There are two Mustafa Kemals. One the flesh-and-blood Mustafa Kemal who now stands before you and who will pass away. The other is you, all of you here who will go to the far corners of our land to spread the ideals which must be defended with your lives if necessary.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
I had to come today, of all days.
‘You don’t have an Atatürk picture?’ I ask Birsen Aldırma, as she piles the lunch table with plates of hummus, meatballs, crudités and yoghurt.
Her family members, gathered here with us, throw wide-eyed glances at each other and then reply on Birsen’s behalf.
‘We have a big one! But it’s being fixed,’ says Feyzullah, the patriarch. ‘Last week there was a storm, and it fell off the wall and smashed. We’ve taken it to the glass shop. It’ll be back tomorrow.’
But these might be the only people in Turkey who don’t need to see a portrait of Atatürk to feel close to him. Because the Aldırmas and the Kuzulus, three generations of them squashed into Feyzullah’s front room, have Atatürk’s blood running through their veins.
Seventy-five-year-old Birsen is still bright-eyed and dark-haired. It seems impossible that she’s the mother of 53-year-old Feyzullah, grey and tired, slumped in his armchair in the corner for most of the morning. He looks too old to be the father of 24-year-old Deniz and nineteen-year-old Derya, with their hennaed hair, trainers and piercings.
The girls’ four cousins are a little older, respectable-looking family men and women in their early thirties. şarap, Deniz and Derya’s aunt (and Feyzullah’s sister), is a portly but well-kept matron with fashionably cut short hair and a motherly way of squeezing my arm and smiling whenever she speaks to me. All of these nine people are the grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Abdurrahman Efendi, Atatürk’s first cousin. They are the last fading flesh-and-blood echoes of a man who, a mere eight decades after his death, has almost become immortalised.
Only Birsen, who married into the family, can recall Abdurrahman. ‘He was this gorgeous guy – charismatic!’ she says.
None are old enough to remember Atatürk himself. Their proud bonds to the man they never met are built around a few scattered trinkets and anecdotes.
‘When I was in primary school, I was always the one asked to read the poems about Atatürk,’ says şarap, a beaming smile splitting her face. ‘I get very emotional when I think about that even now. The last time I visited his mausoleum, I cried!’
Feyzullah picks up as şarap grows too emotional and falters. ‘Thinking of Atatürk … it’s like this kind of person comes along once in a hundred years,’ he says. ‘It’s a great success what he achieved. Here we were in the heart of war. The world was boiling. And he saved our country, gave us freedom.’
They talk on, this warm, modest family. They were not what I expected when I boarded the flight from Istanbul back to Hatay, the southern province skirting the western end of the Syrian border and the region where I had lived for eight months when I first moved to Turkey. Little had I known then that the relatives of the man whose face I was seeing everywhere were so close by. The Aldırmas and the Kuzulus live in İskenderun, a run-down port city facing the island of Cyprus across the water, and in Dörtyol, a town a few miles inland. Their apartments are small, tidy and cheerfully furnished in the typical style of the Turkish lower middle class: lace doilies over small side tables, and delicate, patterned coffee cups brought out only for guests. The walls are hung with framed vistas of Istanbul and Islamic incantations embroidered in Arabic script.
‘This is what we prefer, we like to lead a modest life. We have never hidden behind the fact that we are his relatives. We never took advantage of it,’ says Feyzullah, when I point out how different they are to the descendants of Mehmet VI, the last Ottoman sultan. After his banishment in 1923, they established themselves as part of the European jet set, holidaying in Monaco and, in 2010, opening a court case against Turkey to reclaim some of their lost riches. Now, they are also trying to weigh back into Turkish politics. In early 2017, with the post-coup euphoria just starting to wane, Erdoğan has called a referendum on Turkey’s constitution, and whether it should be changed to one that hands him almost uncontested powers. Erdoğan’s plan to switch Turkey’s system from parliamentary democracy to executive presidency has been floating around since the turn of the decade, and gained momentum after he became president in 2014. If he manages to secure a majority of votes for his Evet, or Yes, camp, Erdoğan will be able to rule by decree and handpick the cabinet. The top ranks of the judiciary will be appointed directly by him and the parliament. The reforms will do away entirely with the system bequeathed by Atatürk.
In the final weeks before voting day, Sultan Mehmet’s descendants have surfaced on state media voicing their support for Erdoğan’s plans. In contrast, Atatürk’s family rarely speak to the press; I’m the first foreign reporter to meet with them. I’m touched at the way they’re dressed in their best clothes for this occasion, and how Birsen has spent hours preparing huge piles of delicious Hatay cuisine – the thing I miss most from my time living in this part of Turkey. The region’s delicacies are famed across the country but difficult to find in their true form outside this province. Warmly spiced lentil soup, peppered beans and little parcels of meat wrapped in ground bulgur – the table is bejewelled with delicacies. Ağca, one of the cousins, has drawn out the family tree for me by hand and taken the day off work to join us. We chat a little about the ancient city of Antakya, my old home, and about the tens of thousands of Syrians who have now found sanctuary there. There is a family of them living next door, Feyzullah tells me. They are all empathetic; after all, the Aldırmas and the Kuzulus are the descendants of refugees themselves.
