Atatürk: Fall of the Ottoman Empire

Summary

Podcast Summary: Dan Snow's History Hit

Episode: Atatürk: Fall of the Ottoman Empire
Date: October 27, 2025
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Mark David Beyer, Professor of International History at LSE

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Overview

In this episode, Dan Snow explores the tumultuous fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), focusing on how these seismic shifts shaped the modern Middle East and Turkey in particular. With expert insights from historian Mark David Beyer, the episode traces the military, political, and social upheaval that led to the birth of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk’s radical reforms, and the lasting legacies and controversies of his rule.
The conversation also places the Ottoman collapse in context with today’s continuing disputes and national identities in the region, touching on themes of nationalism, secularism, ethnic cleansing, and the challenges of post-imperial transition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Aftermath of World War I and Ottoman Collapse

• Devastation and Occupation
  • The Ottoman Empire suffered immense casualties (1 in 4 soldiers killed; see [05:09]), as well as epidemics, famines, and occupation by foreign powers (British, Greeks, Italians, French).
  • Istanbul itself was occupied—a more complete defeat than Vienna or Berlin experienced ([06:13]).
  • Mark David Beyer: “The Ottoman Empire is completely devastated… There have been genocides perpetrated by the Ottomans… At the end of war, the Ottoman imperial capital… is occupied.” ([05:09])
• Contrast with Europe
  • Unlike Germany and Austria, where capitals weren’t occupied, the Ottomans experienced utter military and political defeat ([06:13]).

Birth of a New Nationalism

• Transition from Empire to Proto-State
  • Early postwar movements mainly aimed to save the empire for Muslims, envisioning a smaller, more homogenous state ([07:34]).
  • Multi-ethnic unity had collapsed due to preceding decades of massacres (notably Armenians and Balkan Greeks) and new nationalist ideologies.
• Ethnic and Religious Cleansing
  • New leaders, especially from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), enacted ethnic cleansing and population transfers to create a more homogenous entity ([09:12]).

Emergence of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)

• Background and Military Rise
  • Mustafa Kemal hailed from Thessaloniki (now in Greece) and was representative of a generation trained in modern academies with European influence ([10:38]).
  • He became a hero at Gallipoli (1915–1916): “He was a colonel at the time, who famously told his troops basically to die. And die they did in large numbers.” ([11:18])
• Early Political Activism
  • Kemal and his peers sought to modernize and save the empire, engaging in resistance against the authoritarian sultan and joining the CUP ([12:45]).
  • Secularism was not the initial ideology; early efforts promoted Muslim unity ([13:41]).

The Turkish War of Independence

• Multiple Resistance Movements
  • Post-1918, various groups (Turk, Kurd, Arab, Islamist, Communist) vied for control in Anatolia.
  • Mustafa Kemal maneuvered to eliminate rivals, both militarily and through political purges: “He eliminates his opposition… There also are communists out there, and Mustafa Kemal will basically put them all in a boat in the Black Sea and sink the boat, killing the entire Communist Party leadership.” ([19:54])
  • Allied support for Greek advances into Anatolia catalyzed Turkish resistance and nation-building ([22:08]).

Creation of the Modern Republic

• Victory and Population Transfers
  • Turkish forces defeated the Greeks, expelled them and their local ethnic populations, and abolished the Ottoman dynasty in 1922 ([24:01]).
  • Population exchanges between Greece and Turkey institutionalized ethnic cleansing on both sides ([27:59]).
• Suppression of Minorities
  • Within a few years, policies targeted former allies like Kurdish Muslims. Massive Kurdish uprisings from 1925–1938 were brutally suppressed with aerial bombardment and chemical weapons ([25:08]).
  • Markers of Turkish identity were enforced through law, including language reform (Latinization of script, purging of Arabic/Persian) and clothing reforms (ban on fez in favor of brimmed hats) ([29:17]).
    • “As many as 600 men were executed for defying the ban on religious headgear.” ([31:09])
• Radical Secularism and Modernization
  • The state suppressed religious expression, closed religious schools, and outlawed Kurdish language and identity ([31:21]).
  • “Mustafa Kemal is taking the French ideas of the French Revolution and applying them in a more radical way, perhaps even in France… [abolishing] really the ability to be different.” ([31:21])
• Abolition of the Sultanate and Caliphate
  • The Turkish revolutionaries abolished both institutions—transforming Turkey from an imperial theocracy to a secular republic ([32:06]).

