The Turkish War of Independence is usually told as a story of battles, such as İnönü, Sakarya, the Great Offensive. But the war that decided those battles' meaning was fought somewhere else, in congress halls and newspaper offices, in a one-room parliament in Ankara and a tax office trying to feed an army with no money.
The soldiers won Anatolia back on the ground. It was politicians, journalists, provincial notables, women's organizers, and a handful of ideologues who decided what kind of country would be built on it.
This is the story of that other war: the political struggle between two rival Turkish governments, one in occupied Istanbul and one in what was then an inland market town called Ankara; the social upheaval of a population already exhausted by a decade of war, expulsion, and disease; the cultural project of remaking Ottoman subjects into Turkish citizens; and the economic scramble to keep a resistance movement fed, clothed, and armed with almost no functioning state behind it.
This story covers the same period as the military campaign, from the armistice of October 1918 to the proclamation of the Republic on 29 October 1923, but it asks a different question. Not who won the war, but what kind of nation came out of it.
A country without a government
When the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918, it did not collapse the way Germany, Austria-Hungary, or Russia had. There was no revolution, no abdication, no mutiny in the ranks. The dynasty that had ruled since the fourteenth century simply kept going, stripped of nearly everything that had made it an empire. What Mudros left behind was not chaos exactly, but a vacuum: a state whose army was still largely intact, whose capital was under foreign guns, and whose government had not really an idea about who was actually in charge.
Three days after the armistice, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party that had ruled the empire as a one-party state since 1913, held its final congress and voted to dissolve itself. That same night its leadership, Talat, Enver, and Cemal Pasha among them, boarded a German torpedo boat and fled the country, leaving the empire's most powerful political organization headless overnight. Into the gap stepped a crowd of rival claimants. The Sublime Porte hoped to use the crisis to restore real royal authority under the new sultan, Mehmed VI (Vahdettin). The old Freedom and Accord Party (Hürriyet ve İtilâf Fırkası), exiled and imprisoned for years under Unionist rule, returned from the wilderness hoping to save what it could through cooperation with the Allies. Ottoman Greeks and Armenians began renouncing their allegiance to the empire altogether through their own patriarchates. Kurdish and Arab leaders weighed their own paths to autonomy. And former Unionists, discredited as a party but still embedded throughout the army, police, and civil service, waited to see which faction might give them cover. Most of them eventually found it in a general few people outside the officer corps had heard of: Mustafa Kemal Pasha.
Part of what made this vacuum so dangerous, and ultimately so productive for a movement like Mustafa Kemal's, was that the ideology holding the old empire together had already quietly died before the armistice was even signed. Ottomanism, the nineteenth-century idea that Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews could all be bound together as equal subjects of a single multiethnic, multireligious state, had been fatally undermined by a decade of Balkan territorial losses, wartime ethnic cleansing, and the wholesale departure of the empire's Arab provinces under Allied occupation. By 1918 what remained under any realistic Ottoman control was, for the first time in centuries, an overwhelmingly Muslim landscape stretching from eastern Thrace to the Persian frontier: mostly Turks, but also Kurds, Circassians, and Muslim refugee communities from the Balkans and the Caucasus, with only a shrinking Greek and Armenian minority population still inside its borders and even fewer of them still willing to imagine a shared future with the state that governed them. A movement built on Turkish and Muslim solidarity rather than a restored multiethnic empire was, in that sense, less an ideological innovation than a recognition of a demographic and political fact that had already settled itself by the time Mustafa Kemal stepped off the boat at Samsun.
A country in ruins
Underneath the political scramble in the capital, the country itself was falling apart. A decade of continuous warfare, first the Balkan Wars, then the World War, had gutted rural Anatolia. The province of Yozgat had lost half its Muslim male population to conscription. In Van, the wartime governor estimated that nearly ninety-five percent of prewar residents were dead or displaced. Administration in much of the Anatolian and Thracian countryside had all but collapsed by 1919, and army deserters turned bandit ran informal fiefdoms with the tacit tolerance of local officials who had no means to stop them. Hundreds of thousands of refugees moved through this landscape in both directions at once: Ottoman Christians trying to reclaim homes now occupied by Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, and, from the other direction, over a million refugees fleeing the Russian Civil War poured through the Turkish Straits, with tens of thousands of White Russian émigrés settling in Istanbul for months or years. It was into this landscape, not a stable postwar state but a country running on inertia and local improvisation, that the national movement would have to build something resembling a government from scratch.
