The Ottoman officer who held the ridge at Gallipoli, refused the peace that would have carved up Anatolia, won the war that followed, and then abolished the sultanate, the caliphate, the fez and the Arabic script.
The fork
May 1919. Sent to Samsun on the Black Sea as an inspector to disband the army, he does the opposite and starts organising a national resistance. The government in Constantinople condemns him; within three years he is the government.
What they wanted
A Turkish nation-state, secular and Western in its laws, with Anatolia for Turks. Fast, and from the top.
What it cost
A one-party state; Kurdish revolts crushed in 1925 and 1937–38; a republic that never reckoned with what had been done to its Armenians; and the population exchange it accepted as part of its foundation.
The fight
Founding father or authoritarian moderniser? In Turkey he is a monument and an argument at once, and insulting his memory is still a crime.