Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic and itsfirst President, stands as a towering figure of the 20th Century. Among the great leadersof history, few have achieved so much in so short period, transformed the life of a nationas decisively, and given such profound inspiration to the world at large. The Greatest Leader of ALL Time: ATATURK Soldier, Diplomat, Statesman, Orator, Teacher, Scholar, Genius Proactive Ataturk Community
Once home to the most elegants ball of the times, Atatürk’s favorite Hotel, Tokatlıyan, is now facing an unknown future. Considered as a great piece of architecture, the hotel has been waiting for a restoration for the last 30 years.
The 117-year old Tokatlıyan Hotel stands in the middle of Istanbul’s most crowded Istiklal Street, in Beyoğlu district. DAILY NEWS photo, Hasan ALTINIŞIK
Once a favorite haunt of modern Turkey’s founder, Istanbul’s legendary Tokatlıyan-Pera Hotel continues to face an uncertain future due to a lack of plans to renovate the severely dilapidated building.
“[Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk not only organized balls but also hosted his guests at a rich table during tea hours. It is so unfortunate that the hotel is now in a ruined state,” Professor Afife Batur, a scholar on architectural history at Istanbul Technical University, recently told the Hürriyet Daily News. “The hotel was a pioneer as a building in many ways. The first known hotel posters in Turkey belonged to the Tokatlıyan-Pera.”
Considered by scholars to be a significant architectural achievement, the Tokatlıyan-Pera is one of the best examples of fin-de-siècle architecture in Turkey.
The hotel belongs to the Üç Horan Armenian Church Foundation, one of the richest foundations of Turkey’s Armenian community.
The foundation’s administration, which has remained unchanged for 30 years, has chosen not to adopt any of the numerous renovation proposals that have been submitted over the years.
The hotel was built by Mıgırdiç Tokatlıyan, an Ottoman citizen of Armenian origin who migrated from the northern province of Tokat and adopted the last name Tokatlıyan. The hotel was opened in 1897 with 160 rooms and hosted a number of celebrities, later becoming a favorite of Atatürk.
Emphasizing the significance of the Tokatlıyan-Pera in regard to architecture, Batur said: “It was such a popular building that the Orient Express would transport all of Europe’s high society and the elite to this hotel and elegant balls were held there. These balls would generate several stories for the world tabloid press as well as the Turkish press.”
Another branch of the Tokatlıyan-Pera called the Tokatlıyan-Therabia was situated on the Bosphorus at the exact location of the present-day Tarabya Hotel, Batur said.
Architectural history specialist Dr. Fatma Sedes said the Tokatlıyan-Pera was the apple of the eye of Istanbul and European elites, as well as other political figures. “It was a unique building that left its mark on Istanbul’s architecture,” she added.
via Atatürk’s favorite hotel still doomed – Hurriyet Daily News.
Forgotten soldiers. We all know about Gallipoli; hopelessly conceived mess, dreamed up by Churchill to move the Great War from the glued trenches of France to a fast-moving invasion of Germany’s Ottoman allies in 1915.
Thousands of Arabs joined the fight against Anzac troops in Gallipoli
Embark a vast army of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, French and others east of Istanbul in order to smash “Johnny Turk”. Problem: the Turks fought back ferociously as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, titan of the 20th century, etc) used his Turkish 19th Army Division to confront the invaders’ first wave. Problem two: most of the division were not Turks at all.
They were Arabs. Indeed, two-thirds of the first men to push back the Anzac forces were Syrian Arabs from what is today Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and “Palestine”. And of the 87,000 “Turkish” troops who died defending the Dardanelles, many were Arabs. As Palestinian Professor Salim Tamari now points out, the same applies to the Ottoman battles of Suez, Gaza and Kut al-Amara. In the hitherto unknown diary of Private Ihsan Turjman of the Ottoman Fourth Army – he would today be called a Palestinian Arab – there was nothing but scorn for those Arab delegations from Palestine and Syria who sent delegations “to salute the memory of our martyrs in this war and to visit the wounded”.
What, he asked in his secretly kept diary, were these Arabs playing at? “Do they mean to strengthen the relationship between the Arab and Turkish nations… truth be told, the Palestinian and Syrian people are a cowardly and submissive lot. For if they were not so servile, they would have revolted against these Turkish barbarians,” he wrote. This is stunning stuff.
Far more Arabs fought against the Allies on behalf of the Ottomans than ever joined Lawrence’s Arab revolt, but here is Private Turjman expressing fury at his masters.