Legacies and Modern Reverberations

• Reversal of Secularism
  • Post-1950s, many secular reforms were dialed back, reconciling some of Atatürk’s legacy with Islamic/Ottoman traditions ([33:02]).
  • The recent reconversion of Hagia Sophia from museum back to mosque exemplifies this reversal ([33:39]).
    • “President Erdogan… reversed Ataturk’s decision… you see this reversal of Mustafa Kemal's revolution.” ([33:51])
• Enduring Turmoil
  • Turkish stability remains debatable—multiple military coups and ongoing Kurdish insurgencies highlight unresolved post-imperial issues ([35:35]).
  • Mark David Beyer: “All of Palestine, there’s violence across the land.…I don’t know how stable Turkey is then in this respect.” ([35:35])
• Nostalgia for Empire
  • There’s a modern trend, even among some Turks, to look back at the multi-confessional peace of the Ottoman Empire as a possible political model ([36:47]).
    • “…People say, actually, we should rule over Jerusalem, because when we ruled Jerusalem, there was peace. Which, yeah, pretty much is true. But then it depends on who you ask.” ([37:04])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Catastrophe of Defeat
  "The Ottoman Empire is completely devastated… There have been genocides perpetrated by the Ottomans… At the end of war, the Ottoman imperial capital… is occupied." — Mark David Beyer ([05:09])

• On the Motives for ‘Turkification’
  “This is after 1918, they begin to focus more on what would become Turkey. But again in 1918, they’re uniting Muslims to fight off the foreigners and the remaining local Christians.” — Mark David Beyer ([14:47])

• On Atatürk’s Ruthlessness and Leadership
  “We still have our Ataturk… he's one of these brutal 1930s dictators, but he eliminates his opposition.” — Mark David Beyer ([19:54])

• On the Hat Law and Repressive Reforms
  “It may seem silly to us. Okay, he's making men wear hats. And there were very few hats available… You see pictures of men going around with women's hats because they have brims. But joking aside, hundreds, as many as 600 men were executed…” — Mark David Beyer ([31:09])

• On the Legacy and Stability of Ataturk’s Turkey
  “How many military coups in the country? 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997. How many uprisings?… Turkey today is still killing Kurds, not only in Turkey, but also in Syria and Iraq. So none of those questions of the end of the empire have been established.” — Mark David Beyer ([35:35])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [04:18] Dan Snow introduces Mark David Beyer and sets up the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
• [05:09] Description of the war’s catastrophic impact on the empire and population
• [07:34] Discussion of elite attempts to salvage the Ottoman state
• [10:38] Early life and military rise of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)
• [12:45] Kemal’s political activism and involvement in the CUP
• [19:54] Kemal’s rise to dominance, elimination of rivals, and founding of a Muslim-only resistance
• [22:08] Dual power: sultan and parliament in Istanbul vs. resistance in Ankara
• [24:01] Expulsion of Greek forces, abolition of the Ottoman dynasty
• [25:08] Suppression of Kurds and transformation into a Turkish nation-state
• [27:59] The Lausanne Treaty and the population exchange
• [29:17] Atatürk’s radical nation-building reforms: language, dress, religion
• [31:21] Enforcement of secular reforms and their consequences
• [32:06] Abolition of the Sultanate and Caliphate
• [33:39] Legacy, reversals, and ongoing debates about Turkish identity
• [35:35] Reflection on stability, ethnic conflicts, and modern regional implications
• [36:47] Nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire and the dangers of seeing history through a golden-age lens

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Conclusion

This episode offers a complex, nuanced investigation into how the Ottoman Empire gave way to the Republic of Turkey and how Atatürk’s leadership, reforms, and personality left an enduring—sometimes contentious—mark on both Turkish society and the wider region. The instability and fracture of the early 20th century, along with choices that included secularization, ethnic homogenization, and political authoritarianism, are shown to have profound consequences that echo into today’s Middle East. Listeners are left to ponder the enduring dilemmas of national identity, post-imperial fragmentation, and the costs and contradictions of revolutionary change.

Transcript

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[Dan Snow]

Hi folks, in this repeat episode of the podcast, I thought we'd look back at a very important figure in the history of the Middle east, well, and Europe and a very important set of events and that is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, its defeat after centuries. During those centuries it had for much of that time dominated the Balkans. It had dominated the Middle east and its collapse, its partition. The internal upheavals of the 1920s, while they echo to this day, it's such important context. What's going on right now in present day Israel, Palestine, Syria and Turkey itself. For this I spoke to Mark David Beyer. He is a professor, International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He taught me through the life of the key figure in this period, the life of Mustafa Kemal, known later as Ataturk. He was a soldier, he was a statesman, he's a visionary reformer, founder. The first President of the Republic of Turkey was it's thanks to him that Turkey exists as it does today. After the First World War, the imperial powers thought they might keep going. They thought they might partition not just the Ottoman Empire, but this last chunk of it as well, the bit we now call Turkey. He's also the man who modernized the country's legal education systems. He insisted on the adoption of European customs, of norms down to the way that people dress. He's also the man who has been coded modern Turkish identity and DNA. A man who was bitterly opposed, for example, to Kurdish national aspirations. He was happy to employ violent methods against the Kurds, and that has remained a feature of Turkey's policy towards those Kurds ever since. He's revered, he's despised. He's one of those vital men that emerge from the shambles of the First World War to shape the course of nations and peoples and regions. We're still living in their world, folks. So here we go. This is our episode on Ataturk and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey. Enjoy.