With the elected Chamber of Deputies dissolved and no clear path back to normal parliamentary life, Sultan Vahdettin tried an older, more theatrical form of consultation instead. In May 1919 he summoned a Sultanate Council, a one-off gathering of 131 notables from across Ottoman civil society, to advise the government on whether to seek new elections or accept some form of British or American mandate. The council accomplished almost nothing beyond talk, but the public mood it exposed was unmistakable. Just days later, on 23 May 1919, tens of thousands of Istanbul residents gathered in Sultanahmet Square in what is generally reckoned the largest act of civil disobedience in the city's history to that point, organized by the Turkish Hearths cultural association to protest the Greek occupation of İzmir. The government that issued formal condemnations of the landing while doing nothing to reverse it was already, by the summer of 1919, losing whatever authority it still had over its own capital's streets.
Istanbul, meanwhile, tried to manage its own reckoning with the war just ended. A general amnesty freed dissidents the Unionists had exiled or imprisoned, and the new government under Damat Ferid Pasha, the sultan's brother-in-law, opened war crimes trials against the fled Unionist leadership and their agents in the provinces, prosecuting corruption, wartime profiteering, and the organized killing and dispossession of the empire's Armenian population. Most of the accused were tried in absentia, having already escaped the country, and the public hanging of a district official convicted for his role in the deportations set off protests rather than satisfaction. The trials, run under Allied encouragement and using British-controlled Malta as a holding ground for the accused, never shook the widespread sense that they were a tool of occupation rather than justice.
Many Ottomans, meanwhile, still hoped Washington might rescue them from the whole mess. Since the United States had never formally declared war on the Ottoman Empire, a substantial part of the Istanbul elite saw it as a possible neutral arbiter, and the writer Halide Edip Hanım (later Adıvar) led a Wilsonian Principles Society that lobbied for the empire to become an American League of Nations mandate rather than face partition by Britain, France, Italy, and Greece. American commissions came to investigate, but Woodrow Wilson's collapsing health and the Senate's refusal to ratify League membership ended any real chance of that outcome by the second half of 1919.
Congresses, a pact, and a rival capital
Mustafa Kemal arrived in this environment not as a revolutionary but, on paper, as exactly what the sultan's government needed: a war hero with impeccable credentials and, crucially, someone who had kept enough distance from the CUP's inner circle to be politically usable. Appointed inspector of the Ninth Army in eastern Anatolia at the end of April 1919, ostensibly to restore order and oversee demobilization, he landed at Samsun on 19 May with a mandate that gave him sweeping authority over both military and civil affairs across most of the region. He used it for the opposite of its stated purpose.
Over the following weeks Mustafa Kemal built the political infrastructure of a resistance movement while formally still an Ottoman officer. He met with fellow generals, Kazım Pasha, Ali Fuat Pasha, Refet Pasha, Rauf Bey, and on 22 June issued the Amasya Circular (Amasya Tamimi), a telegram to provincial authorities across Anatolia declaring that the nation's independence was in danger and that the Istanbul government could no longer be trusted to defend it. It called for a regional congress at Erzurum and a national one at Sivas. When the government ordered him back to the capital in early July, he resigned his commission rather than comply, and the war ministry's order to have his own successor, Kazım Paşa (later Karabekir), arrest him was simply refused. It was a quiet but decisive moment: had Karabekir sided with Istanbul instead, the movement might have had no leader left standing.
Erzurum and Sivas
The Erzurum Congress, which opened in July with delegates from the six eastern provinces, produced what amounted to a declaration of independence in slow motion: Anatolia and Thrace within the borders held at the time of the Mudros armistice were indivisible, Greek and Armenian claims on the territory were rejected, and if the Istanbul government could not defend national sovereignty, a provisional one would have to. A Committee of Representation (Heyet-i Temsiliye) was formed to act as an executive body, with Mustafa Kemal as its chairman.
The Sivas Congress that September repeated and broadened these principles with delegates from across the country, folding the many local Defense of Rights societies that had sprung up into a single organization, the Anatolia and Rumelia Defense of Rights Association (Anadolu ve Rumeli Müdâfaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti), and forced every delegate present, most of them former Unionists themselves, to swear they would never revive the CUP. Together, these resolutions became the core of what would soon be called the National Pact, the Misak-ı Millî: a demand for full sovereignty and self-determination within Anatolia and Thrace's Muslim-majority frontiers, modeled explicitly on Wilson's own principles even as Wilson's own government was losing interest in the region.
The last Ottoman parliament
What followed was a slow-motion transfer of legitimacy from Istanbul to Ankara that neither side fully controlled. Grand Vizier Ali Rıza Pasha, a general with nationalist sympathies who replaced the resigned Damat Ferid, negotiated the Amasya Protocol with Mustafa Kemal's movement in October 1919, agreeing to hold new elections for the Ottoman parliament on the understanding that the results would honor the Sivas resolutions. The December 1919 election, boycotted by Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and the old Freedom and Accord Party, returned an overwhelming nationalist majority. Mustafa Kemal himself was elected a deputy from Erzurum but calculated, correctly, that his parliamentary immunity would mean nothing to an occupying power, and stayed in Anatolia rather than take his seat. When the last Ottoman Chamber of Deputies convened in Istanbul in January 1920, it formally adopted the National Pact as its own peace program on 28 January, a document the Allies had no intention of accepting.
