. Several newspapers were shut down for short periods of
time for failing to observe the severe restrictions on political articles.
In the spring of 1983, the NSC permitted the formation of new po-
litical parties. Hoping to encourage the creation of parties with broad
popular appeal, the new election law required that a party receive at
least 10 percent of the national vote in order to win seats in parliament.
When some new parties appeared to be reincarnations of the old par-
ties or when they appeared to be directed from behind the scenes by
former party leaders, they were closed. Thus, the Great Turkey Party
was condemned as being nothing but the Justice Party resurrected, and
Süleyman Demirel was given three months’ house arrest. Likewise,
the founders of the new Social Democratic Party (SODEP), including
Professor Erdal İnönü, son of İsmet İnönü and a newcomer to political
life, were barred from the elections and their party closed. Ironically,
had the military authorities used their power to limit the election to a
contest between these two parties, they might have achieved their ob-
jective of a stable two-party system. These two new parties, Demirel’s
broadly right-of-center and İnönü’s broadly left-of-center, summa-
rized the views of the great majority of the Turkish electorate since the
late 1940s. But under Evren’s influence, the NSC adamantly opposed
allowing former politicians any opportunity to recreate the dysfunc-
tional political atmosphere of the late 1970s.
Eventually, three political parties received approval. One was the
Nationalist Democracy Party, led by retired General Turgut Sunalp;
the second was the Populist Party headed by Necdet Calp, a former
private secretary of İsmet İnönü; and the third was the Motherland
Party, formed by Turgut Özal, who had left the cabinet in July 1982,
even before public release of the draft constitution, over a bank crisis—
an early sign that not all was well with the Turkish economic recov-
ery. Taking advantage of the average Turkish citizen’s desperation to
overcome the destructive inflation, brokerage firms sold junk bonds
and used deregulation of the banking industry to offer extremely high
rates of interest on bank deposits. Hundreds of brokerage firms went
bankrupt during the first half of 1982, when the government imposed
restrictions on the industry and worried consumers caused a bank run.
The failure of one brokerage firm, popularly known as Banker Kastelli,
reflected negatively on Özal, and he and two other cabinet ministers
resigned. Özal bounced back, however, filing an application to form a

political party as soon as it was permissible in the spring of 1983.
President Evren did little to hide his annoyance with Özal, whose
ambition he evidently had not anticipated. The Motherland Party
clearly could not be said to continue a pre-coup political party, and the
generals themselves had brought Özal into their cabinet, so the new
party would have to be allowed to enter the elections. Evren’s obvious
dislike for the Motherland Party made it an early favorite with voters,
who were so tired of military rule they quickly forgave the Banker Kas-
telli scandal. Evren’s stated preference for Sunalp’s NDP doomed it to
a last-place finish. When the results were tallied, Özal’s Motherland
Party had won 45 percent of the vote and an absolute majority in the
first post-coup parliament.
THE ÖZAL YEARS: ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION

From the elections of 1983 until his death 10 years later, Turgut Özal
dominated Turkish political life. Born in Malatya, Özal was an engi-
neer by training and had studied economics in the United States. A
protégé of Demirel, he had served as head of state planning and also
held positions in academe, in industry, and at the World Bank. After an
unsuccessful parliamentary campaign, he was back at Demirel’s side
as his primary advisor before the 1980 coup. Özal’s decision to create a
new political party in 1983 had the effect of splitting the Turkish right,
arguably the largest voting bloc, between those who followed him and
those who, either out of old loyalties or because they resented Özal’s
cooperation with the military authorities, refused to support him and
instead looked forward to Demirel’s return.
After his electoral victory, Özal pursued his program of liberalizing
the Turkish economy. His fundamental aim was to shift from protect-
ing national industry and limiting imports to instead encourage ex-
ports and force Turkish products into a competitive position on the
world market. His tactics did not change much throughout the period:
rapid devaluation of the Turkish lira to make Turkish goods more
competitive; high interest rates to combat inflation by discouraging
consumer demand; gradual privatization of inefficient state economic
enterprises; wage controls, price increases, and an end to state indus-
trial subsidies. In the mid-1980s, these policies showed promising signs
of success. The economy grew steadily before leveling off. Exports ex-
panded dramatically, especially to countries of the Middle East, but
also to the European Community. Whereas before the coup, 60 per-
cent of Turkish exports were agricultural products, by 1988, 80 percent
came from industry, textiles leading the way. The government invested
in large-scale infrastructure projects, including the second Bosphorus
bridge in Istanbul completed in 1987, petroleum excavation in the Ae-
gean, and the Southeast Anatolia project, a massive network of dams
and hydroelectric plants on the upper Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
The annual inflation rate hovered around 40 percent—still worrisome,
but not as high as it had been during the late 1970s.
In other areas, however, progress was incomplete. The privatization
program proceeded only very slowly. Although the government had
success in breaking up state monopolies, such as tobacco, the state con-
tinued to take the largest role in expanding the economy, and it seemed
impossible to really curtail the size of the bureaucracy. The state still
employed 30 percent of all nonagrarian workers in the late 1980s. Pub-
lic sector borrowing continued to rise, with the result that interest pay-
ments on the public debt tripled as a percentage of GNP between 1984
and 1988. This unstable growth pattern contributed to notable social
trends in the 1980s. While the population of Turkey grew by more than
a quarter during the decade, in all of the major cities, it was higher and
in some far higher. Istanbul, a city of about 2.8 million in 1980, grew to
more than 6.6 million in the 1990 census, and the population of İzmir
doubled. Because new housing construction could not keep up with
the human migrations, vast squatter settlements ringed the main cit-
ies, straining the urban infrastructure. The positive results of economic
liberalization came to a few of the largest conglomerates, like the Koç,
Sabancı, and Eczacıbaşı groups, all big, diversified holding companies.
Some of the biggest state economic enterprises, themselves huge con-
glomerates, also fared well—the five largest state economic enterprises
were still bigger than even the biggest private holding company at the
end of the 1980s. Small business felt the benefits of liberalization much
more slowly, and the gap between the richest and the poorest in Tur-
key grew steadily. In the major cities, the contrast between the conspic-
uous consumption of the rich in their glass office high-rises, suburban
single-family dwellings, and their expensive, imported automobiles
and the poor, whose cement block and plaster dwellings with tin roofs
stood sometimes just a few blocks away, were reminiscent of the man-
sion children and street kids in Aziz Nesin’s short stories.
The mixed results of the economic transition do not fully explain the
disappointing rejection of Turkey’s formal application for full mem-
bership in the European Economic Community, which Özal champi-
oned. For all his determined pursuit of liberalization, Özal’s claim in
December 1985 that Turkey was “already a full democracy” was wish-
ful thinking for someone who had risen to power under military rule.
Fifty of Turkey’s 67 provinces were free of martial law by then, but

Istanbul was not until late in 1988, and eight southeastern provinces
remained under a state of emergency throughout Özal’s term as prime
minister. A series of “antiterrorism” laws remained in place through-
out the country. The EC continued to point to this as the basic problem
holding up a positive decision for Turkey.
The issue pointed to a paradox of Özal’s leadership: Economic liber-
alization did not necessarily bring with it political liberalization. While
Özal introduced many new faces to political life in Turkey, he seemed
reluctant to completely normalize political life, to permit old politi-
cal rivals to return, and seemed unable to exert political control of the
military. Much discussion concerned the status of banned politicians
in the 1984 local elections. Süleyman Demirel reputedly ran the new
True Path Party behind the scenes; Bülent Ecevit’s wife registered the
Democratic Left Party; and Necmettin Erbakan was involved in the
Welfare Party. After a nationwide referendum approved their return,
Özal called early general elections for November 1987. Özal’s Moth-
erland Party won with just over 36 percent, but taking advantage of
revised election laws, this translated to an absolute majority in parlia-
ment, 292 of the 450 seats. Erdal İnönü’s Social Democratic Populist
Party finished second and Demirel’s True Path Party third to make up
the opposition. Neither Ecevit’s nor Erbakan’s parties, nor any other,
managed to climb over the 10 threshold.
As Prime Minister Özal skillfully built and managed client relation-
ships, he created a reputation as a master of the tradition of political
patronage so crucial to the operation of Turkish politics. He manipu-
lated the new discretionary fund of the prime minister’s office into a
major budget item, unregulated by parliament. This fund, divided into
more than a hundred separate expenditure items paid for by various
kinds of special taxes, absorbed more than 40 percent of the budget by
1987. Özal’s brothers Korkut and Yusuf, his wife Semra, and his son
Ahmet became close advisors. Yusuf was made economy minister, and
a nephew served as defense minister for several months. Semra Özal
served as provincial chair of the Istanbul branch of the Motherland
Party.
But resentment of Özal went deeper than this. An important dimen-
sion of Özal’s success was his encouragement of an increased role for
Islam in public life. Özal had run unsuccessfully for parliament on the
slate of Erbakan’s National Salvation Party in 1977, and his brother Kor-
kut was also an Erbakan client. The family had ties to the Nakshibendi
Sufi order. Though he had distanced himself from religious fanatics by
such symbolic actions as holding hands with his wife in public, Özal
believed that the exclusion of Islam, the source of the belief system and
the values of most Turkish citizens, from Turkish politics was increasingly
awkward and artificial. Motherland leaders and cabinet members prom-
inently attended mosque worship and observed religious rites and holy
days. “Restrictions on freedom of conscience breed fanaticism,” he said,
“not the other way around.” Özal’s government provided for religious
instruction in public school classrooms beginning in 1984 and oversaw
a huge increase in the number of İmam-Hatip schools, religious second-
ary academies organized ostensibly for the training of mosque leaders,
during the 1980s. Graduates were now permitted to enter universities.
Politically active fundamentalists posed a constitutional challenge
and a profound dilemma: Was Turkey a secular state or was it a demo-
cratic republic? Nothing seemed to focus the issues more sharply than
the headscarf controversy. For advocates of the headscarf (called türban
in Turkish), the issue was one of civil liberties—in a modern democracy,
the individual ought to be free to wear any clothing, within the limits of
public decency. Since the Turkish constitution guaranteed freedom of re-
ligion, laws forbidding the wearing of headscarves violated the Turkish
citizens’ civil liberties. For opponents, however, the headscarf referenced
the veil that Atatürk had made the most famous symbol of the Islamic
order. Wearing it in state buildings amounted to a political challenge to
the Turkish state, whose secularism was guaranteed by the constitution.
A new law, passed by the Özal government, to allow headscarves in
university classrooms was opposed by President Evren himself, who,
in March 1989, petitioned the constitutional court for repeal. Thousands
of university students demonstrated as the issue went into litigation. It
was banned and then permitted again by an act of parliament.
That university campuses were the battlegrounds for the headscarf
wars points to the wider social ramifications of Özal’s political and
economic program. Industrialization had raised the prestige of engi-
neering, scientific, and technical fields. Demirel, Erbakan, and Özal
were all engineering graduates. The open business climate of the
post-coup years witnessed the emergence of a new class of wealthy
entrepreneurs, while broadened educational opportunities in the new
universities assisted the rise of a more diverse professional class. The
new technocrats and businessmen were coming from outside the tradi-
tional classes of republican elites. They were personally religious and
conservative and willing to express this openly. Mass migrations from
the countryside, meanwhile, swelled the biggest cities with hundreds
of thousands of conservative villagers turned urban laborers. Some of
them were gaining political consciousness, and they too responded
positively to political ideas articulated in a religious idiom.
There was little chance of a movement for an Islamic state gaining

traction in Turkey in the 1980s. Islamic revolutionaries occasionally
staged dramatic acts of violence. Respected Cumhuriyet columnist Uğur
Mumcu was killed by a car bomb in January 1993, and later that year,
rioters in Sivas burned down the hotel where Aziz Nesin was staying,
killing 40 people, though Nesin escaped. (Nesin had translated parts
of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses into Turkish.) Yet Islamic radicals
made up only a small fraction of cases before the State Security Courts,
and a 1986 poll found that only about 7 percent of Turks favored the
establishment of a political and legal order based on sharia, Islamic law.
Electoral returns gave Erbakan’s Welfare Party no more than 10 percent
of the popular vote nationally. Sometimes, the specter of an Iranian-
style Islamic revolution was raised, but Turkey was not Iran. In Turkey,
there existed neither a Shah—the immoral target that might galvanize a
national Islamic movement—nor a Khomeini, a charismatic leader who
might direct one. Even at their most repressive, the Turkish police and
army were not SAVAK, the former Shah’s secret police. Most signifi-
cantly, Turkey’s conservative and religious citizens had all grown up in
a secular, democratic tradition and accepted its fundamental premises.
Turkey’s Islamic movement was a democratic movement, commit-
ted to and deriving its strength from the democratic tradition of the
republic. As there had always been a class dimension to the Kemalist
revolution, so there was an unmistakable class element in the concern
about fundamentalism. Kemalism was the ideology and the way of
life of an educated elite, who shared a worldview, a set of common
assumptions about what was valuable in life. These were the people
who had gone to secondary schools and perhaps universities and who
filled posts in government offices, the military officer corps, school fac-
ulties, and who had always believed that they knew what was best for
Turkey. Access to these groups spread only slowly to other sectors of
the Turkish population. During the 1980s, the Motherland Party in-
troduced new groups of people into the patronage system, including
scientists and technicians, newly successful businessmen and profes-
sionals, with whom the traditional privileges of patronage had to be
shared. Secularists detected a different ethos in these new conserva-
tives, not hearing them speak the same political language or seeing in
them the same commitment to Kemalist secularism.
PRESIDENT ÖZAL
In the March 1989 local elections, the Motherland Party lost control
of several large cities and polled only 22 percent of the vote, behind
both the Social Democrats and True Path. Accumulating allegations

of corruption and scandal, with ongoing inflation, which surpassed
80 percent for 1988, eroded Özal’s support. Several Motherland depu-
ties deserted, but Özal refused to resign or call general elections. In-
stead, he ran for president. On the expiration of Gen. Evren’s term,
parliament elected him the eighth president of the Republic of Turkey.
Özal took office in the tumult of October 1989, just days before the
dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and had resided in the president’s
mansion less than a year when, in August 1990, Iraq invaded Ku-
wait. Özal firmly directed a pro-American foreign policy and used
his position to redefine Turkey’s role in regional and world politics,
believing that long-term solutions to Turkey’s fundamental problems
lay in close cooperation with the United States and full membership
in the European Community. He used his trips to America for medi-
cal care to form a cordial relationship with President George Bush.
He met with American officials and appeared regularly on CNN and
American network newscasts, laying out Turkey’s perspective while
communicating staunch loyalty to the Atlantic alliance and the anti-
Iraq coalition. President Bush reciprocated with a visit to Turkey in
July 1991.
Initially, Özal’s efforts paid off. In return for use of İncirlik Air Base
and joining the embargo of Iraqi oil, Turkey got increased American
imports of Turkish products and aid from the Arab Gulf states to offset
Turkey’s lost pipeline revenue. After the Gulf War, however, Turkey
faced a complicated relationship with Iraq and with the Kurds. The
Baath regime of Saddam Hussein was left intact. The “No Fly Zone”
created in Kurdish northern Iraq under American protection offered a
model for potential Kurdish autonomy there that undermined every-
thing the Turkish army had fought for since the early 1980s.
As president, Özal, stating that he himself was part Kurdish, had
sought a nonmilitary resolution of the Kurdish conflict through greater
cultural freedom for Kurds. Circumstances seemed propitious for
such a political solution. Even as Turkish campaigns against Kurdish
separatists in the southeast continued, at Özal’s direction, the cabinet
repealed the 1983 law forbidding use of languages other than Turk-
ish. President Bush paid a state visit to Ankara, and two prominent
Iraqi Kurdish leaders met with Turkish Foreign Ministry officials and
were hosted by Özal at the presidential palace. Nearly one-fourth of
the Social Democrats’ parliamentary bloc, junior partners in the coali-
tion government that took power after the 1989 general elections, were
members of a small Kurdish party, itself barred from the election on a
technicality.
The problem, however, was that Turkey’s civilian politicians had not
succeeded in gaining control of the Turkish military’s actions in the
southeast since the 1980 coup. Through the mechanism of the National
Security Council, the generals intimidated Turkish politicians. Özal
was no exception, nor was his successor as the Motherland Party’s
chair, Mesut Yılmaz. At Nowruz (Kurdish New Year) in March 1992,
as Süleyman Demirel acknowledged publicly the reality of Kurdish
ethnicity in Turkey, more than 90 people were killed by Turkish secu-
rity forces. Meanwhile, the number of “unsolved” murders in Kurdish
areas climbed. Some of the clandestine paramilitary groups responsi-
ble for these killings probably operated independently, but evidence
mounted that many were funded by the Turkish military.
Far from permitting a political solution to the Kurdish rebellion,
Turkey’s generals escalated the conflict after the Gulf War, pouring
nearly 250,000 troops into the region. Their tactics wiped out some
2,000 villages, displaced an estimated 2 million people, and resulted
in more than 20,000 Turkish casualties. Kurdish refugees filled major
Turkish cities, especially Diyarbakır, Adana, Mersin, İzmir, and Istan-
bul. The Turkish army crossed the Iraqi border a number of times and
staged a massive invasion of Iraq in October 1992 in an effort to wipe
out Kurdish bases there that were being used against Turkey. The fol-
lowing spring, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öca-
lan announced a unilateral cease-fire. It surprised the politicians and
generals, but President Özal may have been directly involved. Decid-
ing that the PKK must have been weakened by the campaign of the
previous autumn and sensing final victory, the generals stepped up
military operations. Working with Özal, Öcalan renewed the cease-fire
at a press conference attended by Kurdish former members of parlia-
ment. At this critical juncture, President Özal suffered a heart attack
and died on April 17, 1993.
11
Corruption and Disaster,
1993–2002
Strong, stable government seemed illusive in the decade after the death
of Turgut Özal. Turkey struggled with the same issues that marked the
legacy of the late president. Two of these issues—the role of the military
in politics and the role of Islam in public life—were constant sources of
discussion and debate for as long as the republic had existed. The third,
the commercial privatization process, was just as significant for Turkish
life, but received far less attention, especially outside of Turkey. Privatiza-
tion and the end of central planning in the Turkish economy amounted
to nothing less than the reversal of etatism, one of the fundamental prin-
ciples of the Kemalist revolution. It was carried out with the collusion
and encouragement of the Turkish military, often self-described as the
guardians of the Kemalist system. The consequences were far-reaching.
It was not just that a very large portion of Turkey’s industrial ca-
pacity went up for sale under Özal’s leadership. This process by it-
self made it possible for political patrons to deliver access to dramatic
sources of wealth in the form of control of former government-owned
industrial ventures and businesses. More than this, the careful Kemal-
ist strategy of distributing industrial production capacity throughout
the nation was deliberately abandoned and replaced with concentra-

tion on key urban areas. Under military rule in the early 1980s, cities
with populations of more than 300,000 were unified with their suburbs
to create Metropolitan Municipalities (Büyükşehir Belediyesi). Istanbul,
Ankara, and İzmir were the first of these; more than a dozen more cit-
ies were so designated by the early 2000s.
Istanbul quickly became the exemplar of the Metropolitan Munici-
pality strategy. Industry was increasingly concentrated around the
shores of the Marmara Sea, as the urban development rapidly swal-
lowed virtually all land between Istanbul and Tekirdağ on the west
and İzmit and Bursa to the east. This was partly for ease of access to
international shipping and partly because of Istanbul’s growing prom-
inence in international financial markets. But also, through a vicious
cycle, the greater metropolitan areas provided vast pools of cheap,
unskilled labor in the form of migrants from the Turkish countryside
who had come in search of jobs. The first mayor of the Istanbul Metro-
politan Municipality (elected 1984), Bedrettin Dalan, was a close ally
of Turgut Özal, and with Özal, a cofounder of the Motherland Party. It
was under Dalan’s direction that Istanbul’s urban development took
off, for better and worse. Far from slowing under Islamist leadership,
the process was accelerated in the 1990s under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
who became Mayor of Istanbul in 1994.
While all of Turkey’s major cities grew rapidly in population and had
difficulty meeting the demand for new housing, Istanbul was truly over-
whelmed, its population nearly quadrupling in the two decades after the
military coup of 1980. Millions of migrants lived in hastily constructed
flat blocks that spread out eastward along the Gulf of İzmit and west-
ward to Atatürk Airport and beyond. The new culture of competitive
bidding and contracting, initiated by the privatization of major state-
owned enterprises, spread to and was energetically carried forward by
the construction industry. The stakes were enormous, and it seems hardly
surprising that in the struggle for control of this huge financial poten-
tial, some of the darkest forces in Turkish society were at work, in ways
similar to what was seen all over east central Europe after the breakup
of the USSR and the fall of the old Stalinist regimes. The ugly results
were graphically revealed in different ways by, first, an epic car crash in
November 1996, and then by a devastating earthquake in August 1999.
THE SUSURLUK CRASH AND GOVERNMENT

CORRUPTION
The automobile accident took place at Susurluk, between Bursa
and Balıkesir in northwestern Turkey, in November 1996. A speeding
Corruption and Disaster, 1993–2002 177
Mercedes-Benz carrying four passengers collided with a semi-tractor-

trailer. Three occupants of the car were killed and the fourth injured.
The investigation into the accident turned the truck driver, who also
survived, into a national hero.
The three dead included, first, Abdullah Çatlı, a criminal right-wing
drug dealer and mafia hit man. He was wanted in connection with
the murders of seven leftist students and an attack on leftists at a cof-
fee house in Ankara in the late 1970s and had also been involved in
the Istanbul jailbreak of Mehmet Ali Ağca, the pope’s assassin. At the
time of the crash, Çatlı held a gun permit and, among his 13 passports
in various names, a Turkish diplomatic passport. Guns and silencers
were found in the car. The second dead passenger was Çatlı’s girl-
friend Gonca Us, a former beauty queen and mistress of gangsters.
The third was Hüseyin Kocadağ, the deputy police chief of Istanbul,
a senior security chief who had commanded police units in missions
against Kurdish rebels. The lone survivor in the Mercedes was Sedat
Bucak, a True Path Party Member of Parliament and head of a Kurdish
clan militia receiving government funding to fight Kurdish rebels.
The immediate question, of course, was why were these four people
riding together in the same car? The war in Kurdish eastern Turkey
was no secret. A State of Emergency Governate (known as OHAL by
its Turkish acronym), created several years earlier, placed 11 south-
eastern provinces under the extraordinary authority of an emergency
governor. Many outside the region learned of the human rights viola-
tions under emergency rule through the public demonstrations of the
“Saturday Mothers,” who began staging weekly sit-ins at Galatasaray,
a prominent street corner in Istanbul, the year before the Susurluk
accident. They held photographs and placards demanding to know
what had happened to their relatives and loved ones who had “disap-
peared.” Their nonviolent civil disobedience drew quiet attention to
the military’s dirty secrets. But the Susurluk accident revealed a shock-
ing triangular relationship between the military, organized crime, and
elected officials.
President Süleyman Demirel, who had succeeded Özal, quickly de-
nied government involvement in criminal activity. The Minister of the
Interior resigned when it became obvious that his initial statements
about the crash were not only wrong, but that in fact, he had a long
relationship with Çatlı. Alparslan Türkeş, the aging leader of the far-
right Nationalist Action Party, publicly acknowledged that Çatlı had
been employed by the government to carry out clandestine missions
on behalf of the police and the army. Turkish newspapers published
reports based on police and military intelligence documents show-
ing that the Turkish government had been hiring death squads to
murder Kurdish rebels and others since the mid-1980s and that these
death squads had evidently received a strengthened mandate with
the creation of the “No-Fly Zone” in northern Iraq as a result of the
first Gulf War in 1991. A former Interior Minister admitted that the
National Security Council had approved the use of illegal means to
dispose of enemies. Their weapons were in some cases traced back
to police sources. Funding for the death squads was raised through
bank presidents, who received kickbacks from the drug trade that the
squads were allowed to run. The profits were laundered through casi-
nos licensed by the Ministry of Tourism.
The published versions of official reports on the affair were tainted by
partisan politics, but new information became available almost daily in
the press. They revealed the extent of connections between state secu-
rity forces and police, the banking institution, the government privati-
zation process, cabinet ministries, Members of Parliament, organized
crime, and far-right gangs of violent thugs. Both Mesut Yılmaz, Özal’s
heir as Motherland party leader, and Tansu Çiller, Demirel’s successor
as party chief of True Path, were implicated in the escalating spiral of
scandals. But the issue went back farther, to the tacit arrangement be-
tween former prime minister and then-president Özal and the military,
by which Özal pursued economic liberalization and privatization in
return for not questioning the generals on state security. In the after-
math of the Gulf War, far right nationalist and fundamentalist Mus-
lim groups had been secretly armed and used as paramilitary death
squads, with the knowledge of the highest officials of the Turkish state.
Investigations suggested that the prime ministry slush fund had been
used to pay hitmen and death squads against suspected Kurdish ter-
rorists both in Turkey and abroad.
POLITICAL ISLAM IN THE 1990s

In the two-and-a-half years between Özal’s death and the Susurluk
crash, the Kurdish war had shared the headlines with political Islam
and economic problems. President Demirel began his seven-year term
in May 1993. Tansu Çiller, an American-educated former academic
who was Minister of Economy, succeeded Demirel and became Tur-
key’s first female prime minister.
Within a month, the Kurdish cease-fire broke down and military
operations against the PKK continued as before. PKK guerillas am-
bushed a commercial bus full of off-duty soldiers near Bingöl and
murdered 34 people. Heavy new fighting erupted, the cease-fire was
canceled, and the hoped-for political solution of Özal’s last efforts
seemed lost. International credit rating agencies downgraded Turkey’s

status in January 1994, taking an ever dimmer estimate of Turkey’s
financial situation. The basic ingredients of the simmering financial
stew were development that relied almost completely on foreign in-
vestment and large government budget deficits financed by bonds
held by Turkish banks. The subsequent devaluation of the Turkish
lira cost Turkey an estimated $1.2 billion and devastated the Istanbul
stock market. An austerity package including new taxes, worker lay-
offs, wage freezes, the closing of some inefficient state economic enter-
prises, and price increases on certain commodities, especially gasoline,
tobacco, and sugar, did little to help. In six months, the lira lost half
its value against the U.S. dollar. The situation stabilized somewhat,
but Turkey’s finances remained very vulnerable to momentary turns
of fortune and loss of confidence in its banking system.
In local elections of March 1994, Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare
(Refah) Party captured nearly 20 percent of the vote nationally and
took control of major Turkish municipalities, including both Istan-
bul and Ankara. National elections that came a year and a half later
saw seven parties split the vote, with five gaining representation in
parliament. Welfare won the popular vote with only 21.4 percent, fol-
lowed closely by True Path and Motherland. Although the People’s
Democracy Party showed strongly in the Kurdish regions—it won
over 50 percent in Hakkari—it did not do well nationally and failed
to win seats. Offered the prime ministry, Erbakan was unable to at-
tract coalition partners. A minority coalition of Motherland and True
Path parties seemed desirable, but when Çiller and Yılmaz finally fin-
ished negotiations in the spring, their grand “Motherpath” coalition
lasted only eleven weeks. Çiller, overcoming her distaste for entering
an agreement with the Islamists, joined a coalition with Erbakan that
finally brought the Welfare Party to power in June 1996.
The year in which Erbakan served as prime minister saw an ex-
tended national debate about the role of religion in public life and the
meaning of political Islam. Erbakan made outlandish public assertions.
The extent to which he could expect to carry them through as a partner
in a coalition was, however, unclear. Once during the 1994 municipal
elections, he had promised that the Welfare Party would bring about a
religious regime, “even by the shedding of blood if necessary.” During
the national campaign in December 1995, he pledged to take Turkey
out of NATO, set up an Islamic NATO, an Islamic UN, an Islamic ver-
sion of the European Union, and to create an Islamic currency. Other
Welfare Party deputies and mayors made similar statements. Argu-
ments both for and against the Welfare Party government could be
stated as a matter of principle. “If we believe in democracy, we have to

test Refah (Welfare) in government,” said industrialist Sakıp Sabancı
on the one hand. On the other, Bülent Ecevit noted “Secularism is
the most sensitive aspect of the (republican) regime in Turkey—if it
collapses, the whole regime collapses.” It seemed difficult to decide
whether the Welfare victory should be feared as a danger to Turkish
democracy or admired as a sign of its health. Its success was also due
to simple political factors. Refah articulated a vision of the just society
in a commonly understood Islamic religious idiom, but it also ben-
efited from “anti-Ankara” sentiment, as voters reacted against dour
economic times, scandal, and war. The coalition program agreed on
by Erbakan and Çiller contained few of Erbakan’s campaign promises.
Opposition politicians and a sizable portion of the Turkish voting
public remained suspicious about the Welfare Party’s motives, taking
note of Erbakan’s efforts to recruit Islamists in a variety of lower level
government, police, and military positions. The distribution of politi-
cal power in the Turkish system emphasized relationships between
people. Electoral success had now given the Welfare Party access to
the privileges of power as never before. The party brought a new class
of people into public life, a rising group of newly urbanized laborers,
shopkeepers, small businessmen, and industrialists, who neither fit the
traditional Kemalist mold of the Turkish state servant nor fit the ste-
reotyped image of ignorant and conservative village folk. Rather, they
tended to be devout, well educated, urbanized, fashion conscious, and
deeply shaped by Turkey’s tradition of secular political give and take.
Some segments of Turkish society resented and feared the uncertainty
of a future in which this new class of people would have a growing
role to play.
Erbakan’s coalition was criticized for failing to tackle the budget
deficit, curb inflation, and act on various government scandals, but
his efforts to chart an independent foreign policy course for Turkey
brought the most negative press. He visited several Muslim countries.
In Iran, he signed a $23 billion, 23-year agreement to purchase natural
gas via a pipeline to be constructed from Tabriz to the Turkish border.
This marked the Turkish entry into the competition for promising new
petroleum and natural gas fields of the Caspian Sea basin. During a
trip to Libya, Erbakan sat meekly through a tirade against Turkey’s
Kurdish war delivered by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qadhafi.
He narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in an indignant house of
parliament on his return to Ankara. An incident in the eastern town
of Sincan precipitated Erbakan’s demise. In early February 1997, at a
rally called by the mayor in honor of “Jerusalem Day,” a new holiday
first declared by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1980, the Iranian

ambassador called for the political rule of sharia in Turkey. The crowd
chanted slogans against Israel and against Yasir Arafat and displayed
posters promoting Hamas and Hezbollah. Within a few days, army
tanks on maneuvers rumbled through the streets of Sincan, and the
Turkish army began an investigation of the Welfare Party.
On February 28, 1997, two months after the Susurluk accident, the
National Security Council released a public statement accusing “de-
structive and separatist groups” of working outside the Turkish legal
system “to weaken our democracy and legal system by blurring the
distinction between the secular and the anti-secular. . . . In Turkey,
secularism is not only a form of government but a way of life and the
guarantee of democracy and social peace.” The military command-
ers forced Erbakan’s agreement to a 20-point plan. The ban on cer-
tain Islamic sects would be enforced, the Welfare Party would cease
recruiting fundamentalists for government posts and stop the spread
of religious secondary schools. Restrictions on women’s headscarves
would be kept. Erbakan signed an order purging 160 officers for Islamic
political activities and sympathies. Erbakan resigned, and in January
1998, the Turkish Constitutional Court closed the Welfare Party “be-
cause of evidence confirming its actions against the principles of the
secular republic.” Erbakan and five other Refah leaders were banned
from political leadership for five years. Several individual members
faced criminal charges of subverting the constitution. The mayor of
Sincan received a four-year sentence for “inciting religious hatred.”
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the charismatic mayor of Istanbul, received a
10-month prison sentence. This was a military coup in all but name,
but a coup was no longer unnecessary. Through the NSC, the Turkish
military possessed a constitutionally defined executive authority that
it used since the 1980s to exert its influence on a full range of important
issues.
The new prime minister, Mesut Yılmaz, pressed forward what was
being called the “February 28 Process,” when he was not dealing
with fallout from Susurluk. Parliament required students to complete
eight years of primary education to qualify for admission to Islamic
academies. These academies, popularly called imam-hatip okulları, or
prayer-leader and preacher schools, were first permitted during the
period of military rule in the early 1980s. In 15 years, their numbers
had grown to more than 600, and their enrollment to one-tenth of the
eligible secondary education students in the country. They taught a
simplistic, fundamentalist Islam to students, who after graduation
could go on to enroll in universities, law faculties, police academies,
and other postsecondary institutions. Public protests against enforce-

ment of the headscarf ban broke out all over Turkey, the largest being
in Istanbul. Police detained 20 leading businessmen on charges they
had provided funding for activists. The chief prosecutor in Ankara’s
State Security Court asked for the closure of MÜSİAD, the Independ-
ent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association, and filed charges
against its president for inciting religious hostility.
If the February 28 process had not sunk Welfare, it might have fallen
anyway for other reasons. For one thing, despite its accomplishments
at the municipal level, Welfare fared no better than the other parties at
finding solutions to the basic economic and political problems of the
country. For another, many younger supporters of the party, seeing the
Turkish secular system as the very basis needed for a legitimate pub-
lic expression of faith, were increasingly disenchanted with Erbakan’s
manner of framing political Islam. Others, especially in the movement
associated with Fethullah Gülen, were frustrated with Erbakan’s nar-
row political focus and more interested in furthering an open society
through indirect means such as education.
Gülen, born in a village near Erzurum, became an imam and preacher
in the state system, serving several congregations in the northwest-
ern part of Turkey. Although his formal education did not extend be-
yond elementary school, he was self-educated in philosophy, history,
and the literary and spiritual classics. Since the 1960s, Gülen had been
active in the Nurcu movement. Prosecuted on charges of undermining
secularism in the February 28 aftermath, he left Turkey and lived in
the United States. His followers tended to eschew direct involvement
in politics, preferring instead to use his popularity to influence Turkish
society in other ways. Their greatest impact was through education.
They found a niche by opening thousands of dershanes, after-hours
study and tutoring centers that helped Turkish students prepare for
the all-important high school and university entrance exams.
In the event, within a few weeks, most of the Welfare Party’s depu-
ties had joined a successor party, the Virtue (Fazilet) Party, which sub-
sequently became the largest party in parliament. Yet the February 28
military memorandum had a chilling impact on Turkish democracy,
making it frustratingly clear that it was still the Turkish armed forces
who set the priorities, not Turkish voters.
Susurluk and its web of scandal and thuggery clung to both Çiller
and Yılmaz, while the generals seemed beyond criticism. Yılmaz led
a coalition government after Welfare’s fall, but with revelations that a
Turkish mafia boss was involved in negotiations for the privatization
of one of the state banks, Yılmaz resigned. Bülent Ecevit, elderly head
of the Democratic Left Party and Yılmaz’s coalition partner, returned

to the premiership for the first time since the mid-1970s to lead the na-
tion to early elections in April 1999. Ecevit’s victory in those elections
was helped by the spectacular capture of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of
the PKK. Forced out of hiding in Syria and tracked by Turkish intel-
ligence as he sought political asylum in several European countries,
Öcalan was seized by Turkish authorities in Kenya in February 1999.
The moment of triumph was brief. Ecevit’s return was ruined by the
picture of human negligence and greed uncovered in the Marmara
earthquake of August 1999 and by Ecevit’s mismanagement of a finan-
cial crisis a few months later.
THE MARMARA EARTHQUAKE