[Marc Maron]

Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King.

[Mark David Beyer]

No black white unity till there is first some black unity.

[Marc Maron]

Never to go to war with one another again.

[Mark David Beyer]

And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Mark, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

[Mark David Beyer]

Thank you for having me. Again.

[Dan Snow]

I think the greatest, weirdest coincidence or irony in the history of the entire world is that the Ottomans and the Habsburgs go down in the great Gotterdammerung together, clasped in an embrace after centuries of existential warfare against the other. It's such a weird turn of events.

[Mark David Beyer]

And they were replaced by much smaller, much less important countries as well.

[Dan Snow]

Indeed, the aftermath of both of those empires has been troubling and remains violent and contested right until the present day. Tell me about the Ottoman Empire. We know a lot about the Armistice Day, 1918, 11 November in Germany. Austria has a reasonably precipitous kind of hard end to the war. Does the war end as neatly, if that's the right word, as precisely in the Near East? The Middle East?

[Mark David Beyer]

If we look at the Middle east, we see a very diverse landscape. On the one hand, the Ottoman Empire is completely devastated. The Ottomans suffer some of the highest casualty rates of any combatant in the First World War in terms of proportion of population. There have been genocides perpetrated by the Ottomans. There have been breakouts of epidemics. There have been mass casualties of Ottoman soldiers. I believe one in four Ottoman soldiers, 800,000 men were were killed. Another 800,000 Ottoman soldiers were wounded. The population, as I mentioned, suffered also from hunger Also from occupation. And at the end of war, the Ottoman imperial capital of Constantinople or Istanbul is occupied. And much of the empire is also occupied, whether it be by the Greeks, the Italians, the French or the British. If we look at the Middle east, we see the British have taken over parts of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine and Iraq.

[Dan Snow]

And actually that's the important difference. So Vienna isn't occupied, Berlin isn't occupied. So the Ottomans experience defeat in the First World War in a more complete way, do they?

[Mark David Beyer]

And because of this, there are individuals in the empire who are looking for a new political order. Now, today in Turkey, they like to talk about how already at the end of empire, there were intellectuals and soldiers who were proponents of a new Turkish nation. But when we go back to 1918, that's not the case. In 1918 there were a number of figures who were still trying to figure out how best to save the empire. The Ottoman Empire itself had faced generations of thinkers and statesmen who also were trying to figure out how do we hold this giant empire together? Well, in 1918 it's more or less collapsed. So new thought is going to enter into the picture.

[Dan Snow]

Let's talk about that collapse. So the Ottoman Empire in 1914, it stretches into the Balkans and what we'd now call Caucasus, Central Asia, what we describe as the Middle east, into Arabia, Syria, Palestine, technically, I suppose into North Africa in some ways. How realistic was that? Bits of that could be saved. Why do we end up with the rump of what we call Turkey today? Were those other bits just lost? Were there local nationalist movements? Were the European empires keen to peel them off? What were they thinking in late 1918 that they might able to salvage from this disaster?

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, the empire was occupied, the army was defeated, the population was devastated. But there were a number of men who were Arab, who were Kurdish, who were Turkish, who were Muslim of other backgrounds, who, like I mentioned before, they wanted to save the empire. And so they began to coalesce in what is today central and eastern and northern Turkey. And they sought a way to expel the foreign occupying powers, but also to create almost a Muslim only empire in their understanding of the world. In 1918, only the Muslims would be loyal to the empire. They still wanted to have a caliph, they still wanted to have a sultan, they wanted to have an empire. But this was not going to be the empire, the multicultural, multi religious empire of the past. This was going to be an empire made up of those Muslims in the Anatolia, maybe northern Syria, northern Iraq, who are willing to cobble together a Muslim Proto state.

[Dan Snow]

The proto state bit's so interesting because there's this sort of sorting that you see in the 20th century. This is a big multinational empire to us, that might look slightly more attractive than what followed, but slightly kind of rambling and lots of autonomy and lots of communities living within it. Is this them saying, right to survive in this new world of these nation states which seem to be quite uniform, there's a state that's conscripting people and rather efficient at running the place. And it helps. Everyone's got the same sort of political outlook and the same religious outlook. Is this the Ottoman Empire trying to turn itself into something that they think can survive the next century?

