In Turkey, identity was also on Mustapha Kemal’s mind. In 1927 Kemal gave a speech that, with intermissions, took three days to deliver. This speech, presented at a political party convention, is so famous in Turkey that it is simply called “Nutuk” (The Speech). In this marathon exposition of his ideas, Kemal defined his nation and outlined his plans. He systematically ironed out any problematic historical wrinkles by expunging or avoiding facts like the CUP’s destruction of the Armenians or the existence of a Kurdish people in the east.¹⁹ He also took all the credit for establishing the new republic, giving none to his peers and comrades. Taking on the role of the great paternal leader, Kemal explained to the Turkish people where they had come from and where he saw them going. He outlined a blueprint for the future of the nation.

The speech was delivered in the midst of the cultural revolution Kemal had initiated after establishing the new Republic of Turkey in 1923. Once the Lausanne Treaty was signed, Turkey was recognized by the major powers and international relationships were normalized, Kemal began his program of modernization. He abolished the six-hundred-year-old sultanate and, not long after that, the caliphate itself, a major symbol of Islam for millions. Kemal enacted suffrage for women, modernized the alphabet, and imposed European-style clothing for all Turkish citizens (replacing the fez with the hat). He negotiated and validated the borders of the new nation, borders that have endured up to this day. He initiated the rewriting of the official history of the country, placing the Turks squarely in the center of world civilizations. In 1935 Kemal ordered the people of Turkey to adopt first and last names. He himself took the name Ataturk, or “Father of the Turks.”

The charismatic Kemal Ataturk never missed an opportunity to share his ideas with his nation and the world, becoming one of the most quoted men in history. He sought to instill in his countrymen a sense of national identity, repeatedly reminding them that they were “Turks,” a term that before this time was mainly used by Ottomans to refer to country bumpkins. He explained to his audience that they were an illustrious people who had established one of the greatest empires in the history of the world. They were conquerors, ghazi. (Kemal himself was hailed as “Ghazi” early in his career. The word means “holy warrior.”) They were a people, a nation, a powerful force of history. They were more than just Muslims. They were the inheritors of a great legacy: Ottoman-Turkish culture, strength, and enterprise. To maintain their vitality, it was imperative that they remain pure and proud.

In the early years of the republic, for the sake of international public relations, Turkey officially expressed sympathy for the lost Christian populations. Legislation was passed that seemed to welcome any surviving Armenians back to their homes, and at least on paper, Christians and Jews were to be treated like any other citizens in Turkey. But this was a very cold and toxic embrace. The Turkish government was no longer engaged in an organized system of deportation, but with Kemal’s endorsement, the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia would continue. Even after the tragedy of World War I, there would be no equality for non-Turks in Turkey. Armenians, Greeks, and Muslim Kurds would be treated as second-class citizens and continue to suffer. Laws regarding language, inheritance, religious expression, and education put continual negative pressure on minority groups.²⁰ Unequal taxation, organized race riots, and persistent genocidal policies (particularly against the Kurds) would make life very difficult if not impossible for non-Turks in Turkey, whether they be Christian or Muslim.

Unlike Enver, Kemal showed no enthusiasm for an imagined Turkic empire stretching across Eurasia. But he was a skillful pragmatist and understood how important nationalism was to his revolution. In the new Kemalist republic, all Muslims were welcome as long as they called themselves Turks, and many communities of Muslims—Circassians, Tartars, Allevi, Chechens, Laz, even Arabs—were allowed to officially claim Turkic “roots” in Anatolia whether they had them or not.

Kurds made up as much as twenty percent of the total population in the new republic at the time of its formation. (Today, Kurds form the vast majority in the southeast regions of Turkey.) Kurds are Muslim but not Turkic, and so presented a conundrum for the Kemalists. The solution was that Kurds would no longer officially be considered a separate people. In Ataturk’s republic, Kurds were simply Turks who had lost their way; they were “mountain Turks.” On the ground, Kurds had a choice: be assimilated or be eradicated. Like the Armenians before them, Kurds were discouraged from speaking their own language. After World War I, their settlements would be attacked repeatedly and viciously.

Greeks who lived in western Anatolia (most of whom were Turkish-speaking) continued to present an entirely different quandary for the nationalists. Although the 1922 debacle in Smyrna had erased a major Christian population center and terrorized those who had managed to survive, there were still hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians living in Turkey. As part of the Lausanne Treaty, a massive population swap was negotiated. For outsiders watching from Europe, such a swap seemed logical. The plan was simple: all the “Greeks” in Turkey would “return” to Greece and all the “Turks” in Greece “return” to Turkey. Sadly, these “Greeks” and “Turks” were defined by religion only. Often the Muslim “Turks” in Greece did not speak Turkish and the Christian “Greeks” in Turkey did not speak Greek. As a result, the deportees faced discrimination when they were “returned” and eventually, like the Kurds in the east, were forced to live as less than full citizens.

The few Armenians who had survived the debacle and who tried to return only found more hardship, sometimes death. Even Armenians who had converted to Islam continued to suffer discrimination. As a final blow, the Armenians as a people were excised from the official history of Turkey in what Donald Bloxham has called “a systemic, state-sponsored rewriting of Armenian and Turkish history.”²¹

Kemal’s revision of the historical narrative was formalized in 1932 at a Turkish Historical Congress in Ankara. From this convention was born a three-year project resulting in a spurious “Outline of Turkish History.” The “thesis” on which it was based was complete fantasy, proclaiming that Turkey was the “original” civilization giving birth to all other civilizations, including Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. This “history” was backed up with a pseudoscientific language analysis called “the Sun Language theory” (gunes-dil teorisi), which claimed that all world languages had evolved from a Turkic root language. With their radical distortion of the truth, these theories never gained much traction, and were mostly abandoned after Kemal’s death.²²

Vestiges of these theories nevertheless persist in contemporary Turkish culture. A tourist visiting the Archeological History Museum of Anatolia, a major attraction adjacent to Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, receives an in-depth survey of the history of the land now called Turkey (more or less Asia Minor) spanning thousands of years. Bizarrely, the Armenians, who were settled in the region for two thousand years before the Seljuk Turks arrived, are not mentioned once. This museum is only one of more than fifty such museums that exist all over the Republic of Turkey,²³ contributing, along with schools and publishing houses, to the education and mind-set of all Turkish students. These institutions teach Turkish citizens the “truth” about their country’s history with displays of artifacts and charts and maps. Because of this concerted effort to misinform, most citizens of Turkey have only the vaguest idea of who the Armenians were and what happened to them.²⁴