A violent earthquake struck the populous and heavily industrial-
ized region of the Gulf of İzmit at 3 a.m., on August 17, 1999. With
an epicenter at İzmit, 70 miles east of Istanbul, the earthquake lasted
37 seconds and measured 7.6 on the moment magnitude scale. It was
the seventh in a series of major quakes along the North Anatolian Fault
Zone going back to 1939 and was one of the most destructive any-
where in the world in the twentieth century. Official Turkish govern-
ment estimates stated that 17,127 people died and 43,959 were injured,
but the actual death toll was likely more than twice that. With 120,000
homes destroyed and another 30,000 severely damaged, more than
300,000 people were left homeless by the earthquake. Fire erupted at
the Tüpraş oil refinery at Körfez, on the Gulf of İzmit, and burned for
days. Bridges, viaducts, and tunnels along Highway E80, the Tran-
seuropean Motorway that runs through Istanbul and İzmit, were dam-
aged. Some overpasses collapsed.
Frustrations reached boiling point. Everyone asked how this could
have happened. Turkey’s earthquake risk was a well-known fact, and
Turkish scientists had repeatedly warned that haphazard industrial de-
velopment in the Marmara region threatened catastrophe in the event
of an earthquake. Investigations proved rampant corruption as con-
tractors cut corners, ignored regulations, and put up slipshod build-
ings. Some were arrested; there were many cases similar to that of Veli
Göçer, a developer notorious for his cavalier attitude. One-sixth of a
300-unit complex his company built at Yalova collapsed. In the debris,
concrete blocks were found with bits of shell and even garbage mixed
in. He hid for three weeks after the quake and then claimed that it was
not his fault, “I’m a poet, not a builder.” The government’s response
was tentative and ineffective, with political calculation never far from
sight. It was certainly true that any government would have found
itself strained by the scale of this disaster. Yet Turkish government of-
ficials seemed reluctant to admit systemic corruption, to acknowledge
that corruption seemed to be an alternative description of Turkey’s
persistent culture of patronage whenever large sums of money were
involved. Erkan Mumcu, Minister of Tourism, gave a rare candid as-
sessment: This was “a declaration of bankruptcy for the country’s po-
litical and administrative system.”
Perhaps it was obvious that a new generation of leaders was needed,
but it proved difficult to convince the old guard to step aside. Erbakan
was already barred from politics; Alparlsan Türkeş, ideologue of the far
right, had died. Even in Cyprus, Rauf Denktaş faced the possibility of
electoral defeat. Yet Ecevit carefully labored to amend the constitution
and enable President Demirel, who was even older than himself, to
serve a second term. The effort failed. Rebellious parliamentary deputies
wanted Demirel to retire. To succeed Demirel, Supreme Court judge Nec-
det Sezer, 51, an outspoken advocate of democracy and human rights,
became the 10th president of the republic in May 2000. Ecevit clung to
power long enough to cause observers to wonder how politicians so in-
telligent and experienced could make such colossal political blunders.
Ecevit’s final fall came in another financial meltdown. Its immedi-
ate cause lay in central bank decisions about the government’s lira ex-
change rate policy, which was aimed to bring down inflation. Crisis
erupted in February 2001, when Ecevit stormed out of a National Se-
curity Council meeting after an argument with President Sezer over
corruption investigations. In the extremely sensitive circumstances,
Ecevit’s angry comments to the press caused the overnight collapse
of the Turkish lira and a crash of financial markets. An assistant treas-
ury minister resigned and so did the director of the central bank. An
emergency IMF loan stabilized the situation, but not before millions
of ordinary Turks saw their small savings evaporate and pensioners
saw their income halved. Ecevit’s coalition government hung together
rather than compounding the problems by depriving the country of a
government. Ecevit made the most of the reprieve. He moved forward
a set of legal reforms needed for EU accession—parliament abolished
the death penalty and lifted bans on Kurdish language education, pub-
lishing, and broadcasting. And building on the spirit of cooperation
with Greece, born in Greece’s disaster aid in the earthquake, the two
governments signed an agreement to share natural gas in a planned
new Turkish pipeline.
When Ecevit’s coalition gave way in 2002, the country went to elec-
tions in a political landscape altered by absence of the Virtue (Fazilet)
Party, which was closed by the constitutional court in June 2001. More
than one charge had been brought against Virtue party in the four
years of its existence, for violation of secular political principles or
meddling by banned politicians. Erbakan’s provocative style was de-
tected, for example, in the episode in May 1999, when Merve Kavakçı,
newly elected to parliament on the Virtue slate, wore her headscarf for
the swearing-in ceremony. She was blocked from taking office.
Tired of Necmettin Erbakan’s way of doing things, a large number
of the Virtue Party’s members declined to follow when his cronies
formed yet another successor party, this time called Saadet, “Felic-
ity.” The rebels instead formed a new party, called Adalet ve Kalkınma
Partisi, the Justice and Development Party, better known by its Turk-
ish acronym, AKP. It too faced charges before the constitutional court
10 days before the election in November 2002. Allowed to stand, the
Justice and Development Party won its vindication with a sweeping
victory the likes of which had not been seen in a Turkish election in a
long time. Justice and Development won the election with over 34 per-
cent of the popular vote and received more than two-thirds of the seats
in parliament. None of the political parties in parliament at the time of
these elections won a single seat. Justice and Development won more
popular votes than all the old parties—True Path, Nationalist Move-
ment, Democratic People’s Party, Motherland, and Democratic Left,
plus Felicity—combined. Only one other party cleared the ten percent
national threshold to enter parliament, the Republican People’s Party,
which also had no seats prior to the elections. The obvious meaning
seemed to be that the Turkish people were sick of the usual politics and
ready for major change.
DON’T YOU CRY

With Zeki Müren gone—he died in 1996, just six weeks before the
Susurluk crash—it was left to pop diva Sezen Aksu to weep for all
the Turkish people, who could do little else but get on with their ordi-
nary lives throughout the whole sordid decade. Sezen Aksu was born
in Denizli province and charted her first hit single in 1975, becoming
well known for her distinctive, deep-voiced vocals and her nickname
“Little Sparrow.” She got married, got divorced, remarried, became
a mother, and suffered the loss of her close friend and partner Onno
Tunç, who died in a plane crash. And she grew up as an artist too, in
the years after the 1980 military coup. A prolific writer and composer,
she was not escapist and she was not sentimental. In partnership with
Tunç and Aysel Gürel, Aksu almost singlehandedly kept Turkish pop
music relevant in the face of the overproduced, cloying Arabesque

music that was so popular in the 1970s and 1980s. In her mid-forties by
the end of the century, Aksu’s mature music became the soundtrack of
the generation. She sought an authentic Turkish voice. Even her best-
selling dance album Gülümse (Smile, 1991) gave European techno a
genuinely Turkish instrumentation. Anthropologist Martin Stokes in-
terpreted her work of the 1990s, especially Işık Doğudan Yükselir (Light
from the East, 1995), as expressing a humaneness and strength that she
particularly found in women, like the Saturday Mothers.1 But perhaps
her best remembered song was “Sen Ağlama,” (Don’t You Cry, 1984),
a simply worded lament for lost love. The song was not political at all.
Yet it somehow expressed the sadness felt by everyone as the years
passed and so much that was good was lost.
Don’t you cry, I can’t stand it.

Don’t cry darling, I can’t bear to see you hurt.2
NOTES
1. Martin Stokes, The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular
Music (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 107–145.
2. Aysel Gürel and Sezen Aksu, “Sen Ağlama,” on the album Sen
Ağlama, produced by Onno Tunç (Enter Muzik, 1984).
12
Justice and Development,
2002–2012
For most of its first 10 years in office, the Justice and Development
Party (AKP) enjoyed the respect, if not the full trust, of a broad spec-
trum of the Turkish population. In its first decade in power, the AKP
oversaw economic recovery and rid Turkish democracy of military
domination. Hence, many saw something like the manifestation of the
party’s official name in AKP policies. As the decade wore on, however,
the party’s face seemed increasingly to be that of its charismatic and
controversial leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the
main opposition remained openly suspicious of a religious agenda, the
deeper concerns were the social consequences of the feverish develop-
ment and the unchallenged AKP control of parliamentary processes.
Erdoğan was not at first on the AKP election slate in November 2002
and did not enter parliament with the party’s victory. This was due to
his ban from politics, imposed by the courts several years earlier. At a
rally, Erdoğan had once recited “Soldier’s Prayer.” The poem began:
Rifle in hand, belief in heart

My desire is dual: faith and fatherland
My hearth my army, my superior officer my sultan

Reinforce the sultan, O God!
Strengthen his life, O God!
The author of the poem was none other than Ziya Gökalp, ideologue
of the Young Turk revolution and one of the patriarchs of the Turkish
republic. The poem, originally published in 1913 in the journal Toward
the People, after the gruesome siege of Edirne during the Second Balkan
War, expressed the deep patriotism felt by Ottoman Muslims in those
days. Erdoğan, however, quoted a version of the poem that began
differently, “Minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, mosques
our barracks, believers our soldiers,” and omitted its laudatory lines
about army officers. Erdoğan’s use of the poem was open to varying
interpretations. He quoted it in a speech at a rally in Siirt in Decem-
ber 1997. One of the provinces of the State of Emergency Governate,
Siirt was still at that time under martial law. A year after the Susurluk
crash, the poem could be taken as an indictment of Turkey’s generals
and corrupt politicians, delivered from the pen of one the unassail-
able founders of the republic. In view of the additions and omissions
and Erdoğan’s interviews and speeches, his commitment to Turkey’s
secularist principles seemed unclear. For example, he contrasted those
who blindly follow a charismatic leader—Kemalists—and those who
answer to a higher justice, i.e., Islam. Erdoğan was arrested for inciting
hatred based on religion, a violation of article 312 of the Turkish crimi-
nal code. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison. After exhausting
appeals, he eventually served four months. He was banned from poli-
tics for life.
PRIME MINISTER ERDOĞAN

With Erdoğan disabled, Abdullah Gül, a former Welfare Party dep-
uty from Kayseri and one of the cofounders of the AKP, at first became
prime minister in 2002. A complicated combination of legal maneu-
vers, court challenges, and unforeseen circumstances followed. First,
parliament lifted Erdoğan’s lifetime political ban a few weeks after the
election. After courts ruled that he could not have been party chief at
the time of national elections due to his ban from politics, the AKP
simply reelected Erdoğan as party chief. And then, out in Siirt prov-
ince, the election results were vacated by the courts over charges of
local election irregularities. A by-election was called, the AKP won all
three seats at stake, and Erdoğan, on the AKP list, took one of the seats.
Erdoğan was enabled to enter parliament and become prime minister
Justice and Development, 2002–2012 189
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a

speech at the presidential palace, November
2015. (ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)
by March 2003. He took his seat in parliament and replaced his friend
Abdullah Gül, who stepped aside.
As it happened, parliament was at that moment debating an urgent
request from the United States of America to use the İncirlik Air Base to
create a northern front in Iraq, which the Americans had just invaded.
The United States offered Turkey a package of financial concessions
meant to compensate the certain losses to result from the war, and
NATO promised to defend Turkey in case of Iraqi retaliation across
the border. The Turkish parliament voted to permit American use of
Turkey’s airspace, but did not allow use of its bases, not even for refu-
eling. The proposal had come to the floor of parliament with cabinet
approval and received more yes votes than no, but the large number of
abstentions prevented passage.
Parliament and Turkish officials turned down a huge financial aid
package and saw the Istanbul stock market plunge. They withstood
intense pressure from the United States, including personal phone
calls to Erdoğan from President Bush. The Turkish military itself was
upset by the decision. The generals had hoped to create a buffer zone
in northern Iraq and use the war to its own advantage against Kurd-
ish militias in Turkey. Writing in his memoirs, General İlker Başbuğ,
later Chief of the General Staff, lamented that in his view, an oppor-
tunity to make progress against Kurdish militants in Turkey had been
lost. In the event, the Turkish army organized teams of commandos
and sent them across the border into northern Iraq. One of these teams
was intercepted by American soldiers, who captured them and put
bags over their heads. Incensed Turkish officials complained and got
their release. Though most Americans were uninformed about the in-
cident, the Turkish public was infuriated. The incident was replayed
in reverse 11 years later in a strange and otherwise inexplicable assault
on three American sailors who came ashore for leave in Istanbul in
December 2014. The Americans were followed by a group of Turkish
hoodlums, who surrounded them while they used an ATM machine
in a busy part of Istanbul, shouted nationalist slogans, and threw bags
over their heads before letting them get away. Erdoğan made a state
visit to Washington in early 2004, and damage to Turkish-American
relations was downplayed by President Bush in Istanbul a few months
later for a NATO summit.
Yet the ordinary Turkish population overwhelmingly opposed the
Iraq war and wanted no part of Turkish participation. In public opin-
ion polls, 90 percent opposed it. The parliamentary vote was celebrated
across Turkey not, at least not primarily, as an anti-American measure.
Turkish people did indeed blame the United States for an unnecessary
war, and a war that when it went badly put Turkey at considerable
risk. When Karen Hughes, President Bush’s Undersecretary of State
for Public Diplomacy, visited Turkey, she had a sharply confronta-
tional meeting with a group of Turkish feminists, who let her know
about the war’s impact on ordinary women and children. Yet Turkish
citizens saw the parliamentary vote first and foremost as an assertion
of civilian authority over the Turkish armed forces.
TURKEY AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Military dominance of Turkish democracy was among several re-
lated issues that the AKP targeted over the next two years as it concen-
trated on readying the country to enter the European Union.
Turkey’s recent EU history was rocky. In the EU enlargement that
began in 1997, 12 countries, 10 in Eastern Europe plus Cyprus and
Malta, were given “pre-accession partnerships,” which gave them ac-
cess to financial aid and placed them under annual reviews of progress.
Although at the time the European Council confirmed Turkey’s eligi-
bility for accession to the EU, it did not offer Turkey a pre-accession
partnership. The decision stunned Turkey, which had been a candidate
since 1964 and had joined the Customs Union in 1995. Turks joked bit-
terly that they might have had an easier time with the EU if they had
joined the Warsaw Pact back in the 1950s rather than NATO.
EU states feared Turkish membership for several reasons. Turkey
would probably make a significant economic and financial impact on
the EU. Turkey’s population is greater than any other EU member or
pre-accession partner except Germany. Member states worried that ex-
tension of the EU common agricultural policy to Turkey would swamp
its financial capacity. Many also expressed the fear, led by Germany,
where the largest numbers of Turkish migrants lived, that with fron-
tier barriers removed, cheap Turkish labor would migrate throughout
Europe and outbid comparatively high-priced European labor. Politi-
cal objections to Turkey’s membership were also raised, paramount
among them Turkey’s notoriously poor relationship with neighbor
Greece, a member state, and Turkey’s abuses of the civil rights of po-
litical dissidents and minorities and the use of torture in its prisons.
Though no EU state would admit it, most Turks suspected addition-
ally that the EU would never allow membership of a Muslim country
in its “Christian club.”
Turkey returned to EU candidate status in 1999. The improved situa-
tion was partly an ironic outcome of the Marmara earthquake. Among
the countries contributing foreign assistance in the cleanup was Greece,
whose genuinely humanitarian aid to Turkey was reciprocated a cou-
ple of months later when Athens too suffered an earthquake. In the
months following, Greece modified its previously strong opposition to
Turkish membership in the EU. Turkey gave official recognition to the
government of Cyprus. Erdoğan made a state visit to Athens in May
2004, where Greece expressed further support for Turkish accession.
Turkey extended its acceptance of the EU customs agreement to all
25 member states, Cyprus included. A proposal for Cyprus’s reunifica-
tion and an end to the dispute, negotiated by UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, was put before Cypriot voters in a referendum in 2005. The
population of the Turkish-occupied north voted 65 percent in favor.
In the Greek south, which in any case had an unconditional promise
of EU accession without unification, the referendum was rejected by
more than three-fourths. A week later, the Republic of Cyprus entered
the EU. Membership brings with it an effective veto power over Tur-
key, due to the requirement of unanimity in EU council votes on sig-
nificant issues such as expansion.
During the AKP’s first two years in power, parliament addressed
many of the EU’s political objections in sweeping legal reforms. New
laws made it more difficult for courts to close political parties and
instituted protections for journalists against revealing sources. The

biggest changes came in enhanced rights for women and minorities.
Implementation lagged and controversy threatened to overshadow the
gains—Erdoğan loudly supported criminalizing adultery, but it failed.
References in the criminal code to sexual offenses as crimes against
public morality and the family were deleted. Concepts such as chas-
tity, decency, and shame were removed, and reduced sentencing was
disallowed for honor killings, customary law killings, and killing of
children born out of wedlock. The ban on Kurdish language newspa-
pers, radio, and television was lifted, and previously forbidden ethnic
first names were allowed. An appeals court freed four Kurdish mem-
bers of parliament who had been jailed, including Leyla Zana, the 1995
winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of
Thought. Kurdish newspapers began to be published, and Kurds began
to speak openly in public forums about abuses of civil rights and about
the Turkish military’s scorched earth tactics in Turkish Kurdistan.
Although he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for trea-
son for his role in leading the Kurdish resistance war against the Turk-
ish military, Abdullah Öcalan’s conciliatory public statements seemed
to offer the hope of reconciliation between the Turkish state and the
Kurdish population and an end to the long war. While thousands of
Turks, remembering loved ones whose lives were lost in the war in
Kurdistan, demonstrated for Öcalan’s execution, other voices counse-
led patience. A case challenging the fairness of Öcalan’s trial wound
its way through the European Court of Human Rights. Öcalan himself
called for an end to the separatist war. He pleaded that the two peo-
ples, Turkish and Kurdish, were in the end indivisible, reminding the
public that his own mother was Turkish. Kurdish migration to cities
in western Turkey over the past generation led Öcalan and others to
doubt the possibility of ever achieving Kurdish independence and to
seek instead some form of Kurdish cultural autonomy within the Re-
public of Turkey as an acceptable alternative.
At the same time, quiet discussion of the Armenian genocide of 1915
bubbled up from below, the key issue in the status of Turkey’s Arme-
nian minority. An academic conference on the issue was cancelled by
court order in 2005, and a number of writers and public intellectuals
were arrested for “insulting Turkishness.” This phrase was used in
Article 301 of the revised criminal code, which made it illegal to in-
sult Turkey, the Turkish republic, Turkishness, or the Turkish army,
parliament, and other government institutions. It was part of the very
same revisions that had brought so many advances. Elif Şafak was
charged, based on dialogue in her novel Bastard of Istanbul, and Orhan

Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, and many oth-
ers. Hrant Dink, a well-known Armenian journalist, was given a six-
month suspended sentence.
Dink had begun publishing the first Turkish-Armenian newspa-
per of the Republican era, called Agos, in Istanbul in 1996. As a dual-
language paper, 20 pages of each issue in Turkish and four pages in
Armenian, Agos positioned itself as both a voice of the Armenian com-
munity in Turkey (an estimated 42–45,000 people, mostly in Istanbul)
and a forum for alternative views of all kinds in Turkish society. Care-
ful and diplomatic in its approach under Dink’s direction, the paper
became a catalyst of reconciliation efforts between Turks and Arme-
nians, pioneering use of terms like genocide in Turkish discourse.
It also worked to improve communication with Armenian diaspora
communities in Europe and America, but often found in those places
great differences of view. Agos defended the rights of women to wear
headscarves in Turkish schools, for example, and when France made it
a criminal offense to use terms other than genocide for the 1915 events,
Dink said he would fly to France and personally lead opposition to
the new law. With a print run of 5,000, Agos was self-funded and run
by a small staff working in a tiny downtown Istanbul office. Step-
ping outside to use a nearby ATM machine one day in January 2007,
Hrant Dink was shot to death on the sidewalk by a young teenage
boy, member of a right-wing Turkish nationalist organization. A hun-
dred thousand people, Turks and Armenians and Kurds, Muslims and
Christians, men and women from all walks of life joined his funeral
procession a week later, carrying signs that said, “We are all Hrant
Dink. We are all Armenians.”
By the time of Hrant Dink’s death, Turkey had reentered accession
negotiations with the EU, only to have them suspended again in late
2006. The EU insisted Turkey lift its embargo on flights and shipping
from Cyprus—which Turkey said was in retaliation for Cyprus block-
ing its EU progress. By 2010, however, the great Turkish popular sup-
port for EU membership, which was over two-thirds of the population
in public opinion polls in 2005, dropped 38 percent in a survey con-
ducted by the German Marshall Fund. The Turkish government and
most Turks still believed that the process was important because it con-
tributed to a more open Turkish society. But impact of the worldwide
financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the deep financial problems of Spain,
Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Cyprus made it very unlikely that the
EU would expand again anytime soon. Turkey, moreover, weathered
this crisis better than these countries, such that many Turks began to
feel less certain that their country needed the EU.
ANATOLIAN TIGERS
Popular support for the AKP ticked upward significantly in subse-
quent elections. In local elections in March 2004, the AKP won over
40 percent of the aggregate national vote. In the next general election,
held in July 2007, the AKP polled even higher, 46.5 percent nationally,
winning a second term as the majority party in parliament. The Peo-
ple’s Republican Party placed second, and the right-wing Nationalist
Action Party reentered parliament in 2007 with almost 15 percent of
the vote. A group of candidates from several small leftist and Kurdish
parties formed a block and managed to win 26 seats.
Erdoğan’s winning formula was not mere pious religious rhetoric,
though there was plenty of that. It was a by now familiar combina-
tion of religious piety, nostalgia-tinged Turkish patriotism, and ulti-
mate faith in the capitalist markets. Despite a bump in mid-2006 that
included a mini-devaluation, national economic performance was im-
pressive. This was largely due to the stabilization program initiated
by Kemal Derviş, the World Bank executive brought in as Minister of
Economy by the Ecevit government in the crisis of 2001. The AKP stuck
to the program after the 2002 elections, giving it continued support
under its new economy minister. Derviş entered parliament briefly on
the opposition CHP slate before leaving to direct the United Nations
Development Program. Especially important were structural changes
and regulation meant to distance the banking and financial sectors
from partisan political manipulation. The annual economic growth
rate was about 6 percent, and the world economic downturn after 2008
had no impact on Turkey. Public debt, which had ballooned with the
2001 bank bailouts, came back down under 50 percent of GDP. Budget
deficits fell from over 10 percent of GDP to under 3 percent under AKP
management. Inflation declined from over 70 percent to just 12 percent
in 2002. Persisting at just under 10 percent annually thereafter, the in-
flation rate pointed probably to a Turkish tolerance for nagging struc-
tural inefficiencies, but the economy stabilized sufficiently to permit
revaluation of the Turkish lira. Hyperinflation had made the lira the
world’s least valued currency, trading at 1.65 million to the U.S. dollar.
It was “a national disgrace,” said Erdoğan. The new Turkish lira, intro-
duced on January 1, 2005, knocked six zeroes off the old.
Continued development was encouraged by a new IMF agreement
in 2005. Privatization targets became quite ambitious, including the
communications giant Turk Telecom, and the Tüpraş and Petkim en-
ergy firms. State revenues from privatization skyrocketed from about
1.2 billion in 2004 to over 8 billion in 2005 and remained high through
2008. The budding relationships between Turkey and the Caucasus
and Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, as well as
the Arab world and Iran, took on greater significance as Turkey’s EU
aspirations were being continually frustrated. Turkish manufacturers
found interested buyers in the emerging markets of the former Eastern
Bloc. Turkish cars, washing machines, television sets, furniture, and
textiles performed well in these markets. Besides this, major interna-
tional projects were afoot. The Blue Stream pipeline, bringing natu-
ral gas under the Black Sea from Bergovaya in the Russian Caucasus
to Samsun, opened in late 2005; and in mid-2006, the 1,000-mile long
Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline opened, sending Caspian crude across the
Anatolian plateau to the Mediterranean. In Istanbul, center of the fi-
nancial sector, huge infrastructure projects got underway. The most
spectacular was construction of a commuter rail tunnel under the Bos-
phorus, from Sirkeci in the old city to Üsküdar.
The new commercial climate gained the confidence of and was in
turn fueled by conservative Muslim small businessmen all over Ana-
tolia, whose robust production earned them the nickname “Anatolian
Tigers.” European observers dubbed them “Islamic Calvinists,” both re-
calling the combination of industriousness and quiet piety on which Max
Weber had based his analysis of the rise of capitalism, and contrasting
them with the irresponsible speculation going on in Istanbul construc-
tion. The support of the Anatolian Tigers was a major factor in solidify-
ing the base of the AKP. Kayseri, the hometown of Abdullah Gül, that
went 70 percent for the AKP in the 2004 local elections, was their center.
The former mayor of Kayseri called it the “self-made city.” An indus-
trialized city of 1 million (it was 160,000 in 1970) at the foot of Turkey’s
second tallest peak, Mount Erciyes, Kayseri is capital of the furniture
industry. An estimated 3,500 furniture companies are in operation in the
city, some 400 using mass production processes, including Turkey’s two
largest brands. About 40,000 people work in the furniture industry in
Kayseri. Additionally, the city is a major center for textiles, especially for
denim cloth, and refined sugar. One Kayseri firm established a partner-
ship with the American Levi Strauss company that began in the 1980s
and developed into the leading producer of blue jeans in Turkey. Pri-
vatization of Türkşeker, the state-owned sugar company, and the end of
subsidies for sugar beets upended the Turkish sugar industry in the late
1990s. But the Kayseri sugar factory, managed by its own board of direc-
tors, survived to become the second largest in Turkey.1
Privatization and adherence to the IMF process had the significant

negative consequence of exacerbating Turkey’s chronically high un-
employment rate. The AKP took advantage of World Bank loans to
ameliorate this through both a job-loss compensation program and
support for worker retraining. Yet unemployment remained quite
high, over 10 percent. It was significantly higher in the east and among
youth and the unskilled, and it was over 25 percent among women.
The analysts of the European Stability Initiative, who studied Kayseri,
attributed the high female unemployment rate to rural migration from
the countryside to big cities and the corresponding loss of employ-
ment in agriculture and lag in expansion of the urban service sector.
ERGENEKON
Meanwhile, a little noticed incident in June 2007 turned into one of
the most important civil-military confrontations in modern Turkish
history. It happened in the middle of the national election campaign,
which was held a bit early in the summer of 2007 because parliament
was deadlocked over election of a successor to President Sezer. Police
raided a house in a poor neighborhood in one of Istanbul’s outlying
suburbs and turned up a backpack filled with 27 hand grenades. The
backpack belonged to a retired non-commissioned officer, and the hand
grenades were the same type used in several high-profile terrorist at-
tacks. Investigation of the incident led to allegations that a conspiracy
existed to acquire weapons and explosives, use them to commit terror-
ist attacks, steal personal data, assassinate people, and incite hatred and
armed rebellion. All this was carried out, it was charged, by a shadowy
organization called Ergenekon, whose ultimate goal was to create such
havoc in Turkish society that public order would completely disinte-
grate and the Turkish military would be justified in intervening to over-
throw the government. If perhaps this might at first seem far-fetched,
one must remember that only a dozen years had passed since Susurluk.
The name Ergenekon refers to a term in Turkish nationalist mythic
geography. It is a valley somewhere in the Altay Mountains of Central
Eurasia, where the Turkic peoples are said to have originated. Since the
foundation of the republic, and even before, it was not just the Turkish
secular left that was uncomfortable with Islam, the nationalist right
also sought an identity not based on religion. Islam is fundamentally
trans-national and humanistic. Rather than elevating the authority of
religious texts and concepts, the Turkish right fantasized history as
the progressive unfolding of the glory of the Turkic peoples. The sur-
vival of different ethnic groups in Turkey, such as Kurds, Armenians,
Greeks, Jews, and non-Muslim religions, Alevis included, threatened

the purity of the Turkish people. They stunted its growth, stifled its
historic role, they said. Therefore, the Turkish right might incorporate
certain vocabulary and concepts from Islam, but at best assigned it a
subordinate, instrumental role in creating a “Turkish-Islamic” cultural
synthesis. The combination of AKP Islamic rhetoric and the govern-
ment’s efforts to bring the military under civilian control drew militant
opposition from the far right.
Ergenekon first came up as the name of this conspiracy in docu-
ments that had been seized in a raid on the home of a journalist, Tun-
cay Güney, several years earlier. Güney, whose real profession seems
to have been espionage, was also in the thick of the Susurluk case,
fingering at least one prominent defendant through photographs he
supplied police. He claimed to have worked on behalf of the Turkish
Intelligence Service, MİT, to infiltrate several far-right organizations
and the Gülen movement. MİT naturally denied this. The papers taken
from Güney’s house in 2001 documented violent and illegal activities
being organized by a clandestine “counter-terrorism” group within
the Turkish Gendarmerie whose existence, long rumored, was also de-
nied. Güney’s evidence formed the basis of the government’s initial
legal case when the first Ergenekon indictment was made public in
2008. The indictment asserted that Ergenekon had orchestrated many
of the most spectacular acts of violence of the previous 15 years in
Turkey, including a drive-by shooting at a café in an Alevi neighbor-
hood in Istanbul in 1995, after which 17 people died in rioting; three
bombings at the offices of Cumhuriyet in 2006; a shooting at the Coun-
cil of State in Ankara in 2006; and the murder of a German Christian
missionary and two Turkish converts at a Bible publishing house in
Malatya in 2007. The indictments also charged that the Ergenekon or-
ganization was behind the assassinations of journalist Uğur Mumcu
(1993); business tycoon Özdemir Sabancı (1996); Ankara University
Professor Necip Hablemitoğlu (2002); and Father Andrea Santoro, a
Roman Catholic priest murdered at prayer in Trabzon in 2006. And
Hrant Dink’s killer was, like Santoro’s, a teen boy from Trabzon.
Additional information was found in 2007 in diaries on the com-
puter of Admiral Özden Örnek. They seem to indicate that three years
earlier, when Örnek was commander of the Turkish navy, he together
with commanders of the land forces, air force, and gendarmerie plotted
to overthrow the AKP. The gendarmerie commander, General Şener
Eruygur, was particularly eager for the coup. The plot, code named
“Blondie,” was not implemented due to the Chief of the General Staff’s
refusal to support it, General Hilmi Özkök.
The Ergenekon investigation—or rather investigations, since several

waves of police action took place and a number of separate but inter-
related cases came to court over the next five years—were certainly
complex. The first Ergenekon trial opened in October 2008. The public
reading of the indictment, required by Turkish law, took six weeks to
accomplish, since it was nearly 2,500 pages long. The first indictment
alone named 86 accused, including retired military officers, organized
crime figures, political party staff members, journalists, academics,
and members of nationalist and secularist organizations. Subsequent
indictments roped in some 200 more suspects, sorted into several dis-
tinct but interrelated cases known by popular nicknames. “Blondie”
and several other plots aimed to overthrow the AKP, going back as far
as 2003. The “Action Plan Against Reactionaryism,” allegedly hatched
by a naval officer and some cronies, aimed to expose the supposedly
anti-secular core of the AKP party and the Gülen movement. The “Cage
Plan” targeted prominent non-Muslims for assassination and planned
violence in Alevi neighborhoods. This was merged with another case,
nicknamed “Poyrazköy,” after the neighborhood where a cache of
arms was found on property belonging to the educational foundation
of former Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan. Germany refused to extra-
dite Dalan, who was living in Mannheim. He was accused of being
highly placed in the Ergenekon hierarchy. Another plot to overthrow
the AKP was “Sledgehammer,” planned by staff members of the First
Army. Discovered on the computer of an army colonel, “Sledgeham-
mer” roped in prominent military, political, and media personalities,
including retired Brigadier General Veli Küçük, known from Susurluk;
İbrahim Şahin, who was commander of the special forces branch of the
police and also known from Susurluk; commander of the First Army,
Brigadier General Hürşit Tolon; former Commander of the Gendarmes
Şener Eruygur; and many other senior military officers.
Over time, Turkish public opinion of the situation coalesced into
two basic views, with many variations on each. One view is that the
Ergenekon organization is imaginary. According to this view, where
proof of illegal activities exists involving specific individuals or plots
and conspiracies, action must be taken, but no overarching structure
called “Ergenekon” actually exists and no mastermind has ever been
identified. The gist of the other view is that the cases reveal a perhaps
loosely organized but very real network of individuals and groups,
dedicated to undermining social order so as to provide a rationale for
the violent overthrow of Turkish democracy. In this view, the Ergene-
kon organization is essentially identical with the “Deep State,” a shad-
owy structure where the real direction of Turkish life was controlled by
a self-appointed few. It had existed for years and was responsible for
many acts of intimidation and violence against innocent people. Even
the first view is not immune from conspiracy theories—it denies an Er-
genekon conspiracy, but might assert that the case itself is the outcome
of a conspiracy to destroy Turkey, even hatched by the CIA, Mossad,
the EU, and others. And two major interpretations of the long-term
result of the affair have also been suggested, not necessarily mutually
incompatible. One is that the whole case was politically motivated and
manipulated by the AKP to solidify its hold on power. The other is
that the Ergenekon investigations finally buried the persistent military
domination of Turkish politics.
DEALING WITH THE PAST

