Ataturk's Mausoleum

We have been on the road much of the day today, traveling between Cappadocia and Ankara, the capitol of Turkey. In 1923, when Ataturk (the founding father of the Turkish Republic) put into motion a massive campaign of modernization and Westernization, the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara. Ankara was at that time essentially a provincial backwater, and a huge building program was necessary to remake the city into one befitting the new republic.

I think we have mentioned Ataturk a number of times so far, but I'm not sure that any of us has really clarified his significance to the Turks. After WWI, the Ottoman Empire was in tatters. This previously massive empire (it extended at one time from Austria through the Balkans to modern Turkey, through current-day Syria and the Levant, through Israel and across a strip of Northern Africa) backed the losing side in WWI and was brutally punished by the victors. The treaty the Ottomans were forced to sign at the end of the war left them with essentially nothing but a swath of Northern Turkey and the city of Istanbul, and even Istanbul was subject to significant trade restrictions. Ataturk and the Young Turks refused to accept this state of affairs and staged a revolution against the Ottoman government, nullifying the previous treaty, militarily reclaiming for the Turks what is now modern Turkey, establishing the Turkish Republic, and negotiating a new treaty to claim the land they now possessed. For this reason Ataturk is widely regarded in Turkey as the savior of the Turks, and he retains the status of a national hero to a much greater extent than does a figure like George Washington in the U.S. Ataturk's portrait can be found all over Turkey, in restaurants, private homes, classrooms, government buildings, shops, and a variety of unexpected places. His mausoleum has a status akin to a secular pilgrimage site (where is George Washington buried? Do Americans ever make a special trip there?)

For many non-Turks, Ataturk is more of a mixed bag. Modern Turkey was like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Empire, but in the process many people were burned. Ataturk reformulated the alphabet from an Arabic-like Ottoman script to a Roman script to make it accessible to Westerners, dramatically raised the literacy rate, adopted secularism (based on the French laicite), prohibited traditional Turkish clothing and demanded that women uncover their heads and men wear no hats other than those worn in Europe (e.g. Fedora rather than fez), and defined a form of nationalism that drew heavily on Turkish ethnicity.

The Ataturk mausoleum was fascinating, and it's high on my personal list of places to bring the students next year. At the site we read some of the official Ataturk hagiography (for the students: I use this term loosely - usually it means a biography of a saint, including a variety of miraculous claims. In this case I'm using it to refer to the claims about Ataturk - you'll see why I use the term in a minute). The official story is that Ataturk died in 1938 and was temporarily buried at the ethnology museum (go figure). After he died there was a contest to determine a design for his mausoleum, and it was constructed. Then Ataturk's remains were dug up and the casket was opened only to find him preserved intact, just the way he died (this type of claim tends to be made for saints too)! He was buried in the new mausoleum after that (in the early 1950s).

There is a museum of the history of the Republic attached to the mausoleum which gives a distinctly Turkish understanding of the last 90 years. I think it would be a useful place to visit early in the course because it's probably the clearest example of all we've seen here of some of the ideas we've been trying to help the students understand, such as the concept of a hidden curriculum.

We were pretty tired late in the afternoon today when we got to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations today, but I gave the students an assignment to look at which civilizations were amply represented and which are underrepresented (most obviously the Greeks, who are the Turks' historic enemy, and are generally lumped in with Romans as "Hellenistic and Roman" civilizations if they are mentioned at all). The students were also told to think about the meanings behind the adaptive reuse of this building. Adaptive reuse is a concept from architecture (thanks James!) referring to adaptation of a historic building for use as something else. In this case an Ottoman (Turkic) bedestan (indoor marketplace) has been adapted to house artifacts from the neolithic era until the 19th century in the geographic area that is now Turkey. The vast majority of these artifacts are from non-Turkic peoples.

Ramona mentioned the issue of eating during Ramadan. This has been a complicated issue for us, particularly during the last part of our tour with a guide who is a secularist and has some disdain for religious Muslims. After Ramadan began we tried to eat only indoors and we had late dinners so we wouldn't be eating in front of those on the streets who were fasting. This has been, to me, a matter of respect and an attempt not to interfere with other people's form of devotion. I certainly don't expect our students to fast during Ramadan but do want to encourage them to be respectful. Sometimes we've been ofered tea during the day by people who are fasting. We can refuse once, but beyond that would be impolite. As Ramona mentioned, we've been assured by various people that for them continuing to fast when people around them are eating and drinking affords them extra blessing or extra merit for resisting in the face of temptation.

I must end here for now, because it's a very short night tonight for us. Wake up call is at 2:40 am. We will see you all soon.

Suzanne Mallery

Soldier guarding Ataturk's Mausolem