On October 29 in 1923, Turkey officially became a republic, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. From Wikipedia:
Following WWI, the huge conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire was divided into several new states.[20] The Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922), initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his colleagues in Anatolia, resulted in the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923……
….By 18 September 1922, the occupying armies were expelled, and the Ankara-based Turkish regime, which declared itself the legitimate government of the country in April 1920, started to formalize the legal transition from the old Ottoman into the new Republican political system. On 1 November, the newly founded parliament formally abolished the Sultanate, thus ending 623 years of monarchical Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the newly formed “Republic of Turkey” as the continuing state of the Ottoman Empire, and the republic was officially proclaimed on 29 October 1923 in Ankara, the country’s new capital.[77] The Lausanne treaty stipulated a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, whereby 1.1 million Greeks left Turkey for Greece in exchange for 380,000 Muslims transferred from Greece to Turkey.[78]
Mustafa Kemal became the republic’s first President and subsequently introduced many radical reforms with the aim of transforming the old Ottoman-Turkish state into a new secular republic.[79] With the Surname Law of 1934, the Turkish Parliament bestowed upon Mustafa Kemal the honorific surname “Atatürk” (Father of the Turks) Read More
More about Turkey from Wikipedia:
Turkey is a contiguous transcontinental parliamentary republic, with its smaller part in Southeastern Europe and its larger part in Western Asia (i.e. the Balkans and Anatolia, respectively). Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea is to the south; the Aegean Sea to the west; and the Black Sea to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.[9] Turkey’s location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia makes it a country of significant geostrategic importance.
Because of its close proximity to both Syria and Iraq, Turkey has been a key ally to the US over the year. There is tie to Turkey and the US an event that ended on October 28, 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis possibly the scariest eight days in my lifetime ended when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba – and we all breathed a sigh of relief. The tie to Turkey was that, to end the crisis President Kennedy used the following plan. He sent…….
a formal letter t. o Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet nuclear missiles), coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an open agreement that would appear to the public, and to NATO allies, as a concession to blackmail. The U.S. president elected to transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Read more at The National Security Archive at George Washington University
I was going to couple the above with another event that happened in Turkey on this date in 2013 and that was the opening of the Marmaray Rail Tube Tunnel, but I will save that for the next post!!