‘Our family’s journey started in Thessaloniki … from there we went to Istanbul, Bursa, then finally to here,’ Feyzullah says. ‘Dörtyol is where all the migrants went – it was the designated area. That’s why most people here look like foreigners – they came from the Balkans.’
Atatürk’s immediate family, including his mother, sister and cousin, Abdurrahman, were among the first Ottomans to find themselves uprooted as the empire crumbled. They left their home city of Salonica, now in northern Greece and known as Thessaloniki, during the Balkan war of 1912–13. The fledgling Christian nation states of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro had united to boot the Ottomans out of their last bastions in Europe. The victory was celebrated in the capitals of Western Europe – but the toll was wrought on the Muslims of the Balkans, who were slaughtered and deported to Anatolia.
Over the coming decades, millions more would follow this initial and involuntary exodus, while the revenge exacted by the Turks against the minorities in Anatolia would send millions of Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire fleeing in the other direction. It was the great tragedy of the Ottoman twilight – the bloody curdling of a once-mixed population. The ghosts still haunt Istanbul, a city once teeming with followers of all three Abrahamic religions but which today largely identifies itself as Muslim. Even so, lying in bed on a Sunday morning, I can still hear the sound of one lonely tolling church bell – a reminder of my neighbourhood’s past as a district filled with Greek bourgeoisie. On a scruffy backstreet, where I would not venture were it not for my love of pork, is the city’s last remaining Greek butcher. There is the air of a secret society within his cool, white-tiled walls; a conspiracy of guilty appreciation for his sausages and bacon.
Muslims from the European reaches of the empire fled or were banished back to the Turkish heartlands, where they could find safety and acceptance in their common religion. But by their features, pale-skinned and blue-eyed compared to the darker-skinned Anatolian Muslims, they were marked as outsiders. Later, they became weapons in Atatürk’s war of Turkish independence.
‘People from the Balkans were sent to Hatay because the region came under the control of the French and Armenians,’ explains Ağca. ‘The Turkish state wanted to use the Balkan refugees to populate this region.’
We talk on, past lunch and into the afternoon. şarap shows me photos of their ancestors, and tells me stories about how people react to them when they learn of their famous connection. Today, they bring out their few keepsakes, including Atatürk’s ceremonial sword, a gorgeous swoosh of engraved silver. The younger members of the family admit to using it in play fights as children. Apart from these last few prized possessions, they have given everything to museums, including the Cadillac Atatürk drove down here when he visited his cousin in the 1930s. He left it behind when the engine wouldn’t start. It stayed outside the family’s house until the 1960s, when the state-owned İşbank came and asked for it, along with a haul of old photos. They are now on display in Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara.
‘That was Atatürk’s ethos,’ says Feyzullah, ‘to share all he had with his nation. He used to say, “Even the clothes I’m wearing belong to the people!”’
The family wish they had at least been mentioned on the plaque beside the Cadillac. ‘They wrote “This is a gift from İşbank”!’ says Feyzullah, with a sad and incredulous shake of his head. ‘We were going to donate the sword, too, but we changed our mind after that.’
All day, as I’ve listened to their stories and caressed their keepsakes, I’ve been sneaking glances at their faces, searching for resemblances to Turkey’s most recognisable man. None of them have the giveaway laser-blue eyes, or the shock of fair hair. But in Deniz, a smart, funny university student, I sense something of the force of personality.
‘Atatürk is being removed from everything, from school books, from coins,’ she says suddenly, and I detect the first trace of tears in her eyes. ‘Lately, in the university, everyone can say everything in the open. The people who want to praise him do, but others feel free to insult him. I don’t understand why the lecturers don’t say anything. This is the man who established the republic. I can’t bear it.’
The hundreds of Turks who have served time in prison for breaking Law 5816 might feel differently. Under that statute, anyone deemed to have insulted Atatürk, his image or memory faces up to three years behind bars. Anyone who encourages another to insult Atatürk may be prosecuted as if they had committed the crime themselves. If the insult was carried out publicly or in the press, the maximum sentence may be extended by half. And if the crime occurred at Atatürk’s mausoleum, the perpetrator could be imprisoned for up to five years.