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, I think what had changed was the ideology at the center. Now, bear in mind that the empire wasn't really run by the sultan. In its last decade, from 1913 to 1918, it was run by a triumvirate of revolutionaries. These were radical men who set up practically a dictatorship. They canceled basically all legal rights of all citizens. These were the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. And Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha and Cemal Pasha had pretty much abandoned the idea that all peoples of the empire could continue to live together again. These are the men who engaged in ethnic cleansing, if not massacres of Greeks. The Ottoman Greek population was expelled in the hundreds of thousands from the Balkan wars of 1912-1914 and then in the early part of the First World War. And these men, Talat Pasha, who was interior minister and then prime minister, he was the one who determined that the Armenian population had to be destroyed. So there was a change of ideology at the top. There were then these massive demographic changes. So the empire itself, in 1918, if we take away all the parts that have been cut off by the British and others, is much less religiously diverse than it had been.

[Dan Snow]

Talk to me then about this new generation of thinkers, and particularly perhaps one man, Kemal Ataturk, who interestingly comes from what we now think of today as Greece.

[Mark David Beyer]

Mustafa Kemal was similar to a whole generation of young men who were trained in these new academies, Academies of war and other academies. The Medical Academy was very influential. These were new academies set up under late Ottoman reforming leaders in the 19th century to develop a new generation of officers, but also professionals and technicians who could carry the empire into the new century. And Mustafa Kemal was one of these men who benefited from these new schools in the Balkans. He does come from Thessaloniki today. Then. He was also educated in Istanbul. He's like his generation, these young men Again, they want to save the empire. They see something's going wrong. Mustafa Kemal would be a military hero. There were a number of heroes. He was one of them. He became famous especially during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 and 1916. This was one of the great successes of the Ottoman army during the First World War. The Allies intent was to land at Gallipoli and then go on to Constantinople and then quickly knock the Ottomans out of the war so they could turn their efforts or keep their efforts in the West. But the Ottomans, led by Mustafa Kemal, he was a colonel at the time, who famously told his troops basically to die. And died they did in large numbers, but managed to keep the British and French and New Zealanders and Indian troops at bay so that they withdrew. So he was a war hero there. But he also served in many military campaigns from the beginning of the 20th century. 20th century until that Gallipoli campaign. He served in the Balkan wars, he served in Libya, he served in Syria. So he was one of a generation of men trained with new strategies, trained in foreign languages, trained under German military instructors to fight the new battles of the 20th century.

[Dan Snow]

But he was politicized. Whilst he was climbing the ranks and being one of the best young soldiers in the empire, it seems that he was engaging in political discourse, even resistance.

[Mark David Beyer]

He and some other men had set up a patriotic union of sorts when he was stationed in Damascus. And this was again to modernize, to save the empire, to save it from foreign occupation and to go against the, what they thought the corrupt and authoritarian sultan. So he also joined the Committee of Union and Progress. Again, this at first secret organization that sought from the 1880s to topple Abdul Hamid II, the authoritarian, really the last strong Ottoman sultan. The CUP did manage to overthrow him finally in 1909. And Alaturk, as he was later called Mustafa Kemal, was always part of that effort.

[Dan Snow]

Were there competing ideas about how best to strengthen Turkey and prevent these foreign occupations and the empire falling apart? I mean, were there ideas around adopting a more conservative religious approach or modern secularism? Where was he and his colleagues coming from?

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, secularism would come later. No matter the individual beliefs of Mustafa Kemal or Talat Pasha or Enver Pasha, they actually promoted Muslim unity, unity among Muslims. It's very difficult for us not to read back into the past the republican secularism and nationalism of Turkey after 1923. But if we stick to our time period, that wasn't yet the compelling idea. We can also see that this is a generational struggle. So these were Young officers again educated in new ideas in these European instructed academies who were trying to not only overthrow the sultan, but also to overthrow the old general, the old fuddy duddies that they thought were not waging proper military campaigns.

[Dan Snow]

And I suppose he witnessed those old generals at their worst. I mean, he witnessed before Gallipoli, at the end of the other wars you mentioned, before the First World War, the very important precursor wars, arguably, which led to the First World War in the Balkans. He would have seen incompetence, poor leadership. He'd have seen the empire and those old generals at their worst.