Year of the Locust is an odd little book, terribly short but darkly fascinating, concentrating on the Great War diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, one of them an actual Turk, the others Palestinian Arabs. We are used to British and German soldiers’ accounts of the Great War; scarcely ever do we read of the personal lives of our Ottoman opponents. The Turjman family home, by extraordinary chance, is the very same Jerusalem building, in ruins since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but now transformed into an art gallery, which I visited in Jerusalem just three weeks ago today.
In 1917, when Turjman was shot dead by an Ottoman officer, Palestinian Arabs were less concerned about the Balfour Declaration than whether the British would give them independence, annex them to Egypt or allow them a Syrian homeland. How wrong could they have been? Britain had no intention of adding to its Egyptian interests when it had already given its support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later, as Tamari recounts, the lives of the other two diarists, one Turkish, the other Arab, would revolve around Palestinians who came to believe that it was Jewish immigration that would threaten their future. But it is the Great War that dominates their memoirs.
In the anti-Ottoman literature that permeated the Arab world (and the West) after the war, it is important to remember these Ottomans, Turkish or Arab. There is a touch of Robert Graves here. Turjman’s diary records the plague of locusts that settled upon Jerusalem, the cholera and typhus and the 50 Jerusalem prostitutes sent to entertain Turkish officers, the Ottoman troops hanged outside the Jaffa Gate for desertion, the Turkish aircraft that crashes (“badly trained pilots or badly maintained engines”). Turjman even has a crush on a married woman.
Long forgotten now are the Arab-Turkish Ottoman inmates of the Tsarist prison camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, where Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, born in Jerusalem in 1892, ended up. Islam united them; class divided them. But there were concerts, sports clubs, football teams, a camp library, a Great War version of all the stalags and oflags made famous in the Second World War. Come the Bolshevik revolution, Shehadeh high-tailed it back to the Middle East – via Manchuria, Japan, China, India and Egypt via the Red Sea.
But the most impressive text in this tiny book is not a diary but a letter from Shehadeh’s wife, Saema, in Jerusalem when, 30 years later, he had set off for Gaza as a British mandate officer. “I woke up early this morning,” she writes. “I walked around in the garden for a while. I picked up some flowers and leaves. I picked up some beans to cook for myself. While I was milling around, you were always on my mind. It is your presence that makes this garden beautiful.
“Nothing has a taste without you. May God not deprive me of your presence, for it is you who makes my (our) life beautiful. When you left us last time I noticed that you had a little cold. I am thinking about it. Let me know about your health. Your life’s partner, who loves you with all her heart. Saema.” Now that’s quite a love letter to get from your wife.
via Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent.
ISTANBUL // Six decades after it came into force, a law protecting the memory of the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk still has the power to rock careers, trigger prison sentences and block access to YouTube.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk inspects troops at an officer's training school in Constantinople in 1926. Bettmann / Corbis
Earlier this year, a court in eastern Anatolia acquitted Ahmet Ayicil, a professor who faced up to three years in prison. He had been charged for allegedly saying in his class that Ataturk was a heathen “idol”.
Denounced in 2007 by a student who did not attend the class personally, Prof Ayicil went through a lengthy trial based on Law Number 5816, a special provision that makes it a crime to “denigrate the memory of Ataturk”. Destroying, damaging or desecrating Ataturk busts or monuments carries sentences of up to five years.
The court found Prof Ayicil not guilty because of a lack of evidence. But in 2008, Atilla Yayla, another professor, was given a suspended sentence of 15 months in prison for criticising Kemalism, a secularist ideology based on Ataturk, and for telling a public forum that the EU, which Turkey wants to join, would be wondering why there were “pictures of this man” in every Turkish office.
The law was passed by Turkey’s parliament on July 25, 1951, and came into effect six days later. A former general of the Ottoman army who is credited with erecting Turkey’s republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, Ataturk is a national hero for most Turks. His portrait hangs in every school and public office and is routinely shown during public functions. Sometimes referred to as the “great leader” in official speeches, Ataturk’s image adorns coins and lira bills.
But while Turks in general revere Ataturk, who died in 1938, some wonder whether the time has come to abolish or amend regulations like Law No 5816 because they limit free expression and are unsuitable for a modern democracy.
“It is not a modern law,” Halil Dogan, the president of the Democratic Lawyers Association, a group of lawyers campaigning for democratic reform, said in a telephone interview this week. “Of course everybody should be protected against denigration, but Turkey’s current laws are sufficient for that.”