If it was true, as Chief of the General Staff General İlker Başbuğ
stated, that the era of military coups was over in Turkey, it remained
to deal with the past. Not just the Saturday Mothers, but sisters and
brothers and fathers and others came increasingly to ask that those
responsible for the 1980 coup be held accountable for their crimes.
Immunity for the generals was lifted as one of the judicial reform
measures in the referendum to amend the constitution, held on the
30th anniversary of the coup, September 12, 2010. Eighteen months
later in April 2012, the two surviving members of the five-man junta,
General Kenan Evren and General Tahsin Şahinkaya, both elderly and
ailing, were put on trial in Ankara. All the major political parties, doz-
ens of NGOs and other organizations, and hundreds of ordinary citi-
zens applied for an opportunity to testify against them. Many stories
of unspeakable torture and abuse suffered at the hands of the military
became public knowledge during the trial. Financial records showed
that the two men had become quite wealthy in the meantime, in real
estate holdings and stock investments. Two years later, the defendants
received a sentence of life imprisonment and demotion to the rank of
private. Evren died in May 2015, aged 97.
A good bit of the credit for the end of the coup era went justifiably
to the AKP. As majority party in parliament, in its first two terms, the
AKP demonstrated that an Islamist party could govern without under-
mining democracy. The AKP had repeatedly challenged the military
and its self-righteous and self-appointed role of “protecting Turkey’s
secular society.” At one parliamentary function shortly after the 2002
elections, six deputies’ wives (although not Erdoğan’s) had arrived in
headscarves. President Sezer and the heads of the military branches
pointedly declined to attend. During the first summer after the AKP’s
electoral victory, parliament voted to downgrade the National Secu-

rity Council to advisory status. For the first time since the 1980 coup,
a civilian presided as secretary-general of the NSC. There were other
showdowns. In May 2007, with parliamentary elections looming and
President Sezer’s term about to expire, parliament passed legislation
to make the President of the Republic chosen not by parliament, but
by a nationwide popular election. Sezer vetoed it. After the elections,
however, the winning AKP majority chose Prime Minister Abdullah
Gül as president, then immediately passed the same change that Sezer
had vetoed. And in summer 2008, just as the Ergenekon indictments
were made public but before the trial had begun, the chief prosecutor
brought a case to the constitutional court that would have resulted in
the closure of the AKP. It narrowly failed in the court.
Besides managing Turkey’s parliamentary system, the AKP also
managed its economic transformation. As noted journalist Taha
Akyol put it, “[T]he reason why the period of military coups is over
is due to the development of Turkey’s market economy and demo-
cratic culture. Turkey has integrated into the world economy with
its $150 billion exports. In such a country you cannot stage a coup.
No coup plotter thought about what would become of the stock ex-
change before launching a coup. There was no stock exchange on
12 September 1980.”2
Yet it could not be so simple, this victory of democracy over military
authoritarianism. One person who declined to testify against gener-
als Evren and Şahinkaya was Süleyman Demirel, who was the prime
minister overthrown by the armed forces in 1980. He had gotten even
with the army, he said, by his reelection first as prime minister and
then as president of the republic. “To oppose a system is not to sue an
old man today,” he said, “but to do what is possible when it is neces-
sary.” Where were all those people to testify against the generals, he
wondered, when the new 1983 constitution, written by the generals
and enshrining their authority, passed in a popular referendum with
over 92 percent of the vote? Bringing a truly open and democratic sys-
tem to Turkey meant more than a matter of electing a popular new
president; it meant changing a deeply engrained political culture. That
would take time.
NOTES
1. Paragraph based on Islamic Calvinists: Change and Conservatism in
Central Anatolia (Berlin and Istanbul: European Stability Initiative, 2005).
2. Quoted in Hurriyet Daily News online edition, April 7, 2012.
13
Gezi Park: Turkey Since 2012
In an interview in the arts and public affairs review Kafa during the
heated summer of 2015, Mazhar Alanson, Fuat Güner, and Özkan Uğur,
three musicians who make up the pop band known simply by their
initials MFÖ, were asked what kind of song they would write for the
current situation in Turkey. They replied, “For sure, it would not be a
love song . . . maybe it would be a lament.” Yet they sounded a note of
hopefulness in comparing Turkish democracy to their own long rela-
tionship. Alanson and Güner got together in 1966 to listen to the Bea-
tles’ Rubber Soul. They met Özkan in 1971 and began playing together,
working with several other Turkish musicians. They recorded their first
album in 1984 and represented Turkey in the Eurovision song contest in
1985 and 1988. They have been together ever since. A totally apolitical
and quite ordinary Turkish pop trio, MFÖ has created some of Turkey’s
best-known pop songs. They offered themselves as a simple model of
domestic harmony. There have been many fights, they agreed, “But if
you are making music together, if you are writing a song together, you
do not say things like ‘I don’t have the patience for this.’ ”1
Life in Turkey asked much patience, but was not so different from
life in other countries. Turkey’s economic woes, while significant,
were not worse than those of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal
and were at least partly understandable even to observers living in
the United States after 2006. It was not a wholly unfamiliar experience
that, despite a string of AKP electoral victories, about half the Turkish
voting public disliked the prime minister and wearied of the overt re-
ligiosity of many of their fellow citizens. In circumstances where one
political party dominates the democratic institutions for a long period
of time, a certain cycle was also predictable—from pre-election ideals
and promise, through the earnestness of the first term in power, to hu-
bris in uninterrupted victory, and finally to satire and cynicism in the
face of inevitable failed expectations.
ISTANBUL
It seemed natural that the stress of Turkish life fell heavily on Istan-
bul, that most magnetic of Turkish cities. There were the same extremes
of wealth and poverty seen in other great cities, from the Ferrari Ma-
serati showroom that opened 2005 in Kuruçeşme along the European
shore of the Bosphorus, where luxury cars double parked in front of
swanky seaside restaurants were routine, to the cinder block and cor-
rugated tin of shanties in Sulukule, the ancient Romani neighborhood
of the old city. Forbes magazine said that Istanbul had 37 billionaires in
2013, fifth in the world after Moscow, New York, Hong Kong, and Lon-
don. The city’s ancient Byzantine and Ottoman monuments were being
dusted off one by one for the expanding tourist industry. Topkapı Pal-
ace, Haghia Sophia, and other major historical sites were made more
attractive and accessible to visitors. Yet when the European Union
designated Istanbul the European Capital of Culture for calendar year
2010, it was not merely a nod to history. Istanbul proved that it had
come alive again after decades of neglect by Republican bureaucrats.
Coffee shops, pubs and clubs, and sidewalk cafes filled Beyoğlu, once
again the center of Istanbul’s nightlife. The work of directors such as
Fatih Akın and musicians like Sezen Aksu and Mercan Dede made the
city a center of the burgeoning world film and music industries. Sev-
eral new art galleries opened, funded by prominent philanthropists,
among them Istanbul Modern (2004), from the Eczacıbaşı fortune; the
Pera Museum (2005), by the Koç foundation; the Elgiz Museum of
Contemporary Art (2001) and the Sakıp Sabancı Museum opened in
2002 in the family’s former Bosphorus estate.
Another new museum, Panorama 1453, featured a 360-degree re-
construction of the Ottoman conquest. Istanbul’s rapid transformation
Gezi Park: Turkey Since 2012 203
accompanied a popular taste for all things past. Often, as in the case
of clothing, the Ottoman fad signaled political preferences. Not just
fashionable women’s wear was seen, but even Ottoman-like beards
and robes on men. They were an unambiguous mark of religiosity,
with little of the playfulness and nuance of the headscarf. The Ot-
toman fascination was noticeable across the political spectrum. Two
bestselling novels of Orhan Pamuk were set in Ottoman times, White
Castle and My Name is Red. Ottoman cuisine made a comeback in crea-
tive recipes at places like the Çiya restaurant group in Kadıköy, which
got rave reviews in The New York Times. Seemingly, the whole coun-
try watched Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century), a television
serial about the reign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent that ran
for three seasons (2011–2013). Prime Minister Erdoğan and many re-
ligious people complained about the show’s historical inaccuracies
and focus on the sultan’s love life. Just so—the conservative and reli-
giously observant tended to idealize the Ottoman centuries as a time
when traditional Islamic values were respected and religious toler-
ance prevailed. The liberal and less observant remembered Ottoman
despotism, bigotry, and genocide. Both voiced what kind of Turkey
they hoped for today.
In any case, the nostalgia was not so much for lost empire in any
real political sense. It rather expressed a sense of regret for a city being
irredeemably lost to development, the city not just of the distant Otto-
man centuries, but also of the immediately preceding decades. Early
Republican Istanbul too was obliterated. The sleepy city of the 1960s,
of one and a half million people, was buried under the weight of mass
migrations, of upwards of 14 million people spread out in shantytowns
as far as the eye could see. Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, titled Istanbul, was
a loving description of the city of his boyhood, whose back streets and
bookshops he had haunted. The memoir resurrected the black-and-
white photographs of Ara Güler, the Turkish-Armenian photographer
now in his eighties who chronicled the city’s former life. As dolmuş
routes disappeared and the subway system reached throughout the
city, on İstiklal Caddesi in Beyoğlu, the former Grand Rue de Pera, the
historical tramway was restored to service on new tracks, and most of
the old buildings lining the street were cleaned off and repaired. As
hundreds of steel and glass high-rise office buildings covered the land-
scape and the Marmaray tube opened under the Bosphorus, displacing
37 excavated shipwrecks on the old Byzantine shoreline, Ara Güler’s
pictures spoke of a time when everyone lived in two and three-story
wooden or cinder block and stucco homes and the Bosphorus could
only be crossed by ferry boat. Yet the past is full of errors as well. Pa-
muk’s novel of obsessive love, The Museum of Innocence, was a retell-
ing of the epic Leyla and Majnun, but set in coup-era Istanbul, by an
author who knows Nabakov.
GEZI PARK
When heavy equipment appeared in Taksim Square in Istanbul
on the morning of May 27, 2013, ready to bulldoze the trees of Gezi
Park, alerts went out by social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Several dozen people began a protest in the park. The peaceful dem-
onstration was coordinated by Taksim Solidarity, a nonviolent organi-
zation of activists who had been monitoring the situation in Taksim
Square for several months. The Gezi Park trees were threatened by
the Taksim Pedestrianization Project, the latest proposed solution
to the gridlocked traffic of Taksim. Taksim Square would become a
pedestrian-only zone. Automobile traffic would be routed into tunnels
under the square. Gezi Park, the only green space in this part of the
city, was to be torn up.
Of equal importance, Taksim Square itself, while perhaps not quite
holy ground, is richly symbolic in modern Turkish history. It is the
main square of the district of Beyoğlu, atop the summit of a large hill
that overlooks the walled city of old Istanbul across the Golden Horn.
Encompassing and expanding out from old Pera and Galata, Beyoğlu
was, for the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire, a center of non-
Muslim and foreign culture. Even today, Holy Trinity Church occu-
pies a prominent place on the square, but there are no mosques to be
found anywhere. Instead, Taksim Square has the Revolution Monu-
ment, the most important shrine of the Turkish republic after Atatürk’s
Mausoleum (in Ankara)—during martial law days in the 1980s, it was
forbidden to even sit in its presence. It is the site of May Day demon-
strations and witnessed the bloody police massacre of 1977. Taksim
Square is connected to the port of Istanbul by the mile-long İstiklal
Caddesi, Revolution Boulevard, at the end of which is the funicular
rail line down to the harbor. İstiklal Caddesi was already a walking
mall, closed to automobile traffic since 1990. The Taksim Pedestriani-
zation Project expanded the concept to Taksim Square.
Not only this, but the former Ottoman military barracks that had
previously occupied the site of Gezi Park were to be rebuilt. The bar-
racks originated in the 1890s. Damaged beyond use in the 1909 at-
tempted counterrevolution against the Young Turks, the barracks
were repurposed as a football stadium in the 1920s. All three Istanbul
football teams had played there. Then the arena was torn down in
1940 and made into Gezi Park. The idea of rebuilding the barracks
had been around for awhile—a thread about it in the photo posting
and discussion board WowTurkey.com, for instance, went back to
at least 2003. The plan got the approval of the Municipal Historical
Preservation Board and was included in the contract for the Taksim
Pedestrianization Project when it was awarded in a bidding competi-
tion. As public discussion evolved in the fall of 2012, Istanbul mayor
Kadir Topbaş lent support to the idea that Gezi Park would go and
the barracks would be rebuilt as a shopping mall, topped off with a
mosque.
Taksim Solidarity, the activist group, began keeping vigil as the first
stage of construction got underway in late 2012 with some street clos-
ings. Members handed out leaflets and collected signatures against
the project at the entrance to the Taksim Square underground metro
station. Elements of the group’s protest—the Ottoman-era barracks,
the mosque, the use of historical nostalgia to trump environmental
concerns—were specifically Turkish. The larger context, however, was
global. Turkish corporate greed looked like corporate greed every-
where, no matter its stylishly pious AKP head covering. And when
Taksim Solidarity pitched tents in Gezi Park that first evening, it
showed a debt to the peaceful “We are the 99 percent” and Occupy
Wall Street movements, which in turn owed their inspiration to the
Arab Spring movement of 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt. In the Gezi Park
protests, a younger generation of Turkish people, a generation often
derided for its apathy, joined its voice to the chorus of the rest of the
world’s peoples, calling for more democratic, more open, more hu-
mane societies.
The response to the demonstration was ferocious. On May 28, the
morning after the first campout, a Peace and Democracy Party Mem-
ber of Parliament from Istanbul, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, joined the crowd
blocking the bulldozers and petitioned that the police barriers around
the park be removed as unauthorized. Later that day, riot police ap-
peared and went immediately to the attack, and the attack went viral.
Ceyda Sungur became “The Woman in a Red Dress” when a photo-
graph of her being sprayed at point blank range with tear gas to the
face was posted on social media. On May 29, the 560th anniversary of
the conquest of Istanbul, Prime Minister Erdoğan was at the ground-
breaking ceremony for the third Bosphorus bridge. While the second
bridge had been named for Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, this third
bridge was to be named, incredibly, after Sultan Selim I, notorious for
his violence against Alevis. Erdoğan dismissed the protests, saying,
Taksim Square, Istanbul, June 2, 2013. Gezi Park is visible through the trees on the
left. (Courtesy of Steven Howard)
“Whatever they do will not change our minds. We will do what we are
going to do.” Police stormed Gezi Park the next morning at dawn with
more tear gas and water cannons. Önder physically intervened, calls
went out on social media, and by that evening, 10,000 people were in
the park setting up more tents. Another dawn attack followed, when
the protesters were at their weakest, since comparatively fewer people,
mostly students, spent the night in the park. Önder was wounded by
a flying tear gas canister and hospitalized.
The Gezi Park protest was transformed into a live-action drama
about AKP democracy, watched on monitors mounted around the
globe. It was not a pretty picture. CNN Türk, however, rather than
show the protests and police violence going on in Taksim, broadcast
a lengthy documentary on penguins. People were flocking to Taksim
from all over the city, over 100,000 by the evening, despite police road-
blocks. Demonstrations also occurred in other parts of Istanbul, in-
cluding Beşiktaş and Kadıköy, and spread to Ankara and İzmir. On
June 1, President Gül flew home from a state visit in Türkmenistan
as demonstrations were being staged in more than 40 Turkish cities.
Videos of graphic police brutality were posted on YouTube and other
media sites, while Erdoğan defended the police and demanded that
protesters leave. Thousands of people did the opposite, walking across
the first Bosphorus bridge from Anatolia towards Beşiktaş and Tak-
sim, and others joined the protests from their homes, blinking their
lights on and off and banging pots and pans and kitchen utensils from
the balconies of their apartment buildings. That evening, the police
withdrew from the park and Taksim Square. They continued to attack
protesters in other parts of the city, and on June 2, the first death oc-
curred. Mehmet Ayvalitaş, a 20-year-old young man, was hit by a car
and killed.
The next 10 days were comparatively calm in Istanbul. The dem-
onstrations continued, but a kind of truce with police prevailed as
negotiations took place involving Önder, Taksim Solidarity, President
Gül, and others. Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç apologized for
excessive use of force by the police. Hundreds of thousands of people
remained in occupation of Taksim and Beyoğlu. The fan clubs of all
three Istanbul football teams, Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe, and Galatasaray,
came together in unprecedented harmony. Protests continued else-
where. Two more people died, Abdullah Cömert, a CHP youth in
Antakya, and Ethem Sarısuluk, who was shot to death by a police-
man in Ankara. There were labor strikes and the stock market slid.
Although some investors were pulling out of the Taksim project and
at least one local AKP official resigned, Prime Minister Erdoğan and
many of his supporters seemed incapable of understanding and com-
passion. On a visit to Tunisia, Erdoğan was greeted by similar protests,
but on returning to Turkey, he was met at the airport by enthusiastic
cries of “We will die for you,” and “We will crush them.” Flying around
the country making speeches, he denounced artists and foreigners for
provoking the protests and complained that protesters were attacking
police. He warned, “No one will get away with this.” He promised
patience, but “Patience has a limit,” he said.
Having used the interim of peace to call in reinforcements—troops,
weapons, and munitions—from around the country, on June 10–11, the
police and gendarmes attacked in force, both in Ankara and in Istan-
bul. The government stated that it could no longer guarantee the secu-
rity of citizens and called on the crowds to disburse. Istanbul governor
Hüseyin Avni Mutlu chided mothers, saying they should go and bring
their children home from the park. In response, a group of women
formed a human chain around Taksim Square to protect their chil-
dren from the police, chanting, “The mothers are here!” The doctors’
union fashioned temporary emergency rooms, one in the Divan Hotel
at Taksim Square and another at Dolmabahçe Mosque, down the hill
in Beşiktaş, whose imam graciously opened its doors to the care of the
wounded.
Scenes of violence and brutality alternated with scenes of ironic
humor and ethereal beauty. Police deployed teargas and water can-
nons in many parts of Istanbul, and AKP vigilantes and civil police
roamed the streets looking for people to beat up. One of their vic-
tims was Mehmet Ali Korkmaz, who died of a brain hemorrhage. In
honor of the CNN Türk documentary that had replaced coverage of
the protests, penguins became the ironic mascot of the demonstrators.
Penguin images were everywhere—penguins wearing gas masks,
bandana-wearing penguins throwing flowers, penguins “Photo-
shopped” into photos of water cannon and tear gas attacks. One of
the twitter hashtags used was #direnantarctica. Adopting Erdoğan’s
charge, the demonstrators called themselves Çapulcus, the “Looters.”
Based on the wounded that they were treating, health care workers
charged that pepper spray was being mixed into the water cannons.
Photographic evidence verified this. Elderly women shouted encour-
agement from their windows and balconies to people on the street,
Could you use some water, milk, lemons, antacids? Street vendors sold
gas masks, helmets, and swimming goggles. Glass jars of clean drink-
ing water were left on the street. AKP supporters claimed hysterically
that Dolmabahçe Mosque was no emergency room, that alcohol was
being drunk, and people were having sex in there! One evening, pop
star Tarkan gave a concert. Somehow, a grand piano was set up on a
makeshift stage in front of the Revolution Monument, and pianists
Yiğit Özatalay and Davide Martello, who drove to Istanbul from Sofia,
Bulgaria, played for the quiet crowd. Later, the piano was detained by
the police.
On June 13, a court ruling was handed down halting the Gezi Park
barracks project. In the next two days, a final police offensive cleared
Gezi Park. On June 17, the city still reeling from the shock, Erdem
Gündüz became “The Standing Man.” One lone individual standing
in silence for eight hours in front of the Atatürk Cultural Center, he
drew the curtain across the madness.
DEVELOPMENT AND DISASTER

If the Gezi Park protests exposed a national development obses-
sion that ignored environmental warning signs and seemed devoid
of human compassion, the problem did not go away once the crowds
dispersed from Taksim Square. It was not just that the death of Berkin
Elvan (after 269 days in a coma) reminded the mourning nation of Gezi.
Fifteen years old, he was the eighth person to die because of the Gezi
violence. In Ankara, where demonstrators had also been evicted from
Kızılay downtown and other districts, new protests burst out even be-
fore summer’s end, where a planned new metro stop that would have
destroyed dozens of trees. Ankara Metropoitan Municipality began
work on a road bisecting the campus of Middle East Technical Univer-
sity (METU), straight through a protected campus woodlands adjacent
to a lake. Students and others blocked construction, and the familiar
tear gas and water cannons reappeared. There were two deaths. In
the middle of the night, the last night of Kurban Bayram, the Sacri-
fice Festival, the trees were cut down under police escort. The mayor
called the protestors “militant enemies of the city,” and Prime Minis-
ter Erdoğan said that they should all “go live in a forest.” Ironically,
soon after becoming president in August 2014, Erdoğan himself went
to live in a forest in Ankara. The new presidential palace of more than
1,000 rooms was built within the Atatürk Forest Farm, a protected state
forest. Although challenged in court, construction continued because
Turkish law allows an activity to continue during the time it is under
court appeal. By the time the courts ruled (in July 2015) that construc-
tion was in fact illegal, the palace was complete and had been function-
ing as the presidential estate for half a year.
What were a few trees, the Prime Minister had wondered. Erdoğan’s
cavalier dismissal of environmental concerns spoke for a national ob-
session. After protests at an olive grove threatened construction of a
coal mine, Energy Minister Yıldız Taner added that a couple hundred
trees should not stop Turkey’s development. Were it not one of the
few green spaces left in Istanbul’s central city, Gezi Park and its few
trees would indeed have been nothing in comparison to truly massive
deforestation plotted in other parts of the country. One thing the Gezi
protests proved was the growing strength of Turkey’s environmental-
ist movement. The TEMA foundation, Turkey’s largest environmental
NGO (founded 1992), focused particularly on soil conservation issues.
It planted more than 10 million saplings and 700 million acorns in two
decades. By the time of Gezi, its annual budget was 14 million lira,
from grants, corporate sponsorships, individual donations, and rev-
enues from its own products. TEMA efforts resulted in legislative suc-
cesses in regulating land use in grazing and agriculture.
Conditions in the construction and mining industries were obvi-
ously related to concerns about land use and soil conservation. In ad-
dition to Istanbul’s third airport and third Bosphorus bridge projects,
major mining projects drew protests. Between a nickel mine in Manisa
district, a copper mine, a coal mine in the Black Sea region, coal mines
near Çanakkale, and the Black Sea highway near Rize, Turkish activ-
ists prevented the destruction of millions of trees in the two years after
Gezi. But in worker safety as well as in more narrowly environmen-
tal concerns, the mining and construction industries demonstrated that
often the problem was not so much a need for new legislation as lack of
enforcement and lack of respect for the impact on the lives of ordinary
people.
Two coal mining disasters highlighted the problem. An explosion
and fire killed 301 miners at Soma mine on May 13, 2014, and less than
six months later, 18 more miners lost their lives when a pipe burst and
flooded a mine at Ermenek. Turkey led the world in deaths in min-
ing accidents three years running, beating out even China. At Soma,
an investigation found the sole cause of the disaster to be the mining
company’s negligence. Among many problems, the mine had no au-
tomatic system to detect smoke or heat, the means for extinguishing
fires were inadequate, and the company had not conducted fire and
evacuation drills. Yet the company passed all inspections with a per-
fect record. The construction industry was just as bad. A study by an
industry group found more than a thousand workplace deaths had
occurred in each of the last 12 years, with the construction industry
leading the way. Statistics of the Labor and Social Security Ministry
showed an average of 172 workplace accidents daily. International
Labor Organization figures put Turkey third highest in the world in
worker accidents. Ten construction workers were killed in an elevator
accident in Istanbul in September 2014. As the workers were leaving
work in the evening, the elevator broke and fell 32 floors.
Erdoğan’s callous attitude seemed to exemplify the heedlessness evi-
dent in these industrial failures. For example, while voicing sorrow at
the scale of the Soma mine disaster, the prime minister said that such
accidents should be expected as a natural aspect of the industry. “People
in the area are used to them. . . . Men get into this line of work know-
ing that this kind of thing can happen,” he stated at a press conference.
At demonstrations two days after the disaster, a photograph went viral
of one of the surviving miners, held on the ground by two gendarmes,
being kicked by one of Erdoğan’s aides. The aide was not prosecuted,
but he did get a doctor’s report and missed seven days of work for in-
juries sustained while he was doing the kicking. The miner, meanwhile,
the one who was kicked by the aide, was fined for kicking a tire on
Erdoğan’s car. Later, a fistfight broke out at a meeting of the Planning
and Budget Commission in Ankara during discussion of government
assistance to the Soma victims’ families. The AKP members got into
a petty argument with the CHP deputies that Erdoğan’s promise of a
2000 TL raise for the miners was meant to be an increase in their gross
salary not their net take-home pay. Labor union participation, mean-
while, fell to only 8.8 percent of workers, the lowest level in 50 years.
SCANDAL AND REVENGE

Six months after the Gezi Park protests, in December 2013, Erdoğan
and the AKP faced another crisis. This time, police raids netted doz-
ens of people on corruption charges, among them three government
ministers’ sons and several prominent businessmen with close ties to
the AKP. They were charged with bribing public officials in order to
win construction contracts or to have construction codes and regu-
lations overlooked, and raising illegal funds for pet foundations and
charities in return for political favors. In one case, shoeboxes contain-
ing $4.5 million were seized from the home of the general manager of
state-owned Halkbank. Police on the case worked from wire taps on
thousands of individuals, including Erdoğan and his family, and in the
weeks after the arrests, many key recordings were leaked to the press.
One was of a conversation between Erdoğan and his son, who were ap-
parently talking about how to get rid of cash stashed in their home. In
many instances, the police, judges, and media people involved in this
graft investigation were the same ones who were helping the Erdoğan
government prosecute the military brass in the Ergenekon cases. Four
AKP ministers resigned with the arrests. One called on Erdoğan him-
self to resign, saying that the prime minister was quite well-informed
about what they had been doing. Erdoğan was blindsided by the ar-
rests, but internal AKP politics lay behind them. Although the details
were murky, a major breakdown had occurred within AKP ranks be-
tween party leaders and party members who were also involved in the
Gülen movement. Fethullah Gülen himself lived in the United States,
even after being acquitted of charges against him, yet he was never
far from the main currents of Turkish life. Despite divergent aims, the
Gülen Cemaat movement had been a key AKP constituency from the
beginning. Gülen supporters were known to be strong in the judiciary
and police, and some suggested that the Gülen bloc in the AKP was dis-
gruntled over its share of cabinet portfolios and limited influence after
the 2011 national elections. Others pointed out that Gülen support-
ers had been critical of the AKP leadership for years, going back even
to the February 28 process. One example occurred in May 2010. AKP
leaders quietly backed the Gaza Flotilla, a nonviolent initiative of Turk-
ish NGOs to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza by sending boats with
humanitarian relief supplies. Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza
Flotilla and killed nine Turkish citizens, rappelling on to the boats from
helicopters in the middle of the night while in international waters. The
Cemaat leadership saw the flotilla as a provocation, doomed to failure,
a deliberate sabotage of Turkey’s heretofore good relations with Israel.
Some AKP people complained that the Ergenekon probes had gone
too far, that they endangered military and intelligence operations
against terrorism. More than 400 former officers and noncoms were
in detention, some for long periods of time without trial, doggedly
pursued by the police and judiciary, strongholds of the Cemaat. The
AKP leadership was infuriated when testimony was subpoenaed from
Hakan Fidan, head of the National Intelligence Agency, the man that
Erdoğan had personally tasked with negotiating a settlement with the
PKK. On top of all this, Erdoğan’s increasingly arrogant and authori-
tarian behavior since the 2011 election, witnessed in his reaction to the
Gezi Park protests, disturbed not only Turkish secularists and liberals,
but many in the Cemaat as well.
A polarizing figure by any estimation, Erdoğan was also wearing
out his early support among secularists and skeptical academics. They
had liked his determination to meet EU standards and his courage in
facing down the generals. From the start, some had remained wary
of Erdoğan’s religious views, citing for instance the plans to build a
mosque on Çamlıca Hill overlooking the Bosphorus in Istanbul as an
unacceptable transformation of Turkish public space. Erdoğan voiced
a common Sunni Islamic contempt for Alevis, as for example when
he dismissed opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s comments about
AKP Syria policy during parliamentary debate, saying, “We know
what kind of Muslim you are.” As we have seen, many judged Erdoğan
to be ultimately responsible for the widespread disregard of environ-
mental issues and worker safety.
Instances of Erdoğan’s blurring of boundaries between his person
and state authority began to add up. For example, he habitually re-
ferred to “my” police, “my” soldiers, “my” teachers, “my” civil serv-
ants, “my” shopkeepers. Once while on a walking tour of an Istanbul
neighborhood with the mayor, he saw a man on the terrace of a res-
taurant smoking a cigarette. Erdoğan pointed at him, saying, “That’s
against the law! He’s smoking in an enclosed place. Where’s my po-
lice?” As the man calmly puffed away, Erdoğan grew visibly angry.
“This shameless guy—I’m the president, and he just keeps looking at
me and goes on smoking! It’s the month of Muharrem, for God’s sake!”
The nervous mayor delicately offered that the man could just agree
to not do it again, but Erdoğan insisted. The police showed up, fined
the man, and the restaurant too was fined 6,000 TL—almost $3,000.
And another example: In the year after he became president, the con-
stitutional ban on insulting the president, never invoked before, was
used more than 1,700 times. By comparison, the constitutional ban on
insults of Atatürk, imposed dozens of times every year, peaked at only
580, in 2002 (the year of the AKP’s first electoral victory).
Marshalling all his available resources in the months following
the corruption arrests, Erdoğan struck back at the Cemaat. Figuring
that Gülen supporters would find no palatable political alternative to
the AKP, Erdoğan called their bluff. There is a kind of Muslim left in
Turkey—a group called the Anti-Capitalist Muslims, for instance, who
criticize the materialism and idolatry of Turkish society, that joined
the Gezi protests—but its influence is limited. Erdoğan took his chal-
lenge of the Gülen movement to the public. He repeatedly charged
that the Cemaat movement amounted to a “parallel state” plotting an
“attempted coup” against him. He challenged Gülen to come back to
Turkey, start his own political party, and run for office himself. In a
systematic purge, hundreds of judges, prosecutors, and police officers
were fired or reassigned, including those who had worked on this case.
Legislation was passed in parliament to close university exam prep
schools (dershanes), thousands of which were owned and operated by
businessmen affiliated with the Cemaat. Although it was thrown out
on challenge at the Constitutional Court, informal harassment of the
schools and their personnel continued. He put pressure on other coun-
tries to close Gülen schools abroad. He called for the extradition of
Gülen himself from the United States. The attack resulted in AKP de-
fections, including Hakan Şükür, the former footballer who had scored
the quickest goal in World Cup history, who had entered parliament
on the AKP list in the June 2011 elections. Yet Erdoğan’s calculation
was nonetheless essentially correct—the AKP won the local elections
in the spring of 2014 by a wide margin, and in August, in the first pres-
idential election by popular vote, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected
12th president of the republic.
By the fall of 2014, Erdoğan’s machinery had successfully turned
the tables on the corruption investigation. The case for scandal slowly
eroded and most of the case was dropped for lack of evidence. The in-
criminating recording of Erdoğan and his son, for example, was said to
be a montage of several conversations. The official who had called for
Erdoğan’s resignation rescinded his own and apologized to Erdoğan.
Not only was the case dropped, all over Turkey, police, judges, and media
figures associated with the Cemaat found themselves under arrest. Be-
yond charges merely of unauthorized wiretapping, they were accused
of plotting against the government. An arrest warrant was also issued
for Fethullah Gülen, who was still living in Pennsylvania. (The United
States declined to extradite him.) In May 2015, two judges who ordered
the release of 75 policemen and one TV executive held for connections
to Gülen’s so-called “parallel state” were suspended by the Supreme
Council of Judges and Prosecutors. The official who had prosecuted
the case—the same man who had led the Ergenekon investigations—
fled abroad via Armenia and sought asylum in Germany. One aspect of
the investigation that survived was the cash in the shoebox. The money
turned out to be kickbacks to Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-born Turkish
businessman. Zarrab had been the middle man in a Turkish scheme
to bust the sanctions on trade with Iran by paying for Iranian oil and
natural gas with gold rather than forbidden dollars or euros.
KOBANI AND AFTER