[Mark David Beyer]

In the Balkan wars, the Ottomans lost tremendous amount of territory. The ottomans lose the first Balkan war in 1912, 1913, to a number of southeastern European countries which had once been under Ottoman rule. And this was quite a threat. They almost lost the city of Edirne. Well, they lost it. They conquered it back in the next Balkan War. Edirne was from the 14th century. It was the second Ottoman capital, the first Ottoman capital in Europe before Constantinople. But the biggest problem was that they would lose Salonika today in Greece, Thessaloniki. This was not only Mustafa Kemal's birthplace, but this was also more or less the birthplace of, of the Committee of Union and Progress and some of the most progressive and radical revolutionaries. So they lose their homeland. So this is also another reason why after 1918, they focus really for the first time on Anatolia and northern Iraq and northern Syria, because they've literally lost their homeland in southeastern Europe, which had been the Ottoman homeland for 500 years or more. So what they have left in 1918 is the center, just about the center of Anatolia. So this is after 1918, they begin to focus more on what would become Turkey. But again in 1918, they're uniting Muslims to fight off the foreigners and the remaining local Christians.

[Dan Snow]

This is Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up.

[Mark David Beyer]

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[Dan Snow]

I never looked so good.

[Marc Maron]

You look the same.

[Dan Snow]

But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me.

[Mark David Beyer]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

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[Mark David Beyer]

Can't I just let it go?

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[Dan Snow]

You'Ve mentioned Gallipoli before, but we should say he was wounded, actually. Was he wounded or did he have the bit of shrapnel in his uniform?

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, the stories about Mustafa Kemal are great. I mean, I've seen the pocket watch that supposedly stopped the bullet that shot him when he was at Gallipoli. But apparently he was also wounded in the eye when he, I don't know, retook Edirne in the Balkan campaign. So he suffered a number of wounds. But there's no question that he was a fearless military officer and that he caused his men to sacrifice their lives for him.

[Dan Snow]

And he even won victories over the Russians, didn't he, in 1916, after Gallipoli, on that other forgotten front of the First World War between Turkey and Russia.

[Mark David Beyer]

Yes, he had a great reputation among soldiers and officers, but because he would become the single ruler of the the nation state of Turkey, we always focus on him also because of his own propagandizing for himself and the way people in Turkey were taught about him. But again, back in 1918 there were a number of men, there are a number of other people who also could have donned the mantle of the leader of the resistance against the foreign occupying armies in what was left of the empire.

[Dan Snow]

So this great soldier ends up in 1918. I think his final posting was to Syria, where the catastrophe had overtaken Ottoman forces in that part of the Arab world, Constantinople, Istanbul has Got foreign occupied. So what does our man do? Is he a resister from the beginning?

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, he's actually sent by the Sultan again. The Sultan is still in office, although he's doing the bidding of what the British and the occupiers want. He's seen as a traitor by a lot of the people in the empire. So he actually sends Mustafa Kemal to the east to inspect the army. But Mustafa Kemal uses this pretext to join up with all these other cup committee of union progress men who are organizing a resistance movement across central and eastern Anatolia. So they're already active, the local committee of union and progress activists, politicians and so on. They're already out there organizing, rearming, preparing again, a resistance. And so Mustafa Kemal steps into that. And from 1918 to 1922, he's able to rise to the top of all those movements who will coalesce around him. Now he does a lot of dirty tricks in Turkey. As someone once proudly they said, you know, the Germans had Hitler, the Russians had Stalin, the Italians had Mussolini. We still have our Ataturk, you know, he's one of these brutal 1930s dictators, but he eliminates his opposition. So there are other people in Central Asia, there are Islamists, for example, who want to create a Islamic state. He crushes them. His troops will fight against them. There also are other men like him. For example, Enver Pasha, who was one of the leaders of the empire from 1913 and 1918, gathers an army in what would become southern Russia and wants to enter with his army into Anatolia to fight. And Mustafa Kemal doesn't let them. There also are communists out there, and Mustafa Kemal will basically put them all in a boat in the Black Sea and sink the boat, killing the entire Communist Party leadership. But with a series of maneuvers, he's able to rise to the top of the resistance movement. And that resistance movement will call itself the Defense of Rights Committees. And so they'll have congresses, they'll elect leaders, they'll pass platforms, and they'll begin to say, this is an empire made for Muslims. Christians are not part of it.

[Dan Snow]

It's so odd because the heart of the empire, you still got a sultan, have you, sitting there in Istanbul issuing edicts, telling him to stop doing what he's doing.

