The Kyiv Post’s special coverage of the bilateral relationship comes ahead of Turkey’s 98th Republic Day, also known as Cumhuriyet Bayrami, celebrated by Turks around the world.
The Oct. 29 holiday honors the founding of the modern republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938), who became the country’s first president after the Turkish Parliament changed the country’s system of government to a republic.
On Oct. 29, 1923, the newly recognized Turkish parliament proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, formally marking the end of the Ottoman Empire.
On the same day, Mustafa Kemal, later named Ataturk (father of Turks), who led the Turkish war of independence, was unanimously elected as the first president of the newly born Republic of Turkey. Setting up an alternative government in Ankara, Ataturk sought to create a more democratic regime.
“Gentlemen, we will proclaim the republic tomorrow!” Ataturk is famously quoted as telling his close circle one day before the proclamation on Oct. 29, 1923.
This unanimous vote concluded a four-year independence war against several countries, including World War I allies Great Britain, France, Italy and Greece, an event which officially marked the end of the Ottoman Empire.
The new republic also meant the end of more than a decade of violence for the country exhausted by the war. Ataturk was the de facto leader of what was left of the defeated Ottoman Empire after he led Turkey’s war of independence.
Ataturk served against the Italians in Libya and then in the Balkan Wars in 1911–1913. He made his military reputation repelling the Allied invasion at the Dardanelles in 1915.
In 1919, when the dust of World War I settled, Ataturk began a nationalist revolution in the country, organizing resistance to the peace settlement imposed on Turkey by the victorious Allies after the war.
He resisted Greek attempts to seize Smyrna, a Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, now called Izmir. Victory over the Greeks enabled him to secure revision of the peace settlement in the Treaty of Lausanne, an international treaty recognizing the boundaries of the newly established modern state of Turkey.
Turkey became a secular republic with Ataturk at its head. He established a single-party regime that lasted almost without interruption until 1945. Building upon the legacy of a semi-parliamentarian system in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, the new republic introduced wider democracy to the country.
Ataturk launched a program of revolutionary social and political reform to modernize Turkey. These reforms included the emancipation of women, the abolition of all Islamic institutions and the introduction of Western legal codes, dress, calendar and alphabet, replacing the Arabic script with a Latin one.
Abroad, Ataturk pursued a policy of neutrality, establishing friendly relations with Turkey’s neighbors. Ataturk died in 1938, but he is still hailed today in Turkey as an ambitious statesman who shaped a new country from the ruins of the devastated Ottoman Empire.