The law is not a quaint anachronism. Hundreds of people have spent thousands of days in jail because of it. Professors, poets, mayors and men of religion have fallen foul of the canon, some of them unwittingly, others in a protest of conscience. International human rights organisations and freedom of speech watchdogs have railed against it. But this law is not something Atatürk himself put in place. The notice declaring the new law was published in the Official Gazette on 31 July 1951 – thirteen years after Atatürk’s death, and amid the first pushbacks against his reforms.
In May 1950 the Demokrat Partisi seized power from Atatürk’s CHP in Turkey’s first free elections. Its leader and now prime minister, Adnan Menderes, claimed that the will of the people had been realised, and that the rule of the bureaucratic elites was over. Modern-day Turks would recognise the rhetoric – it is almost identical to the claims Erdoğan has repeated, and repeated again, since his AKP took power in 2002. There are other similarities between the two leaders: both sympathise with Turkey’s religiously conservative masses – although Menderes was decidedly less personally pious than Erdoğan – and both sought to indulge them by loosening some of Atatürk’s firm secularism.
The first law Menderes enacted when his party took power was to reintroduce the Arabic call to prayer. In 1932, Atatürk had passed a law decreeing that it should only be recited in Turkish, to the horror of the devout. So symbolic was this tussle in the greater struggle between secularism and religion in Turkey that it featured in the trailer for Reis, a cringeworthy cinematic hagiography of Erdoğan released in early 2017.
The film tells the story of Erdoğan’s early life, back when he was just plain Tayyip from the tough streets of Istanbul. It casts him as a devout boy guided by his moral compass, unwilling to bend to peer pressure and winning both admirers and enemies because of it – a broadly accurate portrayal. But the trailer showing young Tayyip singing the Arabic call to prayer in defiance of the law? Erdoğan was born in 1953 – three years after Menderes reintroduced the Arabic recitals. By then there was nothing to defy.
Soon after, sensing a new wind of religious freedom, the Ticanis, members of a conservative Islamic order, began attacking Atatürk’s statues. The sect had originated in the North African reaches of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, but grew radical and notorious with the birth of Atatürk’s modern republic. They numbered several thousand, but were concentrated in Ankara. Since the Atatürk statue attacks were soon happening across the country, it seems impossible that all of them were carried out by Ticanis. Historian Jacob Landau suggests that the activity soon also caught on with student and youth protest movements. Nonetheless, the blame was levelled entirely at the men of religion.
Menderes faced a dilemma. He wanted to allow religious Turks a little breathing space, but he didn’t want them going that far. It was Atatürk who had given Menderes his first job in politics, and there was still a lingering loyalty. Neither was he so personally invested in Islam as some members of his party – his wife was an opera singer, a purveyor of a very European art form. So he drew up a law making it a crime to attack Atatürk’s memory.
It was a deeply controversial move. Much of the opposition came from the CHP – the party of which Atatürk is the ‘Eternal Leader’ – which thought the law undemocratic and unconstitutional. But Menderes also faced revolt from within his own ranks, with the more religious members of his party dismayed at the ‘deification’ of a mortal. One independent member of the house argued that the law would mean university professors could be prosecuted for their lectures – prophetic, since that is exactly what happened in later decades.
The bill was rejected by a sliver on its first vote, by 146 votes to 141, and sent back to the justice committee for redrafting. Word went round that the government was planning to retract the law – and then, the statue attacks escalated. On a single day, two Atatürk monuments in Ankara were defaced in broad daylight, right in front of an army base. The head of the Ticani sect was arrested, along with a dozen of his members, but the vandalism spree continued. Within a month, more than a hundred of the order’s followers had been rounded up, and the investigations spread to the Nakşibendis, another conservative group. On 12 July 1951, the interior minister held a press conference vowing to ‘liquidate the snake whose head needs to be crushed’. When the slightly amended bill came back to parliament twelve days later, it was approved by 232 votes to 50. Six members of the house abstained. Atatürk’s honour was enshrined in law.
Cumhuriyet recorded the tumultuous scenes in parliament as the bill progressed. ‘Deputies for and against the law made a lot of noise, banged on the desks, and some got into verbal fights,’ wrote the newspaper’s parliamentary correspondent.
Bedii Unustun, the MP for Çanakkale – the place where Atatürk led his soldiers to glorious victory in the Battle of Gallipoli – opposed the law with a poetic speech. ‘Running the state as a dictatorship is like sailing a boat in a pool,’ he said. ‘Democracy is sailing in the open seas. This proposition is the government’s way of locking open waters into a pool. The government is putting heavy burdens on its people in the disguise of Atatürk love … Its ship will lose its way and get smashed on the rocks.’