Mr Dogan stressed that, as with every law, the interpretation and implementation of Law No 5816 was the key. Several high-profile investigations and decisions by prosecutors and courts, based on suspected defamations of Ataturk’s legacy, have been denounced as attempts to stifle critics.
One of the most controversial cases was a verdict blocking nationwide access to YouTube on the grounds that it included a video denigrating Ataturk. The ban was lifted in October last year, two-and-a-half years after it came into effect, because the video clip was erased. “The YouTube interpretation [of the law] was definitely a step against the freedom of speech,” Mr Dogan said.
In another example that made headlines, Ipek Calislar, a writer, was tried in Istanbul for writing in a book that Ataturk disguised himself as a woman once to escape a planned attempt on his life. Ms Calislar was acquitted in 2006.
Three years later, Can Dundar, a journalist and filmmaker, was questioned by prosecutors after complaints against Mustafa, a documentary about Ataturk’s life that depicted him as a sometimes lonely man who drank alcohol. A comic book titled Genc Mustafa, or Young Mustafa, which included a scene in which Ataturk was beaten as a young man, triggered a trial against the publishers earlier this year. The case is ongoing.
But Mr Dogan said he was confident that the law may be changed because Turkey, which has brought in several reforms for its EU bid, was strengthening the rights of its citizens. “I think that freedom of speech will be widened, I see a chance to change the law,” he said.
The issue of Ataturk’s legacy is expected to come up during talks about a new constitution for Turkey, due to begin after parliament returns from its recess on October 1. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as well as the two biggest opposition parties have formed committees to prepare for the talks, the daily Vatan reported this week.
Turkey’s constitution was drawn up under military rule in 1982 and is widely considered outdated and anti-democratic. One of the problems facing lawmakers, academics and non-governmental groups discussing the new constitution is the question of whether the reference to “Ataturk nationalism” as the state ideology should be included in the new text.
Some legal experts of the AKP have suggested that the new constitution should be free of references to “Ataturk nationalism”, Kemalism or other ideologies. But the secularist Republican People’s Party, the main opposition party, has said it wants to keep the first three paragraphs, which describe Turkey as a republic committed, among other things, to “Ataturk nationalism”.
tseibert@thenational.ae
via Some Turks ready to abolish law that protects memory of Ataturk – The National.
It remains one of the biggest mysteries for foreign visitors to Turkey: Why are the pictures and statues of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk still so omnipresent more than 70 years after his death?
There is no country in Europe where you will find a similar situation. In monarchies, portraits of the ruling king or queen adorn official state offices, but these are depictions of the living monarch and will be replaced after his or her rule with those of his of her successor. In republics, the same applies to the president in office. Nowhere else will you find such an abundance of representations of a former king or president so many years after his death. For many Europeans, this calls to mind all sorts of associations with the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe or the present day authoritarian regimes in Central Asia, governed by anti-democratic ideologies and old-fashioned despots. By both counts, these comparisons do not bode well for a positive opinion of Turkey.
On the other hand, most Turks find it hard to cope with this Western incomprehension. They blame the visitors for their insensitivity and lack of knowledge about Turkish history and defend Atatürk’s ongoing domination of public spaces by referring to his pivotal role in saving the country from annihilation 90 years ago and for laying the still invaluable groundwork for today’s Turkey. You will probably find more ardent supporters of Atatürk among the Turks who do not vote for the current ruling party, but even among the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) rank and file, many would passionately make the case for honoring Atatürk’s legacy in such a visible way.
I vividly recall an incident some years ago when a then-colleague from the European Parliament, knowledgeable about the country and strongly in favor of Turkey’s accession to the EU, cautiously suggested in an off-the-record conversation with Turkish journalists that maybe one day, as a sign of strengthened democracy and growing self-confidence in Turkey, the pictures of Atatürk might slowly fade away. His remarks were leaked and caused a flurry of commotion in the Turkish media. Before being able to visit Turkey again, he had to explain publicly that he did not intend to insult Atatürk or his ideas.
The Atatürk perception gap between Turks and non-Turks is not going to disappear quickly. But there is good news for those who find it important to bridge that divide and stimulate some common understanding about the founder of the Turkish republic. Now for sale in Turkish bookshops is the latest publication by Şükrü Hanioğlu, a professor at Princeton University in the US and a distinguished scholar on the late Ottoman Empire and the early republic. The book is called “Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography.” In less than 250 pages and in a very accessible style, Hanioğlu shows how the founder of the Turkish Republic was an intellectual and social product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through an analysis of Atatürk’s life, ideas and work, the author explores the uneasy transition from the late Ottoman imperial order to the modern Turkish nation-state and traces Atatürk’s intellectual development.