In late 2012, Turkey became entangled in the complex war in the
borderlands of southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, and northern Iraq.
The war was the result of the breakdown in security both on the Iraqi
side of the border, after the 2003 American invasion, and on the Syrian
side of the border, with the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad
that began in the “Arab Spring” of 2011. Although the Turkish mili-
tary conducted occasional operations in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey had
avoided overt involvement in the war. It was drawn into the conflict at
this point because, with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS), AKP support for the Syrian rebels compromised the security of
Turkey’s own Kurdish populations.
After AKP moves to take down restrictions on freedom of expres-
sion, Kurds actively sought broader liberties. Use of Kurdish was still
banned in parliament, for example. Ahmet Türk defied this in 2009,
prodding a dialogue with Erdoğan and further negotiations to ad-
dress Kurdish desires. The Kurdish settlement process produced a
cease-fire and a peace letter from jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öca-
lan, read out in Diyarbakir at Nowruz in March 2013. Mahmud Bar-
zani, head of Iraqi Kurdistan, met Erdoğan in Diyarbakir in the fall.
Erdoğan’s wife wore a Kurdish scarf while Kurdish-Turkish singers
Şivan Perwer, who had been living in Germany, and Ibrahim Tatlıses
performed Kurdish folk songs. A government report timed with the
meeting frankly laid out the human and financial cost of the con-
flict with the PKK since the mid-1980s. An estimated 35,000 people
had died, including 7,000 Turkish soldiers, and economic losses, in
military expenditures, borrowing, and unrealized economic growth,
totaled $1.2 trillion. Erdoğan walked a fine line trying to appear
peacemaker, but not caving into PKK. Yet despite the good will, by
the summer of 2015 this settlement process broke down completely
and war returned.
As the Syrian demonstrations became a revolt and then a civil war,
the AKP government actively sided with the Syrian rebels. Early in the
conflict, Syrian rebel groups met in Istanbul, and the Free Syrian Army
headquarters were for a time in Turkey, in Hatay Province. The Turk-
ish government and its allies, however, underestimated the difficulty
of overthrowing the Assad regime, which had its own international
support. After more than two years of fighting, the Assad govern-
ment more or less regained control of the western Syrian cities, while
the rebel forces both fought the Assad regime and also fell into a vio-
lent war with each other. The AKP government continued to fight the
Assad regime, even when it became apparent that it was likely a losing
cause, and the priority of the United States and other onlookers shifted
to the need to contain the power of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria)
among the rebel groups. In the eastern Syrian provinces, where the
war between the rebels raged, Turkey was dragged directly into the
conflict. ISIS seized several towns on the Syrian-Turkish border begin-
ning in the fall of 2013, and the war became largely a Kurdish-ISIS
conflict.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS forces seized Mosul, on the upper Tigris,
threatening not only Iraqi Kurdistan, but also the Kurdish-populated
region along the Turkish border in both Iraq and Syria. Under these
circumstances, tension grew between the PKK militias and the Turk-
ish military. The Turkish PKK militia supported its Syrian counterpart
(the PYD), who were defending their towns and villages against ISIS.
The AKP government, on the other hand, secretly allowed ISIS recruit-
ing within Turkey and smuggling of ISIS oil in exchange for arms. In
January 2014, Cumhuriyet published photos of a convoy of Turkish
MİT trucks transporting arms at the Syrian border. The AKP govern-
ment, obsessed with toppling Assad, seemed blind to the threat of ISIS.
The months-long siege of Kobani, one of the border towns besieged
by ISIS, drew attention to the ISIS advance and to the Turkish govern-
ment’s obstruction of a unified defense. Under intense international
pressure, the AKP permitted Turkish Kurds to join the defense of Kob-
ani, and the Kurdish fighers successfully lifted the siege in January
2015. Seven months later, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Suruç,
another border town, killing 32. Incensed at the lax border security, the
PKK blamed not only ISIS, but also the AKP for this atrocity and killed
two border policemen in revenge. The Turkish-Kurdish settlement
process collapsed, and the PKK ended the cease-fire and attacked the
Turkish military. In the event, the AKP finally consented to the use of
İncirlik air base and joined the anti-ISIS forces.
The government’s conflicting priorities in the war were exacerbated
by uncertain political conditions. In the national elections of June 2015,
although the AKP won with 40 percent of the popular vote, it lost the
parliamentary majority it had enjoyed for 12 years. The big surprise
was that the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) cleared the 10 percent
threshold to enter parliament with 80 seats, fourth after the Republican
People’s Party and the Nationalist Action Party. HDP, headed by
Selahattin Demirtaş, was a new party, an amalgamation of small, pro-
Kurdish parties with organized labor and women’s and LGBT rights
groups that had run previously fielded candidates as independents.
The hung parliament meant that for the first time since 2002, a coali-
tion was needed to form a government. By law, if no coalition was
formed within 45 days, the president could call a new election. Coali-
tion negotiations stalled, the deadline expired, and new elections were
called. Fears about the security situation produced a slight alteration
in the vote, just enough to return the AKP to its parliamentary major-
ity. CHP took second. Although both MHP and HDP saw their share
of the vote decline from the June result, both parties cleared the 10
percent threshold to keep representation in parliament.
The renewed AKP majority was seen as allowing a mandate to
President Erdoğan. The president had made no secret of his wish to
move Turkey towards a presidential system of government. Rightly or
wrongly, Erdoğan and the AKP had reached the conviction that Turkey
would be better served by a strengthened executive branch. During
the campaign Erdoğan repeatedly stated that single-party majorities
in parliament worked better in Turkey than coalition governments. In
the 41-year period between passage of the 1961 constitution and the
AKP victory of 2002, when coalition governments were the norm and
single-party control of parliament the exception, coalitions often ex-
ercised weak leadership. In the current circumstances in Turkey, as in
many countries, the populace was polarized in its political views. If
there was a positive aspect of this it was that the political parties rep-
resented in parliament with the 2015 elections offered clear differences
of vision and program priorities. The negative side, however, was that
the parties and their respective constituencies had difficulty the find-
ing common grounds for cooperation that was essential for coalition
government to function.
After a dozen years of Justice and Development Party leadership,
many wondered whether Turkish society had truly been opened up for
the benefit of all citizens, or whether a new elite had merely substituted
itself in place of the old. Under AKP rule a new power class seemed to
take advantage of the same old privileges, through the same old mech-
anisms of patronage and nepotism, as had been enjoyed for decades
by the old Kemalist elite. As in the weary period after many domes-
tic fights, the Turkish people got back to work, students returned to
school, and the football season was underway. Mazhar-Fuat-Özkan’s
counsel of patience seemed profound. The three musicians acknowl-
edged that their generation had lived in simpler times, and they fret-
ted about what kind of world they might be leaving their offspring.
“Still I have hope,” said Özkan Uğur, “that better days lie ahead.”2
NOTES
1. The interview by Ayça Derçin Karabulut appeared in Kafa (Ekim
2015), 28–30.
2. Ibid., 30.
Notable People in the
History of Turkey
Abdülhamid II (1842–1918). Ottoman Sultan 1876–1909. Son of Sul-

tan Abdülmecid. Raised to the throne on the breakdown of Murad V.
A modernizer who oversaw the economic and technological develop-
ment of the empire. Promulgated the first Ottoman constitution, but
suspended it a year later and closed the parliament. The Young Turk
revolution forced him to restore the constitution and call elections. De-
posed after the failure of the counterrevolution of April 1909, he was
exiled to Salonika, where he stayed until the outbreak of the First Bal-
kan War. He lived in retirement in the Beylerbeyi Palace in Istanbul
until his death.
Adıvar, Halide Edib (1884–1964). Nationalist journalist, novel-

ist, and orator. Born and raised in a traditional Islamic household in
Istanbul; learned to read, write, and recite the Qur’an. Attended a
Greek kindergarten and had English governesses and private tutors.
The first Turk to graduate from the American College for Girls (1901).
Married Salih Zeki and had two sons but divorced her husband when
he took a second wife. Later, she married the noted scholar Dr. Abdül-
hak Adnan Adıvar. Published several novels, including Ateşten Göm-
lek (Shirt of Fire), Sinekli Bakkal (Grocery of Flies), and Vurun Kahpeye
220 Notable People in the History of Turkey
(Strike the Whore). She and her husband disagreed with the radical
secularism of the early Republican years. They went abroad in 1925
when the Independence Tribunals began arresting Atatürk’s political
enemies. Except for a short visit, they returned to Turkey only after
Atatürk’s death. While in exile, Halide Edib published in English two
volumes of her personal remembrances, Memoirs (1926) and The Turk-
ish Ordeal (1928), and wrote and spoke extensively as a goodwill am-
bassador for the Turkish revolution.
Ahmet Rıza (1858–1930). Ottoman intellectual and politician. Inter-

ested in bringing about the advancement of modern, scientific, and
rational society, his thought was influenced by the French positivist
Auguste Comte. Founded the Association for the Union of Ottomans
in 1889, which became the Committee of Union and Progress in 1895.
In the same year, he began publishing the dissident journal Mesşveret,
whose editorial stance advocated a synthesis of modern science and
Islamic civilization. A believer in constitutional monarchy, Ahmet Rıza
thought that loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty could unite the different
ethnic and religious groups of the empire.
Aksu, Sezen (1954–). Singer and songwriter. Born Sarayköy, near

Denizli, daughter of an educator; grew up in İzmir. Her second single
(1976) was a hit; but she became especially popular after the 1980 coup.
Advanced Turkish popular musical tastes beyond classical and ara-
besque; influential figure in the new world music genre, fusing Turk-
ish instrumentation and style with western pop. Active in support of
minority and women’s rights and in the power of art to transcend cul-
tural differences.
Alp Arslan (1030–1073). Seljuk Sultan (1063–1073). Son of the Seljuk

chieftain Chaghri Bey, he demonstrated military leadership early in
his youth. Succeeded to the Seljuk throne in 1063 and was recognized
as Sultan by the Caliph in Baghdad. Campaigned in Armenia and the
Caucasus in order to control the Turkoman forces in his army. Defeated
the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert, August 1071, taking the
emperor prisoner. As a result of this victory, all of Anatolia was opened
to Turkish raiding, migration, and settlement.
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938). General and politician, first

president of the Turkish republic (1923–1938). Born in Salonika and
graduated from the military staff college in 1905. In Damascus in 1907,
he founded a secret society, the Fatherland and Freedom Society. Began
to work with the CUP when he was stationed in Salonika with the Ot-
toman Third Army. He participated in the Action Army that put down
the counterrevolution in 1909. Before World War I, served in Libya and
in Sofia. First achieved fame for his leadership in the defense of the
Dardanelles in 1915. Directed the Ottoman retreat from Syria in 1917.
In May 1919, was appointed to direct the demobilization in eastern
Anatolia, but instead joined the growing resistance movement, becom-
ing its most important leader. He led the unification of the various
Anatolian Societies for the Defense of Rights at two nationalist con-
gresses in July and September 1919, at which he was elected president.
During the next three years, he served as president of the nationalist
parliament and coordinated and led the military campaign that re-
pelled the Greek invasion of Anatolia. He was elected first president of
the republic when it was proclaimed on October 29, 1923. During the
next 15 years, he oversaw the beginnings of the modernization of Tur-
key through a series of reforms. Took the family name Atatürk in 1934.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver on November 10, 1938. His remains
were buried in the archaeological museum in Ankara and transferred
to a mausoleum at Anıtkabir, when it was completed in 1953. Married
to Latife in 1923–1925. Atatürk left no heirs.
Ayla, Safiye (1907–1998). Popular singer. Born in Istanbul, attended

the Girls’ Teaching School in Bursa, and taught school in Istanbul. Re-
ceived musical and theoretical training from Yesari Asım Arsoy, the
greatest composer of the era. Debuted in 1930 at the famous Moulin
Rouge theater in Istanbul. Made more than 500 records in her career,
performing both in Turkey and abroad, on the radio and in films. The
most famous singer of her generation.
Bayar, Celal (1883–1885). Banker, government administrator, politi-

cian, prime minister, and third president of the republic (1950–1960).
Born in a village near Bursa; worked for the Deutches Orient Bank
branch there. He joined the CUP in 1907 and the Ottoman Associa-
tion for the Defense of Rights in 1918. Elected to the last Ottoman par-
liament that met in Istanbul in 1920, then fled to join the nationalist
parliament in Ankara. Became the nationalist Minister of Economy in
1921 and Minister of Reconstruction and Settlement in 1924. Directed
the Business Bank (İş Bankası) from its founding in 1924 until he be-
came Minister of Economy again (1932–1937). Oversaw the economic
development of the SEEs during the 1930s in balance with support for
private enterprise. During 1937–1938, served as prime minister. One of
the founders of the Democrat Party in 1946. Became third president of
the republic after the DP victory of 1950. Arrested in the military coup
of 1960 and convicted of violations against the constitution, his death
sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the National Unity
Committee. Released because of advancing age and ill health in 1964,
he lived another 20 years.
Cebesoy, Ali Fuat (1882–1968). General and politician. A classmate

of Mustafa Kemal at the military academy, he became a CUP member.
In the War of Independence, commanded the nationalist troops on the
western front and entered the nationalist parliament. Became national-
ist envoy to the Bolsheviks in 1920–1921. With Kâzim Pasha, he op-
posed Mustafa Kemal’s increasing dictatorialism, and with him was
arrested, tried, and acquitted in the İzmir conspiracy trials, 1926. Reen-
tered parliament before Atatürk’s death; appointed to İnönü’s cabinet,
1939. After the death of Kâzim Karabekir, he was speaker of parliament.
Çiller, Tansu (1944–). Professor, economist, politician, and Turkey’s

first female prime minister. Born in Istanbul; educated at Boğaziçi Uni-
versity; received an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire and
a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut (1978). After postdoctoral
work at Yale and a year at Franklin and Marshall College, she returned
to Turkey and taught economics at Boğaziçi University. Became an
economic advisor to Süleyman Demirel, joined his True Path Party.
Entered the cabinet as Minister of Economy in 1991. After Özal’s death
and Demirel’s election to the presidency, became True Path Party chief
and prime minister, 1993–1995. Served as deputy prime minister in
a coalition government with the Welfare Party, 1996–1997. She and
husband Özer Uçuran, who married her and took her name in 1963,
amassed a considerable personal fortune, which became the object of
criticism and a legal investigation. Her name has become synonymous
with parliamentary corruption.
Demirel, Süleyman (1924–2015). Engineer, politician, prime minis-

ter, and president. Born in a village near İsparta. Earned an engineer-
ing degree from Istanbul Technical University in 1949. Studied in the
United States as an Eisenhower fellow, 1954–1955. Returning to Turkey,
he directed the Department of Hydraulic Works, 1955–1960. After the
fall of the Menderes government, he taught at the Middle East Tech-
nical University, Ankara, before joining the Justice Party in 1962. Be-
came party chair after the death of Rağıp Gümüşpala in 1964; served
as prime minister between 1965 and 1971. Resigned after the “coup by
memorandum,”March 12, 1971. Became prime minister again as head of
two “Nationalist Front” coalitions in 1975–1977 and 1979–1980. The latter

government was unseated by the military coup of September 12, 1980.
After the ban on political participation of former politicians was lifted
in 1987, he became chair of the True Path Party and entered parliament
again. When True Path won the general elections of 1991, he became
prime minister a seventh time. After the death of Turgut Özal, parlia-
ment elected Demirel the ninth president of the republic (1993–2000).
Dink, Hrant (1954–2007). Armenian-Turkish journalist, editor, and

businessman. Born Malatya, grew up in the Gedikpaşa Armenian
evangelical orphanage (Istanbul) after his parents’ divorce. Ran a
bookstore with his brothers and operated a children’s summer camp.
Founded Agos, a paper published in Armenian and Turkish (1996). The
paper frankly addressed problems facing both communities in Turkey.
Assassinated by a 17-year-old Turkish terrorist; his funeral in Istanbul
drew over a hundred thousand people of all ethnic groups and faith
communities.
Ecevit, Bülent (1925–2006). Journalist, politician, and prime minis-

ter. Born in Istanbul, graduated Robert College (1944), studied Sanskrit
literature at Ankara University. Leaving university, began a career as
a journalist. Served as assistant to the press attaché at the Turkish Em-
bassy in London. Returned to Turkey, worked two newspapers, then
spent a year at Harvard (1957–1958). A published poet and one of Tur-
key’s most intellectual statesmen, he did not obtain a university degree.
Entered parliament as a CHP deputy, 1957. After the first military coup,
he served on the Constituent Assembly (1961) and as Minister of Labor
entered the cabinet of the İnönü coalition governments (1961–1965)
while continuing to write a daily newspaper column. Authored the
“left-of-center” program of the CHP after the mid-1960s and took a
principled stance against cooperation with the military government in
1971. Became the third president of the CHP, 1972 (after Atatürk and
İnönü). Became prime minister in coalition governments (1973–1974,
1978–1979). Directed the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Barred
from politics after the military coup, 1980–1987. Led the Democratic
Left Party founded by his wife Rahsan (1987–1989). Returned to par-
liament in 1991, becoming deputy prime minister in a coalition led
by Mesut Yılmaz of the Motherland Party (1998) and prime minister
again (1998–2001).
Enver Pasha (1881–1922). Ottoman army officer and politician.

Touched off the 1908 Young Turk revolution when he defied orders to
return to Istanbul and fled to the Macedonian hills with his troops. Forced
Sultan Abdülhamid II to restore the Constitution of 1876 and convene
parliament. Led the coup d’état of January 1913 that brought the CUP
faction to power. Acting on his dream of a unified Eurasian Turkish state,
led Ottoman troops in an invasion of the Russian Empire in the Cauca-
sus after the Ottomans entered World War I in 1914. Fled to Berlin after
the war. Failing to obtain Bolshevik backing, attempted a comeback with
troops marching into eastern Anatolia against the nationalists in 1921.
The nationalist victory at Sakarya dashed his hopes. Died leading central
Asian Turks against Bolshevik armies in the Russian civil war.
Erbakan, Necmettin (1926–2011). Engineer, professor, politician,

and prime minister. The political leader of Islamic fundamentalism in
Turkey. Born in Sinop, son of a judge. Took an engineering degree from
Istanbul Technical University (1949) and a doctorate in mechanical en-
gineering at Aachen Technische Hochschule, Germany. As president
of the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (1969), clashed
with Prime Minister Demirel in defense of small business against inter-
national capitalism and the European Community. Entered parliament
as an independent deputy from Konya (1969); created the National
Order Party (1970) and led its several subsequent manifestations. The
leading voice of politicized revivalist Islam in Turkey. Served as dep-
uty prime minister in a coalition with Ecevit and the CHP (1974) and
in the two Nationalist Front coalitions of the 1970s. After the ban on
political participation was lifted in 1987, became head of the Welfare
Party (1987) and reentered parliament (1991). After the Welfare Party
victory in 1995, Erbakan became prime minister in a coalition govern-
ment (1996–1997). Barred from politics for life (1998) after charges of
advocating the fall of constitutional secularism in Turkey.
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip (1954–). Politician, prime minister, and

president. Born in Istanbul of Georgian ancestry. Studied business ad-
ministration at university and played semi-professional football.
Joined the youth branch of the National Salvation Party as a student.
Elected mayor of Istanbul (1994); served a prison term for challenging
official secularism (1999). Cofounder of the Justice and Development
Party (AKP); became prime minister when constitutional changes over-
turned his lifetime ban from politics (2003). Became 12th president of
the republic (2014).
Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682). Pen name of Dervish Mehmed Zilli,

Ottoman writer, one of the greatest travel writers of world history. Born
Istanbul. His father was chief court jeweler, his mother an Abkhazian
slave girl raised in the palace, who was cousin of the Ottoman states-
man Melek Ahmed Pasha. Educated as a Qur’an reciter and then re-
ceived a palace education, becoming a member of an elite palace guard
corps. Lived in the household of Melek Ahmed and accompanied the
pasha on his various assignments until Melek Ahmed’s death (1662).
Most famous for his 10-volume Seyahatname (Book of Travels). The
product of more than 40 years of travel and observation, the work is a
monumental description of Ottoman life and culture, full of linguistic
and historical trivia, folklore, social analysis, and humorous anecdotes.
Evren, Kenan (1918–2015). General and president. Graduated from

the military academy (1939), became a four-star general (1974) and
chief of general staff (1978). Led the 1980 coup d’état and became head
of state, chairing the National Security Council. By the national refer-
endum of November 1982 approving the new constitution, he auto-
matically became seventh president of the republic and resigned his
commission. Retired at the end of his term in 1989. Arrested in the Er-
genekon investigations, he was tried and sentenced for his role in the
1980 coup.
Gül, Abdullah (1950–). Politician, prime minister, foreign minister,

and president of the republic. Born in Kayseri; studied at Istanbul Uni-
versity; did graduate work in the United Kingdom; received a PhD in
economics from Istanbul University (1983). Entered parliament as a
Welfare Party deputy (1991), subsequently was a deputy for the Vir-
tue Party (1999). Became prime minister with the AKP victory in na-
tional elections (2002); stepped aside when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was
cleared to enter parliament; became foreign minister (2003). Served as
11th president of the republic (2007–2014).
Gülen, Fethullah (1938–). Charismatic spiritual leader and author

with an inclusivist and eclectic theology. Born in a village near Erzu-
rum. Received a grade-school education; memorized the Qur’an. Be-
came state imam and preacher in Edirne and then İzmir (1966). Joined
Risale-i Nur reading circles while continuing to work as an itinerant
preacher and teacher. Arrested with other Nurcus in the wake of the
1971 coup, then released. Avoided politics thereafter to concentrate on
education, publishing, and community activism; founded non-profit
organizations and charitable foundations. Left Turkey after the Febru-
ary 28, 1997, “post-modern coup”; lives in the United States. Exercises
global influence through his educational trusts and publishing efforts.
Güney, Yılmaz (1937–1984). Kurdish-Turkish actor and filmmaker.

Born in a village near Adana. Began working in commercial film in early
1960s; became a popular actor and established his own film company
(1968). Served two prison sentences in the 1960s for his political activi-
ties. Released in the general amnesty (1974); imprisoned again for kill-
ing a judge in a restaurant brawl. Among his films, Umut (Hope) and
Yol (The Road) stand out for their cinematic style and themes of the
struggle of the individual against social convention and tradition. Es-
caped from prison (1978) and oversaw the final editing of Yol in Swit-
zerland. The film won the highest award at the Cannes film festival.
He died of cancer in Paris in 1984.
Hurrem Sultan (1500?–1558). Wife of Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I,

mother of Sultan Selim II. Probably Ukrainian by birth, her name may
have been Alexandra Lisowska. Taken in a Tatar slave raid, she was
probably presented to Süleyman by his mother shortly after his ac-
cession. Called Haseki Hurrem, the “favorite,” in Turkish sources,
and Roxelana in Western sources. Revolutionized Ottoman politics
by her formal marriage to Süleyman and permanent residence in
the Topkapı palace, where she deeply influenced public affairs. Her
mosque in Istanbul (1539) was the first commission of the court archi-
tect Sinan. Some of her correspondence survives, including her letters
to Süleyman.
İnönü, İsmet (1884–1973). General and politician, prime minister,

second president of the republic (1938–1950). Graduated from the
Army Staff College (1906), joined the CUP in Edirne. Worked with
Mustafa Kemal in Syria (1917), appointed undersecretary of the Minis-
try of War (1918). Joined the nationalists (1920), entered the nationalist
assembly and became first Minister of War. Commander of the nation-
alist forces on the western front; twice defeated Greek armies at İnönü,
hence the family name, given by Atatürk (1934). Headed the Turkish
delegation at the Lausanne conference. Resigned his commission, be-
came CHP chief and first prime minister of the republic (1923–1924,
1925–1937). When Atatürk died, parliament elected him second presi-
dent of the republic (1938–1950). After World War II, guided the transi-
tion to a multiparty system, going into opposition in parliament when
defeated in the 1950 elections. Prime minister in coalition governments
(1961–1965). Resigned from the CHP (1972) when defeated by oppo-
nents of his policy of cooperation with the military government. Kept
his Senate seat until his death.
Karabekir, Kâzim (1882–1948). General and politician. Graduated

from the military academy (1905), joined the CUP in Edirne (1907).
Promoted to brigadier with command of the armies in the Caucasus in
1918. His support for Mustafa Kemal and commitment of troops under
his command were critical to the nationalist success. Helped coordi-
nate the calling of the first nationalist congress at Erzurum (1919). De-
feated the Armenians on the eastern front (1920). Became a member of
the nationalist assembly. Disagreed with Mustafa Kemal after the War
of Independence; formed the opposition Progressive Republican Party
(1924). Arrested and tried by the Independence Tribunals (1926) but
acquitted. Reentered politics after Atatürk’s death; became speaker of
parliament (1946), which post he held until his death.
Koç, Vehbi (1901–1996). Businessman, industrialist, and philanthro-

pist. His family gained property confiscated from Armenians. Began
in business at age fifteen with a grocery store in Ankara. Entered con-
tracting after Ankara became the capital city; in the 1930s was Turkey’s
leading private investor in imports of American and European goods.
Produced Turkey’s first automobile, the Anadol (1967). Founded Tur-
key’s largest private conglomerate, Koç Holding, in motor vehicles,
home appliances and electronics, information technology, processed
food, and tourism. The Koç foundation established one of the first pri-
vate universities in Turkey.
Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad (1890–1966). Historian, professor, politi-

cian, and cabinet minister. Leading historian of the early Republican
era; director of the Turkish Historical Society (1927–1932). Was largely
responsible for the introduction of professional historical methodol-
ogy, emphasizing the identification and interpretation of primary
sources. His work was interdisciplinary and influenced by insights
from anthropology and literary criticism. Elected to parliament (1935).
After World War II, became one of the founders of the Democrat Party;
became foreign minister (1950–1957). Helped found the short-lived
New Democrat Party (1961).
Kösem Valide (1589?–1651). Popular name of Mahpeyker Sultan,

Greek by birth, the most powerful woman in Ottoman history. Fa-
vorite concubine of Sultan Ahmed I; Queen Mother (1623–1651). Sons
Murad IV (1623–1640) and Ibrahim (1640–1648), and grandson Me-
hmed IV (1648–1687) reigned as sultans. Was effective ruler of the
empire during the reign of the incompetent Mustafa I (1617–1618,
1622–1623) and the regent for her minor son Murad IV in early years
of his reign. Saved the dynasty by preventing the murder of Ibrahim
by Murad IV, who had executed his other brothers. Assassinated by
order of Turhan, the mother of Ibrahim. Kösem’s vast fortune was
dedicated to charitable and humanitarian causes.
Mahmud II (1784–1839). Ottoman Sultan (1808–1839), youngest son

of Abdülhamid I and Nakş-i Dil. Raised to the throne on the deposi-
tion of Mustafa IV and assassination of Selim III (1808). Reigned dur-
ing critical period of conservative opposition to reform and revision
of the balance of power in Europe. Built a coalition of interest groups
in support of reforms; destroyed the Janissary corps (1826) and began
purge of Bektashi-Alevis. Reasserted central control of Anatolia. His
efforts lay the foundation for the period of Tanzimat reforms after his
death.
Mehmed II (1432–1481). Ottoman Sultan (1444–1446, 1451–1481),

conqueror of Istanbul (May 29, 1453); son of Murad II and Hüma, a
slave concubine. Rebuilt and resettled Istanbul, making it the imperial
capital. Conquered Albania, the Morea, and Bosnia, establishing the
northern Ottoman boundary at the Danube; conquered Karaman and
defeated Uzun Hasan. His conquests established Ottoman domination
of the Black Sea. A man of culture and a skilled administrator, his codi-
fication of imperial law (Kanun) defined the fundamental institutions
of Ottoman government and the basic taxation system of the empire.
Mehmed VI Vahideddin (1861–1926). Last sultan of the Ottoman

Empire; son of Abdülmecid I, succeeded to the throne on the death of
his brother, Mehmed V (1918). Followed policy of cooperation with the
victorious allies after the armistice of Mudros, opposing the national-
ists. Accepted the Treaty of Sèvres (1920); deposed by the nationalists
and fled the empire (1922); lived out his life in exile.
Menderes, Adnan (1899–1961). Politician, prime minister. Born into

an old landholding family in Aydın. Served in World War I and the
War of Independence; studied law at the Ankara Law Faculty. Joined
the Free Republican Party in 1930; after its closure, joined the CHP;
represented Aydın in parliament after 1931. Led opposition to the land
reform act after World War II. Founding member of the Democrat
Party (1946). Healed divisions among the Democrats, became party
chief, and with the party’s electoral victory became prime minister
(1950). His government was brought down by military coup, May 27,
1960. Arrested, tried, and convicted of treason; executed September 17,

1961. His remains, buried on İmrali, were reburied in Istanbul in a
public ceremony in 1990.
Müren, Zeki (1931–1996). Singer and songwriter, actor, and poet;

without doubt the most popular artist of the twentieth century in Tur-
key. Born in Bursa, son of a merchant; educated at Istanbul Academy of
Fine Arts; became a radio star and frequent nightclub performer from
the early 1950s through the late 1970s. Never married, he displayed
an ambiguous gender identity and cultivated a flamboyant personal
style, including heavy makeup and effeminate gestures; the question
of his homosexuality was skirted publicly until after his death. Para-
doxically, while he was beloved seemingly by all, he was extremely
popular among conservative, religiously inclined women.
Nesin, Aziz (1915–1995). Pen name of Mehmet Nusret Nesin, hu-

morist and satirist, journalist, short story writer, and novelist. Born
in Istanbul; graduated from the military academy (1937). Discharged
for “abuse of authority.” Jailed in roundup of leftists (1946). Published
first satirical book, Azizname (1948). Arrested in Istanbul riots (1955)
and several other times. Founded the Aziz Nesin Trust (1972); became
one of Turkey’s leading philanthropists. Elected general secretary of
the Turkish Writers’ Union (1977). Several volumes of short stories and
his memoirs, Istanbul Boy, are available in English.
Nursi, Said (1877–1960). Influential religious leader, writer, and