Most of what Unustun said was lost in the din of the shouting and banging. There was loud applause when the vote was passed. But some thought it didn’t go far enough. Nadir Nadi, editor of Cumhuriyet, pondered in an opinion piece days before the law was passed:
Imagine we caught all the Ticanis and changed the penalty for statue destroyers and Atatürk insulters to ten years. Will we be able to protect the revolution and the living memory (other than the stone and the brass) of Atatürk this way? If the proposed law passes as it is, will it stop people from abusing religion? Will the fundamentalists who are afraid of attacking statues refrain from attacking the revolution? Will overt and covert propaganda such as covering the women at home [with headscarves], bringing back the Arabic script, and overwriting the civil law and replacing it with Sharia stop with such measures?
Nadi supported the law, but also lobbied for similar punishments to be brought in for those who refused to obey Atatürk’s dress-code reforms, or his introduction of the Latin alphabet.
Menderes eventually fell on his sword. As his tenure progressed, he grew bad-tempered, thin-skinned and corrupt, jailing journalists and rigging elections in a bid to cling to power. In 1960 the Turkish army – the ultimate guardians of Atatürk’s legacy – stepped into politics for the first time, overthrowing Menderes and putting him on trial on a colourful array of charges including ‘extravagance’, fathering an illegitimate child, and embezzlement. The court found him and several other high-ranking figures within his party guilty of violating the constitution, and sentenced them to death by hanging. Menderes swung in September 1961. It was only three decades later, under the presidency of the whisky-loving but pious Turgut Özal, that his memory began to be rehabilitated.
Erdoğan has taken it a step further. Now, you will find boulevards, airports and parks named after Menderes. He is one of only three Turkish leaders, including Atatürk, whose graves have been turned into mausoleums (the other is Turgut Özal). And in 2013 the island in the Sea of Marmara where he was tried and hanged was renamed ‘Democracy and Freedom Island’.
Yet it was Erdoğan’s government that, in May 2007, enacted another parcel of legislation designed to keep Atatürk’s reputation safe, this time in response to a very modern problem. In the age of the internet, the statue-smashers of the 1950s now make their feelings known in homemade films, in blog posts and on comment threads. Law 5651 allows websites to be blocked on a wide range of grounds including child abuse, indecency and copyright infringement. The law’s original impetus, however, was the increasing criticism of Atatürk on the ungoverned space of the web. Over the next two years, more than 3,700 websites fell foul of the law, including MySpace, Google and several Kurdish news sites. But the big target was video-hosting site YouTube, which had refused Turkey’s repeated requests to take down videos criticising Atatürk. In 2009 the Organisation for Security and Economic Co-operation in Europe tallied that 2,972 websites were blocked in Turkey for various alleged crimes against Atatürk – more than were blocked because they involved prostitution.
The ironclad limits of these laws leave little room for academic or even casual debate regarding Atatürk’s life and work. Most Turks’ knowledge of their founding father wanders little from the script of the ‘Long Speech’ – a thirty-six-and-a-half-hour blockbuster that Atatürk delivered to parliament over six days in 1927. In it, he outlined the history of the war of independence, and the principles of the new republic. He also delivered damning criticisms of everyone from the sultans and their court to the foreign occupying powers, while glossing over the Ottoman Empire’s own misdeeds and errors in its final acts.
Above all the treachery and misfortune in this narrative sits Atatürk – part saviour, part prophet – who foresees and then orchestrates the Turkish nation’s rebirth. This is the folklore narrative taught in schools, in universities, in films, and it has captured the official version of history even beyond Turkey’s borders. Writing in Turkish Studies, an academic journal, in 2008 a Finnish historian totted up only six theses, in any language and published in any country, which examine the Long Speech with a critical eye. So is it any wonder that those Turks who aim to break the mould, to shake things up a bit, to question, are usually rounded on by the rest of their society?
Some of those who have done so recently include historian İpek Çalışlar, whose study of Atatürk’s short-lived marriage landed her in court. The alleged offence? To have repeated an anecdote told to her by a relative of Atatürk’s wife, Latife, about how the couple swapped clothes so that he could escape a group of rebellious soldiers who were plotting to kill him. ‘In Turkey, we always have legal obstacles for writers. Like learning how to swim, you learn how to write without getting in trouble with the law,’ Çalışlar told me.
Can Dündar, a well-known journalist writing for the pro-Atatürk Cumhuriyet, was repeatedly hauled into court for scenes in his 2006 documentary Mustafa, which showed Atatürk smoking and drinking heavily. One of Dündar’s staunchest supporters was CHP veteran Ertuğrul Günay, who had joined the AKP in 2007 when it seemed like the party of liberal ideals.