[Mark David Beyer]

You still have a parliament as well. So you have a government in Istanbul which has a weak army, which has no authority really in Anatolia. So these resistance fighters, whatever we want to call them, they are going to find a religious figure, the Mufti of Ankara, who will Denounce the Sultan as a traitor and say that anyone who captures him can kill him. The Sultan, for his part, in Istanbul, in Constantinople, will have the mufti of Istanbul, a religious figure. The Sheikh Al Islam declared, mustafa Kemal is a traitor, and anyone who captures him can kill him. So we've got these dueling Muslim politicians, but the Sultan, by his actions, really has discredited himself in the eyes of most of his Muslim subjects by this point. Also, the Allies have declared in 1920 the Division of what was left of the empire into different spheres of influence. Then they allow the Greek army, which occupies Izmir on the west coast, to actually move into Anatolia to make this occupation real. So you have an actual occupying army. And at this point, 1920 to 1922, where Mustafa Kemal and his men will launch successful campaigns against that occupying army and eventually defeat the Greeks. They reach as far as 80 km southwest of Ankara, so they're moving quite rapidly across. But Mustafa Kemal and his men will be able to resist them, defeat them, capture their commander and expel them from Anatolia while burning the city of Izmir and expelling all of its Greek population as well.

[Dan Snow]

And for people, this is worth just quickly pausing, I suppose, because there might be some modern resonances. I mean, the Greeks, were they trying to carve out an empire in this part of Asia Minor based on the fact that it had been part of the Greek world back in classical antiquity, thousands of years before? Was this claim based on their. Well, their historical possession of this ground?

[Mark David Beyer]

It was, and it was also based on the fact that you still had a large Greek population in western Anatolia, of course, but by 1922, that population is largely expelled. And by 1922, Mustafa Kemal and his men are able to actually launch a parliament. Well, by that point. And so the parliament in Istanbul basically abolishes itself. And finally, in 1922, these resistance fighters have become a, you know, a very consolidated political movement with a parliament of their own in Ankara. And they actually abolished the Ottoman dynasty which had been around since the end of the 1200s. In 1922, they basically put the last sultan, Mehmet VI, on a British battleship and he sails away to Malta, and the dynasty is outlawed from returning any member of the dynasty.

[Dan Snow]

It's an extraordinary story, and presumably because of these Greeks living on the coast of Anatolia there, Asia Minor, who were seen to have foreign sympathies because of, I suppose, what the Arabs who'd risen up during the war. This new Turkey, as you've pointed out, this was a place where minorities would not be sort of tolerated as they once had been.

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, that's the thing. And what we forget is that again, from 1918 to 1922, Mustafa Kemal and his officers and his soldiers are Turks and Kurds and Circassians and Chechens and Arabs, all these different Muslims trying to save the empire. When the Turkish Republic is declared in 1923, we will begin to see a change such that within a couple years, by 1925, in fact, this new Republic of Turkey is going to turn its back on all those Muslim elements that help establish it. So already in 1925, we see warfare against Kurds. There'll be massive, massive Kurdish uprisings from 1925 to 1938 when Mustafa Kemal passes away. And these are met with some of the first usage of aerial chemical warfare and aerial bombing. And in fact, one of the airports in Istanbul today is called the Sabiha Airport. This is named after one of Ataturk's foster children. He adopted over a dozen orphans. Many of them were probably victims or parents had been victims of the Armenian genocide. So he adopts this young woman, Savi Hagyukcen. She becomes Turkey's first airline pilot and also one of the first fighter pilots, and she drops bombs on rebelling Kurds. So the point is, is that the place we know today as Turkey becomes very Turkish soon after the Republic is established in 1923, which is not something that many people could have predicted even a year earlier.

[Dan Snow]

We're going to come on to that. I just want to quickly finish off the Greeks who are attacking deep into Anatolia. A military victory he probably would have put up there with Gallipoli, was managing to drive those Greeks out of Asia Minor, completely and inadvertently toppling David Lloyd George, the mighty. David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, from his job as well.

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, not only that, but the Battle of Sakaria, where it took place 80 km southwest of Ankara. This was a great victory. And again, Mustafa Kemal, he has a lot of opponents today in Turkey, but no one would deny that he was a great military leader and he was able to again rally his men to accomplish great things for their side. No one would deny that. But also, of course, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's husband, the reason he ends up in Britain was also because of the defeat of the Greek army. Prince Philip was of course, Greek, or let's just say, from a royal family that was ruling Greece. And his father was a defeated general who was going to be lynched or court martialed and executed. But The British managed to bring him and his son Philip out of the country and the rest is history.

[Dan Snow]

So the very brief Greek empire that extended right into Asia, as Alexander's had once done, comes to an end, takes with Prince Philip and the British Liberal Party and David Ladoric leader. And how quickly then does he manage to capture Istanbul? How long before his territory represents what is effectively today we'd recognize as modern Turkey?