Islamic modernist. Born in a village near Lake Van; ethnically Kurd-
ish. Had good relations with the Young Turks leadership. One of the
founders of the Mohammedan Union, but did not condone the vio-
lent counterrevolution (1909). Advisor of Sultan Mehmed V; during
World War I taken captive, spent two years in Russian POW camps.
Supported the nationalists, addressed the nationalist assembly. Ar-
rested and tried by the Independence Tribunals after the Sheikh Said
rebellion (1925). Lived the rest of his life between prison and exile in
various villages and towns of western Anatolia, writing extensively.
Sought an accommodation between modern rational, scientific society,
and Islam. His major work, Risale-i Nur (Epistle of Light) circulated in
unpublished form. Exercised a decisive impact on the emergence of
political Islam in Turkey.
Öcalan, Abdullah (1948–). Cofounder, leader, and military com-

mander of the PKK (Partiye Karkaran Kurdistan, or Kurdistan
Workers’ Party). Born in Siverek, eastern Anatolia. Studied at Ankara

University. Organized meeting in Diyarbakır (1977), at which Kurdish
rebels adopted “The Path of the Kurdish Revolution.” The document
planned the violent liberation of Kurdistan from rule by Turkey and
Kurdish feudal classes and became the official program of the PKK
when it was founded (1978). Fled Turkey before the 1980 military
coup, directing PKK operations from Lebanon and Syria. Began a war
to liberate Kurdistan in 1984, which cost an estimated 30,000 lives over
15 years. Captured in Kenya (1999) after being expelled from Syria;
brought back to Turkey, imprisoned for life on İmrali Island.
Orhan (d. 1362). Second Ottoman Sultan. Son of Osman, the dy-
nasty’s founder, and Mal Hatun, daughter of a local Turkish lord.
Conquered Bursa (1327) and İznik (1331). Allied with John VI Can-
tacuzenus, Byzantine usurper; married John’s daughter Theodora.
Armies commanded by his son Süleyman raided Thrace and took
Gallipoli (1354) and Edirne (1361).
Özal, Turgut (1927–1993). Engineer, economist, politician, and

president of the republic. Born in Malatya; graduated from Istanbul
Technical University (1950); studied engineering and economics in
the United States. Entered Demirel’s cabinet as head of the State Plan-
ning Organization (1967–1971). After the 1971 coup, taught at Middle
East Technical University before becoming special projects advisor at
the World Bank. On his return, joined Sabancı Holding. Reentered
the government March 1975, as undersecretary and acting Head of
State Planning. As deputy prime minister and Minister for Economic
Affairs (1979), was architect of the austerity program of the Demirel
government (1980). After the September 12, 1980, coup, remained
in government until forced to resign in a banking scandal (1982).
Founded the Motherland Party and led it to victory in the 1983 gen-
eral elections, serving as prime minister until 1989. Succeeded Kenan
Evren to become eighth president of the republic (1989). Died in of-
fice, April 17, 1993.
Pamuk, Orhan (1952–). Novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for litera-
ture (2006). Born in Istanbul, educated at Robert College and Istanbul
University. His early novels attracted critical acclaim; popular success
came with The Black Book (1990). His work explores themes of personal
identity, complex causation, and mysticism. Several are retellings of
classic tales. My Name Is Red (2000), which won the author the Nobel
Prize, retells Ferhad and Shirin in a story narrated by several characters,
including a dog, a coin, and a murdered corpse; Snow (2002), the most
explicitly political, is about the headscarf controversy; Museum of Inno-
cence (2007) retells Leyla and Majnun as modern obsessive love in 1980s
Istanbul. Pamuk later opened a quirky museum of the same name. He
also published a memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005). He, like
several other artists and intellectuals, was charged with violating Arti-
cle 301 of the Turkish constitution, insulting Turkishness or institutions
of the Turkish republic. Charges against Pamuk were dropped. Most of
his work has been translated into English and other languages.
Rumi (1207–1273). Better known in Turkey as Mevlana, also known

as Celaleddin. Poet, musician, and foundational spiritual master of
Sufi Islam. Born in Balkh (today in Afghanistan), son of a Sufi leader.
While a youth, his family became refugees, driven out by the Mongol
advance; they settled in Konya. Experienced a profound spiritual re-
newal through an encounter with Shams of Tabriz, a Sufi master. Most
of his poetry was written in Persian, only a small portion in Turkish.
His most famous works are his Divan, or anthology, and the Mesnevi,
a six-volume verse epic whose significance in the history of Islamic
mysticism is second only to the Qur’an itself. One of the three most im-
portant Turkish saints (together with Haji Bektash and Haji Bayram),
he is buried at Konya.
Sabahettin (1877–1948). Prince Sabahettin, member of the royal

family, dissident politician. Father was Damad Mahmud Celaleddin
Pasha, a grandson of Sultan Mahmud II; his mother was a daughter
of Sultan Abdülmecid and sister of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Joined the
CUP in Paris, became the main rival of Ahmet Rıza. Influenced by Ed-
mond Desmolins, he believed that the best route to modernization lay
in individualism and support of the family unit. Sought economic de-
velopment through classical liberalism, free trade, and encouragement
of an entrepreneurial spirit; advocated freedom of religion in a multi-
ethnic empire; supported foreign intervention on behalf of Ottoman
Armenians. Accused of plotting the assassination of Mahmud Şevket
Pasha, left the empire (1913) but returned (1918). Exiled (1924) with
other members of the Ottoman dynasty.
Sabancı, Haci Ömer (1906–1966). Businessman, industrialist, and

philanthropist. Received a village education before moving to Adana
for work in his youth. Entered the cotton business, opening the first
modern cotton factory (1938). Diversified into other sectors and
founded Akbank (1947). Adana-based investments were unified in
Sabancı Holding (1967) by his son and heir, Sakıp Sabancı. During the
1980s, it became the second leading private conglomerate in Turkey.
Selim I (1466–1520). Nicknamed Yavuz, “the resolute,” Ottoman

sultan, son of Bayezid II and Ayşe Hatun, daughter of a rival Anato-
lian Muslim dynasty. Born in Amasya, where his father was provincial
governor. His short reign (1512–1520) was pivotal in Ottoman history
because of his victories over Shah Ismail in Eastern Anatolia, Armenia,
and Azerbaijan, conquest of Syria and Egypt, and violence against Ale-
vis in Anatolia.
Selim III (1761–1808). Ottoman sultan (1789–1807). Son of Mustafa III

and Mibrişah. Carried out thorough reform of Ottoman military ad-
ministration and finance. Overthrown by a Janissary coup (1807), im-
prisoned, and assassinated (1808).
Süleyman I (1494–1566). Longest reigning Ottoman sultan (1520–1566),

son of Selim I. Known as “Kanuni,” the Lawgiver, in Turkish literature,
and “the Magnificent” in the West, his reign is often seen as the peak of
Ottoman power. Conquered Rhodes (1520), Belgrade (1521), Hungary
(1526), and Iraq (1534). His legislative activity reorganized the central
Ottoman bureaucracy and military-administrative institutions. Died
on campaign.
Talat Pasha (1874–1921). Ottoman administrator, dissident, Young

Turk politician, grand vezir. As a postal clerk in Edirne, founded the
dissident Ottoman Freedom Society, later merging it with the Com-
mittee of Union and Progress. Acting speaker of the first Young Turk
parliament (1908). Held several cabinet posts, especially interior min-
ister (1913–1918), and simultaneously finance minister and grand
vezir (1917–1918). Organized the mass deportation of Armenians in
April 1915 and was the government figure ultimately responsible for
the campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Resigned from the
government (1918) and fled the empire. Assassinated in Berlin (1921)
by an Armenian terrorist.
Türkeş, Alparslan (1917–1997). Army officer and politician, leader

and ideologue of the nationalist far right in Turkey. Born in Cyprus.
Conviction for anti-Republican activities (1944) overturned on appeal.
Was among the junior officers who staged the 1960 military coup. As
member of the National Unity Committee, was undersecretary to the
prime minister and leader of its radical faction. Dismissed in a purge
(November 1960) and sent to the Turkish embassy in India. Returned

(1963) and became a member of the Republican Peasant’s Nation Party
(renamed Nationalist Action Party, 1969), taking over its chairman-
ship in 1965. His philosophy of the “Nine Lights” became the party
program. Was deputy prime minister and minister of state in the two
Nationalist Front coalitions of the 1970s. After the 1980 military coup,
was tried for organizing violent commando actions during the 1970s.
Regained a seat in parliament (1991).
Yalman, Ahmed Emin (1888–1973). Journalist. Born in Salonika; was

a Sabbatean. Obtained a PhD degree from Columbia University (1914);
took up an academic position in Istanbul during World War I. Exiled
by the British in 1920–1921. Founded the newspaper Vatan in 1923,
introducing innovative, American-style journalism. The paper was
closed by Mustafa Kemal (1925) and reopened in 1940; it became the
leading voice of the opposition Democrat Party after World War II.
Spent time in prison after he broke with the Menderes government in
the late 1950s. His memoirs were published in English.
Yaşar Kemal (1923–). Pen name of Kemal Sadık Gökçeli, journalist

and novelist. Born into a mixed Kurdish-Turkish family in a village in
the Çukurova. Introduced to the circle of socialist activists and writers
in Adana in the late 1930s; published his first poem in the journal of
the Adana People’s House in 1939. Tortured in prison (1950). He began
writing for Cumburiyet in 1951, reporting on the life of the common
people of Anatolia. His first published novel, İnce Memed (translated
into English as Memed, My Hawk) won the Varlık Press prize for the
best novel of 1955. Of his dozens of novels, about 10 are available in
English translation, including They Burn the Thistles, The Wind from the
Plain, The Legend of Ararat, and The Legend of the Thousand Bulls.
Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924). Sociologist and essayist, political dis-

sident, Young Turk. Born Diyarbakır, was part Kurdish. Became the
most influential theorist of the Turkish nationalist movement. He en-
visioned a modern, Westernized nation in which Turks would retain
their native culture. His major works were Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak,
Muasırlaşmak (published in English as Turkish Nationalism and Western
Civilization), and Türkçülüğün Esasları (Principles of Turkism). Elected
to parliament (1923).
Glossary
Akhi: Masters of guild associations in medieval Anatolia. The akhis

supervised both the commercial production of the guild and the de-
votional exercises of the members and their families.
AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi): Justice and Development Party,
the leading political party in Turkey since 2002. Its current leader is
Ahmet Davutoğlu.
Alevis: Minority religious sect in Turkey, making up perhaps one-
fourth of the population. The name means “of Ali,” those who are
followers of or devotees of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mu-
hammad. Hence the sect bears some relation to Shiism, but most
members consider themselves neither Shiite nor Sunni.
Bey: Originally a Turkish military title, its meaning has changed over
time. In medieval Turkey, a bey was a commander or prince. In the
Ottoman Empire, the title was given to provincial military com-
manders and senior officers below the rank of vezir. In the later em-
pire, the title was equivalent to a military captain. In modern Turkey,
the word bey is a title of respect, used after the first name, for all
older men or adult men.
BMM: Büyük Millet Meclisi, Grand National Assembly, the parliament
of Turkey.
236 Glossary
Caliph: The title of the supreme ruler of the medieval Islamic world.
It derives from the Arabic word khalifa, meaning “successor,” refer-
ring to the origin of the title in the early successors to the Prophet
Muhammad. The office of the caliph is the caliphate. After the first
four “Rightly Guided” caliphs of the first Islamic century, the cali-
phate became a title of the nominal rulers of the Islamic world. The
Ottoman sultans claimed the title after the conquest of Egypt (1517).
Capitulations: Agreements between the Ottoman government and
foreign commercial communities, granting privileges such as tax ex-
emptions and low tariffs, and allowing them to fall under the legal
jurisdiction of their own consuls rather than the Ottoman courts.
The first of these agreements was reached with France in 1536. In
the nineteenth century, the merchants and their consuls, backed by
their home governments, exploited the old agreements to their ben-
efit, extending their rights of extraterritoriality to Christian Ottoman
clients and creating powerful financial enterprises outside Ottoman
political control.
Cemaat: “The Community,” another popular name for the group
following the spiritual vision of Fethullah Gülen. Also known as
Hizmet.
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP): The Ottoman dissident
group of expatriates organized by Ahmet Rıza in Paris in 1889. After
the revolution of 1908, begun by officers loyal to it, the CUP became
the most important group in the Ottoman government. It remained
a secret organization until the growth of opposition forced it to begin
operating as a quasi political party in 1911. Officers of the CUP car-
ried out a cabinet coup d’état in 1913 and governed the empire until
the end of World War I.
Democrat Party (DP): Turkish Demokrat Partisi; Political party
founded in 1946 by Celal Bayar, Refik Koraltan, Adnan Menderes,
and Fuat Köprülü after their ouster from the Republican People’s
Party. The party won the elections of 1950 and ruled Turkey through-
out the decade of the 1950s. After the military coup of May 27, 1960,
the party was outlawed and its leaders jailed. Menderes and two
former cabinet members were hanged in September 1961.
Dervish: Member of a mystical Islamic (sufi) order. Important orders
in Turkey included the Bektashis, the Nakshibendis, and the Mevle-
vis (the “Whirling Dervishes”).
Devşirme: The Ottoman institution of the child levy. Christian youths
mostly from the Balkans were taken as state slaves, converted to
Glossary 237
Islam, taught Turkish, and trained in the palace system for service in
the military-administrative hierarchy of the empire. By this means,
most of the ruling class of the classical Ottoman Empire was of slave
origin. The devşirme was discontinued in the seventeenth century.
DGM: Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemeleri, State Security Courts. Extraordi-
nary courts established in 1972 to try political crimes against the na-
tion. Abolished in the late 1970s, they were reestablished after the
1980 military coup.
DİSK: Turkish acronym of Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfedera-
syonu, the Confederation of Revolutionary Labor Unions of Turkey,
a Marxist-oriented labor union association. Formed in 1965, it was
closed by the military authorities after the 1980 coup. It reopened in
1991.
Divan: The Ottoman Council of State. The council was headed by
the grand vezir and included the governors-general (beylerbeyis)
of the two greatest provinces, Rumelia and Anatolia, other officers
with the rank of vezir, the kadıaskers of the provinces of Rumelia
and Anatolia, the head treasurers, the Chancellor (nişancı), the com-
mander of the Janissary corps (Yeniçeri ağası), and the Admiral fleet
(Kapudan Paşa).
Ergenekon: A series of investigations and trials, begun in 2008, of hun-
dreds of military officers and others accused of trying to overthrow
the elected Turkish democracy.
Etatism: Term for centralized economic planning and supervision in
the Turkish republic. State planning of the economy, expanded in
the 1930s in response to the worldwide economic depression, was
institutionalized as one of the “Six Arrows” of ideological Kemalism
and enshrined in the constitution by amendment in 1937.
Gazi: Warrior in the gaza, the sacred struggle against the enemies of
God. Muslim fighters in medieval Byzantine and Armenian Anatolia
called themselves gazis. The term was also occasionally used infor-
mally as a title for victorious commanders throughout the Ottoman
period.
Grand Vezir: English translation of the Ottoman title Sadr-ı Azam. The
grand vezir was appointed by the sultan to be deputy head of state
and chair of the council of state (divan). He carried the sultan’s seal
as the mark of his authority. During the classical age, the grand vezir
was typically of devşirme origin and a successful military commander
and administrator. Informal afternoon meetings of the council, in the
residence of the grand vezir, gradually became the most important
238 Glossary
meetings of the council. In the nineteenth century, the office evolved

into a kind of prime ministry and was not necessarily held by mili-
tary commanders.
Gray Wolves: The paramilitary arm of the youth organization of the
Nationalist Action Party.
HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi): People’s Democratic Party. Po-
litical party established in 2013 as coalition of leftist parties focused
on the Kurdish issue. The current leaders are Selahattin Demirtaş
and Figen Yüksekdağ.
Hizmet: Literally “service,” this is the popular name of the movement
based on the spiritual vision and teachings of Fethullah Gülen.
İmam-Hatip Okulları: Popular name of secondary academies for the
training of preachers, prayer leaders, and other mosque leaders in
the Republic of Turkey.
İncirlik: Location of the biggest air force base in Turkey. Originally
built by the United States as Adana Air Field in the 1950s, it is now
shared by Turkish and American forces.
Janissary corps: The elite infantry corps of the Ottoman army. Janissar-
ies were of devşirme origin. The corps and its spiritual organization,
the Bektashi order, were destroyed by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826.
Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP): The political party founded in 1961
as the main successor to the banned Demokrat Party. The first chair
was Rağıp Gümüşpala. After his death, the party was chaired by Sü-
leyman Demirel until it was closed down by the military authorities
after the coup of September 12, 1980.
Kanun: Sultanic law. In the Ottoman Empire, kanun, comprising the
corpus of decrees of the sultan, was considered a legitimate source of
law, alongside the sharia and custom, to regulate the life and institu-
tions of the Islamic state.
Karakol: A nationalist organization created by the CUP officials in
1918 in anticipation of the end of the war, Ottoman defeat, and oc-
cupation of the empire. Its purpose was to protect the CUP party
members from arrest and to support a nationalist resistance move-
ment in Anatolia.
Kemalism: Atatürkçülük, the worldview and ideology of the Republi-
can People’s Party and the military and bureaucratic elites of mod-
ern Turkey. It is encapsulated in the “Six Arrows”: Republicanism,
Secularism, Nationalism, Populism, Etatism, and Revolutionism.
Glossary 239
Kurush: Turkish copper coin, one one-hundredth of a Turkish lira. In

Ottoman times, it was a silver coin and the basic currency of the late
Ottoman empire. First minted in 1690, it replaced the earlier Otto-
man silver coin, the akçe.
Lira: The basic unit of currency in the Turkish republic. It retained the
name of the Ottoman gold lira (introduced 1844), made up of 100
silver kurush.
Malikane: A lifetime contract giving the holder rights to collect speci-
fied revenues on behalf of the Ottoman central treasury and the
responsibility to remit the revenues according to an agreed-upon
timetable.
Medrese: An Islamic college. Its traditional curriculum stressed exege-
sis of the Islamic sacred texts and the study of theology, rhetoric,
Arabic grammar, philosophical logic, and astronomy.
Millet: One of several religiously defined national communities in
the Ottoman Empire and also the system of semiautonomous self-
government of these communities. Christian and Jewish community
life in the empire was organized through the institution of the millet
system.
MİT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı): National Intelligence Organization.
Founded in 1963 to reorganize and replace the older National Secu-
rity Agency, its purpose was to uncover and track conspiracies in the
armed forces and to monitor radical, especially leftist, activities in
the general population.
Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP): The political party
founded in 1983 by Turgut Özal.
Mukataa: A short-term tax farm contracted between the Ottoman cen-
tral government and an agent for the purpose of collecting and re-
mitting specified imperial revenues.
The National Order Party (Millî Nizam Partisi, MNP): Political party
founded by Necmettin Erbakan and others in 1970. It was the first
explicitly religious political party in Turkey. Closed by court order
in 1971, it was replaced by another party, also started by Erbakan,
the National Salvation Party (Millî Selâmet Partisi, MSP). When it,
too, was closed after the 1980 military coup, its successor was the
Welfare (or Prosperity) Party (Refah Partisi) which, when also closed,
was succeeded by the Virtue (Fazilet) Party.
National Pact (Misak-ı Millî): Document originally drawn up by
the national congress at Erzurum (July 1919) as the basis for the
240 Glossary
establishment of the post–World War I Turkish nation. It was ex-

panded and ratified by the Sivas congress (September 1919) and ac-
cepted by the last Ottoman parliament (February 1920).
National Security Council (Millî Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK): Established
in 1962 following the failed coup attempt of Col. Talat Aydemir. It
is chaired by the president; its members are the prime minister, the
ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and internal affairs; the chief of
the general staff; and the commanders of the military branches, the
army, navy, air force, and gendarmes.
Nationalist Action Party (Millî Hareket Partisi, MHP): Right-wing
political party controlled by Alparslan Türkeş. Its former name was
the Republican Peasants’ Nation Party. Closed by the military gov-
ernment in 1980, the party re-formed after 1983 under other names,
reverting to its former name in 1992. The current head of the party is
Devlet Bahçeli. Its youth wing is the Grey Wolves.
Nationalist Front: Popular name of two coalition governments of
the 1970s, led by Süleyman Demirel and the Justice Party. The first
(March 1975–June 1977), included the National Salvation Party,
led by Necmettin Erbakan, the Nationalist Action Party, led by
Alparslan Türkeş, and the Republican Reliance Party. The second
(July 1977–January 1978), included the Justice Party and the first two
of the junior partners.
NUC: National Unity Committee. A council of 38 members that gov-
erned the country after the military coup of May 27, 1960. Its Turkish
name was Millî Birlik Komitesi (MBK). It was headed by Gen. Cemal
Gürsel.
Nurcu: Popular name of the movement built on Said Nursi’s spiritual
classic Risale-i Nur, Treatise on Light.
OYAK: The Turkish acronym of Ordu Yardımlaşma Kurumu, the Army
Mutual Assistance Association, founded 1960. It is one of the largest
conglomerates in Turkey.
Pasha: Senior officer in the Ottoman military. In the classical age, the
title was given to the governors-general of the most important prov-
inces and the vezirs of the dome. It was gradually extended to senior
nonmilitary administrators. In the late empire, the rank was essen-
tially that of a general. The title was abolished by the republican
parliament but is still popularly used to refer to the senior military
brass.
PDA: Ottoman Public Debt Administration. A European financial bu-
reau created in 1881 for the purpose of administering the repayment
Glossary 241
of the Ottoman debt and brokering new loans for the Ottoman
government.
People’s Houses (Halkevleri): Public cultural and educational organi-
zations established in cities and towns of Turkey beginning in 1932
for the purpose of communicating and encouraging loyalty to Re-
publican ideals. In small towns and villages, their equivalents were
called People’s Rooms (Halk odaları).
PKK: Kurdish acronym of the Partiye Karkaran Kurdistan, the Kurdis-
tan Workers’ Party. Revolutionary party founded by Abdullah Öca-
lan in Ankara in 1978.
Qur’an (Turkish Kur’an-ı Kerim): The Holy Koran, the sacred scrip-
tures of Islam, containing the revelations of God to the Prophet Mu-
hammad (d. AD 632).
Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP): The po-
litical party founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1922. Like all po-
litical parties, it was closed by order of the military government in
1980. It was reestablished in 1992 and is currently headed by Kemal
Kılıçdaroğlu.
Second Republic: A popular term referring to the period of the second
republican constitution, between 1961 and 1980.
SEEs: State Economic Enterprises. Government-owned conglomerates
created in the 1930s for the purpose of carrying out the planned in-
dustrialization and economic development of Turkey.
Seljuks: A medieval southern Turkish tribe that took control of Bagh-
dad and dominated the caliphate from the mid-eleventh to the mid-
twelfth century. A branch of the Seljuk ruling dynasty established a
kingdom in central Anatolia (Rum) between the late eleventh cen-
tury and the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century.
Sharia (Turkish Şeriat): Islamic canonical law, comprised of material
distilled from the Qur’an, the tradition of the prophet, jurispruden-
tial commentaries, and the wisdom of community consensus. There
are four accepted schools (mezheb) of orthodox Sunni Islamic juris-
prudence: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali. The Ottoman Em-
pire practiced the Hanafi tradition.
Sheikhulislam (Turkish Şeyhülislam): Title of the highest ranking
ulema official in the Ottoman Empire, appointed by the sultan. Also
known as the mufti of Istanbul or, in English, the Grand Mufti. He
gave authoritative juridical rulings and administered a large govern-
mental department that oversaw religious affairs.
242 Glossary
Shiites: Members of one of two major denominations in Islam. The

name derives from the Arabic term Shi‘atu ‘Ali, the Party of Ali.
Southeast Anatolia Project: A major hydroelectric system under con-
struction in the upper Euphrates region of southeastern Turkey.
SPO: State Planning Organization (Turkish Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı).
An advisory council created in 1960 under the authority of the prime
minister to determine and implement state economic strategy and
policy.
Sublime Porte: Translation of Bab-ı Ali, the residence of the grand vezir
that came to be synonymous with the Ottoman central government.
Sultan: Islamic ruler of a territory who received investiture from the
caliph in Baghdad. The term came to mean any Muslim king, queen,
prince, or princess.
Sunnites: Members of one of the two major Islamic denominations
(the other being Shiites). The name derives from the Sunna, the tradi-
tion of the Prophet Muhammad.
Susurluk: Site in northwestern Anatolia of an auto-truck accident in
November 1996 that led to the uncovering of a web of government
corruption.
Tanzimat: The period of centralizing governmental reforms between
the Rose Garden Rescript of 1839 and suspension of the Constitution
of 1876 (in 1878).
Timar: The Ottoman feudal military revenue grant. Typically, cavalry
soldiers living in the provinces received a grant of the right to collect
the revenues of an estate, called a timar. In return, they owed the Ot-
toman central government the obligation of military service.
Topkapı: The Ottoman imperial palace in Istanbul, residence of the
sultans and seat of the central government in the classical age. The
palace was built by Sultan Mehmed II in the 1470s and expanded by
later sultans. It served as the residence of the sultans until the con-
struction of the Dolmabahçe Palace in the nineteenth century.
Treaty of Lausanne: The treaty, signed in July 1923, established Turkey
as an independent nation.
Treaty of Sèvres: The treaty, signed in August 1920, formed the settle-
ment of World War I for the Ottoman lands. It partitioned the Otto-
man Empire between the victorious allies. The Turkish nationalist
victory rendered it moot.
True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi): A political party founded in 1983.
Süleyman Demirel, former chair of the Justice Party (1987–1993) until
he became president. The party was then chaired by Tansu Çiller.
Glossary 243
Türk-İş: Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, Confederation of Labor

Unions of Turkey, the country’s largest and most influential organ-
ized labor association. It was founded in 1952.
Turkoman: Semi-nomadic Turkish clans who fought and raided on be-
half of the Seljuk dynasty on the Byzantine and Armenian frontiers
of the Islamic world in Anatolia.
Ulema: The scholars, jurists, and liturgical leaders of Islam. Strictly
speaking, the term clergy should not be used to translate ulema, be-
cause unlike Christian clergy, the ulema do not receive ordination.
Vakıf: Islamic financial trust. A registered trust in which the revenues
from a source were earmarked to the support of a specified charita-
ble or religious purpose, and thereby tax sheltered. A charter defined
the purpose and conditions of the vakıf, spelled out its management
structure and appointed its trustees.
Vezir: The rank of an Ottoman military commander. The highest
ranking vezirs were called “vezirs of the dome” (kubbealtı vezirl-
eri) because they were assigned oversight of affairs of the council
of state and stationed in the capital. Other vezirs were provincial
governors-general.
Village Institutes: A national system of schools to train teachers
for village-level literacy and vocational education. Developed by
İsmail Hakkı Tonguç in the late 1930s, the system began operations
throughout Turkey in 1940. They were closed in 1953.
Young Turks: English translation of Jeune Turques, the name given in
Paris to the group of Ottoman dissident expatriates led by Ahmet
Rıza and to the junior officers who staged the revolution of 1908.
YÖK (Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu): Higher Education Council. Founded
in 1982 as the organ of centralized control of universities, it is re-
sponsible for long-range planning and policy making in national
higher education and makes all appointments of deans and rectors
(university presidents).
Bibliographic Essay
The books and articles and other materials mentioned below are in-
tended as a guide for the interested reader who wants to know more
about specific aspects of Turkish history. Although this essay gives
only materials published in English, it should be emphasized that
the overwhelming majority of the primary sources for Turkish his-
tory exist only in Turkish and have not been translated. Knowledge of
Turkish is essential for original historical research on Turkey. The lead-
ing scholarly organization of Turkish studies in North America is the
Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, which publishes the semi-
annual Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.
For basic reference materials, the online resource guide maintained
by the Library of Congress gives a good overall introduction to the
several fields of study that comprise Turkish studies. Although Turkol-
ogischer Anzeiger seems to have ceased publication, its annual volumes
are the most complete bibliography for specifically Turkish subjects as
long as it was published. Metin Heper and Nur Bilge Criss’s updated
Historical Dictionary of Turkey (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 3rd ed., 2009)
is a handy, short reference work. Donald Edgar Pritchard’s Histori-
cal Geography from the Earliest Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 1972) contains outstanding maps for the period it covers.
246 Bibliographic Essay
Köy Köy Türkiye Yol Atlası, published by Map Medya in Istanbul at