The Allied response came on 16 March 1920 in the shape of a coordinated raid on Istanbul, backed by warships in the harbor, that arrested nationalist deputies, occupied government buildings, and eventually sent some 150 accused politicians and officials into internment on Malta. The sultan, under direct Allied pressure, dissolved parliament on 11 April and effectively suspended constitutional government altogether. It was, in retrospect, the single worst move the occupying powers could have made for their own interests. By decapitating the Istanbul government and its parliament, the Allies removed the only rival source of Turkish political legitimacy and handed Mustafa Kemal's movement an argument it could not have invented for itself: that Ankara, not Istanbul, was now the only place where the Turkish nation's elected representatives could actually meet.
A rival assembly, a rival faith
Mustafa Kemal moved immediately. Deputies who had escaped the Istanbul roundup, along with newly elected delegates from across the country, gathered in Ankara, and on 23 April 1920 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, TBMM) convened for the first time in a building that had previously served as the local headquarters of the CUP. It elected Kemal as its speaker and effective head of government. The assembly's membership reflected the diversity of Anatolia itself: Turks, Circassians, Kurds, and at least one Jewish deputy sat together under a name, Turkey, that had never before been used as the country's formal title. The choice of that word over "Ottoman Empire" was itself a political statement, a quiet declaration that whatever came out of this movement, it would not simply be a continuation of the old multinational empire under new management.
The sultan's government fought back on the one ground it still controlled absolutely: religion. Sultan Vahdettin, as caliph, issued a fatwa branding the Nationalist revolutionaries as infidels who had committed apostasy and calling for the death of their leaders, and Damat Ferid's government sentenced Mustafa Kemal, Halide Edip, and Ali Fuat to death in absentia for treason. Ankara answered in kind. The mufti of Ankara issued a counter-fatwa declaring that the caliphate itself was a prisoner of the Entente and the Damat Ferid government, and that the nationalist movement's real goal was to free the sultan-caliph from his captors. It was a genuinely dangerous moment for Mustafa Kemal's movement, since much of rural Anatolia took religious authority seriously and a fatwa from the caliph himself was not something to shrug off.
The sultan pressed his advantage by raising an irregular force known as the Kuva-yi İnzibatiye, the Caliphate Army, and funded a second body of roughly two thousand men from non-Muslim communities to fight the nationalists directly. Combined with the bandit leader Ahmet Anzavur's Circassian irregulars, these forces triggered a genuine, if short, civil war in northwestern Anatolia through the spring and early summer of 1920, with fighting around İzmit, Düzce, Bolu, and Gerede that drew in British troops and aircraft as well. It ended not with a decisive battle but with desertion: facing determined nationalist militia under commanders like the Circassian irregular leader known as Çerkez Ethem, much of the Caliphate Army simply defected or melted away, and the British, weighing a general staff report that concluded a full suppression of the nationalist movement would require twenty-seven divisions Britain did not have to spare, quietly disbanded what remained of the sultan's force by the end of June.
The assembly at work
Governing from Ankara meant inventing a state almost from nothing, and the Grand National Assembly's first order of institutional business was to decide what kind of state it actually was. In January 1921 it passed the Teşkilat-ı Esasiye, a spare twenty-three-article constitution that did something the old Ottoman constitutional order never had: it located sovereignty explicitly in the nation rather than the sultan. "Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation or condition," the document declared, and executive and legislative power alike were vested in the assembly itself, which governed through committees of its own deputies rather than a separate cabinet answerable to a monarch. It was, by design, a legally revolutionary document dressed in modest, almost bureaucratic language, careful not to explicitly abolish the sultanate even as it built a government that no longer needed one. It also pushed power outward rather than concentrating it in Ankara, granting real authority to local councils, an emphasis some historians have called Turkey's first real experiment in local democracy.
First Group, Second Group
None of this meant the assembly was unified. From its earliest sessions a loose bloc of deputies chafed at how much personal authority Mustafa Kemal was accumulating, and in May 1921 he moved to formalize his own base of support as the Anatolia and Rumelia Defense of Rights Group, later simply called the First Group, inside the assembly. Deputies who declined to join it, a mix of religious conservatives, provincial notables wary of centralization, and former Unionists suspicious of Mustafa Kemal's rising personal power, coalesced the following year into an organized opposition, the Second Group. The two blocs argued fiercely over the extraordinary emergency powers repeatedly granted to Kemal during the war, over the pace and direction of reform, and over how far the revolution should go once the fighting stopped. At its most pointed, in November 1922, the Second Group even tried to introduce a bill to strip Mustafa Kemal of his own assembly seat. It failed, but the fact that it was seriously proposed says something about how contested Mustafa Kemal's authority still was within his own parliament even after the military campaign had turned decisively in his favor.