[Mark David Beyer]

Another campaign they launched was in the East. So in 1918 there was a fledgling Armenian Republic that was established and one of the first campaigns of Mustafa Kamal was actually east to keep the Russians and their Armenians out of Anatolia. Once that was accomplished, then they turned west and they could kick the Greeks all the way out. And don't forget also that the treaty that gave birth to the modern republic of Turkey was a Treaty of Lausanne in Switzerland. And this treaty stipulated what was called at the time a population exchange between the new Republic of Turkey and and Greece. And population exchange we today would call ethnic cleansing. So basically, well, the numbers are in dispute, but very large numbers of Greeks from Anatolia were expelled with the exception of Istanbul and some islands. In exchange, Muslims in Greece were expelled from Greece and sent to Turkey. So again, this was another separation of the populations that would make it very difficult for Muslims in Greece or Orthodox Christians in Turkey to prosper. This was in 1923 and 1924.

[Dan Snow]

And that's the same time, as you said, they're clamping down on the Kurds. So again, this multi ethnic empire is transforming into a, well, what it wants to be, a kind of homogenous Turkish state.

[Mark David Beyer]

It became a single party, single ruler, nation state. And the aim of the nation state with revolutionary reforms passed by Mustafa Kemal and his party, those defense committees, defense of rights committees were converted into the single political party, the Republican People's Party. So this party then passed a number of revolutionary steps that would make Turkey Turkish. So the Kurdish language was outlawed, for example, and they changed the Alphabet. So Ottoman script is written in a Persian Nephite, Arabic script from right to left, but they substitute that with the Latin Alphabet. For years they had language committees that got rid of Arabic and Persian words and replaced them with either neologisms in Turkish or simply took German and French words and made them Turkish. So there was this very radical policy of making Turkey more like France and turning away from the east, turning away from Islam. It was a very radical secular republic, turning away from the public expression of religion. This had a high cost though, because again, there were a number of rebellions by Kurds who were suppressed, but also by religious Muslims who also were suppressed. One reform that everyone remembers is the so called hat reform. So Mustafa Kemal decreed that men had to wear hats with brims, right? Because the idea is that would prevent a man from praying. So the fez was outlawed because that doesn't have a brim and you can still wear it in a mosque and so on. It may seem silly to us. Okay, he's making men wear hats. And there were very few hats available in Turkey at the time. You see pictures of men going around with women's hats because they have brims. But joking aside, hundreds, as many as 600 men were executed for defying the ban on religious headgear.

[Dan Snow]

And he closes religious schools and breaks up religious brothers. But weren't a few of them going, hang on, mate, I thought this is what we were fighting for. Where does the radical secularism kind of come from? And it doesn't sound like it was there at the beginning particularly.

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, no, it's a package. I mean, Mustafa Ekamal is taking the French ideas of the French Revolution and applying them in a more radical way, perhaps even in France, making sure that people dress the same. People are dressed as citizen. They won't have any names that will display any kind of hierarchical belonging. He's abolishing, really the ability to be different. Everyone has to be a Turkish speaking, Turkish thinking, Turkish educated citizen. Like I said, there's a whole basket of goods that goes along with being a citizen.

[Dan Snow]

And fascinatingly so, it's not the victorious allies who topple the Caliphate. The Ottoman family, which has ruled over much of this part of the world since at least the 16th century. It is this revolutionary movement from within Turkey itself.

[Mark David Beyer]

So in 1922 or even before that, they separated the function of the Sultan from the Caliph. So the Sultan is the secular leader. The Caliph is the symbolic religious leader. And for centuries, those two positions had been fused in one man, in the Ottoman Sultan. But what Mustafa Kemal and his fellow revolutionaries did was they separated the two. So the Sultan became just the sultan. Then when he was expelled in 1922, there was a caliph. But then in 1924, the new republic abolished the Caliphate and expelled the Caliph. So this caused a backlash in Turkey itself, but also throughout the Muslim world, especially in British South Asia, there was a lot of opposition to Turkey because it abolished this symbolic Sunni religious office.

[Dan Snow]

He dies in 1938. But the system, the state that he built, I mean, the 20th century is a time of upheaval. I mean, it was pretty enduring.

[Mark David Beyer]

It wasn't until 1950s when a lot of these radical changes began to be dialed back. So, for example, in Mustafa Kemal's time, they began to recite the call to prayer not in Arabic, but in Turkish. And this wasn't popular. But the point was they also translated the Quran into Turkish so that people could understand it in their native language. They did everything they could to to strip the country of its Islamic past and its Ottoman past. But from the 1950s, with a generational change, the Turkish Republic began to reconnect with its Ottoman and Islamic forebears.