1/400,000 scale, is the best atlas of Turkey today.
For current events in Turkey, all important Turkish daily newspa-
pers and news magazines have websites; for English readers, Hürriyet
Daily News has the best and oldest archive; other English online dailies
include Today’s Zaman, Cumhuriyet, and Daily Sabah.
On Ancient Anatolia, Ekrem Akurgal’s guide Ancient Civiliza-
tions and Ruins of Turkey 10th ed. (Istanbul: NET Turistik, 2007) is a
detailed, single-volume reference covering major sites through the
Roman period with photos, maps, and diagrams. Seton Lloyd, Turkey:
A Traveller’s History of Anatolia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1989) is a readable introduction. Lynn E. Roller’s
In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999) is a care-
ful study of the available data with broader implications than the title
suggests. John Freely, coauthor with Hilary Sumner-Boyd of the best
historical guidebook for Istanbul, Strolling Through Istanbul: A Guide
to the City (Istanbul: Redhouse, 1972), also wrote the excellent, brief
Classical Turkey (London: Chronicle Books, 1990) in the Architectural
Guides for Travelers series.
Environmental history in Anatolia is beginning to get some atten-
tion. One might well begin with studies of seismicity by Nicholas Am-
braseys and Caroline Finkel, The Seismicity of Turkey and Adjacent Areas:
A Historical Review, 1500–1800 (Istanbul: Eren, 1995), and a second by
Ambraseys, Earthquakes in the Mediterranean and the Middle East: A Mul-
tidisciplinary Study of Seismicity to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009); Elizabeth Zachariadou’s Natural Disasters in the
Ottoman Empire (Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 1999) is broader;
and Samuel White’s work brings together data on climate in Climate of
Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
The best general history of Turkey since AD 1000 is the Cambridge
History of Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006–2012),
which features separate topical chapters written by the best authorities
in the field. The first of its four volumes covers the Byzantine period
until the conquest of Constantinople (1071–1453); the second volume
covers 1453–1603; volume 3 covers 1603–1839; volume 4 covers the last
two centuries. Two other Cambridge histories fill desperate gaps. First,
on Byzantine Empire, there is now The Cambridge History of Byzantium,
c. 500–1492, ed. Jonathan Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2009); additionally, volume 5 of The Cambridge History of
Early Christianity, edited by Michael Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), covers the Eastern Church. George Ostrogor-

sky’s classic, History of the Byzantine State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1969) remains useful. Beyond these, although studies
of specific aspects of the history of Christianity during the Ottoman
centuries have been published, few general evaluations are available.
Though methodologically flawed, the work of Speros Vryonis Jr., The
Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization
from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1971), is still valuable, and Steven
Runciman’s The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of In-
dependence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) is excellent.
One wishes for more works along the lines of two exemplary studies
by Clive Foss, Byzantine and Turkish Sardis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1976), and Ephesus After Antiquity: A Late Antique,
Byzantine, and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), which is more balanced in assessing the complex dynamics of
the second wave of Turkish conquests, along the river valleys.
Study of the origins of Turkish culture in Anatolia, of the Seljuks,
and their contemporaries before the Ottoman conquest should con-
tinue with Claude Cahen’s The Formation of Turkey: The Seljukid Sultan-
ate of Rum, Eleventh to Fourteenth Century (Harlow, England: Longman,
2001). The travelogue of Ibn Battuta was translated by H. A. R. Gibb and
published in three volumes of the Hakluyt Society series as The Travels
of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325–1354; volume 2 contains the parts on Anato-
lia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). The writer, who
knew neither Greek nor Turkish, almost never mentioned Christians.
Survey histories of the entire Ottoman period are almost as rare
as Byzantine histories. Two bear mention recently, Caroline Finkel’s
Osman’s Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2005), and Suraiya Faroqhi’s
The Ottoman Empire: A Short History, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton,
NJ: Marcus Wiener, 2009); Douglas A. Howard, Amid the Ruins: The Ot-
toman Empire 1300–1924, is forthcoming (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, expected 2016). Otherwise general histories tend to cover
either the first half or the second half of the empire’s long lifespan,
breaking typically at some point in the eighteenth century: Colin Imber,
The Ottoman Empire 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Houndsmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and the volume of topi-
cal chapters edited by Christine Woodhead, The Ottoman World (New
York: Routledge, 2012), all cover the first half, as does Halil İnalcık’s
classic The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Wei-
denfeld and Nicolson, 1973). Donald Quataert’s The Ottoman Empire,
1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) covers
the second. Admirable alternatives from diverse perspectives include
İnalcık and Quataert’s two-volume Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jane
Hathaway’s The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule 1516–1800 (Harlow,
England: Pearson Longman, 2008); Şevket Pamuk’s A Monetary History
of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
and Virginia H. Aksan’s Ottoman Wars 1700–1870 (Harlow, England:
Pearson Longman, 2007); which is broader than the title allows. Reşat
Kasaba’s A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees
(Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2009) reconceptualizes the
history of the empire in ways that historians are still grappling with.
The foundation of the Ottoman Empire is still one of the hottest
debates in medieval historiography. Historians have especially fo-
cused on the role of Islam. Several studies by Paul Wittek and M. Fuad
Köprülü, the scholars who ignited the argument in the 1930s, have
been republished. Two skeptics reopened the issue in the 1980s; first
was Rudi Paul Lindner, in Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia
(Bloomington, IN.: Uralic and Altaic Series, 1983), and then in a 1987
article Colin Imber famously called early Ottoman history a “Black
Hole” (“The Ottoman Dynastic Myth,” Turcica 19 [1987], 7–27). Cemal
Kafadar’s Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) is an
excellent introduction to the issues. The major primary sources were
helpfully published by Heath Lowry, Nature of the Early Ottoman State
(Albany, NY: SUNY, 2003). Rudi Paul Lindner’s Explorations in Otto-
man Prehistory (Ann Arbor, MI.: University of Michigan Press, 2007)
shifted the debate crucially to the field of archaeology, which is still in
its infancy in Ottoman studies. See The Historical Archaeology of the Ot-
toman Empire: Breaking New Ground, ed. Uzi Baram and Lynda Carroll
(New York: Kluwer Academi/Plenum, 2000).
After the origins debate, the second major question in recent Otto-
man historical writing has been the concept of decline after 1600, an
issue closely related to the orientalism debate in Middle Eastern stud-
ies more broadly. For Ottoman history, Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj’s For-
mation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire; Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1991); and an article by Ariel Salzmann,
“An Ancient Régime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and Political Economy
in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics and Society 21
(1993): 393–423, epitomized the arguments. Other key issues include
the role of women. Leslie Peirce’s The Imperial Harem: Women and Sov-
ereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993) presents a significant revision of the first four centuries of
Ottoman political history. On women in the Ottoman period, see the
collection of articles edited by Madeline C. Zilfi, Women in the Ottoman
Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill,
1997). Essential documentation exists in Ottoman court records, which
have been extensively studied by a number of scholars, including on
the issue of women, especially by Ronald C. Jennings in several ar-
ticles; for example, “Women in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial
Records—The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Eco-
nomic and Social History of the Orient 18 (1975): 53–114.
The history of Ottoman Anatolia as a discrete piece of the Ottoman
Empire has been neglected. On the one hand, historians of the Ottoman
Empire have rightly regarded the project of an Anatolian history as
anachronistic, since what we now call “Anatolia” is not the same thing
as Ottoman Anatolia. Historians of the Republic of Turkey, on the
other hand, have tended to indiscriminately adopt the entire Ottoman
Empire as the background of republican history. Given the relative ne-
glect of Ottoman history in the other successor states of the empire in
the Balkans and the Middle East, this is not all bad for the study of
Ottoman history. An unusual departure is Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks’
Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), which makes the effort to integrate the one-third of Eu-
rope that was Ottoman into a general survey of the continent.
When it comes to the Ottoman background of contemporary Ana-
tolia, we encounter the third great debate about Ottoman history, the
need to explain the genocidal violence of the final years of the empire
and first years of the republic. Research has focused on demography,
culture, including religion, and colonialism. The best integrated narra-
tives are Uğur Ümit Üngör’s The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and
State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011) and Carter Vaughn Findley’s subtle Turkey, Islam, Nationalism,
and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2010). Two classic studies are worth knowing, though they are
now outdated, not least because they ignore the violence: Bernard
Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxord University
Press, 1962), and Niyazi Berkes’s The Development of Secularism in Tur-
key (Reprinted New York: Routledge, 1997). Also useful are Erik Jan
Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London and New York: I.B. Tau-
ris, 3rd ed., 2004), for its emphasis on the continuity between the late
empire and the republic, and Feroz Ahmad’s The Making of Modern
Turkey (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993), written from a strongly
Kemalist and CHP perspective.
The Armenian genocide literature has been transformed since the
publication of the first edition of this book in 2000. The demographic
context was examined in two books by Justin McCarthy, Death and
Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922 (Princeton,
NJ: Darwin, 1995), and The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (Lon-
don: Arnold, 2001), and one by Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population
1830–1914; Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, WI: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Edward J. Ericson’s Ordered to Die:
A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (New York: Prae-
ger, 2000) sets the right tone for the military context. The immediately
preceding conflict and the model it provided for ethnic cleansing has
unfortunately received little attention; see Ericson’s Defeat in Detail: the
Ottoman Armies in the Balkans, 1912–1913 (New York: Praeger, 2000),
and Richard C. Hall’s The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First
World War (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). In this regard,
the most important book is still the Carnegie Endowment’s report,
published between the second Balkan War and the beginning of the
Great War, in February 2014, republished as The Other Balkan Wars:
A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Enquiry in Retrospect (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 1993).
The most important works in debates about the genocide are
Raymond Kévorkian’s The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (Lon-
don and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Guenter Lewy’s The Armenian
Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: Uni-
versity of Utah Press, 2005); Robert Melson’s Revolution and Genocide:
On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Taner Akçam’s The Young
Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: the Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleans-
ing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012). Fatma Müge Göçek’s Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish
Present, and Collective Violence Against Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014) tries to explain the puzzling official and
popular Turkish refusal to acknowledge culpability.
Late imperial culture, including religion, was studied by Selim
Deringil in The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of
Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); the
book was influential in reassessing the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II.
Erik Jan Zürcher’s collected essays illuminate the culture of the transi-
tion from wartime empire to republic, The Young Turk Legacy and Na-
tion Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London and
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010). The above-mentioned books of Niyazi

Berkes, Bernard Lewis, and Carter Findley have considerable material
on late Ottoman and early republican culture. Young Turk politics has
been studied in the detailed books of M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation
for Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), and The Young Turks in Opposition (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
As for political economy and colonialism, recent scholarship has
stressed the symbiotic nature of relations between native entrepre-
neurs and international capitalism. Donald C. Blaisdell’s European
Financial Control in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1929) can still be quite
useful alongside Murat Birdal’s The Political Economy of Ottoman Pub-
lic Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth
Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010). The social and eco-
nomic context is the subject of Donald Quataert’s Social Disintegration
and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to Eu-
ropean Economic Penetration (New York and London: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1983). While many older studies of the Kemalist revolution
were overly enthusiastic, Richard D. Robinson’s The First Turkish Re-
public: A Case Study in National Development (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
University Press, 1963) retains its value, and Henry Elisha Allen’s
The Turkish Transformation: A Study in Social and Religious Development
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935; reprint New York 1968) is
insightful.
Andrew Mango’s Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern
Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000) is the standard biography of
the nation’s founder. A new biography by Ryan Gingeras appeared
just as this book was ready to go to press, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: Heir
to an Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Long neglected
by comparison, İsmet İnönü has two recent studies in English, Metin
Heper’s İsmet İnönü: The Making of a Turkish Statesman (Leiden: Brill,
1998), John Vander Lippe’s Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü
and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany, NY
SUNY, 2009).
The best studies of Turkish politics from the opening of the system in
1945 to the coup of 1980 are Kemal Karpat’s Turkey’s Politics: The Transi-
tion to a Multi-Party System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1959); Feroz Ahmad’s The Turkish Experiment in Democracy 1950–1975
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977). Walter F. Weiker’s The Turkish Revolu-
tion, 1960–1961: Aspects of Military Politics (Washington, DC: Brook-
ings Institute, 1963); C. H. Dodd’s Politics and Government in Turkey
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), and
Jacob Landau’s Radical Politics in Modern Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 1974)

are good on the second republic, as is Robert Bianchi’s Interest Groups
and Political Development in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1984). The political parties were the subject of a study by
Metin Heper and Jacob M. Landau (eds.), Political Parties and Democ-
racy in Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991). Metin Heper has authored a
number of important articles about political life in Turkey in the 1980s
and 1990s.
For the post-1980 era, Mehmet Ali Birand’s two books are fascinat-
ing: The Generals’ Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of 12 September 1980
(London: Brassey’s, 1987) gives a blow-by-blow description of the mil-
itary intervention; Shirts of Steel: An Anatomy of the Turkish Armed Forces
(London: I.B. Tauris, 1991) is a study of military life based on inter-
views. See also William Hale, Turkish Politics and the Military (London:
Routledge, 1994). Three collections of papers explored the cultural
transition underway at the time: Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba’s
Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1997); and Andrew Finkel and Nükhet Sirman’s
Turkish State, Turkish Society (London and New York, 1990); Günsel
Renda and C. Max Kortepeter’s (eds.) The Transformation of Turkish Cul-
ture: The Atatürk Legacy (Princeton, NJ: Kingston, 1986) cover Kemal-
ist Turkish literature, art, and music in transition. Berch Berberoğlu’s
Turkey in Crisis: From State Capitalism to Neocolonialism (New York:
Praeger, 1994) analyzes the economic transformation after 1980. For
a rare glimpse into the perspective of an industrialist, see The Life of
Hacı Ömer Sabancı, by Sadun Tanju, translated into English by Geoffrey
Lewis (Saffron Walden, England: World of Information, 1988), which
is a biography of the founder of one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates.
His son, Sakıp Sabancı, one of Turkey’s leading industrialists, has pub-
lished a memoir called This Is My Life (Saffron Walden, England: World
of Information, 1988).
Since the rise of the AKP after 2000, the most important discussions
in Turkish scholarship have taken up the interrelated issues of civil-
military relations, the role of religion, and the place of women and
minorities in national life. Not much of the recent literature has found
its way into English as of yet. The best studies of religion are Jenny B.
White’s Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002) and M. Hakan Yavuz’s
Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003). Ergun Özbudun’s Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to
Democratic Consolidation (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), was an
early effort to understand the role of the military. On Said Nursi, see
Şerif Mardin’s Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of
Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989); Ibrahim M.
Abu-Rabi‘’s (ed.), On the Life and Thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
(Albany, NY, 2003); and Şükran Vahide’s Islam in Modern Turkey: An In-
tellectual Biography of Beiuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2005). For Fethullah Gülen, Doğu Ergil’s Fethullah Gülen and the Gülen
Movement in 100 Questions (New York: Blue Dome, 2012) has now been
translated.
On the veil issue and the status of women in general, Elizabeth
Özdalga is excellent, The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism, and Popu-
lar Islam in Turkey (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998); see also several
studies by Deniz Kandiyoti, especially Fragments of Culture: the Every-
day of Modern Turkey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2002), and “Some Awkward Questions on Women and Modernity in
Turkey,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East,
pp. 270–287, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1998). Jenny B. White’s Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s
Labor in Urban Turkey (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994) is
also insightful on the vital economic context. Julie Marcus’s A World
of Difference: Islam and Gender Hierarchy in Turkey (London: Zed Books,
1992) is also good. See also the thoughtful book by Nilüfer Göle, The
Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1996).
The standard work on the Kurds in Turkey is Kemal Kirişçi and
Gareth M. Winrow’s The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of
Trans-State Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1997). See also Servet
Mutlu’s article, “Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 517–541. The best
treatment of the historical background is Wadie Jwaideh’s The Kurdish
National Movement: Its Origins and Development (Syracuse, NY: Syra-
cuse University Press, 2006); additionally, see Martin van Bruinessen’s
Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan
(Leiden: Brill, 1992). On the Turkish Alevis, see several collections,
including Turkey’s Alevi Enigma, ed. Paul J. White and Jost Jongerden
(Leiden: Brill, 2003); The Alevis in Turkey: Emergence of a Secular Islamic
Tradition (London: Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2007), ed. David
Shankland; and Alevi Identity: Cultural Religious and Social Perspectives
(Repr. London: Routledge Curzon, UK, 2003), ed. Tord Olsson, Elisabeth
Özdalga, and Catharina Raudvere.
On Turkish popular music, see Martin Stokes’s The Republic of Love:
Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2010) and The Arabesque Debate: Music and Musicians in
Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Yaşar Kemal

was the subject of a special issue of the journal Edebiyât: A Journal of
Middle Eastern Literatures, 5, nos. 1–2 (1980), edited by Ahmet Ö. Evin.
Yaşar Kemal on His Life and Art, trans. Eugene Lyons Hébert and Barry
Tharaud (Syracuse, NY, 1999), the publication of a series of interviews,
amounts to an autobiography. The English translation of Aziz Nesin’s
autobiography, Istanbul Boy, published by the University of Texas Press
(Austin, TX, 1977), provides a richly evocative description of Turkey
during the early decades of the republic. Evin also has published a
study of the history of the Turkish novel, Origins and Development of
the Turkish Novel (Minneapolis, 1983). Traditional Crossroads has pub-
lished several CDs of early recorded Turkish popular music.
Index
Abasiyanık, Sait Faik, 129 Adıvar, Abdülhak Adnan, 88, 99

Abbasid Empire, 34, 38 Adıvar, Halide Edib, 88, 93, 94
Abdülaziz, Sultan, 65, 69 (photo), 115, 129, 219–20
Abdülhamid I, Sultan, 228 Aegean region, 8, 13, 27, 28, 30, 37,
Abdülhamid II, Sultan, xxi, 65, 70, 78, 103, 118, 123, 144; Ottoman
71–77, 219, 224, 231, 250; and control in, 41, 43, 46, 52; and
Young Turks, 75–77 Russian expansion, 60; Turk-
Abdülmecid, Sultan, 65, 95, 219, ish principalities in, 35, 38–39;
228, 231 visit of Ibn Battuta to, 40
Action Army, 77, 86, 221 Aegean Sea, 6, 7, 31, 151–52,
Acts of the Apostles, 30 168
Adana, 8, 13–14, 46, 102, 124, 125, Afghanistan, 39, 112, 231
173, 226, 231, 233; American Africa, 11, 12, 45f, 53. See also
military in, 131, 147–48, 238; Egypt
Armenian massacres in, 77; in Afyon-Karahisar, 90
literature, 129; Ottoman prov- Ağca, Mehmet Ali, 155–56, 164,
ince of, 68; and Ottoman trade, 177
52; in partition of Anatolia, 89; Agos, 193, 223
and railroad, 72 Agriculture, 6–9, 10–12, 20, 27, 69,
Adbürrahman Şeref, 96 73, 118, 120, 122–24, 133, 144,
256 Index
167; in AKP economic strat- Alphabet, xxii, xxv, 100–101, 107,

egy, 196; in early republican 111
economy, 103, 104, 108–9, 118; Altaic languages, 5
and environmental concerns, Amarna tablets, 26
209; and EU candidacy, 191; Amasya, 41, 46, 87, 232
Neolithic, 24–25; and Ottoman Amasya Declaration, 87
administration, 42, 72; in Özal American Council of Learned
years and Young Turks, 78 Societies, 133
Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, 66 American Research Institute in
Ahmed I, Sultan, 227 Turkey, 148
Ahmet Rıza, 75–77, 220, 231, 236, Anatolia, vii, xv, xix, xx, xxi, 3, 4,
243 6–9, 13, 23–32, 33–44, 54, 59,
Air travel and transport, 14, 104, 62, 63, 68–69, 70, 72, 81, 83–85,
133, 148, 155, 207, 209 86–91, 94, 97–100, 101, 114, 136,
Akad, Lütfi Ö., 129–30 160, 194–95, 200, 207, 220, 221,
Akçura, Yusuf, 81 224, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235,
Akhis, 37, 40, 235 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 246, 247,
Âkif, Mehmed, 107 248, 249; and early republican
Akın, Fatih, 202 national culture, 105–9, 129;
Akkoyunlus, xx, 43 and early republican national
Aksu, Sezen, 185–86, 202, 220 economy, 100–104, 124; Otto-
Alaca Hüyük, 25 man province created, 45–46;
Alanya (Alaiyye), 40 Ottoman provincial adminis-
Alauddin Kaykubad, xx, 36 tration of, 47–49, 51–52;
Albania, Albanians, 54, 62, 70, 78, partition of, 97, 112,
79, 80, 81, 112, 228 150
Aleppo, 26; Ottoman conquest of, Anıtkabir Mausoleum, 1–2, 3
44; Ottoman province of, 46, (photo), 4, 9, 204, 221
68; in Ottoman trade, 52; and Ankara, xv, xx, xxiii, 1–4, 6, 7,
railroad, 72; and Seljuks of 13–14, 16, 19, 25, 29, 35, 46, 90,
Rum, 35 94, 96, 105, 108, 124, 125, 130,
Alevis, 10, 54, 102, 97, 155, 197, 136, 172, 176, 180, 182, 199,
212, 235, 253; and civil unrest, 210, 221, 222, 223, 227, 228,
155–56, 197–98; conflict with 230; Americans in, 131, 147–48;
Sunnites in Ottoman Anatolia, capital of republic, 1–4, 110–11;
54, 64, 205, 228, 232; in Sheikh and civil unrest, 148–49, 155,
Said rebellion, 97 177, 197, 206–7, 209; in 1960
Alexander the Great, xix, 28–29 coup, 136; in 1980 coup, 160;
Ali Pasha, 65, 72 as headquarters of national
Ali Pasha, of Canik, 62 resistance, 88–89, 90; Ottoman
Ali Pasha, of Janina, 62 province of, 68; and Ottoman
Alp Arslan, 34, 220 trade, 52–53; and railroad, 72;
Index 257
and urbanization, 102; Welfare Armenians, 27, 46, 67–68, 76, 85, 86,
Party wins municipality, 179 89, 101–2, 124, 153, 193, 196, 203,
Ankara, Battle of, 41 223, 227, 231; and Young Turks,
Antakya, 207. See also Antioch xxi, 76, 77, 84–85, 231, 232
Antalya, 8, 39–40 ASALA, Armenian Secret Army
Antioch (Antakya), 35 for the Liberation of Armenia,
Arab Spring, 205, 214 153
Arabia, xx, 53, 64, 100; Ottoman Âşık Veysel, 108
conquest of, 44, 45; in World Association of Turkish
War I, 83 Industrialists (TÜSİAD), 154
Arabic language, xiv, 5, 106, 107, Assyria, 26–27
126, 146, 236, 239, 242 Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Pasha),
Arabic script, 100–101 xv, xvi, xxii, 1, 2 (photo), 3, 4,
Arabs, 83; defeat of Byzantines 9–10, 14, 16, 22, 23, 78, 85–88,
and Sassanians, 30; in World 90–91, 93–102, 103–11, 124–25,
War I and peace settlement, 83 130, 133, 136, 143, 160, 220–21,
Ararat, Mt. (Ağrı Dağı), 9, 233 223, 226, 241, 250, 251, 252;
Archaeology, 23, 24, 25, 106, 203, death of, 109–11, 145, 170, 221,
248 222, 227; name conferred, 107,
Architecture, 25, 38, 50, 51 (photo), 221; and nationalist move-
111, 123, 204–5, 212, 226, 246 ment, 86; personality cult of,
Ardahan, 70 125, 213; principles invoked in
Armed Forces Union, 137 military interventions, 161–63;
Armenia, 8, 37, 46, 214, 220, 237, speeches of, 3, 99, 106, 107, 110,
243; in antiquity, 27–30; and 163; in War of Independence,
Arabs, xix; 30–31; and Byzan- 85–91, 152
tine advance, 31, 35; independ- Atlantic Ocean, 56–57
ence after World War I, 84, 89; Augustus Caesar, xix, 4, 29, 31
monophysitism in, 30–31; in Austria, 54, 56, 82
Ottoman-Iranian wars, xx, 53, Austria-Hungary, 70, 78, 82, 85
232; Shah Ismail in, 232; state Aydın, 13, 39, 40, 41, 46, 68, 119,
in Cilicia, 35, 39; and Turkish 124, 228
conquest, 34–35, 232, Ayla, Safiye, 108, 221
237 Azerbaijan, 83, 232; in Ottoman-
Armenian genocide, 84–85, 192, Iranian wars, xx, 44, 53, 232;
250; denial of, 85, 192. See also Shah Ismail in, 44; in World
Armenian massacres War I, 83
Armenian language, 5–6 Azerbaijani language, 5
Armenian massacres, 72, 77, 232,
250; in Adana, 77; during reign Babylon, 26
of Abdülhamid II, xxi, 72; Baghdad, 34, 35, 36, 53, 220, 241,
during World War I, xxi 242; in Ottoman trade, 52; and
258 Index
railroad, 72; sacked by Mongols, Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, 62

38; and Shah Ismail, 44 Bayram, 209
Baghdad Pact, 132 Bektashi Order, 54, 63–64, 236, 238
Baku, 83 Belgrade, 52, 62, 69, 232
Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, 11, 195 Berkes, Niyazi, 115, 132, 249, 251
Balıkesir, 11. 40, 176 Berlin, Congress of, xxi, 70
Balkan Mountains, 41, 70 Beys, 42, 235
Balkan Pact, 112 Bible, 197
Balkan Wars, xxi, 79–81, 82, 85, 86, Biga, 68
102, 188, 219, 250 Birecik, 9, 52
Balkans, xiii, 7, 11, 43, 45, 47, 48, Birgivi, Mehmed, 54
54, 56, 63, 76, 78, 113, 236; in Bithynia, 40
antiquity, 28; crisis of 1870s, Bitlis, 68, 101
xxi, 69–70; and Crusades, 36; Black Sea, 6, 7, 41, 195
in foreign policy of Republic of Black Sea region, 9, 11, 29, 46, 68,
Turkey, 112; Muslim and Turk- 87, 105; and Blue Stream pipe-
ish population of, 70, 81, 88, 97, line, 195; and Cold War, 132;
101; national states in, 63, 65, and environmental concerns,
68, 69, 70, 74, 79, 249; Ottoman 209–10; and Goeben incident,
conquest of, 41, 42; and Otto- 82; Ottoman control of, 43; and
man military reforms, 59, 63; Russian expansion, 56, 60, 83;
Ottoman provinces in 45; re- states in antiquity, 28–29
gional warlords in, 56, 62; and Blondie. See Ergenekon
Russian imperialism, 57, 59, 60; Blue Stream Pipeline, 195
and Treaty of Lausanne, 91; and BMM, Büyük Millet Meclisi.
Young Turks, 75–77, 79–81 See Parliament
Banks and banking, 50, 72, 73, 104, Boğazköy, 26
122, 123, 166, 179, 184, 194, 221, Bolu, 52
231; Banker Kastelli scandal, Boran, Behice, 132–33
166–67, 230; Halkbank scandal, Boratav, Pertev Naili, 132
211; and SEEs, 104, 123, 144; Bosnia and Hercegovina, 54, 70,
Susurluk scandal, 178, 182 228; annexed by Austria-
Baphaeon, Battle of, 40 Hungary, 78; assassination of
Başbuğ, İlker, 189, 199 Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Batman, 9, 144 in, 82; occupied by Austria-
Batum, 70 Hungary, 70; peasant revolt in,
Bayar, Celal, 221–22; and xxi, 69
formation of Democrat Party, Bosphorus, 7, 14, 17, 25, 35, 68,
119; president of republic, 121; 72, 195, 202, 203, 212, 213; first
trial of, 139 Bosphorus bridge, 14, 207;
Bayezid I, Sultan, xx, 40–42 Ottoman fortifications on, 41,
Bayezid II, Sultan, 43, 44, 232 130; second Bosphorus bridge,
Index 259
14, 168; third Bosphorus Burhaneddin, 41

bridge, 14, 205, 209 Bursa, 8, 14, 68, 72, 102, 176, 221,
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 83 229; Ottoman conquest of, xx,
Britain, xxi, 73, 76, 78, 79, 95, 104, 230; and Ottoman trade, 52–53;
122, 130, 223, 233; and Cyprus visit of Ibn Battuta to, 40
issue, 70, 124, 132, 150–51; and Bursaspor, 17
Eastern Question, 69; mandate Bush, George H.W., 172
in Iraq and Mosul issue, 89–90, Bush, George W., 189, 190
95; and Napoleonic wars, 61, Byzantine Empire, 31, 230, 237,
62; Ottomans open embassy, 241, 246–47; and Battle of Man-
60; and Turkish War of Inde- zikert, xv, xix, 34, 220; and Cru-
pendence, 89–90; in World sades, 36; Emperor Basil II, 31,
War I and peace settlement, 34; imperial heritage of, 4, 7,
82, 83–84, 88–90, 112; in World 47, 202, 203; Ottoman conquest
War II, 112–13 of, xx, 40–41, 43, 237; in post-
Bronze Age, 25, 26 Mongol era, xx, 38, 39; and
Brussels, 133, 152 Sassanian Iran, 30; and Turkish
Bucharest, 56 migrations, 33–35, 37
Buda, 52 Byzantium, 30
Budget, 19, 21, 104, 138, 141, 142,
165, 210; and economic lib- Cairo, 44, 114
eralization, 12, 179, 180, 194; Çaldıran, Battle of, xx, 44
and Ottoman debt, 73, 77, 78; Calendar, xxii, 100
and prime ministry discretion- Caliph, Caliphate, 220, 236; aboli-
ary fund, 165, 169; in second tion of, 95–97; destroyed by
republic, 149, 151, 152; and Mongols, 38; in Menemen in-
Young Turks, 77–78 cident, 103; Ottoman sultanate
Bulgaria, 7, 13, 14, 113, 208; in Bal- and, 72–73, 79, 95–97, 236; and
kan Wars, 79–80; and Cold War, Seljuks, 34, 36, 220, 241, 242
130; in Congress of Berlin, 70; Calp, Necdet, 166
independence of, 70, 78; Otto- Canada, 132
man atrocities in, 69; Ottoman Capital tax, xxii, 113–14, 119
conquest of, 40, 41; and refu- Capitulations, 52, 67, 91, 102, 236
gees in Ottoman empire, 70; Cappadocia, 6, 113
regional warlords in, 62; and Carchemish, 26–27
Russian Empire, 56 Caspian Sea, 34, 83, 180, 195
Bureaucracy, 168; of Abdülhamid II, Çatal Hüyük, xix, 25
74; in Ottoman Empire, 48–49, Catherine the Great, 56–57, 59, 60
55, 63–64, 232; in early republic, Caucasus region, xiii, xx, 11, 27, 81,
105; politicization in republic, 132, 142, 195, 220; in Ottoman-
125, 162; and Tanzimat, 65; and Iranian wars, xx, 44, 52, 53, 54;
Young Turks, 78 and Russian expansion, 59, 60,
260 Index
69; in World War I and Turkish Cilician Gates, 52

War of Independence, 83–85, Çiller, Tansu, 178–80, 182, 222, 242
89, 101, 224, 227 Civil-military relations, 20, 21–22;
Cebesoy, Ali Fuat, 222 in AKP era, 190, 192, 196–200,
Cemaat. See Gülen movement 211, 237; in 1960s, 136–37, 139,
Cemal Pasha, 80, 83, 86 142; in 1970s, 149–50, 154; in
Census, 64, 102, 168 1980s, 159–61, 162–67, 168–69,
CENTO, Central Treaty 173; in 1990s, 177–78, 181–82;
Organization, 132 in Ottoman Empire, 47–49,
Central Eurasia, xiii, 5, 27, 33, 53–54, 62–63, 65
34, 52, 57, 81, 101, 195, 224; Clothing and politics, xxii, 99–100,
Mongols and, 33–34, 38, 41; 170, 203, 253
as mythic homeland of Turkic Cold War, ix, xv, 130–33, 143, 157;
peoples, xv, 11, 38, 105, 196; U-2 incident, 131
Tamerlane’s empire, 41–42 Committee of Union and Progress
Cevdet, Abdullah, 82 (CUP), xxi, 75–84, 86, 87, 119,
Cevdet, Ahmed, 66 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, 231, 236,
Ceyhan River, 8 238
Chalcedon, Council of, 30 Communications, ix, 13–15, 17,
Chinggis Khan, 38 20, 76, 85, 104, 124, 133, 195;
Christians and Christianity, xix, development of, under Ab-
10, 30–31, 35, 36–37, 39, 44, 100, dülhamid II, 71–72; in Turkish
102, 111, 191, 193, 196–97, 198, War of Independence, 87–88
204, 236, 239, 243, 246, 247; and Communism and Communists,
capital tax, 113–14; and Cru- 109, 132–33, 142, 147
sades, 35–36; Orthodox, 30–31, Communist Party, 147
57, 60, 102; and Ottomans, Constantine, xix, 30
48–51, 55, 62, 63, 70, 73, 77, Constitution, 9, 15, 17–20, 213,
84, 85, 236, 239, 247; in post- 222, 231, 237; and AKP amend-
Mongol Anatolia, 39; and ments, 19, 199, 224; Ottoman,
Seljuks of Rum, 36–37; spread xxi, 65, 71, 75, 76, 78, 219, 224,
of, 30–31; and Tanzimat, 66–68, 242; republican (1924), xxii, 96,
69; in Treaty of Küçük Kay- 98, 100, 106, 109, 114, 119, 127;
narca, 57, 60. See also Armenian of second republic (1961), xxii,
massacres; Armenians xxiii, 136, 137–39, 140, 141, 145,
Church and Churches, Christian, 147, 149, 150, 160, 161, 162, 216,
30, 37, 51, 204, 247; and 241; and secularism, 100, 125,
Islamization, 37, 247. See also 170, 181, 224; of third republic
Christians and Christianity (1982), 161, 162, 165–66, 170,
Churchill, Winston, 114, 122 184, 200, 224
(photo) Constitutional Court, 18, 20, 138,
Cilicia. See Çukurova 150, 165, 170, 181, 185, 200, 213
Index 261
Construction industry, xiv, 11, 168, 239; in Lydia, 28; in republic,

176, 195, 205, 209–10, 211 103, 239
Conversion, of Anatolian Chris- Cyprus, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 54, 70,
tians to Islam, 37; of Anatolian 124, 150–53, 184, 190, 191, 232;
population to Christianity, xix, ceded to Britain, 70; constitu-
30; of devşirme youths, 48, 56, tion of, 151; and EU, 190, 191,
236–37. See also Dönme 193–94; Green Line in, 151;
Corruption in politics, xxiii, independence of, xxii, 132, 150;
104–5, 156–57, 166–67, 172, intercommunal violence in,
175, 176–78, 183–85, 217, 222; xxii, 151; and Johnson letter,
in Banker Kastelli scandal, 147; Turkish military interven-
166–67; connection with eco- tion in, xxiii, 152–53, 223; and
nomic and political liberali- Turkish public opinion, 141,
zation, 169, 178, 211–12; and 146–47; Turkish republic
earthquake of 1999, 183–84; declared in northern, 152
and Kurdish war, 211–12, 214; Cyrus, 28
in Susurluk scandal, 176–78
Crimea, 43, 56, 59–60, 69, 70 Dağlarca, Fazıl Hüsnü, 129
Crimean Khanate, 43, 56, 59–60 Dalan, Bedrettin, 176, 198
Crimean War, 73, 101 Damad Ferid Pasha, 86, 88, 90
Croesus, 28 Damascus, 35, 44, 52, 76, 86, 220
Crusades, xx, 35–36, 38, 41 Danishmends, 35, 36
Çukurova (Cilicia), 8, 11, 52, Danube River, 5, 41, 43, 52, 69, 228
144, 233; agriculture in, 11, Danubian Principalities
123–24; in antiquity, 27, 28, (Wallachia and Moldavia), 56
30; Armenian state of, 35, 39; Dardanelles, xxi, 7, 82, 83, 86, 130,
and hydroelectric power, 144; 221; Ottoman conquest of, 41
invasion of, by Ibrahim, 69; Darius I, 27
in literature, 117, 129, 233; Darius III, 28
Ottoman conquest of, 44, 68; Davutoğlu, Ahmet, 21, 235
Ramazanoğlu dynasty in, xx, Debt, 12; in Democrat era, 128;
44; regional notables in, 63; and military rule, 163; of Otto-
Turkish principalities in, 38; man Empire, xxi, 69, 73–74, 78,
in World War I and peace 91, 103, 240–41, 251; and post-
settlement, 89 1980 economic liberalization,
Currency, ix, xxiv, 1, 103, 120, 128, 168, 194; of SEEs, 144
179, 194, 239; AKP reform of, Dede Korkut, 38, 108
xxiv, 194; collapse of 2001, xxiv, Deep State. See Ergenekon
179, 184; and economic liber- Demirel, Süleyman, 21, 167, 170,
alization, 167; hard currency 173, 200, 222–23, 224, 230; and
and trade, 13, 123, 144, 154; of Justice Party, 141–43, 150, 238;
Ottoman Empire, 43, 50, 62, and Kurdish war, 177–79; and
262 Index
1971 military coup, xxii, Earthquake, xxiii, 176, 183–84, 191,