The First Group's position was never quite as secure as its dominance in floor votes suggested, and it did not stay tolerant of organized opposition for long. When the country finally went back to the polls in 1923 for what amounted to a founding election for the new order, the Second Group and other independent critics were largely squeezed out of the new assembly altogether, less through a fair fight than through the First Group's control of candidate lists and local party machinery. It was an early sign of a pattern that would recur throughout the following decade: a movement that had built its legitimacy on the language of popular sovereignty and elected representation proved, in practice, considerably less patient with organized dissent once it held the reins of state itself.
Tribunals and dissent
The war years also saw the establishment of a parallel system of Independence Tribunals (İstiklal Mahkemeleri), extraordinary courts empowered to try desertion, treason, banditry, and rebellion outside the ordinary judicial process, with sentences including summary execution. They were a blunt instrument, used against army deserters and rebel leaders but also, more controversially, against communities the government judged politically unreliable, and their reach expanded considerably during the various internal revolts and the suppression of the Pontic Greek uprising along the Black Sea. Whatever else the tribunals accomplished, they made unmistakably clear that the Ankara government, for all its rhetoric of popular sovereignty, was prepared to govern by summary force when it judged its survival to be at stake. Desertion alone gives some sense of the scale of the problem the tribunals were built to address: at the movement's lowest points, entire regiments' worth of conscripts simply walked away from their units rather than fight, and Ankara's response combined the carrot of amnesty for men who returned voluntarily with the very real threat of a tribunal verdict for those who did not. The same courts that tried army deserters also handled cases of local rebellion and, controversially, prosecuted community leaders judged to be organizing or sympathizing with separatist movements, a mandate broad enough that its application varied considerably depending on which general happened to be running a given region and how much patience Ankara had for due process at any particular moment in the war.
Political dissent that never rose to armed rebellion still ran into the same wartime instinct toward control. Newspapers critical of the assembly's direction, whether from religious conservatives uneasy with the pace of change or from remaining Unionist sympathizers wary of Mustafa Kemal's own rising authority, operated under real constraints on what they could print, and provincial administrators leaned on the same emergency legal architecture built to fight deserters and rebels to keep local criticism within tolerable bounds. None of this was unique to Turkey's revolutionary government: most states fighting for their survival on this many fronts at once have reached for similar tools. But it sat in genuine tension with the movement's own founding claim, repeated at every congress from Erzurum onward, that it existed to restore the sovereign voice of the nation against a government that had stopped listening to it.
The end of the sultanate
The struggle for legitimacy between Ankara and the Ottoman throne finally reached its conclusion in the last months of 1922. With the military campaign against Greece won and an armistice signed at Mudanya, the Allies invited both the Istanbul government and the Ankara assembly to the peace conference at Lausanne, a move plainly intended to sow division between the two by treating them as equally legitimate. The assembly's answer was immediate and radical: on 1 November 1922 it voted to abolish the sultanate outright, arguing that the government in Istanbul, having ruled under foreign occupation since 1918, had already forfeited any real claim to sovereignty, while leaving open the possibility that the assembly itself might appoint a member of the Ottoman house to the separate, now purely religious office of caliph. Vahdettin, the last Ottoman sultan, left the country aboard a British warship on 17 November, ending six centuries of dynastic rule almost without incident. A single delegation, Ankara's, went to Lausanne.
Faith, family, and the home front
Religion ran through the movement's social fabric in ways that went well beyond the dueling fatwas of the sultan and the Ankara mufti. Village and provincial life in Anatolia still ran largely on the authority of local imams, hocas, and sheikhs, and the movement's early organizers knew perfectly well that no amount of telegraphed circulars from Erzurum or Sivas would matter much if the local religious establishment turned against them. Mustafa Kemal's own public language through the congresses of 1919 leaned heavily on defending the sultanate and caliphate from foreign captivity rather than on the explicitly secular nationalism his government would adopt only after the fighting ended, precisely because that framing was what made the movement legible and acceptable to a rural population for whom loyalty to the caliph was not an abstraction. Sufi orders and religious brotherhoods, uneven and sometimes divided in their sympathies, provided real organizational infrastructure for the resistance in parts of the country where formal Defense of Rights committees had barely taken root. The same religious authority that could be turned against the movement, as the sultan's own fatwa demonstrated, could just as easily be turned in its favor, and much of the movement's early political skill lay in making sure it usually was.
