This is the thirteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, probably without being able to locate Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, and western Europe on a globe, President Trump tried to dictate peace terms in the war between Russia and Ukraine by lip-syncing what he heard from Russian President Putin on a two-hour prep phone call.)
The Ankara home office of the Turkish president, seemingly for life, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Down the hill from the presidential palace and through one more police checkpoint, I found the Atatürk Museum Mansion. Mercifully, in all my planning the night before, I had downloaded its image to my phone, and that’s what I showed at each police stockade. I don’t really think the president police wanted me biking along Erdoğan Alley (or whatever the presidential high street is called), but at the same time I still think that Atatürk trumps everyone else in Turkey, and that’s the reason I was allowed to pedal along the imperial boulevard.
A police woman from a nearby checkpoint came over to me as I was locking my bicycle to a drain pipe near the front door, but unlike the dour cops on the road above, she was chatty and friendly, and told me that she had grown up in Rize, on the Black Sea coast. She inspected the folding bicycle and wished me a pleasant stay in Turkey (which isn’t something you often get).
On my first visit to Istanbul in summer 1976, two policemen with truncheons roughed me up in a public park which, they said, I had entered after it was closed to pedestrians—not something I had expected from the Turkish tourist slogan “Choose Your Memories”.
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On this occasion, by the time I entered the Atatürk presidential mansion, I think I had qualified as one of the world’s experts in Atatürk museums. Not only had I been to the two other Atatürk exhibitions in Ankara, but I had also been to his birthplace museum in Thessaloniki (alas now in Greece) and his military academy museum in Bitola, North Macedonia. In Istanbul, I had seen his house there, which is also a museum.
This museum seemed to have what all the other museums had, which is replicas of his sitting rooms, desk, important books and papers, and, of course, more of his formal wear, including a top hat and walking stick.
A few of the museum displays describe his early years, growing up in what was then Salonica. His father was a military officer, and his mother, while probably Turkish, might well have had the mixed family blood that is all too common across that part of the Balkans (then under Turkish occupation)—meaning, her ancestors might well have been Jewish, Bulgarian, or Macedonian (which can be read to mean Slavic). No one is quite sure.
The young Mustafa was destined for a military career from an early age. He was a junior officer, a captain, in 1908 when the Young Turks (a group of senior military officers) staged their coup d’état against the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, ushering in a form of limited republican government (with generals at the top to see that nothing got out of hand). Of the democratic stirrings at that time, author Sean McMeekin asks in The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923:
Can the peoples of this simmering ethno-religious cauldron of a country—Muslims and Christians, Balkan Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians, Turks and Greeks, Circassians, Tatars, Armenians and Kurds, Arabs and Jews—really have believed that a few French words (liberté, fraternité, égalité) would submerge their differences, reverse the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-old stagnation and decline, and bring Turkey into the sunlit uplands of modern constitutional democracy?
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Several things saved the Young Turk Revolution from devouring its own during the long course of World War I, which otherwise collapsed the Ottoman Empire.
One was the leadership of certain German generals in Turkey—notable Liman von Sanders who led the defense at Gallipoli and defeated the landing Allies—and the other was the distraction of the Russian revolution in 1917, which coincided with the success of the Russian army in eastern Turkey (which might well have further partitioned the country).
In the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia gave away all the gains its army had made against the Turks in Kars and Erzurum, which allowed Atatürk and his compatriots after World War I to use eastern Turkey as the region to rally national consciousness.
In the best negotiations of the war, Russia cut a deal in 1915 that it would control Constantinople (Istanbul) should the Allies be successful in their Gallipoli campaign (which saw few contributions from the Russians). But that transaction came to naught when the Allies lost their bid for the Straits and later when the revolution took Russia out of the war.
McMeekin writes: “It was Disraeli’s summoning of the fleet that had forced the Russians to stand down at San Stefano in 1878. Now that Britain and Russia, in 1916, were wartime allies alongside France, the empire’s death knell seemed to have rung at last—except that the British and Russians kept failing to coordinate strategy in the Ottoman theater.”
Ironically, Turkey has a greater historical claim to Crimea than either Ukraine or Russia, and the issues underlying the current Ukraine-Russia war echo those fought over by Russia, Turkey, and the western allies in 1853-56, 1877-78, and 1914-18.
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By the 1920s, it was Atatürk who was the beneficiary of this legacy, which allowed him to push the Greeks out of Asia Minor, the Russians back to the Caucasus, and the occupying British, French, and Italians back to their barracks in the Middle East.
Admittedly, Atatürk had lost Palestine to the French and British, but at the same time the new Turkish state was stripped of its Arab component, which in the long run might well have saved it. As McMeekin writes:
In the end Kemal and the Turkish nationalists, following the failure of Enver’s Caucasian gambit in 1918, chose triage, abandoning the ungovernable empire—and its troublesome minorities—in favor of an exclusionary nation-state they could govern with a firm hand. In this project, they succeeded beyond expectations. Outside Turkey’s borders, the War of the Ottoman Succession rages on, with no end in sight.