‘There is no habit of free and diverse thought in Turkey, neither on the left nor on the right,’ he told me. ‘Each side has their own taboos and subjects that they want to hold above all discussion. Political identifications are as dogmatic as religious identifications. Surely, Atatürk is very significant and precious for Turkey. But some “leftists” who took the subject of Atatürk to be a taboo went as far as demanding me to ban this film. This is in fact the greatest problem that Turkey has. All sides of our political spectrum are in their essence conservative. Our leftists are actually right wing, and therefore our right wing is extreme right!’
Dündar’s film was not even critical of the nation’s founder. ‘I wanted to present Mustafa Kemal in a more intimate, affectionate light,’ he said at the time. ‘All those statues, busts and flags have created a chief devoid of human qualities.’
Jokes about Atatürk are glaringly absent from Turkish conversation and culture. The few I have heard or read are incredibly lame and demand a detailed knowledge of Turkish history. There is this one, for example, that did the rounds following Menderes’s execution: Atatürk and Menderes meet in heaven, and the former asks the latter how Turkey is doing. Menderes tells him of everything that has happened, including his own unfortunate end. ‘Well Adnan, that’s kismet [fate],’ Atatürk says. ‘No, not kismet – İsmet!’ replies Menderes.
İsmet Inönü was Atatürk’s sidekick and prime minister, who took over the CHP on his death. He is often blamed for keeping the party locked in the past and enabling the rise of Menderes’s DP. See? It’s hardly going to get them rolling in the aisles.
I did find one internet-age Atatürk joke that a few English-speaking Turks might laugh at:
‘What did Atatürk’s father say to him when he did well?’
‘Adda-Turk!’
Apart from this, the only Atatürk humour you will find are jokes designed to offend Turks, usually penned on Greek or Armenian chat rooms. What’s the reason? If the career of Göksel Kaya is any indication, it’s because Turks far prefer their Atatürk humour in the form of high kitsch.
For thirty years, Kaya, an actor, has been playing one character. Each day he gets up, slicks back his hair, fluffs up his eyebrows, and dons a sharp suit and shiny shoes. His hair is bleached a radioactive yellow-blond and he wears shockingly blue contact lenses – although he insists that all his attributes are natural. He has studied the habits and mannerisms of his muse to the point where he now assumes them without thinking. OK, so he smokes Parliaments, a cheap brand, rather than handmade and monogrammed cigarettes. But he does so with the same flick of the wrist and self-conscious flair as Atatürk.
Sometimes Kaya plays his character on stage or in films. More often he just spends his days in character, walking the streets of his home city of İzmir – a bastion of Atatürk fanaticism on the Aegean coast, a stone’s throw from the nearest Greek islands. It was where, as a soldier, the young Mustafa Kemal met his soon-to-be wife, Latife. And it was İzmir that bore the worst brunt of the war of independence. As the Greeks left Asia Minor, defeated at the hands of Atatürk’s army, huge fires ripped through the beautiful old city. Almost all of it was destroyed.
These days, İzmir is known as a safe haven for Turks who want to kiss their lovers in public, wear revealing miniskirts or get raucous on their rakı. It’s most likely down to the alchemy of two influences – the whiff of Greek culture that still hangs in the air, and the city’s connection to Atatürk. İzmir is a totem for the CHP, Atatürk’s party. ‘What we need,’ Barış Yarkadaş, the CHP deputy for my Istanbul neighbourhood, told me a few days after Erdoğan’s referendum, ‘is for the whole country to become like İzmir.’
A nice thought, perhaps, but deluded. İzmir is different; it feels as if it were built on ley lines. With a few exceptions – certain neighbourhoods of Istanbul and Ankara, for example, and other coastal cities with a view out towards Europe – Turkey is a conservative country. In the heartlands of Anatolia and along the northern Black Sea coast, life revolves around business, the mosque and the family. Even in the Kurdish lands of the east, where the PKK’s leftism and feminism has stamped a big footprint, patriarchy and tribal politics rule.
Perhaps it is the rest of the country that will eventually creep into İzmir, not the other way around. In the summer of 2017, two young women dressed up for a night out in Alsancak, İzmir’s central district, full of clubs and students, and were sexually harassed by men on a motorbike. They went to find the nearest police officers. But instead of helping the women, the officers told them they were at fault.
‘Look at yourselves,’ said one. ‘You deserve more than that with those outfits.’ And then they doled out what they deemed to be a fitting punishment – a slap around the face for each of the women.The incident was caught on security cameras and the women filed a legal complaint against the officers. One was arrested and charged with the attack but released on bail two days later.
But the İzmir I see as I accompany Göksel Kaya through the busy centre one afternoon is still the city where Atatürk rules. Decked out in a navy blue suit, with a crisp white shirt and a red hanky peeking out of his breast pocket, Kaya sails down the street to the amazed stares of onlookers. Some simply gawp. Others bound up and ask for a photo – and as soon as that happens, others flock to him so that, quickly, he is surrounded by a crowd. Kaya is used to it: he knows how to make a quick exit when the throng is getting out of control. ‘Hadi!’ – Come on! – he shouts back to me as he bustles his way through.