Who fought
The war reshaped Anatolian society well beyond the front lines, and much of that reshaping fell on people who never picked up a rifle. Kuva-yi Milliye units, the irregular militias that carried the resistance before a regular army existed, were themselves a rough cross-section of a shattered rural society: demobilized soldiers, army deserters looking for a cause that offered amnesty, dispossessed farmers, and, in the country's more contested regions, Circassian and Kurdish communities who had their own scores to settle and their own reasons to distrust a movement led largely by former CUP officers. Many of these communities, especially Circassian and Albanian refugee groups resettled in northwestern Anatolia after earlier wars, were wary of a movement whose officer corps included men who had helped organize the wartime deportations of Ottoman Armenians, and joined the national cause only when local leaders could broker truces in older blood feuds first. Loyalty to the movement, in other words, was negotiated village by village rather than simply assumed.
The scale of that irregular mobilization is easy to understate in hindsight, precisely because it worked. Because nearly every Anatolian man of fighting age had already served somewhere in the Ottoman Army during the First World War, raising an armed band was rarely a matter of training people from scratch. It was a matter of persuading men who already knew how to fight, and who in many cases already had a rifle hidden in a barn or a mountain cache, to point that experience at a new enemy under a new flag. That made the Kuva-yi Milliye simultaneously the movement's greatest early asset and one of its more persistent headaches, since bands raised this quickly, under local leaders with their own agendas, did not always take orders from Ankara once the immediate crisis that had raised them had passed. The Çerkez Ethem affair, in which the very irregular commander who had crushed the sultan's Caliphate Army and put down half a dozen smaller revolts eventually turned on Ankara himself in the winter of 1920, was the most dramatic example, but hardly an isolated one.
Women in the movement
Women's participation in the movement, though it involved far fewer people in uniform than the Kuva-yi Milliye's male irregulars, left an outsized mark on how the resistance understood itself. Halide Edip Hanım (later Adıvar), already a well-known novelist before the war, became one of the movement's most visible public figures: she had helped organize mass protests in Istanbul against the Greek landing at İzmir in May 1919, later smuggled weapons out of the capital before joining the resistance in Anatolia with her husband in 1920, and worked with the journalist Yunus Nadi to found the Anatolian Agency (Anadolu Ajansı), the nationalist movement's own news service, in April 1920. After the Battle of Sakarya she was given the honorary military rank of corporal, a largely symbolic gesture but a telling one for how the movement chose to represent its own inclusiveness.
She was not alone. A number of women led or fought alongside irregular militia units directly, most famously Fatma Seher Hanım (later Erden), remembered as Kara Fatma (Fatma the Black), who raised and commanded her own Kuva-yi Milliye detachment and became one of the war's most enduring symbols of female combatants. In the movement's immediate aftermath, this wartime visibility fed directly into an organized women's rights movement: the writer and activist Nezihe Muhiddin Hanım tried to found Turkey's first political party, a women's party, in 1923, only to be blocked on the grounds that women did not yet have the right to vote or stand for office, before founding the Turkish Women's Union the following year instead. The right to vote itself would come in 1930 for local elections and 1934 nationally.
The burden at home
The human cost of total mobilization, meanwhile, fell on everyone. By the time the Commander-in-Chief law gave Mustafa Kemal emergency powers in the summer of 1921, the government's National Obligations (Tekâlif-i Milliye) decrees were requisitioning a fixed share of the population's remaining food, clothing, transport, and livestock outright, with promises of later compensation that many families never saw in practice. Villages that had already lost the bulk of their working-age men to a decade of continuous conscription were now also expected to supply the army's material needs, a burden that fell hardest on women, children, and the elderly left to run farms and workshops on their own. It is difficult to overstate how thin the margin was: this was a mobilization carried out by a country with almost no functioning currency, no meaningful tax base, and a population already exhausted by the losses of the First World War.
Everyday scarcity was the ordinary condition of the home front rather than an occasional hardship. Basic goods, cloth, leather, sugar, kerosene, moved through informal and often illegal channels as much as through any organized market, and local Nationalist officials found themselves policing black-market trade in the same requisitioned goods the government itself needed for the army, a tension that never fully resolved itself before the fighting ended. Inflation ate away at whatever cash still circulated, and towns close to the shifting front lines, Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar among them, changed hands enough times between 1920 and 1922 that their populations lived through occupation, requisition, and reoccupation more than once within a single stretch of the war.
Minorities and the remaking of Anatolia's population
No account of the movement's social dimension can avoid the fact that it unfolded across a landscape whose demographic character was being violently remade at the same time. By the war's end, the empire's Christian population, which had made up roughly a fifth of Anatolia's people before 1914, was a small fraction of that, a transformation rooted in wartime campaigns of deportation and killing against Ottoman Christians that had begun years before Mudros and did not fully stop when it was signed. The nationalist movement inherited this landscape rather than creating it, but it did not reverse it either.