The director of the Atatürk Mansion Museum walked me around the house, and afterwards she invited me to her offices for tea. There I met Atatürk the cat, who seemed to have the run of the mansion, and talked with the director about other Atatürk museums in the world. She encouraged me to visit Atatürk’s tomb in Ankara, a memorial complex known as Anıtkabir.
She gave me directions and, fortified by tea, I set off on my bicycle, only this time, at the first police checkpoint, the officers had new policies, and I had to hand over my passport and answer stern questions about where I had been. Yet again, when I showed my pictures of Atatürk’s top hat (not to mention his namesake cat), I was allowed to carry on, and in less than thirty minutes, I was back downtown, this time looking up another access road blocked by a police roadblock.
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To enter Anıtkabir, I needed to buy a ticket, stow my bag in a locker, and lock my bicycle to road sign outside the front gate. The irony is that cars, once they were inspected, were allowed to drive up to the base of the memorial. But bikes could not get anywhere near Atatürk’s tomb.
I was leery about locking my bicycle on a busy Turkish street, but I did so in a place that was opposite a police command post, figuring that might either deter thieves or, conversely, incite the cops to join with them in liberating the bike. (Mercifully, it was there when I got back.)
I walked up a sweeping wooded drive to the memorial, which, much more than a tomb, is another retrospective on the life of Mustafa Kemal and an official history of modern Turkey. I was there almost two hours.
The tomb itself is at the end of a long promenade in a building fronted with columns (monumental but less grand than Erdogan’s palace). Inside I found hundreds of school children, writing down the dates of Atatürk’s life and death (1881 – 1938).
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Of more interest to me—beside the exhibits of his speed boat and a model of his railway sleeping car—was the attached history museum that, leaving aside the cabinets with more of his tuxedos, went into detail about the Turkish campaigns in World War I (except those against the Armenians) and those in the 1919-22 war with Greece in western Anatolia.
The museum has a number of oversized paintings showing the destruction of Allied warships in the Dardanelles. In one picture the French battleship Bouvet is taking a direct hit to its midships and already listing hard to port. But in the museum I was most drawn to the terms of the Mudros Armistice, which was signed on October 30, 1918, ending the war between the Entente (Britain, French, and Russia) Powers and the Ottoman Empire.
At that point, while Ottoman armies were having success in the Caucasus, from which the Russians had withdrawn (McMeekin: “Of all the deathbed miracles that had saved the Ottoman Empire in the modern era, Lenin’s revolution was surely the greatest.”), they were losing heavily in Palestine, and the combined French-Serbian-British forces had broken through the Axis lines in Macedonia, eliminating Bulgaria from the war and threatening to take Constantinople (which they did).
Not wanting to fight on three fronts, the Ottomans surrendered, and what they gave up is listed in the terms agreed at Mudros, a town on the island Lemnos, not far from the mouth of the Dardanelles.
It was a Carthaginian peace that allowed the Allies to occupy and partition all of the Ottoman Empire. (For example, point 15 of the armistice reads: “All railways shall be under the control of the police forces of the Entente Powers.”) The Allies also secured the right to occupy the Armenian provinces in the east, and they received approval to liquidate what was left of the Ottoman Empire.
Mudros, and then the Greek invasion of central Anatolia, explain why Atatürk and his fellow officers decided to keep up the fight. On one panel in the museum he’s quoted as saying, in May 1919: “The occupation of Izmir by the Greek army has caused a profound agony far beyond our imagination and expression to the nation and army with I have close relations. Neither the nation nor the army shall yield and accept this unjustifiable attack on its existence.”
Other paintings in the museum suggest that Greek Smyrna was destroyed in response to massacres that the Greek army—following the lead of Greek clerics—committed in western Anatolia. (In the painting, Greek soldiers are bayoneting Turkish mothers and babies. I almost got the feeling that the Greeks themselves lit fire to Smyrna and jumped into the burning sea as part of their own plans.) In these accounts, order is only restored when Atatürk marches his troops into the city now called Izmir (Greeks have another version).
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One of the British officials most concerned with the war’s end in Asia Minor was Winston Churchill, who in September 1922 was Colonial Secretary and responsible for many British holdings in the Middle East, including the occupation sector around Çanakkale.
After the fall of Izmir, Churchill hated the idea of losing control of the Straits, and wanted the border between Europe and Asia drawn down the channels of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, but his colleagues in the British government talked him out of yet another war—although Britain would gets its fair share of conflict in the regions of the defunct Ottoman Empire that it took under its control.
And another way to look at the current conflict in the region between Russia and Ukraine is as the extension of the battles fought in World War I and afterwards between the remnants of the tsarist, Ottoman, and British empires—but to explore those vestiges I needed to head east to Erzurum and Kars, and eventually Georgia and Armenia.