His resemblance to Atatürk is striking but only, I suspect, because of the dye-and-contact-lens accoutrements and the anachronistic outfits. When we finally reach a coffee shop, and the waiters are done taking their selfies, I ask him how he realised his likeness to Turkey’s most famous face.
‘It was during my military service,’ Kaya tells me. ‘I put on my uniform for the first time, and – GAH! – my commander gasped.’
He pulls out his phone and begins reeling through the huge archive of photos that he keeps on it. It’s true – in the leveller of khaki, he bears far more of a resemblance to Atatürk.
Kaya’s odd career has taken him to the front row of some of Turkey’s biggest events. He has often been in the first line of dignitaries at the official celebrations for the country’s national days. He has met the head of the armed forces – and even Erdoğan, on a couple of occasions. Small children, who are told by their teachers that Atatürk sees them when they cheat, sometimes cry in Kaya’s presence. It is as if Turks want to kid themselves that Atatürk is still with them – albeit several inches taller, several pounds heavier, and actually not all that much like Atatürk really, once you take away the embellishments.
Not everyone is a Kaya fan. Down in Hatay, Atatürk’s descendants are unimpressed. The friend I cadge his number from, who is part of a powerful CHP family in Istanbul, harrumphs when I say I want to meet him. ‘That guy just uses Atatürk!’ he says.
I’ve heard the same accusation levelled at many different people, from the flag sellers to the CHP to the people who are campaigning for the No vote in the referendum, using images of Atatürk on their leaflets. Whenever Atatürk is invoked, and for whatever reason, someone will accuse the one who has summoned the spirit of doing so with cynical motives. Every Turk feels like they own Atatürk, and none of them want to share.
Kaya, though, just seems to want to spread joy. Eight months after our first meeting, he calls to ask if I fancy joining him on Victory Day, the national holiday celebrating Turkey’s defeat of the Greeks in the final battle of the war of independence. He is leading a rally of the city’s classic car club from the Maltepe parade ground, where leader of the opposition Kemal Kılıcdaroğlu held his justice rally six weeks ago, to the ridiculously flamboyant Dolmabahçe palace, a monument to the excesses of the late Ottomans and the place where Atatürk died. The route will take them across the bridge where Erdoğan’s fanatics faced off against the coup-plotting soldiers. It is to be a journey laced with symbolism – but also peppered with a good dose of humour.
I turn up at the meeting point early on an August morning to find a gaggle of people milling around rows of gleaming vintage cars. Most have Turkish flags draped over their bonnets, and the owners of those that don’t are digging banners out of their boots and tying them on. There is one red Mercedes from the 1950s that is permanently patriotic. It has the star and crescent of the Turkish flag sprayed onto its roof, and a silhouette of Atatürk on the bonnet. A sticker across the front windscreen reads Iyi ki varsın (‘It’s good that you exist’).
‘I hate that saying,’ mutters my Turkish friend, who has come along for the ride. ‘It’s from the shit we had to repeat in school every morning: My existence is dedicated to the Turkish existence. Fuck that.’
The car that Kaya will travel in is the centre of attention – partly because no one can get it started. It is a racing green Ford Phaeton from the 1930s, with gleaming silver trims and bug-eye headlamps and red number plates that read ATA, loaned to the club by a museum owner who has only driven it twice in the past decade. Militaristic music booms out over the car park from huge speakers strapped to the back of a pick-up truck. ‘Sarı saçlı, mavi gözlü!’ (Blonde hair, blue eyes!) goes the refrain to one tune, repeated every three or four songs. My friend is in patriotic hell.
Most of the cars are huge American gas guzzlers, like props from films set in the 1950s. They are popular among Turks, the club’s secretary, İlker Tayalı, tells me, because scores of them were sent to the country as part of America’s post-Second World War aid package. Atatürk is popular here, too.
‘We do these rallies on our national days because we adore Atatürk,’ says Tayalı, as we sit in his 1961 Chevrolet Bel Air, waiting for Kaya to arrive and for the parade to begin. It is a gleaming slash of white with a varnished blue interior. Tayalı, who is forty-three, speaks about his hobby with a boyish pride. ‘We also drive to all the cities that were important in the war of independence. We present our cars, we learn about the history, and then we eat and drink.’
The crowd here look similar to the one that showed up for the Justice March: educated, moneyed and Westernised. There are a few small dogs. Several women have come in form-fitting vintage dresses and cute high heels. Most others are wearing Atatürk-emblazoned T-shirts. I ask Tayalı what the link is between the founder of the republic and Turkey’s classic-car enthusiasts.