[Dan Snow]

And we have just seen in the last few months, the President of Egypt converting the Great Mosque in Istanbul back into a mosque from a museum. So that process is ongoing.

[Mark David Beyer]

Well, President Erdogan, of course, as you mentioned, he reversed Ataturk's decision, which was to convert the Hagia Sophia, which had been the greatest Byzantine church in the world. In 1453, when the Ottomans conquered it, Sultan Mehmed II converted into a mosque. Ataturk then converted into a museum. Erdogan recently converted it back into a mosque, and it's now again a house of prayer. Again, you see this reversal of Mustafa Kemal's revolution. We haven't mentioned the why he's called Ataturk, which is also part of his propaganda. So Ataturk means father of the Turks. And this was a title bestowed upon him later on in his career in the 1930s. And Mustafa Kemal himself, he gave a six day speech in 1927, I think it was 30 hours and 30 minutes in which he narrates the history of the Turkish nation. You can say, but it begins with him in 1919 when he lands on the shore of Anatolia, when he's sent by the Sultan as an inspector. So all of history that he wants people to remember begins with him when he comes ashore like a phoenix or almost a messianic figure. And that's when Turkish history begins, 1919, after the Ottomans, after everything that happened. It's as if they have a clean slate. And he can now say, a new Turkey is born that has no relation to the past. Again, this is 1927, and this is not how things really were in 1919. But this narration is what we have today. And this is why people today only think of this aspect of the country.

[Dan Snow]

All these years later, how can we judge Ataturk's Turkey? Has it been any more stable than its neighbours? Has it been a success?

[Mark David Beyer]

I don't know what you mean by stable, because there have been how many military coups in the country? 1960-1971-1980-1997. How many uprisings have there been? This is all unfinished business from the Ottoman Empire. So the Kurdish uprisings in the 20s and 30s until they're crushed. But again from the late 60s, there's Kurdish intellectual movements. From the early 1980s, there's actual military guerrilla campaigns. They continue to this day. Turkey today is still killing Kurds, not only in Turkey, but also in Syria and Iraq. So none of those questions of the end of the empire have been established. We look at Iraq today and we look at the Kurdish autonomous region. We look at Sunni Shi warfare, we look at the influence of Iran, the United States. That hasn't been solved. We look at Palestine today, there's war between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. But of course, all of Palestine, there's violence across the land. So Lebanon was a French colony, Syria was a French colony. Syria has been undergoing an uprising since 2011. Right. So I don't know how stable Turkey is then in this respect.

[Dan Snow]

On Twitter, at the beginning of the Israel Garden War, I was watching all the various takes from various people. And the thing you don't expect to see in 2024 are people nostalgic for large transnational multi confessional empires. But that started to creep in. People going, hey, maybe the best solution here was in the Ottoman Empire.

[Mark David Beyer]

And there are also people in Turkey who say, actually we should rule over Jerusalem, because when we ruled Jerusalem, there was peace. Which, yeah, pretty much is true. But then it depends on who you ask. So then if you remember what happened to the Armenians, then you say, wait a minute, have you forgotten about what the CUP government did in the First World War? It wasn't only peace and brotherhood. There were long periods of that. But we have to look at the whole history.

[Dan Snow]

Well, thank you for doing that with us today. That was a tour de force. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about, well, the whole thing, really, but particularly through the person of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk. That was great. Thank you, Mark.

[Mark David Beyer]

David, thank you for having me on the show.

[Dan Snow]

Thank you so much for listening as always. And thanks for sticking with this podcast for so many years. If you're a longtime fan now, if you are, you'll remember the days when we used to smash out seven episodes a week. You'll probably notice that we're slowly honing the craft. We're bringing you longer and frankly, better episodes. There's a lot more research that goes into them and we're trying to focus on more of what you want as well. And that's exactly what we're going to keep doing. So from November, there's going to be a change in our release schedule. You're going to get new episodes every Monday and Thursday if you're a subscriber, which I urge you to become, of course. And then if you are, you'll get extra bonus episodes on Fridays too. The reason I'm doing that so I want to make sure I can put more time into the episodes I'm making for you. Try to and do more of those expellers for example, and I just monologue along. People seem to like those. Thank you very much for all the reviews. As you can imagine though, those take a lot of time. So with this new release schedule, I'll be able to give you more of those. Worry not though. Dan Snow's history isn't changing, it's just getting better.

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[Dan Snow]

Got donuts.

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[Dan Snow]

Well I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me.

[BetterHelp/Verizon/T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Dan Snow]

Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network. Nice.

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[Mark David Beyer]

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[Dan Snow]

So what are we having for launch?

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