What I can see

This three-storey building of Macedonian folk architecture with striking enclosed balconies used to be the home of Mustafa Kemal (Mustafa was his family name, Kemal his army name, that means maturity, perfection), later called Ataturk (= Father of the Turks). He was born here in 1881. It is now a museum that features photographs of Kemal from different periods of his life, as well as personal items, some of which have been brought here from Ankara, as well as kitchenware, documents from his school years, the room where he was born and his mother’s bedroom, among others. Most of the furniture is authentic, although several pieces have come from his mausoleum and the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Museum visits are scheduled through the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki.

What I can't see

Turkish visitors to the museum often consider a visit here as a kind of pilgrimage. Kemal came from a poor family and became a military leader, politician and reformer of the Turks. He belonged to the movement of the Young Turks which formed in 1908 in Thessaloniki, which at the time was under Ottoman sovereignty. Their manifesto, written in 10 languages, stated the ideals of modern Turkey: equality, freedom and justice for all. Kemal envisioned a secular and de-Islamized Turkish state. He replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, thus contributing to the dissemination of theatre and classical music in Turkey, while strengthening “Turkishness” by using nationalism and language, rather than religion. Finally, he obligated citizens to use their family name by law. Apart from secularizing Turkey, he was also a gifted military leader, who disrupted the expansive course of Greece deep into Asia Minor at a time when the so-called “Great Idea of Greece” was to recover Byzantine Empire borders and to “eliminate” Turkey. His military action culminated in the Smyrna (Izmir) Catastrophe, where he committed war crimes that led to massive waves of mainly Greek refugees. Mustafa Kemal died on November 10, 1938. The mentors of Turkish nationalism were the Crimean Tatars and Azeris (Turkic-speakers of tsarist Russia), who turned the hitherto disparaging term “Turk” (meaning uneducated Muslim farmer) into a term with a positive connotation that gradually replaced “Ottoman”.

 

Info

• Address: 17 Apostolou Pavlou St.
• Phone: +30 2310 248452

Bibliography