147–49; and 1980 military 246
coup, 160, 161; and military Eastern Europe, East Central Eu-
rule, 162, 166; in National rope, 5, 11, 26, 81, 190, 195; in
Front coalitions, 153–54, 156, Eastern Question, 60, 69–70;
240; as president, xxiii, xxiv, and economic liberalization,
177, 178, 184; and True Path xv, 12, 163, 176; in Ottoman
Party, 169, 178, 242 wars, 43, 53
Demirtaş, Selahattin, 21, 216, Eastern Question, 69–70
238 Eastern Rumelia, 70
Democrat Party (DP), xxii, 119, Ecevit, Bülent, xxiii, 143, 180, 194,
120, 121–27, 139–42, 154, 223, 224; and civil unrest, 155;
221–22, 227, 228–29, 233, 236; and Cyprus crisis, 152; and
formation of, 119; leadership Democratic Left party, 169; and
of on trial, 139, 229; and 1960 1973 elections, 150; and mili-
military coup, 136; wins 1950 tary rule, 160, 162; and party
elections, xxii, 121 politics, 153, 154; as prime
Democratic Left Party, (DSP), minister, xxiii, 150, 154, 182–83,
xxiii, 169, 183, 185, 223 184; takes CHP left of center,
Denktaş, Rauf, 184 143
Depression of 1873, 69, 73 Ecevit, Rahsan, 169, 223
Depression, Great, 103, 237 Economic policy, of Turkish Re-
Dershane, Cram school, 16, 182, public, 10–13; 101–5, 108, 110,
213 221, 237, 241, 242; in 1960s, 137,
Derviş, Kemal, 194 139, 141, 143–56; in 1970s, 154,
Dervishes, 37, 39, 50, 63, 77, 97, 99, 156; of AKP, 194–96, 200,
103–4, 224, 236 208–11; of Democrats, 122–23,
Devşirme, 48, 56, 236, 237, 238 126, 128; and market reforms,
Dink, Hrant, xxiv, 193, 197, 223 164, 167–69, 230, 252; in multi-
DİSK, Türkiye Devrimci İşçi party era, 119, 120; under
Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, military rule after 1980, 161,
145, 149, 237; and civil unrest, 162–63, 178. See also Capital tax
155, 156; closed by military Economic, policy, Ottoman, 46,
authorities, 164 49–53, 55–56, 251; of Abdülha-
Divan, 48, 237 mid II, 72, 73–74; of Tanzimat,
Diyarbakır, 9, 81, 131, 173, 214, 67–68; of Young Turks, 75–76,
230, 233; Ottoman province of, 78, 81, 231
46, 68, 84; and Ottoman trade, Eczacıbaşı, Nejat; Ezcacıbaşı
52 Holding, 168, 202
Dodecanese Islands, 78, 112 Edebali, Sheikh, 40
Dönme, 113, 233 Edib, Halide. See Adıvar, Halide
Dulkadir, 46 Edib
Index 263
Edirne (Adrianople), 7, 13, 75, 225, 2002, xxiv, 184–85, 187, 188,
226, 227; in Balkan Wars, 79, 194, 199, 225; of 2004, 194, 195;
80, 188; falls to Russia, 70; Ot- of 2007, 194, 196, 200; of 2011,
toman conquest of, 41, 230; in 211, 212, 213; of 2014, xxiv, 213;
Ottoman provincial system, 45, of 2015, xxiv, 21, 216
68; and Ottoman trade, 52; and Elvan, Berkin, 208
Young Turk revolution, 232 Enlightenment, European, 71
Education, 12, 15–16, 20, 21, 96, Entente Powers, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87,
101, 108–9, 120–21, 123, 161, 88, 89
181–82, 184, 225, 231, 241, 243; Enver Pasha, xxi, 76, 79–83, 85–87,
and exchanges with United 95, 223–24
States 133, 148; nationalism Environment, 20, 27, 205, 208, 209,
and, 108–9; Ottoman palace 210, 212, 246
system of, 48, 225; and Otto- Ephesus, 13, 30, 247
man reforms, 71–72; religious, Erbakan, Necmettin, xxiii, 142–43,
72, 80, 96, 181–82; and Young 170, 224; barred from politics,
Turks, 80. See also Universities 162, 182, 184; and February 28
Egypt, xiv, xx, xxi, 25, 26, 27, 51 process, 181–82; and military
(photo), 64, 73, 83, 137, 146, rule, 150, 160, 162, 164; in Na-
205, 232, 236; Mamluks in, tionalist Front coalitions, 154,
44; Muhammad Ali in, 62–63, 240; and National Order Party,
68–69; in Napoleonic wars, 62; 143, 145, 150, 239; and National
as regional center in Ottoman Salvation Party (MSP), 150,
Empire, 56; in World War I, 83 153, 169, 239; as prime minis-
Eisenhower Doctrine, 132 ter, xxiii, 179–81; and Welfare
Elections, xiv, 19, 73, 78, 114, 136, (Refah) Party, 169, 171, 179,
154, 161; Ottoman, of 1876, 73; 180, 239; and Virtue Party, 185,
of 1908, 76, 219; of 1911, 79; of 239
1912, 79; of 1919, 88; Republi- Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, xiv, xv,
can, of 1927, 99, 1935, 107; of xxiv, 19, 21, 189 (photo), 199,
1937, 113; of 1946, 120; of 1950, 224, 225; barred from poli-
xxii, 121, 126, 128, 226, 236; of tics, 187–88; and corruption
1954, 127; of 1957, 127; of 1961, charges, 211, 213; as Mayor of
139–40 (photo), 141; of 1963, Istanbul, 176, 181; as president,
141; of 1965, 141–42, 145, 146; 213, 214, 216; as prime minis-
of 1969, 148; of 1973, xxiii, ter, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194,
149–50; of 1974, 153; of 1977, 203, 205, 211–13; and Gezi Park
153; of 1983, xxiii, 166–67, 230; protests, 205–9
of 1984, 169; of 1987, 169; of Ergenekon, xxiv, 196–99, 200,
1989, 171–72; of 1991, 223; of 211, 212, 214, 225, 237.
1994, xxiii, 179; of 1995, xxiii, See also Susurluk
179–80; of 1999, xxiii, 183; of Erim, Nihat, murder of, 156
264 Index
Ertuğrul, Muhsin, 130 202, 212. See also European

Erzincan, 13, 40, 52 Community
Erzurum, 8, 9, 13, 35, 53, 101, 160, Evliya Çelebi, 224–25
182, 225; Ibn Battuta in, 40; and Evren, Kenan, xxiv, 161–62, 163,
medieval Anatolian trade, 35; 225; as president, xxiii, 165–67,
Ottoman province of, 46, 68; 170, 172, 230; trial of, 199–200
and Ottoman trade, 52; in War
of Independence, 87, 89; in Facebook. See Social media
World War I, 83, 84, 101 Family name law, xxii, 4, 107, 221,
Erzurum, Congress of, xxi, 87–88, 226
227, 239 Felicity Party, 185
Esad, Mahmud, 100 Fethi Bey, 103
Eskişehir (Dorylaeum), 7, 11, 13; Feyzioğlu, Turhan, 138
and Crusades, 35; and Otto- Fez, xxii, 99
man trade, 52; in Turkish War Film, 128, 129–30, 153, 159–60, 202,
of Independence, 90 221, 226
Etatism, 104, 110, 119, 237, 238; Finance, 20, 73–74, 195; and capital
in DP era, 120, 121; after 1980 tax, 113–14; and colonialism,
military coup, 175 67, 240–41, 251; in depression
Euboia, 43 of 1873, 69; and economic lib-
Euphrates River, 8, 9, 26, 27, 35, eralization, xxiv, 12, 176, 179,
38; and extent of Ilkhanid 183, 184; and economic perfor-
power, 38; and extent of Otto- mance in 1960s and 1970s, 141,
man power, 41; and medieval 144; and military, 137; in Otto-
Anatolian trade, 35; and Ot- man economic system, 48–50,
toman trade, 52; in Southeast 54–55, 60–62, 63, 64, 243; and
Anatolia project, 9, 168, 242; railroads, 72; in world crisis
Uzun Hasan and Akkoyunlu after 2006, 193–94
state in region of, 43 Folklore, 132, 225
European Community, 163, 167, Football, 16–17, 204–5, 207, 213,
168–69, 172, 224; associate 217, 224
membership in, 128, 144; and Foreign Policy, Ottoman, 60, 69,
economic liberalization, 73–74; and Capitulations, 236;
168–69; and 1980 military and Tanzimat, 65, 67, 72; of
coup, 161; reaction to Cyprus Young Turks, 76, 79, 81, 82,
conflict, 152; reaction to 231. See also Eastern Question
Kurdish war Foreign Policy, republican, 12,
European Council, 130, 161, 190 20, 21, 103, 132, 144–45, 240;
European Court of Human Rights, of AKP, 189–90, 214–16, 225;
192 İsmet İnönü and, 111–14, 120;
European Union, xxiii, xxiv, 10, and military rule, 161; NATO
20, 179, 184, 190–94, 195, 199, and, 131–32, 152–53, 179, 189,
Index 265
191; in Özal years, 172; of Gezi Park, viii, xiv, xvi, xviii, xviv,
Turkish nationalists, 87, 95; 201, 204–8, 209, 210, 211, 212,
and United States, 120, 123, 213
130–33, 189–90; of Welfare Giresün, 11
Party, 179–81 Göbekli Tepe, xix, 24 (photo)
France, xxi, 52, 61, 71, 78, 79, Goeben incident, 82
103, 112, 113, 132, 152, 159, Gordium, 27
193, 226, 236; and Eastern Gören, Şerif, 159
Question, 69; Hatay issue, 113; Grand National Assembly.
mandate of in Syria, 89, 97; See Parliament
Napoleonic wars of, 62; and Grand Vezirate, Grand Vezir, xx,
Ottoman debt, 71, 104; Otto- 48, 53, 54, 64, 65, 69, 77, 78, 80,
man embassy in, 60, 65; Turk- 86, 88, 232, 237, 242
ish embassy in, 103; in World Granicus, 28
War I and peace settlement, 82, Gray Wolves, 147, 164, 238, 240
89, 90; Young Turks in, 75–76, Grazing, 7, 8, 209
231, 236, 243 Greece, 7, 28, 85, 132, 184, 193, 202;
Free Republican Party, 103, 228 and Aegean disputes, 151–52;
Freedom Party, 127, 140 in Balkan Pact, 112; and Balkan
Fuad Pasha, 65 Wars, 79–80, 85; and Cyprus
Fulbright Exchange Program, 133, issue, 124, 132, 150–53; and
148 earthquake relief, 184, 191; and
exchange of populations, 91,
Gallipoli, 68; Ottoman conquest 101–2; and EU, 191; invasion
of, 41, 230; in World War I, 2 of Anatolia, 87–90, 97, 221, 226;
(photo), 87 military rule in, 152; NATO
Gaza flotilla, xxiv, 211 and, 131; Truman Doctrine
Gazi, 39, 93, 237 and, 120, 130; war of independ-
Gaziantep, 160 ence of, 63, 68–69, 247; and war
Gecekondu, 124 with Ottoman Empire, 74; and
Gediz River, 8 World War II, 113
Georgia, 8, 13, 54, 224 Greek language, 4, 5, 6, 28, 31, 43,
Germany, 10, 12, 13, 24, 61, 79, 100, 247
108, 136, 152, 191, 197, 198, 214, Greeks, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 43,
224; investments in Ottoman 61, 63, 67, 101, 102, 197, 219,
Empire, 73; and Ottoman debt, 227; and civil unrest, 124; and
73; and Turkish laborers, 12, exchange of populations, 101–2
163; unification of, 69; in World Guilds, 37, 40, 50, 51 (photo), 235
War I, 2 (photo), 82, 85, 86; Gül, Abdullah, xxiv, 188, 189, 195,
in World War II, 113–14; and 200, 206, 207, 225
Young Turks, 78, 80 Gülen movement, 182, 211–13,
Germiyan, 39, 41 236, 238, 253
266 Index
Gülen, Fethullah, 182, 211, 214, Hizmet. See Gülen movement

225, 253 Honor killings, 160, 192
Güler, Ara, 203 Hüdavendigar, 68
Gulf War. See Persian Gulf War Hülegü, 38
Gümüşpala, Rağıp, 141, 222, 238 Human rights, 118, 177, 184
Güney, Tuncay, 197 Hungary, 38, 42, 53, 163, 232.
Güney, Yılmaz, 159–60, 226 See also Austria-Hungary
Gürsel, Cemal, 136, 140–41, 149, Hunyadi, János, 42
240 Hurrem Sultan, 47, 226
Gypsy. See Romani Hurrians, 27
Husayn, Sharif of Mecca, 83
Habsburg Empire, 53, 54, 62. Hüseyin Rauf, 87, 88, 96, 99
See also Austria-Hungary
Hacılar, 25 Ibn Battuta, xx, 39–40, 44,
Haji Bayram Veli, 4, 231 247
Haji Bektash, 4, 39, 231 Ibrahim, son of Muhammad Ali,
Hakkari, 11, 179 69
Hamid, 39, 41, 46 Ibrahim, Sultan, 227–28
Hamidian regiments, 72 Ilkhans, 34, 38, 39, 41, 42
Hammurabi, 26 Image of Turkey in the West, 72,
Harem, 47, 249 153
Hasan Fehmi, 77 İmam-Hatip Okulları, Prayer-
Hatay, 8, 113, 215 leader and preacher schools,
Hattians, 25, 26, 28 15, 126, 170, 181, 238
Hattusas. See Boğazköy IMF, International Monetary
Headscarf issue, 170, 182, 185, 203, Fund, 10, 12, 156, 163, 184, 194,
231, 253. See also Clothing and 196
politics; Veil Imperial Rescript of 1856, 64
Hellenization, 28–29 Independence Tribunals, 98, 220,
Herodotus, 27, 28 227, 229
Higher education. See Universities India, x, 11, 34, 52, 57, 137, 233
Historical memory and tradition, Indian Ocean, 43, 45, 52, 56, 57
6, 9, 101, 110, 162, 163, 202, Indo-European languages, 5, 26,
203–4, 205 28
Historical Society, Ottoman, 96 Industry, 9–11, 20; in AKP era,
Historical Society, Turkish, 106, 194–96, 202, 210; in DP era,
111 123, 124; in early republican
History, study of, 105–6, 225, 227, economy, 102, 103, 104, 108,
245–54; in Atatürk’s great 109; expansion of in 1960s,
speech, 110; and military rule, 144–46; Ottoman, 49, 53, 72;
162; Ottomans, in 203 and Özal era, 167, 168, 176;
Hittites, xix, 3, 23, 25–26, 105 Young Turks and, 81
Index 267
İnönü, İsmet, xxii, 107, 166, 226, Ottoman regional center, 56;
251; and Bülent Ecevit, 143, Ottoman conquests of, 53; and
150; in coalition governments, Ottoman trade, 52, 72; revolu-
140–41; democratization, 121; tion in, 132; and Sadabad Pact,
and Law on the Maintenance 112; Seleucids in, 29; Seljuks
of Order, 97; and military au- in, 34–36, 220, 241; Shah Ismail
thorities, 121, 137, 139; as Millî I in, 44; and Syrian civil war,
Şef, 111–14, 120; as opposition 214–15; Tamerlane in, 41; in
leader in parliament, 121, 125, World War I and peace
128; as president, 109, 111–14, settlement, 83
118–21, 131; as prime minister, Iraq War, 189–90, 214
97, 139–40 (photo), 141, 147; in Iraqi Kurdistan, 214, 215
War of Independence, 90–91 ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and
Instagram. See Social media Syria, 214–16
Internet, 15, 204, 205, 210 İskenderun, 8; in French mandate
İpekçi, Abdi, murder of, 155–56, of Syria, 89, 113
164 Islam and politics, xiii, 157, 224,
Iran (Persia), ix, 7, 8, 13, 14; Achae- 229, 252; and Abdülhamid II,
menid dynasty in, xix, 27–29; 71, 73; and AKP, 188, 197, 199,
and AKP policy, 195, 214; and 212; and DP, 121, 125–26, 133;
Baghdad Pact, 132; Ilkhans in, in early republican reforms,
34, 38, 39; imperial heritage of, 98, 99, 100, 107; and Febru-
47; Islamic revolution in, 171; ary 28 process, xxiii, 181–82;
Ottoman wars with, xx, 44, 53; in Islamist political parties,
Parthian kingdom in, 29; and 142–43, 162, 164, 178–180, 224;
Sadabad Pact, 112; Safavids in, and Justice Party, 161; in Kurd-
34, 57; Sassanian dynasty in 30; ish rebellion, 98; in nationalist
Seljuk Empire in, 35–36; Shah debates, 94, 95–97; in Ottoman
Ismail I in, xx, 44; Tamerlane Empire, 44, 47, 54, 63–64, 66,
in, 41; and trade routes via 67, 238, 241; in Özal years,
Anatolia, 52–53; Welfare Party 169–71; radicalization of, and
and, 180–81 civil unrest, 77, 156, 161, 171; in
Iranian (Persian) language, 5, 106, War of Independence, 88, 94;
107, 146, 231 in Young Turk era, 76, 80.
Iraq (Mesopotamia), xxi, 7, 8, 232; See also Gülen movement
and Abbasid Caliphate, 34, 38, Islamic civilization, 34, 37, 44,
220, 241, 242; Baghdad Pact, 46–47, 101, 106
132; British mandate of, 89, Ismail, I, Shah, xx, 44, 46, 54, 232
97, 112; Ilkhans in, 34, 38, 39; Israel, 154, 181, 211–12
and ISIS forces, 215; invades Issus, Battle of, 28
Kuwait, 172; and Kurdish war, Istanbul (Constantinople), xiv,
173; no-fly zone in, 178; as xviii, xxi, xxiv, xxv, 7, 10, 13, 14,
268 Index
16, 17, 26, 60, 102, 112, 114, 117, American military in, 131,
119, 123, 133, 145, 148, 157, 169, 147–48; and civil unrest, 124,
177, 193, 196, 198, 212, 215, 219, 156, 206; economic congress
222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233, in, 101; and Ottoman trade, 52;
241, 246; Atatürk’s symbolic and railroad, 72; urbanization
use of, 100, 111; as capital of of, 124–25, 168, 173, 176; in War
Byzantine Empire, 30, 31, 34, of Independence, 87, 90, 93
40, 41, 246, 247; as capital of İzmit, 52, 68, 72, 149; earthquake
Ottoman Empire, 47–48, 51–52, in, 183–84; urbanization of, 176
54–57, 62, 68–72, 242; change of İznik (Nicaea), xix, 30, 36; and Cru-
name, 43; civil unrest in, 124, sades, 35; Ottoman conquest
128, 148, 149, 155, 156, 163, 182, of, 40, 230; Seljuk conquest of,
190, 193, 197, 204–8; and con- xx, 35
trast with Ankara, 4, 100–111;
and Crusades, xx, 36; earth- Jaffa, 76
quake in, 183–84; and the end Janina, 62, 79
of the Ottoman Empire, 86–89; Janissaries, 48, 53, 54, 55, 228, 237,
and environmental concerns, 238; destruction of, xx, 63–64;
204–11; and martial law, 169; and New Order army, 60, 61,
and military takeovers, 136, 62
160; Neolithic settlement, 25; Jazira plain, 9, 89
Ottoman conquest of, xx, 43, Jerusalem, 35, 45, 180; and
228; and political corruption, Crimean War, 69; Ottoman dis-
202–4; in republican cultural sidents in, 76; Ottomans and
life, 96, 98, 106, 107–8, 130, 146, pilgrimage to, 52; in World
162, 202–4, 221, 229, 230, 231; War I, 83
as republican financial center, Jesus Christ, 30, 100
179, 189, 195, 202–4; Taksim Jews and Judaism, 10, 30, 51, 66,
Square in, 111, 162, 204, 205, 67, 68, 102, 197, 239
206 (photo), 207, 208; urbaniza- Jihad, 82
tion of, 124–25, 168, 173, 176, John Paul II, Pope, 164
202–4; and Welfare party rule, John V Paleologos, 41
xxiii, 179, 181; and Young John VI Cantecuzenos, 40, 230
Turks, 76–81, 224 Johnson, Lyndon B., 147, 151, 152
Italy, 69, 202; occupies Libya and Justice and Development Party
Dodecanese Islands, 79; in (AKP), viii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xxiv,
republican foreign policy, 112, 21, 185, 187, 188, 194–200, 202,
132; in World War I and peace 210, 235; wins 2002 elections,
settlement, 82, 89; and Turkish 185; and civil-military rela-
War of Independence, 89 tions, 196–99; and clash with
İzmir (Smyrna), 8, 11, 13, 14, Gülen movement, 211–13; and
98, 102, 124, 220, 222, 225; EU accession process, 190–94;
Index 269
and Gezi Park protests, 205–8; Kemalism (Atatürkçülük), 109–11,

popular appeal of, 194–95, 199, 238; and democracy, 171;
216–17; and Syrian war, 214–16 and ideology of military
Justice Party (AP), 140, 141, 142, government after 1980, 161–62
147–50, 238; and Great Turkey Kenya, 183, 230
Party, 166; and 1980 military Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruholla, 171,
coup, 161, 162, 166; in Nation- 181
alist Front coalitions, 153–54, Kılıç Arslan II, 35
240; as partial successor to Kızıl Irmak River, 28, 30
Democrat Party, 140; True Path Kobani, xxiv, 214, 215
Party as successor to, 242 Koç, Vehbi and Koç Holding, 124,
168, 202, 227
Kadesh, Battle of, 26 Kocaeli, 8
Kadıasker, 48, 237 Konya, 6, 7, 25, 224, 231; as capital
Kadızade, Mehmed, 54 of Emirate of Karaman, 39; as
Kahramanmaraş. See Maraş capital of Seljuk Sultanate of
Kâmil Pasha, 77, 79 Rum, xx, 36–38; civil unrest in,
Kansu, Şevket Aziz, 132 156, 161; Ibn Battuta visits, 40;
Kanun, 46, 47, 66, 228, 232, 238 Ottoman province of, 68; and
Kara George, 62 Ottoman trade, 52; shrine of
Kara Koyunlu, 42 Rumi in, 39, 231
Karabekir, Kâzim (Kâzim Pasha), Konya, Battle of, xxi, 69
87, 89, 108; and Progressive Köprülü, Grand Vezir Mehmed,
Republican Party, 96, 98 xx, 53, 54
Karagöz shadow theater, 108 Köprülü, M. Fuad, 119, 121, 127,
Karakol, 86–88, 238 227, 236, 248
Karaman, 39, 41, 43, 46, 53, 228 Koraltan, Refik, 119, 121, 236
Karamanlis, Konstantin, 152 Korea, South, 16, 141
Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri, 129 Korean language, 5
Karası, 40, 46 Korean War, 131
Karlowitz, Treaty of, xx, 54 Korutürk, Fahri, xxiii, 156
Kars, 46, 70, 105, 119 Köse Dagh, Battle of, xx, 38
Kastamonu, 41, 68 Kösem Valide, 227–28
Kayseri, 7, 8, 26, 27, 188, 225, 249; Kosovo, 78
Ibn Battuta visits, 40; sacked Kosovo, Battle of, 41
by Mongols, 38; sacked by Küçük, Fazıl, 151
Seljuks, 34; manufacturing in, Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of, xx, 56,
195–96 59, 60
Kâzim Pasha. See Karabekir, Kültepe, 26
Kâzim Kurdish language, 5, 97, 184, 192,
Kemal, Mustafa. See Atatürk 214
Kemal, Orhan, 129 Kurdish nationalism, 164, 192, 253
270 Index
Kurdish revolt (1925), xxii, 97, 253 Language Society, Turkish, 106,
Kurdish war, 164, 178, 180, 192, 111, 146
196, 214, 253; cease fire in, 178, Late Bronze Age, 26
214, 215; and government cor- Latife, 99, 221
ruption, 173, 177–78; human Lausanne, Treaty of, xxii, 91, 93,
and material costs of, 214; refu- 94, 102, 112, 113, 226, 242;
gees of, 173; and Syrian civil compulsory exchange of
war, 215 populations in, 91, 102
Kurdistan, 8, 46, 192, 253; in Treaty Law, 9, 17, 18–20; and civil and
of Sèvres, 89. See also Iraqi human rights, 81, 145, 170,
Kurdistan 172, 192; and land reform,
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 119–20; Ottoman synthesis of
155, 173, 229–30, 241, 253 secular and Islamic, 46–47,
Kurds, 97, 102, 159, 172, 192, 193, 228, 232, 238; in republican re-
194, 214, 253; Alevis and Sun- forms, 96–98, 99–100; and sha-
nis among, 97; and Armenian ria, 66, 77, 80, 96, 97, 103, 161,
massacres, 72; and ethnic inter- 171, 241; in Tanzimat, 64–68,
mixing with Turks, 81, 98, 129, 71; and Young Turks, 78,
192, 226, 229, 233; and HDP, 80–81
216, 238; martial law and, Law for the Encouragement of
159–60, 164, 169; in Mosul re- Industry, 103
gion, 112; in Ottoman Empire, Law on Fundamental
46, 54, 63; in People’s Demo- Organizations, 90, 95
cratic Party, 179; and political Law on the Maintenance of Order,
liberalization, 192; separatist 99
war of, 156, 160, 189, 190, 230; Lawrence, T. E., of Arabia, 83
and Turkish nationalists, 97, 98 League of Nations, 86, 89, 112
Kut al-Imara, 83 Lebanon, 25, 131, 230
Kütahya, 39, 90 LGBT, 146, 163, 216, 229
Libya, 78, 86, 112, 180, 221
Labor, 10, 124, 125, 170, 176, 180, Linguistics, study of, 106, 146
210, 253; abroad, 12, 144, 191; Lira. See Turkish Lira
and civil unrest, 149, 155–56; in Literacy, 10, 101, 108, 123, 243;
1961 constitution, 138, 145; in scientific, 12
legal reforms, 165; and strikes, Literature, 38, 39, 88, 93–94, 106,
103, 120, 141, 145, 148–49, 207 107, 108, 117–18, 128–29, 132,
Labor unions, 20, 120, 155, 210–11, 135–36, 146, 193, 203–4, 219–20,
216; confederations of, 133, 223, 229, 230–31, 232, 233, 252,
156, 164, 237, 243; in Ottoman 254; Christian, 30; European,
Empire, 78; in early republic, 67, 71, 108
118; under military rule, 164, London, 60, 90, 122, 202, 223
165 London, Treaty of, 80
Index 271
Luwians, 26 Marmara region, 7–8, 29, 35, 37,

Lycia, 28 38, 176, 183–84; Ottoman
Lydia, 28 control of, 40–41, 46, 52, 68
Marmara Sea, 7, 52, 90, 160, 176
Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Marmaray rail, 24–25, 195, 203, 213
Yüzyıl), xiv, 203 Marshall Plan, 120, 122, 131
Mahmud II, Sultan, xx, 62–64, 65, Martial Law, 20, 118, 124, 128, 149,
68, 69, 228, 231, 238 155, 159, 160–61, 164, 165, 169,
Mahmud Şevket Pasha, 77, 80, 86, 188, 204
231 Mass media, 106, 150, 211, 213
Makal, Mahmut, 128–29 Mazhar-Fuat-Özkan (MFÖ), 201,
Makarios II, Archbishop of 217
Cyprus, 150–52 Meander River. See Menderes
Malatya, 27, 167, 197, 223, 230 River
Malik Shah, 34, 35 Mecca, 44, 45, 52, 83, 100
Malikane, 55, 239; abolished, Mecelle, xxi, 65, 66
65–66 Medes, 27, 28
Mamluks, 44 Medina, 44, 45, 52, 83, 100
Mandates, 86, 87, 89, 95, 97, Mediterranean Sea, 6, 7, 8, 13, 38,
112 39, 82, 144, 152, 195, 246; in
Manufacturing, 8, 11–12, 55, 73, antiquity, 25, 29, 31; and Cold
108, 124, 144, 195 War, 132; in Ottoman trade, 43,
Manzikert, Battle of, xv, xix, 33, 44, 45, 52, 56; and Russian
34–35, 220 expansion, 60
Maraş (Kahramanmaraş), 117; civil Medreses, 38, 72, 80, 239; closed, 96
unrest in, 155 Mehmed I, Sultan, 42
Maritsa River, 7, 41, 68 Mehmed II, Sultan, (the
Marj Dabik, Battle of, 44 Conqueror), xx, 43, 205, 228,
Market economy, xv, 10–12; and 242
AKP, 194–96, 200; and DP, 119, Mehmed III, Sultan, 53;
122–23, 125, 126–27; in early circumcision of, 51 (photo)
republican economic strategy, Mehmed IV, Sultan, 54, 227
104, 119; in economic policy of Mehmed V, Reşad, Sultan, 77, 228,
Turgut Özal, 162–63, 167, 229
175–76, 252; and government Mehmed VI, Vahideddin, Sultan,
corruption, 175–76, 178, 85, 89, 228
182–83, 211; and military rule, Menderes, Adnan, xxii, 119, 121,
144, 165, 175, 200; and post- 122 (photo), 123, 124, 127, 128,
World War II liberalization, 131, 132, 143, 222, 228–29, 233,
119–20. See also Privatization 236; execution of, 139; and
Marmara earthquake (1999), formation of DP, 119; and 1960
183–84, 191 military coup, 136
272 Index
Menderes River, 8, 39, 68, 72, 105 Mitanni, 26

Menemen incident, 103–4 Mithridates Eupator, 29
Menemencioğlu, Numan, 113 Mongol languages, 5, 34
Mercan Dede, 202 Mongols, xx, 33, 231, 38–39, 41, 57;
Mersin, 8, 25, 173 in Anatolia, 38–39, 241
Metropolitan Municipalities, 14, Monopolies, state, 14, 128, 144,
176, 179, 209 156; Ottoman, 50, 74; in early
Mevlevi Order, 39, 236 republican economic strategy,
Midas, Tomb of, 27 103, 104, 106; in economic
Middle East, Middle Eastern, ix, liberalization, 168
x, xiv, 5, 11, 12, 16, 29, 48, 66, Montenegro, xxi, 69, 70; in Balkan
130, 132, 146, 167, 246, 248, 249, Wars, 79; revolt of Albanians
253, 254 in, 78
Midhat Pasha, 71 Morea (Peloponnesus), 228, 43
Migration, 13, 132; in antiquity, 26, Mosque, mosques, 10, 38, 50, 51,
27; in Ottoman Empire, 69; of 72, 96, 107, 111, 170, 188, 204,
Turks into Anatolia, 33, 34–35, 205, 207, 208, 212, 226, 238
38–39, 101, 105–6, 220; of Turk- Mosul, 35, 89, 112, 215
ish laborers abroad, 12, 191; Mother Goddess, 27, 29, 246
internal in republican Turkey, Motherland Party (ANAP), xxiii,
104, 156, 168, 170, 192, 196, 203 166, 170, 171, 172, 176, 185,
Military in politics, xv–xvi, 21–22, 223, 230, 239; in 1983 elections,
237, 240, 251–52; and discon- 167; and career of Turgut Özal,
tent in DP era, 125, 127–28; and 167, 169, 230; in “Motherpath”
February 28 process, 181–82; coalition, 179; formation of,
and 1960 military coup, 166; and government corrup-
136–37, 228–29, 236; and 1971 tion, 172, 178; as led by Mesut
military coup, 149–50, 223, Yılmaz, 173, 178
226; and 1980 coup, 160–62, Mudanya, 52, 72, 90
163, 165–66, 200, 223, 225; Mudros, Armistice of, 85, 87, 228
and Colonel Aydemir’s coup Muğla, 39
attempts, 141; in Ottoman Muhammad Ali, 62, 63, 68–69
Empire, 47, 53, 62; and Savior Muhammad, Prophet, 10, 100, 235,
Officers, 79; and support for 236, 241, 242
İnönü, 121, 125; Young Turks Muhammadan Union, 77
and, 75, 79–80. See also Muhteşem Yüzyıl. See Magnificent
Civil-military relations Century
Millet, millet system, 66, 67, 72, Mukataa, 50, 239
239 Mumcu, Uğur, murder of, 171, 197
Mining, xiv, 7, 9, 50, 104, 145, Murad I, Sultan, 40, 41, 42
209–11 Murad II, Sultan, 42, 228
Missionaries, xix, 30, 72, 197 Murad IV, Sultan, 53, 227, 228
Index 273
Murad V, Sultan, 65, 69, 70, 219 involvement in government