Communities of Ottoman Greeks along the Black Sea coast, hoping to establish an independent Pontic state, and Armenians in Cilicia and the east, hoping to see a promised Armenian homeland made real, found themselves instead facing a movement whose National Pact explicitly claimed all of Anatolia and Thrace's Muslim-majority territory as indivisible Turkish land, with no room in that vision for separate Christian states carved out of it. The suppression of the Pontic Greek uprising along the Black Sea and the fighting in Cilicia between Nationalist irregulars and the French-backed Armenian Legion both left substantial civilian death tolls behind them, figures that remain disputed between Turkish, Greek, and Armenian historians to this day.
Estimates of how many Armenians died in the fighting between Nationalist forces and the short-lived Republic of Armenia in 1920 remain a genuinely contested question in the historical literature, with Armenian sources from the period citing tens of thousands of dead among both soldiers and civilians in the contested Kars and Aras valley region, and Turkish and other accounts offering considerably lower figures. What is not contested is that the war's end left the six eastern provinces the wartime Armenian genocide had targeted almost entirely emptied of the Armenian population that had once lived there, and that the Nationalist movement's treaty with Armenia in December 1920, followed a few months later by a comparable settlement with Soviet Russia, fixed the eastern border in a way that closed off any realistic prospect of an Armenian state re-forming on Anatolian soil.
Kurdish communities occupied a more ambiguous place in the movement. Kurdish leaders had their own hopes for autonomy or independence, encouraged by the Treaty of Sèvres's provisions for a Kurdish plebiscite, and the National Pact's language about Turkish and Kurdish Anatolia being inseparable was itself a calculated appeal for Kurdish support against those aspirations. Most Kurdish tribes and notables did back the national movement, whether from genuine shared cause, religious solidarity as fellow Muslims, or simple calculation about which side was likely to win, but the relationship was never entirely settled, and localized Kurdish uprisings, most notably around Koçgiri in 1921, showed how quickly that support could fracture when promises of autonomy failed to materialize into anything concrete.
The population exchange
The war's demographic reordering of Anatolia reached its formal, internationally sanctioned conclusion at Lausanne, where Greece and Turkey signed a convention in January 1923 mandating a compulsory exchange of populations: more than 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Anatolia, Eastern Thrace, and the Black Sea coast for some 350,000 to 400,000 Muslims living in Greece, close to 1.6 million people in all, uprooted by treaty rather than by war. Religion, not language or self-identification, was the determining criterion, which meant Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from central Anatolia and Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete were swept into the same compulsory exchange as everyone else. It was the first internationally ratified compulsory population exchange in modern history, and it settled, by depopulation rather than negotiation, a question the war itself had never fully resolved: what an overwhelmingly Muslim and Turkish nation-state would do with the substantial non-Muslim populations still living inside its claimed borders.
The war of words: press, poetry, and national culture
Ankara understood from early on that it was fighting a propaganda war as much as a military one, and it built the institutions to fight it with remarkable speed for a government that could barely feed its own army. The newspaper Hakimiyet-i Milliye (National Sovereignty), began publishing in Ankara on 10 January 1920, months before the Grand National Assembly itself even existed, and became the movement's semi-official voice, carrying Kemal's own editorials alongside government announcements. Three months later, in April 1920, Halide Edip and Yunus Nadi founded the Anatolian Agency specifically to counter what they saw as a coordinated Allied and Greek propaganda effort to demoralize the country and undercut the movement's legitimacy abroad. Its bulletins, carrying government statements, front-line reports, and international news, were distributed to newspapers across unoccupied Anatolia, effectively opening what the movement itself sometimes called a second front fought entirely with typewriters and telegraph wire.
An anthem
Culture was every bit as contested a battlefield as territory. In 1921 the assembly launched a public competition for a new national anthem, drawing more than seven hundred submitted poems, none of which the selection committee found acceptable. Parliament turned instead to Mehmet Akif Bey (Ersoy), already one of the country's most respected poets, who had deliberately stayed out of the original competition because he objected to its cash prize. Persuaded to contribute anyway, without taking the reward, Akif produced the ten-verse poem that the assembly adopted as the İstiklal Marşı, the Independence March, on 12 March 1921, months before the war's outcome was even decided. A separate competition for the music dragged on inconclusively through the war years; different regions sang the words to different tunes until an official melody was finally settled in 1924. The prize money Akif had refused was redirected to a charitable foundation that trained poor women and children in vocational skills, a small but telling detail from a movement that liked to present its sacrifices as collective rather than individual.