The book is a must read for both Turks and non-Turks. Turkish historiography tends to view Atatürk as a solitary genius who singlehandedly wrought a miracle in the form of modern Turkey. One way of showing respect for this extraordinary achievement is by hanging his picture on all Turkish walls even today. While fully acknowledging the enormous impact of his leadership, Hanioğlu explains the ways in which Atatürk’s views were shaped, for instance, by his Thessalonikian background and his education at non-religious and military schools. In constructing his vision of a new Turkey, Atatürk acquired most of his ideas from Western and Ottoman grand theories on the importance of science and the diminishing role of religion in the modern world. The book does not shy away from criticism and explains that the radicalism of Atatürk’s program led to the authoritarian character of his politics. Like many other transformative state builders, he harbored little tolerance for dissent or criticism.
Let us hope that, after reading this book, both foreigners and Turks alike will have a better understanding of who Atatürk really was, where he got his ideas from and why he is so important to Turkey. We will see in 20 years time whether this improved and more balanced awareness will have an impact on the number of pictures and statues of Atatürk in this country and the appreciation for them by guests and hosts alike.
As the grandson of Russell Boardman, I enjoyed reading Ms. Roscoe’s review of the premiere showing of Cape Cod over Istanbul [Aug. 5, 2011: “When Cape Cod Flew to Istanbul”]. Overall, I found the article to be informative and well-written, but I must take exception to the rather careless and erroneous parenthetical remark regarding Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s role in what happened in Armenia in 1915 (and not in 1918 as stated in the article) and the implication that Boardman and Polando were probably aware of Ataturk’s alleged role in this unfortunate episode of modern Turkish-Armenian history.
I highly recommend reading Andrew Mango’s magnificent biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk was intensely engaged during 1915 as the commander of the Anafartalar Group in the gruesome defense of the Gallipoli peninsula (on the other size of Asia Minor from Armenia) while the decision to deport the Armenians from eastern Anatolia was taken by the CUP leadership in Istanbul in April 1915. If blame is to be assigned to the Turkish leadership of the day for the consequences of this decision, then the CUP leadership, in particular, Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha, bear far more responsibility for what happened than Ataturk.
It is unfortunate that too many Americans today are unfamiliar with the character and accomplishments of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. No man did more for the right of women to participate as equals in a modern secular republic in whose creation, out of the ashes of a despotic and crumbling Ottoman empire, he played an enormous role. Nor did anyone embrace with more passion and conviction such western notions as the separation of religion and state, the rule of law, and the reliance upon modern science rather than myth and superstition in making decisions regarding the public good.
Why would a bitter rival from Greece during the 1921-1923 Turkish war of independence (Eleftherios Venizelos) later, as Prime Minister of Greece, nominate Ataturk for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934? Why would Boardman and Polando choose to fly to Istanbul and be received by Ataturk if they thought that he might have been responsible for what happened in Armenia in 1915? I would be interested to hear Ms. Roscoe’s answers to these questions and her thoughts on these matters.
Russell Teglas
Arlington
via The Barnstable Patriot – LETTERS: Setting the record straight.
FAMILY PRIDE – Dorothy Polando and son David enjoy the reception for a new documentary about John Polando and Russell Boardman’s daring 1931 flight from New York to Istanbul. The medal around her neck was given to her husband by the Turks.
New documentary celebrates pioneering achievement
The documentary Cape Cod to Istanbul premiered on July 31 at the Cape Cod Cultural Center in South Yarmouth to commemorate the 80th anniversary of an historic flight taken in 1931. They flew on a mix of skill, good mechanics, know-how and daring. In a little over two days (49 hours), a specially designed airplane flew from New York City’s Floyd Bennett Field, 5,011.8 miles to Istanbul, Turkey. The pilots were John L. Polando and Russell N. Boardman, who named their plane the “Cape Cod” and painted it on their fuselage because it was the first area discovered in America.
Boardman was born to a farm family in Connecticut in 1898. According to the documentary made over four years by Turkish director Aydin Erel, Boardman was both virtuous and a daredevil, becoming a Hollywood stunt pilot, flying for such as Howard Hughes in the film Hell’s Angels. Polando, born in 1901 in Lynn, learned to fly in 1918 and joined the Army Air Corps in 1927.
