Not far from Taksim Square, where in the summer of 2013 protests against the Erdogan administration were met with police violence, stands the immense Istanbul Military Museum, “dedicated to one thousand years of Turkish military history.” Along a dark corridor deep within the building is a large room labeled simply “Hall of the Armenian Issue with Documents” (Belgelerle Ermenia Sorunu Salonu). This compact exhibition features along its walls dozens of photographs of atrocities purportedly committed by Armenian “gangs.” Many are dated in the summer of 1915, the very period when the worst acts of violence were taking place against the Armenian population living in eastern Asia Minor. In the center of the room is a large glass case. In the case is a striped dress shirt, still stained with patches of blood. This is the shirt Talat was wearing when he was shot. A plaque outlines Talat’s biography. There is no mention of his conviction for war crimes by the Ottoman courts in 1919. The final sentences simply say: “He was killed in Berlin by an Armenian called Sogomon Tehlerian [sic] in 1921. His remains were taken to Istanbul in 1943 and reburied in the cemetery at Hurriyet-I Ebediye Hill [Monument of Liberty Hill].” The message of the hall is clear: Armenians constituted a real danger to Turkey during World War I, culminating in the murder of a Turkish patriot. (Enver’s remains are also interred on Liberty Hill.)

If you fly Turkish Airlines from one area of Turkey to another, the in-flight magazine will feature a map of the region. Although all adjacent countries are labeled on the map, only an empty unlabeled outline of the modern country of Armenia can be found. On another flight within the country of Turkey, I watched an in-flight video about the city of Van, the fortress city once a bastion for Armenians which at the beginning of the genocide was attacked and overwhelmed by the Turkish military. This city is today a tourist destination, featuring lovely medieval Armenian Christian architecture. Though Van was once a thriving center for Turkish Armenians, there are no Armenians living there today. The promotional video, like so much of the media that make up our modern history, makes no mention of Armenians whatsoever.

The cult of Kemal grew alongside the concept of “Turkishness.”²⁵ Even when visiting Turkey today, it is impossible to venture very far without seeing Ataturk’s ruggedly handsome face gazing down upon you. His portrait hangs behind the counter in nearly every shop, on the wall of every office. His image is printed on all currency. He is omnipresent. In this secular state, Ataturk has replaced God as the ultimate authority. It is true that Islam discourages naturalistic representation in religious art and architecture, and for that reason Ataturk’s image stands out even more. But in some respects Ataturk transcends even Islam, because he symbolizes Turkey itself.

The pervasive nature of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey is the product of his own self-promotion. Like other world leaders of his period, he harnessed the power of the mass media to win over a public vulnerable to the influence of film and radio. For example, in interviews and speeches, he redefined his role as an effective and able general at Gallipoli to “the man who saved Constantinople.” This legend would only grow, and by the end of his life, Ataturk was known to his countrymen as “the man who saved Turkey” and “the father of the country.” For the rest of Ataturk’s life, every speech and interview he gave would erode the reputations of his contemporaries while elevating his own stature. Schoolchildren would begin each day pledging, “O Ataturk the great! I swear that I will enduringly walk through the path you opened and to the target you showed. May my personal being be sacrificed to the being of the Turkish nation. How happy is the one who says: ‘I am a Turk.’ ”²⁶ To this day, Law 5816 makes disparaging Ataturk a criminal act. This law has been used against journalists.²⁷

To be the father of a people, there has to be “a people.” This is an essential element of nationalism. “A people” can be defined culturally, linguistically, religiously. But there is usually an underlying notion of “pure blood.” The entire ideology of the Young Turks was built on this racist notion of pure-bloodedness. Perhaps people with “pure blood” do exist in the most northern reaches above the Arctic Circle or on some isolated Pacific island. But the last place on earth where genetic “purity” could ever exist would be in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Not only was this region an enormous melting pot, but also the very nature of Turkish society and its institutions guaranteed that non-Turkic “blood” would be continuously intermixed with the genetic repository of the original invaders from the Far East. Ataturk himself, with his blue eyes and light skin, appears to have been descended from Slavic Europeans, not Turkic invaders.

Not only would Turkish history be rewritten by Ataturk, not only would the Turkish government take the position that no coordinated extermination of the Armenians had ever taken place, but also any previous written history became essentially unavailable because it was literally unreadable. Until 1929, Turkish was written in an Arabic script; after 1929, a twenty-nine-character Western alphabet would be employed. (Ironically, this new alphabet was created by an Armenian, Hagop Martayan Dilicar, a favorite of Ataturk’s.) Words themselves were altered to make them more “Turkish.” Vocabulary was deleted, new words added.

Place-names all over the country were Turkified (for example, “Smyrna” became “Izmir”), which only added confusion and another obfuscating layer to the buildup of historical sediment. In fact, the Turkish language has changed so radically since the time of Kemal’s “Nutuk” that a Turk living today would not be able to understand his actual words. The speech literally has to be translated for contemporary Turkish speakers. Most important, any record, history, or document created prior to 1929 is totally unreadable by all Turks and even most scholars. The impact of this makeover has been to significantly impede historical research, and it is one of Ataturk’s most devastating accomplishments.

In 1938 Kemal Ataturk’s lifestyle, fueled by little sleep, high-octane raki, chain-smoking, and endless cups of black coffee brought his intense life to an end. He was fifty-seven when he died of cirrhosis of the liver. By this time his godlike status in Turkey was unassailable. Like Stalin and Mao, he had held his country in thrall for decades, and when he died, new personalities and institutions would try unsuccessfully to fill the void he left behind. The struggle within Turkey that continues to this day is the legacy of Kemal Ataturk’s radical reformation, made possible by his tremendous vitality and charisma and his commitment to the goals of the Ittihad. That vision, of the Ittihadists and, by extension, Kemal Ataturk, did not include the non-Muslim population of what was once the Ottoman Empire.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Post-Ataturk

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

—Gabriel García Márquez

In the decades following World War I, the Republic of Armenia became fully integrated into the Soviet Union. At the same time, the newborn Republic of Turkey reinforced its alliance with the United States. Christians in Turkey continued to be persecuted, while the Turkish government actively refused to acknowledge the organized destruction of the Ottoman Empire Armenians during the war. The prospect of violence constantly loomed. In 1933, an Armenian archbishop in New York City was murdered by members of the ARF for his pro-Soviet posture. In the 1940s and 1950s, organized harassment and killing of Armenians and Greeks in Turkey led to further “purification” of the population. Military coups unseated at least three Turkish governments. In the 1970s and 1980s, radical Armenian terror cells calling themselves the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia and the Justice Commandos murdered dozens of Turkish diplomats and their associates. In 1991, in the midst of a war with neighboring Azerbaijan, the Republic of Armenia broke free from the defunct Soviet Union. When the outspoken Armenian humanist Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish periodical Agos, was assassinated in broad daylight outside his offices in Istanbul in 2007, some saw the killing as a long-delayed reprisal for the murder of Talat.