The intellectual roots of Turkism
Behind these individual acts of cultural improvisation sat a much older intellectual current that the war now had the chance to put into practice. The sociologist and poet Ziya Gökalp, writing well before the war, had already argued that the empire's Ottomanist and Islamist identities, both built around holding together a multiethnic, multireligious empire, had failed and needed to be replaced by an explicitly Turkish national identity grounded in language, culture, and shared history rather than dynastic loyalty. Gökalp's own influence on the CUP era had been considerable, and his ideas about Turkification, modernization, and a national culture built on the Turkish vernacular rather than the ornate, Persian- and Arabic-inflected language of the old Ottoman elite fed directly into a broader literary movement, the Milli Edebiyat, National Literature, current that writers like Ömer Seyfettin, Ali Canip, and, slightly later, Yakup Kadri (later Karaosmanoğlu) had been building since before the First World War through organizations like the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları). Mustafa Kemal himself would later credit Gökalp as one of the intellectual fathers of his own thinking. The choice of the very word "Turkey" for the new assembly's name in 1920, in preference to any variant of "Ottoman," was the practical, political expression of an argument intellectuals had been having in literary journals for a decade already.
An economy rebuilt from almost nothing
Whatever else the national movement accomplished, it did so while presiding over one of the more threadbare economies of any government fighting a major war in the twentieth century. The Ottoman Empire had entered the First World War already deeply indebted, its finances effectively supervised since 1881 by the European-run Public Debt Administration (Düyun-u Umumiye), which controlled entire categories of state revenue, salt, tobacco, spirits, stamps, and silk taxes among them, on behalf of foreign bondholders owed something on the order of 140 million pounds sterling, a debt equal to more than half the empire's prewar economic output.
The war itself only deepened the hole: the government suspended payments to foreign creditors in August 1914, even before it had formally entered the fighting, and four years of mobilization, blockade, and destruction wiped out much of the tax base that might otherwise have served that debt. By the time Ankara's assembly convened in 1920, there was no meaningful national currency system to speak of, minimal functioning taxation in the war-torn interior, and a government that had to improvise its own financing almost month to month, using requisition and moral appeal in place of a treasury it simply did not have.
The results were visible in the crude machinery of wartime mobilization. The National Obligations decrees of August 1921, issued under the emergency powers granted to Kemal after the retreat to the Sakarya, requisitioned a fixed share of the country's remaining food, clothing, transport animals, and vehicles directly from the population, with the state's promise of eventual repayment standing in for money in the future. Soviet financial and military aid, arriving in installments of gold and matériel from 1920 onward, filled part of the gap, as did captured French equipment left behind after the withdrawal from Cilicia. None of it amounted to a functioning wartime economy in any conventional sense. It was closer to a subsistence arrangement between a government and a population that had already been asked to sacrifice everything once, during the world war, and was now being asked to do it again.
İzmir Economic Congress
What makes the movement's economic record notable is not the wartime improvisation itself but what came immediately after it. Barely five months after the guns fell silent, while the Lausanne conference was in recess over the still-unresolved questions of Mosul, war debt, and the capitulations, the Ankara government convened an economic congress at İzmir between 17 February and 4 March 1923, drawing well over a thousand delegates representing farmers, merchants, industrialists, and organized labor from across the country, alongside the movement's political leadership. It was a deliberately theatrical choice of venue: the same city whose occupation by Greek troops in May 1919 had touched off the war was now hosting a congress built around the argument that Turkey's independence would be worth little without an economy to back it.
The congress's resolutions, quickly nicknamed the Misak-ı İktisadi, the Economic Pact, in deliberate echo of the wartime National Pact, sketched out an economic vision for the country to come: support for Turkish private enterprise and domestic industry, encouragement of new domestic banks to break dependence on foreign capital, a cautious welcome for foreign investment so long as it operated under Turkish law rather than the old capitulatory privileges, and firm opposition to monopolies, whether foreign or domestic. It was less a detailed policy program than a statement of economic sovereignty to match the political sovereignty the movement had just won on the battlefield, but the underlying message was unmistakable: the capitulations, and the foreign financial control that had come with them for nearly half a century, were not coming back. That commitment became formal a few months later at Lausanne, where the abolition of the capitulations stood alongside the recognition of Turkish sovereignty itself as one of the treaty's central achievements, ending a system that had let foreign powers exempt their citizens and, in practice, much of the country's trade from Ottoman law and taxation since the nineteenth century. The vision of private, domestically owned enterprise that the İzmir delegates endorsed would not survive the decade intact, the onset of the Great Depression and the young republic's own turn toward state-led industrialization saw to that, but as a first statement of economic intent from a government that four years earlier had been financing itself through confiscated cattle and requisitioned cloth, it was a striking act of confidence.