‘We feel a kind of friendship with Atatürk,’ he says. ‘We like his etiquette, his education, his character. He is a symbol of the modern Turkish man, with his clothes and all his habits.’
Across town, there is another party in full swing. Istanbul’s city government, which is controlled by Erdoğan’s party, is holding a parade down Vatan Caddesi, a boulevard running through the heart of one of the city’s most conservative districts. The mayor of the city is there along with scores of soldiers. Erdoğan, meanwhile, is at Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara. He uses the occasion to reiterate his commitment to crushing the coup plotters and the terrorists. Tayalı is unimpressed.
‘Now Erdoğan is trying to say that the coup anniversary is our national day – it’s nonsense!’ he cries. ‘He doesn’t want all of this. He openly doesn’t like Atatürk. He knows that there are many people who are Atatürk fans, and that makes him nervous.’
Because of the state of emergency, Tayalı couldn’t get official permission to hold his rally. Officially, it is illegal – all public gatherings and demonstrations must be approved by the government under the emergency laws. But he is going ahead with it anyway, knowing that Atatürk is the one man Erdoğan won’t fight. Even if he is only here in the form of a lookalike, bumper stickers and T-shirts, that is enough.
There is a buzz around the car park as Kaya arrives, dressed in a sharp tuxedo and with a lashing of Brylcreem keeping every hair on his head in place. The car owners swarm around him. A preened TV news presenter rushes forward, dragging her cameraman after her, to get a prime shot of Kaya-Atatürk climbing into his car, which the mechanics have finally got going. Then, to the opening chords of the İzmir March booming through the pick-up’s speakers, we swing out onto the highway.
On Bağdat Caddesi, a street where Istanbul’s ostentatiously wealthy parade their riches, crowds pack out onto the streets to take photos, and cheer as Kaya passes. He waves regally. His fans hold up their cameras and snap photos. Old women pull silk scarves from their necks and wave them, blowing kisses with their other hands. The drivers honk their horns. We are causing a ruckus; a police car weaves its way into the convoy and pulls up beside us.
‘You take the lead!’ shouts Tayalı through his window to the dark-haired cop in the driving seat.
The young policeman looks unsure. He doesn’t want to cut in front of a man who the crowds are cheering as if he really were Atatürk.
‘That wouldn’t be appropriate!’ he shouts back.
So, as a compromise, he inches forward and pulls almost – but not quite – level with Kaya’s car. The police stay with us past the Fenerbahçe football ground and along the highway right up to the bridge, their siren adding to the din of the horns and the cheering of the crowd. When we get to the bridge’s entrance, we pull in to the side to regroup next to the memorial to the coup martyrs. As the mechanics pour cool water onto the engine of Kaya’s car and the drivers get out to take photos against the backdrop of the Istanbul vista, a car speeds past with a young, shirtless man hanging out of the rear passenger-side window.
‘RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞAAAAAAAN!’ he shouts, as he twirls his T-shirt round his head.
A retort flies back from a member of the convoy: ‘Fuck off!’
Tayalı shakes his head sadly.
‘We never used to be like this,’ he says. ‘It’s Erdoğan who has made us like this, he has done it intentionally. He has polarised our society.’
Since he left no biological children or nephews and nieces, few traces of Atatürk’s genetics were carried down the generations. Was that deliberate? Did he sense the dangers of leaving an heir? Turks need only peek over their borders to see what unchallenged dynastic power can bring. The Assads in Syria, the Aliyevs in Azerbaijan, the Barzanis in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq – all of them are determined to pass down their title along with their DNA, never mind what turmoil that brings down on their people.
But how could Atatürk have known of the familial dictatorships that would spring up in the old Ottoman lands decades after his death? Everything we know about him suggests that he did not have children simply because he wasn’t that interested. His marriage to Latife, the daughter of a wealthy İzmir trader, broke down in less than three years because he spent too much time drinking and chatting with his old comrades in arms, the men with whom he was building his new country. He never remarried, though stories of his dedicated womanising abound. One of the more colourful is that he took the virginity of Zsa Zsa Gabor, when he was fifty-six and she, at twenty, was married to the first of her eight husbands. ‘He dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion. Atatürk was very wicked. He knew exactly how to please a young girl,’ Gabor later wrote in her memoirs.
Despite his reputation as a womaniser, Atatürk also became self-styled father figure to the Turkish nation, and adopted seven children. His own flesh and blood, what few there were, could expect little in the way of favours or fame. In 1938, as Atatürk was remoulding the country, his cousin Abdurrahman took over the running of the local railway station in nearby Dörtyol. Atatürk’s sister, Makbule, moved there too, and bought a small house next door to her cousin.