Müren, Zeki, 146, 163, 185, 229 corruption, 178; under military
Museum of Innocence, 204, 231 rule, 150, 165–66
Museums, 26, 111, 202, 221, 231 National Unity Committee (NUC),
MÜSİAD, Independent Industrial- xxii, 136, 222, 232
ists’ and Businessmen’s Nationalism, 67–68, 153, 233, 249;
Association, 182 Anatolian Turkish, 81, 96–97;
Music, 6, 39, 108, 128, 129, 130, in culture of early republic,
146, 185–86, 201, 202, 217, 220, 105–9; radicalization of, dur-
221, 231, 252, 253–54 ing Cold War, 142, 147; among
Mustafa I, Sultan, 227 “Six Arrows,” 109–10, 238; and
Mustafa III, Sultan, 232 Treaty of Sèvres, 86, 89, 91; of
Mustafa IV, Sultan, 62, 228 Young Turks, 81
Mustafa Kemal. See Atatürk Nationalist Action Party (MHP),
Mustafa Reşid Pasha, 65 21, 142, 150, 216, 233, 238, 240;
Muwatallis, 26 role in civil unrest of, 154–56
Myriokephalon, Battle of, xx, 35 Nationalist Democracy Party,
166
Nakshibendi Order, 97, 103, 169, NATO, North Atlantic Treaty
236 Organization, xv, xxii, 21, 122,
Namık Kemal, 71 127, 131, 133, 136, 191; in civil
Napoleon Bonaparte, 62 unrest, 155; and end of Cold
Nasreddin Hoca, 108 War, 172; and Greek-Turkish
Nasser, Gamal abd al-, 137 conflict, 152; and Iraq War,
Nation Party, 121, 125 189, 190; and militarization of
National identity, 4–5, 6, 7, 9, 196, Turkish society, 133; reaction
252; in early republic, 105, 106, to 1980 military coup, 161; and
107, 108; nostalgia in, 194, 203, Welfare Party, 179
205; in Ottoman Empire, 45. Natural gas, 180, 184, 195, 214
See also Kurds Nazım Hikmet, 132
National Intelligence Organization Neolithic Age, 24–25
(MİT), 50, 197, 212, 239 Neshites, 26
National Order Party (MNP), 143, Nesin, Aziz, 129, 135–35, 157, 168,
145, 150, 224, 239 171, 229, 254
National Pact, xxi, 87, 116, 267–68 New Fund Treasury, 60, 61
National Salvation Party (MSP), New Order Army, 59–64
150, 153, 169, 224, 239, 240 New Turkey Party, 140
National Security Council (NSC), Nicaea. See İznik
20, 21, 139, 161, 184, 225, 240; Nicaea, Council of, xix, 30
during AKP era, 21, 200; in Nicopolis, Battle of, 41
1982 constitution, 165, 173; Nile River, 5, 29, 52, 62
and February 28 process, 181; Nish, 41, 52
274 Index
Niyazi Bey, Ahmet, 76 Paganism, 10, 24, 25, 27, 29, 37

Nurcus, Nurcu movement, 126, Pakistan, 131, 132
143, 182, 225, 240 Palaians, 26
Nursi, Said (Bediüzzaman), 98, Palestine, xv, xxi, 25, 44
126, 139, 143, 157, 229, 240, Pamuk, Orhan, 193, 203, 230–31
252–53 Pan-Turk movement, 81, 113, 114
Paris, 60, 65, 103, 226; Young Turks
Öcalan, Abdullah, xxiii, 155, 173, in, xxi, 75–76, 231, 236, 243
183, 192, 214, 229–30, 241 Parliament (Grand National As-
Occupy movement, 205 sembly), xiv, 4, 13, 15, 18–21,
OECD, Organization for Eco- 84, 85, 109, 142, 170, 172, 184,
nomic Cooperation and 205, 213, 223, 224, 226, 228, 233,
Development, 10, 12, 15 235; in 1961 constitution, 136,
OEEC, Organization for European 138, 156–157, 161; and 1980
Economic Cooperation, 130 military coup, xxiii, 157, 160,
Oghuz Turks, 5, 34, 38 162, 167; in 1982 constitution,
Oghuzname, 38 165, 166; and AKP control,
Old Testament, 26 xxiv, 185, 187–89, 190, 191, 192,
Orhan, Sultan, xx, 40–41, 230 194, 196, 199–200, 212–13, 216,
Osman, Sultan, 40, 42, 95, 230, 247; 225; and DP control, 121, 122,
Osman’s dream, 40 124, 127, 128, 136; and Febru-
Osman II, Sultan, 53 ary 28 process, 181–82, 185;
Ottoman Bank, 73, 104 and government corruption,
Ottoman dynasty, 33, 34, 40, 42, 169, 177–78, 222; and Kurd-
43, 47–48, 53, 95; women of, ish conflict, 173, 184, 192, 214;
47–48, 226, 227–28 nationalist, 88, 89, 94–96, 221,
Ottoman Freedom Society, 76, 232 222; Ottoman (1876), xxi, 71,
Ottoman Liberal Party, 76, 77 219; Ottoman (1908), xxi, 75,
OYAK, Army Mutual Assistance 224, 232; Ottoman (1920),
Association, 137, 144, 240 88–89, 94, 221, 240; and politi-
Özal, Korkut, 169 cal stalemate in second repub-
Özal, Turgut, xxiii, 21, 230, 167–73, lic, 145, 148, 149, 150, 156, 157;
175, 176, 177, 178; as advisor in single-party state, 97, 98, 99,
to Süleyman Demirel, 156, 100, 104, 106, 107; and transi-
162–63; death of, 173, 222, 223; tion to multi-party system, 113,
and Kurdish conflict, 172–72, 114, 119, 120, 121, 222, 227; and
178–79; and manipulation of Welfare Party control, 179, 180;
patronage system, 169; and Young Turks and, xxi, 75–77,
military rule, 162–63, 166–67, 78, 79, 232
169; and Motherland Party, Parthian kingdom, 29
xxiii, 166, 167, 169, 178, 239; Patronage, 21, 104, 125, 154, 156,
and religion, 169–70 184, 217; and corruption, 169,
Index 275
175–76, 184, 217; in Ottoman 199, 213, 216, 235, 236, 238, 239,
Empire, 55–56, 67, 236; in Özal 240, 241, 251–52; and 1961 con-
years, 169, 171, 175–76 stitution, 138; in 2002 elections,
Peace Corps, 148 185; democratization and, 119,
Peker, Recep, 120 121, 124, 127; and military rule,
People’s Democratic Party, 128, 136, 149, 160–64, 166–67;
Halkların Demokratik Partisi in Ottoman Empire, 76–77, 79,
(HDP), 21, 216, 238 80, 84
People’s Houses and People’s Pompey, 29
Rooms, 108–9, 126, 130, 241 Pontic Mountains, 9
People’s Party, 95–96. See also Popular culture, xiii, 6, 146, 153,
Republican People’s Party 163, 185–86, 201, 202, 203, 217,
Pergamum, 29 220, 221, 226, 229, 253–54; and
Persia. See Iran the Gezi Park protests, 2015,
Persian Gulf, 9, 52, 72 206, 207, 208
Persian Gulf War (Gulf War), 172, Population, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11,
173, 178 12, 13, 19, 84, 88, 89, 128, 187,
Persian (Iranian) language, 5, 106, 190, 191, 193, 235, 250; after
107, 146, 231 Congress of Berlin, 70, 73; of
Peter the Great, 56, 60 medieval Anatolia and Turkish
Petroleum, x, 9, 11, 103, 112, 144, migrations, 36–37; of Ottoman
183, 214, 215; and Aegean ex- Anatolia, 31, 36, 43; and urban-
ploration, 151, 168; Arab-Israeli ization, 124, 144, 168, 175–76;
October War, 154, 156; Caspian after War of Independence, 91,
Sea fields and, 195; and 97, 101–2, 112
Persian Gulf War, 183 Populations, compulsory exchange
Phrygians, xix, 27, 28 of, 91, 102
Pilgrimage, 39, 45, 52, 139 Populist Party, 166
Pir Sultan Abdal, 146 Postal service, 64, 72, 232
PKK, Partiye Karkaran Kurdistan. Presidential Palace, xv, 4, 189, 209
See Kurdistan Workers’ Party Press, 14–15, 17, 77, 184, 210,
Planning, economic, xv, 104, 123, 223; Anatolian News Agency
141, 144, 163, 167, 175, 230, 237, (Anadolu Ajansı), 14; censor-
242; in 1961 constitution, 139, ship of, 15, 114, 118, 123, 127,
141; in five-year plans, xxii, 128; in 1961 constitution, 138,
104, 120, 141 139; in 1982 constitution, 185;
Poetry, 39, 71, 107, 108, 129, 132, Cumhuriyet, 14, 98, 124, 150,
146, 223, 229, 231 164, 171, 197, 215, 246; and
Poland, 56, 163 government corruption, 178,
Political parties, 18, 19, 20–21, 180, 211; Hürriyet, 14, 121, 124,
95–96, 103, 114, 141, 143, 152, 164, 200, 246; and military rule,
154, 155, 179, 182, 191, 194, 198, 150, 161; Milliyet, 14, 121, 155;
276 Index
nationalists and, 98; Ottoman, 252–53; Hellenistic, xix, 29;

77; in political-economic lib- in medieval Anatolia, xix, 29;
eralization, 119, 121; political Neolithic, 24–26; and Ottoman
polarization of, 146; Sabah, 14, military reforms, 63–64, 228;
246; Vatan, 119, 121, 233; Young Paleolithic, 24; and republican
Turks and, 78; Zaman, 14, 246 nationalism, 97, 110; role in
Prisons, 19, 159–60, 164, 191 public life of, in republic, 10,
Privatization, 57, 123, 167, 168, 15, 22, 100, 121, 125–26, 170,
175, 176, 178, 182, 194–96, 248 171, 179, 181, 188; and Sunnite-
Progress Party, 79 Alevi conflict in republic, 10,
Progressive Republican Party, 96, 155–56, 197–98, 205, 212; and
98, 227 Sunnite-Shiite conflict in Otto-
Provincial administration, 11, 19; man Empire, 44, 46, 54, 63–64,
and Kurdish conflict, 177, 188; 232; and Tanzimat, 66–67; and
under martial law, 161, 164, Young Turks, 103, 231
165, 169; Ottoman, 45–47, 48, Republic, declaration of, xxii, 4, 9,
49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 60, 70, 74, 235, 13, 94–96, 98, 221
237, 240, 242, 243; in Tanzimat, Republican Peasants’ Nation
xxi, 64–66, 68 Party, 140, 142, 145, 240
Pruth, Battle of, 56 Republican People’s Party (CHP),
Public Debt Administration, 21, 96, 99, 108, 109, 110, 119,
Ottoman (PDA), 74, 240, 241 149, 154, 156, 207, 228, 236, 238,
241, 250; in AKP era, 185, 194,
Qadhafi, Muammar, 180 210, 216; and Bülent Ecevit,
Queen Mother. See Valide Sultan 143, 148, 150, 153, 223; closure
Qur’an, 50, 107, 108, 126, 219, 225, of, 160–61, 166; in coalition
231, 241 governments, 139–41, 154, 224;
and DP, 119, 120–21, 122,
Radio, 14–15, 106, 126, 128, 130, 127–28; İnönü leadership of,
146, 160, 161, 163, 192, 221, 229 111, 118, 119, 140 (photo), 226;
Railroads, 14, 72, 77, 85, 90, 102, and military rule, 136–37; in
103, 104, 118, 120, 155, 195, 204 single-party state, 99, 105, 110,
Rakka, 46 111
Ramazanoğlu dynasty, xx, 44 Republican Reliance Party, 154,
Ramses II, 26 240
Refet Bey, 87, 98 Rhodes, 232
Refugees, xiv, 13, 38, 39, 69, 70, 88, Rize, 9, 210
93, 97, 101–2, 173, 231, 248 Roads and highways, 13–14, 72,
Reliance Party, 154, 240 114, 118, 120, 122, 123, 183, 210;
Religion, 4, 9–10, 15, 22, 47, 68, in medieval Anatolia, 35, 28,
100, 102, 110, 113, 127, 196–97, 41; and Ottoman trade, 50, 52
235, 236, 238, 241, 249, 250, Roman Catholicism, 197
Index 277
Roman script. See Alphabet Sakarya River, 9

Romani, 6, 202 Salonika, xxi, 86, 219, 220–21, 233;
Romania, 69, 70, 80; in Balkan and Balkan Wars, 79; Ottoman
Pact, 112; and Balkan Wars, 80 conquest of, 41; and Young
Romans, 4, 7, 29, 30, 31, 246 Turks, 76, 79
Romanus IV Diogenes, 34 Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü), 6
Rome, 4, 29, 30, 31, 36, 164 Samsun, xxi, 9, 87, 110, 195
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 114 Sanjak, 46, 68, 70
Rose Garden Decree, 64, 66 Sanjak of Novi Pazar, 70
Rum, 36, 241, 247 Saraçoğlu, Şükrü, 113
Rumelia, 41, 45, 48, 70, 237 Sarajevo, 82
Rumi (Mevlana Celaleddin), 39, Sardis, 28, 247
231 Sarıkamış, 83, 89
Rushdie, Salman, 171 Saruhan, 40, 41, 46
Russia, xx, 13, 38, 56, 59, 76, 195, Saturday mothers, 177, 186, 199
229; and Balkan Wars, 79–80; Sava River, 43
and Crimean Khanate, 59–60; Savior Officers, 79
and Eastern Question, 56, Schliemann, Heinrich, 23
69; and Mongol invasions, 38; Scutari (Shkodër), 79
in Napoleonic Wars, 62; and Sea Peoples, 27
Straits issue, 132; in Turkish Secularism, 9, 109, 111, 114, 115,
War of Independence, 90; and 125, 142, 147, 164, 170, 180, 196,
wars with Ottoman Empire, 249, 253; and AKP, 188, 198–99,
xx, 56–57, 59–60, 62–63, 65, 212, 224; and Alevis, 97; in
69–70, 73, 74; in World War I, Atatürk’s reforms, 99–101, 118;
82–84, 89, 224 as civic religion, 9; in constitu-
tion of republic, 9, 17, 170; DP
Sabahettin, Prince, 76, 77, 81, 231 and, 125–26, 136; in February
Sabancı, Hacı Ömer, 124, 231–32, 28 process, 181–82, 185, 224; in
252 foundation of republic, 95, 98,
Sabancı, Özdemir, assassination 220; influence of on politicized
of, 197 Islam, 171, 180; among Six Ar-
Sabancı, Sakip; Sabancı Holding, rows, 109–10, 238; and Welfare
124, 168, 180, 202, 230, 232, 252 Party government, 180; of
Sabbateans. See Dönme Young Turks, 75, 79
Sadabad Pact, 112 Selim I, Sultan, xx, 33, 43, 44, 45,
Şafak, Elif, 192 46, 54, 73, 205, 232
Safavid dynasty, 34, 46, 53, 57 Selim II, Sultan, 226
Saint John, 30 Selim III, Sultan, 59–61 (photo),
Saint Paul (Saul of Tarsus), xix, 30 62, 63, 64, 228, 232
Sait Halim Pasha, 80 Seljuk dynasty, xv, xx, 220; in
Sakarya, Battle of, 90, 152, 224 Great Seljuk Empire, 34, 35, 48
278 Index
Seljuks of Rum, xx, 34, 35, 36–37, Slavery, 28; of Bayezid I, 41, 42;
38, 39, 243, 247 military, in Islamic civilization,
Semitic languages, 5, 100 36; in Ottoman Empire, 47–48,
Senate, 138, 226 54, 225, 226, 228, 236–37; in
Serbia, 41; and Balkan Wars, Seljuk Anatolia, 36
79–80, 85; and Bosnian crisis, Sledgehammer. See Ergenekon
xxi, 69, 70; Ottoman conquest Smyrna. See İzmir
of, 41; revolt against Ottoman Soccer. See Football
rule, 62–63; and World War I, Social Democratic Party (SDP),
82 166, 169
Sèvres, Treaty of, xxii, 86, 89, 91, Social media, 15, 204, 205, 206,
95, 97, 112, 228, 242 207, 208, 210
Seyhan River, 8, 144 Societies for the Defense of Rights,
Sezer, A. Necdet, xxiv, 21, 184, 196, 86, 221
199–200 Sofia, 41, 52, 70, 86, 208, 221
Sharia, 71, 171, 241; and 1980 Söğüt, 40
military coup, 161; in Atatürk’s Soma, xiv, 210
reforms, 96; in ideology of Southeast Anatolia Project, 168,
Abdülhamid II, 77; in Kurd- 242
ish rebellion, 97; in Menemen Soviet Union. See USSR
incident, 103; movement for Special Organization, 84, 85
imposition of under leadership Sports, 16–17, 20. See also Football
of Erbakan, 181; in Ottoman State Economic Enterprises
law, 47, 66, 238, 249; repealed (SEEs), 104–5, 123, 137, 141,
by republican parliament, 100; 144, 145, 221, 241; and eco-
and Young Turks, 77, 80 nomic liberalization, 167, 168,
Sheikh Said Rebellion, xxii, 97–98, 176, 179; reforms needed after
229 1960, 144–45, 156
Sheikhulislam, 64, 78, 80, 88, State of Emergency Governate
241 (OHAL), 177, 188
Shiites and Shiism, 10, 235, 242. State Planning Organization
See also Alevis (SPO), 139, 141, 163, 167, 230,
Siirt, 188 242
Sincan incident, 180–81 State Security Courts, 150, 165,
Sivas, xxi, 8, 9, 155, 171; Ibn Bat- 171, 182, 237
tuta visits, 40; and medieval Stefan Dushan, 41
Anatolian trade, 13, 35; Otto- Stock market, 69, 184, 189, 200,
man conquest of, 41; Ottoman 207
province of, 46, 68; sacked by Straits, 7, 30, 52, 60, 130; Com-
Mongols, 38 mission, 91; in Montreux
Sivas, Congress of, xxi, 88, 240 Convention, 112, 130; in Treaty
Six Arrows, 109, 237, 238 of Küçük Kaynarca, 56–57;
Index 279
in Treaty of Lausanne, 91; in Susurluk scandal, xxiii, 176–78,

World War I and peace 181, 182, 185, 188, 196, 197, 198,
settlement, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89 242
Strikes. See Labor Synagogues, 51
Sublime Porte, 65, 242 Syria, 8, 14, 31, 35, 160; in antiq-
Suetonius, 4 uity, 25, 26; civil war in, xv,
Suez Canal, 83 12, 13, 212, 214, 215; French
Sufism, 54, 169, 231, 236 mandate in, 89, 97, 113; and
Süleyman (Seljuk Bey), 35 Hatay issue, 113; invasion of
Süleyman, Prince (son of Sultan by Ibrahim, 68–69; and Kurd-
Orhan), 41, 230 ish conflict, 183, 230; Ottoman
Süleyman I, Sultan, xiv, xx, 46–47, conquest of, xx, 44, 232; Otto-
53, 203, 226, 232 man provinces in, 53; in World
Süleyman II, Sultan, 53 War I and peace settlement,
Sultan, xiv, xx, xxi, 35, 36, 37, xxi, 83, 87, 221, 226
242; deposition of, 53, 62, 69,
70, 76, 77, 95, 228, 232; and Tabriz, 39, 44, 52, 180, 231
Ottomans, xv, 33, 41–49, 53, Taksim Solidarity, 204, 205, 207
54, 59–66, 68–78, 85, 86, 87, 88, Taksim Square, 111, 162, 204, 205,
89, 95, 126, 188, 203, 205, 219, 206 (photo), 207, 208
220, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, Talat Pasha, Mehmet, 76, 80, 85,
231, 232, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 86, 87, 232
250; use of title by Anatolian Tamerlane (Temür-i Lenk), xx, 41,
beys, 40 42
Sultanahmet square (in Istanbul), Tanzimat, xxi, 64–68, 69, 71, 73,
51 (photo), 88 228, 242
Sultanate, 43; Ottoman, 40, 42, 45, Taurus, Mountains, 6, 8; in antiq-
79, 95; Ottoman abolished, 95, uity, 25; as boundary between
97; Seljuk, 48, 36 Byzantine and Arab empires,
Sumerians, 105 31; in fiction of Yaşar Kemal,
Sunalp, Turgut, 166–67 129; invasion of by Ibrahim, 69
Sunay, Cevdet, 149 Taxation, 18, 118, 141; Byzantine,
Sunnites and Sunnism, 10, 44, 54, 31; and capital tax during
64, 102, 212, 235, 241, 242; and World War II, xxii, 113, 114,
Alevis in Kurdish rebellion, 97; 119; and economic liberaliza-
conflict of with Alevis in civil tion after 1980, 169, 179; in
unrest, 155–56; conflict of with early republican economic
Shiites in Ottoman Anatolia, strategy, 99, 103, 103, 105; Ot-
44, 46, 63–64 toman, 36, 47, 49–50, 52, 67,
Suppiluliumas, 26 228, 236, 243; and Ottoman
Supreme Board of Judges and debt, 74, 78; and Ottoman mili-
Prosecutors, 20, 165 tary reforms, 60, 61, 64; and
280 Index
Ottoman revenue contracting, Triple Alliance, 62, 82

54, 55, 61, 63, 65, 239; in second Troy, 13, 23, 25
republic, 156; in Tanzimat, 64, True Path Party (DYP), 169, 172,
65, 66; Young Turks and, 78 177, 178, 179, 185, 222, 223,
Tekke, 46 242–43
Telegraph, 72, 76, 85, 87, 88, 104 Truman Doctrine, 120, 130, 132
Telephone, 72, 104 Tughrul, 34
Television, xiii, xiv, 6, 14–15, 172, Turhan Sultan, 228
192, 195, 203, 206, 208, 214 Türkeş, Alparslan, 128, 136, 142,
Theodora, 40, 230 147, 150, 153, 154, 160, 184,
Thrace, eastern, xv, 7, 97, 105, 130; 232–33; and 1960 military
in Balkan Wars, 80; in East- coup, 128, 136–37; and 1980
ern Question, 70; Ottoman military coup, 160, 164; and
conquest of, 41, 230; in Otto- Nationalist Action Party, 142,
man provincial system, 45, 68; 150, 177, 240; in Nationalist
regional warlords in, 62; in Front coalitions, 153–54, 240;
Treaty of Lausanne, 91, 102; and National Unity Commit-
in Treaty of Sèvres, 89 tee, 240; Nine Lights philoso-
Tigris River, 9, 26, 27; and extent phy of, 142, 147; role in civil
of Ilkhanid power, 38, 39; and unrest, 154, 155, 156
Southeast Anatolia Project, Turkic languages, 5, 106
168; and ISIS control, 215 Türk-İş (Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları
Timars, 49, 54, 60, 242 Konfederasyonu), 125, 133,
Tokat, 52 145, 243
Tonguç, İsmail Hakkı, 108, 109, Turkish Hearths, 81, 108
120, 132, 243 Turkish language, xxv, xxvi, 4,
Tourism, xvii, 8, 13, 20, 178, 184, 5–6, 16, 34, 38, 48, 64, 81, 97,
227 100–101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 129,
Trabzon (Trebizond), 11, 17, 197; 136, 146, 170, 171, 177, 185, 193,
medieval Greek kingdom in, 240, 241, 242, 245, 246, 247; in
37; Ottoman control of, 46, 68; 1982 constitution, 165, 172; and
in World War I, 83 devşirme youths, 48, 237; in
Trade, 10–11, 20, 123, 125; Abdülh- Islamic liturgy, 107; and
amid II and, 71; in early repub- politicization, 146
lican economic strategy, 103; Turkish Lira, xxiv, 103, 120,
illicit, 178, 214; Ottomans and, 128, 167, 179, 184, 194, 209,
43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52–53; 239
in Tanzimat, 67; Young Turks Turkish Workers’ Party, 133, 145,
and, 73, 231 146, 149, 150, 155; and civil
Transcaucasian Republic, 89 unrest, 149, 155
Trdat the Great, xix, 30 Türkler, Kemal, 145, 156; murder
Trebizond. See Trabzon of, 156
Index 281
Turkmen language, 5 Universities, 16, 20, 23, 121, 125,

Turkmen, Turcomans, 34 138, 147, 148, 162, 164–65, 170,
Turks, Turkic peoples, 4, 5, 33, 34, 171, 181, 182, 213, 224, 233,
35, 36, 38, 41, 81, 87, 97, 102, 243; Ankara University, 16,
105–6, 112, 196, 224; conversion 107, 121, 127, 132, 138, 148,
to Islam, 34; and steppe tradi- 149, 155, 197, 223, 230; Bilkent
tion in medieval Anatolia, 38 University, 16; Boğaziçi Uni-
TÜSİAD, Association of Turkish versity, 16, 222; and campus
Industrialists, 154 unrest and violence, 148–49,
Twitter. See Social media 155; constitution and, 136,
138; Hacettepe University,
Ukraine, 11, 226 149; and expansion of higher
Ulema, 37, 55, 63, 64, 241, 243; education, 164–65, 170; and
and Islamization of Anatolia, headscarf controversy, 170;
37; Mahmud II and, 63; and Istanbul Darülfünunu, 16, 72,
modernization, 65, 77; and Ot- 107; Istanbul Technical Uni-
toman economy, 55, 64; and versity, 16, 107, 142, 155, 222,
republican regime, 96, 108 224, 230; Istanbul University,
Ün, Memduh, 130 16, 81, 107, 128, 136, 142, 155,
Unionists. See Committee of 225, 230; Koç University, 16,
Union and Progress 227; Middle East Technical
United Nations, 10, 114, 118, 131, University, 16, 209; and mili-
194 tary rule, 150; and political in-
United States Agency for Interna- volvement, 125, 127, 128, 132,
tional Development (USAID), 138, 145–46, 164; private, 16;
133, 134 Sabancı University, 16.
United States Information Agency See also YÖK
(USIA), 148 Urartians, Urartu, xix, 27
United States of America, ix, x, Urban II, Pope, 35
xiii, xv, 13, 20, 86, 113, 119, 127, Urbanization, 124, 156, 168, 170,
130–33, 136, 142, 147, 152, 153, 176, 180
164, 172, 178, 182, 189, 190, 193, Urfa (Edessa), 9, 13, 24, 68;
195, 202, 211, 213, 214, 215, 219, Crusader County of, 35
222, 225, 227, 233; and Cyprus U.S. dollar, 179, 194, 214
conflict, 147, 151–53; economic USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist
aid, 113, 120, 123, 128, 130, 131, Republics (Soviet Union),
132; and militarization of Turk- ix, 104, 113, 132, 147, 151,
ish society, 133; military facili- 152, 176, 195; and Cold War,
ties and personnel of, 127, 131, 130, 131, 132; treaty with,
146, 147–48, 149, 155, 163, 189, 112; in World War II, xv,
190, 238; Turgut Özal and, 167, 113
172, 230 Uzun Hasan, xx, 43, 228
282 Index
Vakıf, 50, 243; Ministry of Reli- in Ottoman dynasty, 47, 226,

gious Endowments, 80; and 227–28; involvement of in re-
Ottoman financial reforms, 64; publican politics, 107, 145, 169,
and Young Turks, 80 178, 185, 214, 222, 223, 242; and
Valide Sultan (Queen Mother), 53, suffrage, xxii, 107; in Yılmaz
227 Güney’s work, 159–60; and
Van, 68, 83, 101 Young Turks, 81
Van, Lake, 9, 27, 34, 84, 229 World Bank, 10, 21, 144, 163, 167,
Veil, 99, 170, 253. See also 194, 196, 230
Headscarf issue World War I, 3, 73, 77, 78, 81,
Venice, 43, 44, 53 82–85, 87, 96, 111, 112, 118, 153,
Venizelos, Eleutherios, 89, 90 221, 224, 226, 228, 229, 233,
Vezir, xx, 48, 53, 54, 64, 65, 69, 77, 236, 240, 250; and abolition of
78, 80, 86, 88, 232, 235, 237–38, Capitulations, 91, 102; Arme-
240, 242, 243 nian genocide in (see Armenian
Vidin, 62 genocide); armistice of Mudros
Vienna, 54, 60, 69 ends, 85; assassination of Arch-
Vilayet, 68 duke Franz Ferdinand begins,
Village Institutes, xxii, 108–9, 114, 82; Ottoman entry into, 82;
126, 129, 130, 132, 243 Ottoman military campaigns
Virtue Party (FP), 182, 184–85, 225, in, 83; and peace settlement
239 of, 91, 96, 242. See also Sèvres,
Treaty of
War of Independence, xv, xxi, 3, World War II, xv, 111–15, 118, 127,
84, 89–91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 108, 130, 226, 227, 228, 233
161, 222, 227, 228, 247
Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), xxiii, Xanthos, 28
169, 171, 182, 188, 222, 225, 239;
and February 28 process, Yalman, Ahmed Emin, 119, 121,
181–82; heads government, 233
179–81, 222, 224 Yaşar Kemal, 117–18, 124, 129, 150,
Wilson, Woodrow, 86 233, 254
Women, xxii, 17, 50, 81, 84, 85, 99, Yemen, 78
100, 108, 143, 145, 148, 159–60, Yerevan, 89
163, 186, 190, 192, 193, 203, Yılmaz, Mesut, xxiii, 173, 178, 179;
216, 220, 229, 249, 252, 253; as prime minister, 181, 182,
in dynastic marriages, 47; in 183, 223
economy, 145; education and, YÖK (Yüksek Öğretim Kurumu),
81; in Gezi Park protests, 205, Higher Education Board, 16,
207–8; and headscarf issue, 99, 20, 164, 243
181, 185, 193, 214, 253; role of Young Ottomans, 71
Index 283
Young Turk revolution, xv, xxi, Yugoslavia, 112, 132

75–77, 79, 86, 188, 219, 223; and Yunus Emre, 38, 108
counterrevolution, 77
Young Turks, xxi, 75–85, 86, 91, Zagros Mountains, 25
94, 98, 102, 108, 112, 153, 188, Zana, Leyla, 192
204, 219, 223, 229, 232, 233, 243, Zincirli, 27
250–51; and Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp, 81, 188, 233
resistance, 85–87, 91 Zonguldak, 9, 104, 145
About the Author
DOUGLAS A. HOWARD received a BA from Western Michigan Uni-

versity and an MA and PhD from Indiana University. He is Profes-
sor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where
he teaches courses on Middle Eastern, Indian, and World History and
has directed off-campus study programs in Hungary, Turkey, and
Washington, D.C. He is a former editor of The Turkish Studies Associa-
tion Bulletin and is the author of Amid the Ruins: The Ottoman Empire,
1300–1924 and academic articles on Ottoman administrative and liter-
ary history. He enjoys reading good novels, drinking strong coffee, and
playing the piano.
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THE

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Howard, Douglas A. (Douglas Arthur), 1958– author.

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Timeline of Historical Events xix

Turkish Spelling and Pronunciation Guide xxv

3 The Turkish Conquest of Anatolia, 1071–1517 33

4 Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire, 1517–1789 45

5 The Late Ottoman Empire, 1789–1908 59

6 Revolution and War, 1908–1923 75

7 The Early Turkish Republic, 1923–1945 93

8 Multiparty Democracy, 1945–1960 117

9 Military Intervention and the Second

10 The Military Republic, 1980–1993 159

11 Corruption and Disaster, 1993–2002 175

12 Justice and Development, 2002–2012 187

13 Gezi Park: Turkey Since 2012 201

Notable People in the History of Turkey 219

Bibliographic Essay 245

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series is intended

represents a succinct chronology of the nation’s historical evolution,

Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling

When the editors at Greenwood Press approached me to suggest

religious authorities, but do nothing to dampen their appeal. And the

Although personally offended at the way history was presented in

I would like to thank the editors at Greenwood Press, especially Kait-

recent visits to Istanbul, his residence for several years. I am indebted

9600–8000 Göbekli Tepe in use

1832 Egyptian invasion of Anatolia; Ottoman armies de-

1920 August: Treaty of Sèvres

1973 October: CHP wins post-coup national elections; Bülent

2000 May: President Süleyman Demirel retires; Necdet Sezer

Modern Turkish uses a modified Roman alphabet of 29 letters, pro-

J, j, like the French j, or the s in measure

TURKEY AND THE TURKS

Mustafa Kemal Pasha, photographed in Novem-

Atatürk’s mausoleum, called Anıtkabir, or “The Memorial Tomb,”

75,000 people, but the nationalists made it their headquarters and, in

THE TURKISH LANGUAGE

non-Turkish languages spoken by minorities in Turkey include Arme-

THE REGIONS OF TURKEY

plateau is wheat, although irrigation makes barley, corn, fruits, pop-

and remains today a cosmopolitan city at the center of national, com-

iron ore is mined at Divriği, between Sivas and Erzurum. Winters in

practice, the amount of attention they give to religious observances,

THE ECONOMY OF TURKEY

consumption. Other major national industries are metals, cement, and

Two percent of Turkey’s population is of foreign birth. And this is to

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS

Monaco and Liechtenstein.) Long-distance travel in Turkey is typically

satellite television dishes appeared in the early 1990s, the constitution

or “cram” schools known as dershane. Hundreds of these privately

THE GOVERNMENT OF TURKEY

Turkish government can be understood as the interrelated activities of

The Judicial Branch

The Legislative Branch

Assembly. The 550 seats in parliament are filled by national elections

The Executive Branch

meetings of the Council of Ministers when he deems it necessary. He

but powerful networks of political patronage, both personal and asso-