Diplomacy as politics: from Sèvres to Lausanne
The diplomatic contest that ran alongside the fighting was, in its own way, as much a political struggle over legitimacy as the rivalry between Istanbul and Ankara had been. The Treaty of Sèvres, which the Allies imposed on the Istanbul government in August 1920, would have partitioned Anatolia itself among Greece, Italy, France, and an independent Armenia, reduced what remained of the empire to a rump state, and placed Istanbul and the Straits under international control. Ankara never recognized it, and the treaty's own unpopularity, even among some of the Allies who had drafted it, meant it never took effect in the first place: Italy began quietly arming the nationalists within months of signing it, resentful at how little Anatolian territory it had actually been promised, and France signed its own separate peace with Ankara barely a year later.
The diplomatic reversal was completed at Lausanne, where the Ankara delegation under İsmet Pasha, the same general who had commanded at İnönü and Sakarya, insisted from the conference's opening session on being treated as the equal of any other sovereign power at the table rather than as a defeated party negotiating terms. The conference dragged on for months, broke down entirely in February 1923 over Mosul, war debts, and the capitulations, and resumed only after both sides recalculated their positions during the recess, the same recess in which Ankara held its economic congress at İzmir as a pointed reminder of its own resolve. When the Treaty of Lausanne was finally signed on 24 July 1923, it did what Sèvres had tried to prevent: it recognized the Grand National Assembly as the legitimate government of a sovereign, internationally acknowledged Turkish state, with borders substantially those the National Pact had originally claimed, only the northern Iraqi question around Mosul left for later resolution. It remains, notably, the only one of the treaties that ended the First World War still in force without major revision a century later.
The Republic proclaimed
By the autumn of 1923 the political architecture of the old order had been dismantled piece by piece, and the movement's own institutions were maturing into something that looked less like a wartime resistance committee and more like a state. On 9 September 1923, the Anatolia and Rumelia Defense of Rights Association, the umbrella organization born at the Sivas Congress four years earlier, was formally reconstituted as a political party, the People's Party, soon renamed the Republican People's Party, with Mustafa Kemal as its leader. It was less a new creation than an acknowledgment of what the association had already become: the closest thing the country had to a governing political machine.
The final step came a few weeks later. On 29 October 1923, the Grand National Assembly declared Turkey a republic and elected Mustafa Kemal as its first president, with wartime colleagues like Fevzi Çakmak and İsmet İnönü taking senior positions in the new government. The office of caliph, separated from the sultanate the previous November and left, for the moment, in the hands of a member of the Ottoman family, would itself be abolished a few months later, in March 1924, closing the last formal link to six centuries of dynastic rule. But that lay just beyond the period this movement had fought through. What had been achieved by October 1923 was already remarkable enough on its own terms: a nation that four years earlier had existed mainly as a set of telegrams between disaffected army officers now had a constitution, an elected assembly, a functioning if threadbare economy, a recognized international border, and a name of its own.
How historians remember it
Historians have argued for decades over how to tell this story honestly, and the arguments go well beyond simple disagreement over dates and casualty figures. The version Mustafa Kemal himself set down in his own six-day speech to the assembly in 1927 (Nutuk - The Speech), and which became the country's official memory of the period for much of the twentieth century, presents the movement as a clean break from the corrupt and discredited politics that came before it, with Kemal as its singular and indispensable leader. More recent scholarship has complicated that picture considerably, pointing out how many of the movement's leading figures, Kemal included, had themselves been Unionists, how thoroughly the CUP's networks of officers, officials, and financing fed into the new movement even as its congresses swore to bury the old party for good, and how much of the human cost of the period, borne disproportionately by the empire's Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish populations, sat awkwardly against the movement's own preferred narrative of national liberation. Some historians have gone further still, arguing that large stretches of the fighting in the Black Sea region, central Anatolia, and the Marmara area are better understood as a civil war than as a series of isolated local revolts, one whose losers, people who backed neither the sultan nor Ankara and did not consider themselves rebels at all, have been written out of the standard account almost entirely. Even the war's Turkish name has become part of the argument: some historians have criticized the standard term Kurtuluş Savaşı, the War of Liberation, for casting Turkey purely as a victim of outside imperial powers in a way that leaves little room for the experience of the minorities who lived through the same four years on the losing end of the new nation's founding.
None of this cancels out the other. A genuine, broad-based political and social movement built a functioning state out of almost nothing in four exhausting years, drafting a constitution, running a wartime economy on credit and confiscation, founding a press and a literature to match its politics, and, in the end, negotiating its way into a treaty the older empire had never managed to secure for itself. That same movement also inherited, and in places extended, some of the darkest chapters of the empire it replaced. The country that emerged from it, secular, centralized, built around a single national language and a single understood national story, was neither a simple continuation of the empire nor a total break from it. It was something new, assembled in a hurry, under pressure, by people arguing constantly among themselves, and with people outside the room entirely, about what it should be.
PAGE LAST UPDATED ON 25 JULY 2026