‘Abdurrahman looked a lot like Atatürk, he was also blond and blue-eyed and quite well-built,’ says şarap, his granddaughter. ‘People were amazed to see him, because he looked quite modern. Completely different to the people down here! His wife was a proper Istanbul lady. There were no cars here at that time, then she shows up driving and wearing dresses from the city. Everyone here thought, Wow!’
Hatay was the newest and most controversial part of the country. A thumb of land tucked away at the bottom of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, it was initially handed to the French mandate in Syria under the Treaty of Sèvres. The new Turkish state and the Turkish population in Hatay never accepted it, however, and it functioned as an autonomous region to various degrees and in various forms from 1921 onwards. In 1938 it proclaimed itself an independent state under Turkish and French military supervision; a year later it was fully absorbed into the Turkish republic. Today the building where the short-lived parliament once sat houses an ice-cream parlour, a cinema, and the café where I held so many meetings with Syrian rebel leaders in 2013.
Atatürk made Hatay one of his personal projects. Its population was – and still is – a mix of Arabic-speaking Christians and Alawites, alongside a Jewish community that is now almost defunct. They might all have been happy enough to become part of the new Syrian state (though their descendants were definitely relieved that they hadn’t when the civil war broke out there in 2011). But for Hatay’s Turkish-speaking Muslim community, to be cut off from the new motherland was a tragedy. When Atatürk visited the nearby city of Adana in 1923 he was greeted by an Antakya woman dressed in black mourning. She held up a banner reading GAZI BABA SAVES US. Gazi is an honorific title for someone who has been injured in battle. Baba is the Turkish word for father.
The French rulers soon realised Atatürk’s power, and banned any mention of him in the region’s schools. But the Hatay Turks found ways to rebel. They followed Atatürk’s reform of the alphabet from Arabic to Latin, and began abandoning the fez when his Hat Law decreed it. Meanwhile, Atatürk lobbied in Ankara and in international conferences for Hatay to become a part of Turkey. It was the last of his ambitions he would see achieved: four months before he died, the Turkish army marched into Hatay and its parliament voted to adopt Turkish laws.
Layer upon layer of history and blood shapes the contours of this region – the influx of Syrian refugees escaping the carnage over the border is only the latest coating. Just down the road from Feyzullah’s apartment I spot the old French military cemetery packed with the bodies of men who died for imperial misadventure. Years before, on a lazy summer’s weekend, my Syrian boyfriend and I took a trip to Vakıflı, a tiny mountain hamlet nestled between İskenderun and Syria and the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey. The people who live here are the descendants of a band of neighbours who refused to flee during the great expulsion and murder of millions of Armenians and other Christian minorities by Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in 1915, as the communities of the Ottoman Empire turned on each other. Instead, they gathered arms and holed up in their village high up in the mountains. Their suspicion and fear of Muslims has passed down through the generations; when my boyfriend and I went into a guesthouse to see if we could stay the night, the owner eyed his Arabic passport with misgiving. Eventually she agreed to let us stay; we guessed she assumed he was a Syrian Christian.
Late in the day, as the sun is setting over this complicated little corner of Turkey and after I’ve filled my notebook with his family’s anecdotes, Ağca offers to takes me to The First Bullet Museum in Dörtyol, housed in the building where Atatürk – together with the leaders of the Hatay Turks – planned to bring the province into the republic.
As we drive the short journey over there from İskenderun, Ağca starts talking about how he once had political ambitions of his own. ‘I studied public diplomacy at university, and under the old system I could have been a district governor after that,’ he says. ‘But then the AKP changed the rules. Now you have to have a political science degree. So I went to do my military service, and came back to work in an electrical appliances store.’
I wonder, though, if the rough, macho politics of the new Turkey is the place for any of this family. I’ve tried to push them on how they might vote in the referendum, and to introduce the topic of the president, and how he divides the country’s opinion. They’re having none of it. Feyzullah says he doesn’t think that any leader of Turkey should be insulted, whether they are dead or alive. Others make noises about how it wouldn’t be right for all the power to be with one person, but don’t say who that person could be. When they do express strong opinions, it’s within the safe borders of local government and parochial issues. I take the hint: they are scared. So I drop the subject of Erdoğan and the referendum, and go back to speaking about the past – a place where they seem far happier.
Ağca leads me into the small museum, an old Balkan-style wood-and-stone house, the upper floors overhanging the lower ones. Inside I find a very different view of Hatay’s history to the one told in the bucolic wine houses of Vakıflı. The heroes of the story told here are not the Armenians who stood firm in the mountains, but the Turks who led the attack against them. The name has been chosen because Dörtyol believes itself to be the place where the first shot was fired in Atatürk’s war of independence.
In the attic room, we find the obligatory waxwork of Atatürk – and Ağca and I take the obligatory selfie.