They met at a “Wall of Death” motorcycle event in Revere, where Boardman was a cyclist, and became lifelong friends. Boardman thought Polando at 120 pounds and with excellent aviation mechanic skills would make a great co-pilot. Together they pursued the dream of breaking a world record.
A few transcontinental flights had occurred in those days. One at least had been flown in an aeroplane designed by Giuseppe Bellanca. Together with Bellanca Aviation, Polando and Boardman redesigned Boardman’s plane “The American Legion” after a fire had badly damaged it. No longer was it a dragonfly-like biplane typical of the times, instead it was a monoplane that sported a set of extra-long wings to carry an extra big load of fuel which it would burn at 10 gallons an hour, for a seventy mile span. During a test flight with 740 gallons aboard, the plane was too heavy. They jettisoned 500 gallons over Brooklyn, and flew back, sparks flying behind them.
Working with meteorologists and mapmakers, and with a new distance-measuring device, the stripped-down “ship” weighed one ton before loading it with fuel for a final weight of thee and a half tons. The NR 761W with the new name of “Cape Cod” was ready to go.
From New York over Long Island up to Newfoundland, through massive cloud cover they dropped a New York Times out to the Harbour Grace island lighthouse. They dropped the papers at various spots on the trip, as it was their major financier along with ten thousand postcards the pilots had sold for two dollars a piece as mementos. Flying on to Ireland, then Paris and Munich, they circled around the Alps at night to avoid crashing into them. They came near failure when a fuel tank went dry, stalling out and starting up to continue in the day onwards to Istanbul. (They had decided to fly there rather than to Moscow because the distance would be enough to break the former record for the longest transcontinental flight.) They arrived having eaten a roast chicken and sleeping in brief shifts, pretty tired and hungry, and temporarily deaf.
The government of Turkey welcomed them with celebration, grand hotels, medals of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, and gold, and vast proclamations. Ataturk, Gazi Mustafa Kemal, the Grand Pasha said they had “turned the Black Sea into a lake.” He commended the aviators as part of the “youth (who) are the creators of compassion.” (There is grim irony here to those who know history and are aware of Ataturk’s huge part in the Armenian genocide of 1918, a history of which it may be likely the pilots were aware.)
Back at home President Herbert Hoover gave them each the Distinguished Flying Cross. The two traveled to New York and Boston where parades were given in their honor, finally arriving at Cape Cod. Boardman settled eventually in Bass River and Polando in East Sandwich, and members of the family still live in both places. One of the pilots said on a newsreel that they loved Cape Cod: “It’s a wonderful place, cool in the summer and warm in the winter!”
In their honor the Barnstable Municipal Airport was named Boardman/Polando Field in 1981. When the new airport layout is complete, it will do more than show the extant plaque to commemorate the two.
At the Yarmouth event, t about a hundred folks, including Boardman and Polando friends, family, and airport commission members, spanned ages from the Greatest Generation, down to toddling great great grandchildren. (The audience was so good looking and clean cut, it was like a brisk blue wind blowing out of the unpolluted skies.)
Dorothy Boardman (who kept the Patriot’s books for 15 years), is now 95. She told the audience she had seen a wonderful newsreel about two brave men in her hometown of Milwaukee.
“I told my father, who had been a World War I pilot, about how these wonderful men had made an astonishing record,” she recalled. “My father was impressed.”
Thirteen years and four months later, she was the head USO hostess at the Brown Palace in Denver when John Polando and a friend walked in as the bar was closing. She suggested the men go across the street to get something to eat. “I don’t think I can find it,” John said, enlisting her help (against regulations). He and his friend tossed a double-headed coin to see who would take her home. John (who had been previously married) “won.” They were married on April Fool’s Day. “The military had a sense of humor then,” Polando said. “They gave him two days off.”
They never discussed airship accidents, Polando said, and had a wonderful relationship, blessed with three children and numerous descendants. Boardman died two years after the historic flight. Polando lived until 1985. The plane itself came back to the states on the ship “Excalibur” and later was lost after being shipped to Mexico.
The film has a few difficulties. Some footage is hard to hear and needs subtitles. Subtitles that are on the footage need to be larger and clearer. Names are not flashed on the screen so it is difficult to tell which pilot is speaking, or who the political figures are. The loose ends of where the pilots ended up in their lives, what they did, how they lived after the flight were never told, leaving the story incomplete. But the feat itself, performed without the instruments we take for granted today, lives on in aviation history.
“They were all alone up there in those days,” an audience member said. They sure were.
