This autumn, Ozlem Karakus, her son Ali and cousin Cansu made the long drive from Ankara to Thessaloniki. Their three-day odyssey had a single goal: to get to the three-storey, Ottoman-style building on Apostolou Pavlou Street in the Greek port city where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was born and spent his early years. “He is our father,” Karakus said of the soldier-statesman who created the modern nation from the ruins of the Ottoman empire just over a century ago. “Atatürk is incredibly important to us. He is the best leader who ever came into this world.”
For the 43-year-old tax inspector, it was a “dream come true” to visit the house. “To come here and see his birthplace has meant so much,” she enthused. “It was wonderful even if I would have liked to have seen more from his childhood, a few more belongings, a few more personal effects.”
Few places are as indicative of Atatürk’s enduring appeal as the pink-walled abode where Turkey’s first president is thought to have been born in the spring of 1881.
This year alone, nearly half a million visitors – the vast majority from Turkey – are expected to make the pilgrimage to Thessaloniki with the sole purpose of visiting the place that the legendary leader first called home. Numbers have soared since 2013 when the building was transformed into a modern museum chronicling his life and achievements. “Since January around 430,000 people have visited the house,” said an official at the Turkish consulate general, which shares grounds with the museum and oversees its daily management. “There are days when up to 6,000 visitors arrive, many on special tours in buses from Turkey, and the queues are very big.”
On feast days and high days – especially the 10 November anniversary of Atatürk’s death, from cirrhosis of the liver, in 1938 – officials have been forced to erect giant screens outside the building to accommodate the crowds, with emotions often running high.
“We love him,” said another visitor, Cansu Gigdem, who trained as an opera singer in Ankara, cupping her hands in a gesture of gratitude. “He did so much for us.”
Until 1912, when Thessaloniki was incorporated into the Kingdom of Greece, the city was under Ottoman control, with the young Mustafa Kemal growing up in what was then an impoverished Muslim neighbourhood. Noticeboards in the building’s courtyard, where his father, Ali Rıza, is believed to have planted a pomegranate tree, describe the fabled multicultural metropolis as “a window of the Ottoman empire opening to the western world”.
Once visitors reach the room where the national independence hero “opened his eyes to the world” they are often in tears.
“No figure is more iconic for secular Turks than Atatürk,” said Kostas Ifantis, a professor of international relations at Panteion University in Athens, referring to his programme of reforms that turned Turkey into a western-facing secular republic. “Through top-down social engineering and policies that included empowering women with the vote, replacing the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet and banning the headscarf and fez, he transformed Ottoman society. What we see today is people paying homage to a man they feel deeply indebted to.”
How the house came to be given to the leader barely more than a decade after the Turkish republic’s foundation following the 1919-22 Greco-Turkish war is testimony to a rare period of rapprochement between the two rivals and the visionary policies of the former field marshal, then still known as Mustafa Kemal, and his Greek counterpart, Eleftherios Venizelos.
Although the Greek army was routed by forces commanded by Kemal in a conflict that would also end with the sacking of Smyrna and the mass exchange of populations – a calamity still referred to as the Asia Minor catastrophe – the leaders were bent on reconciliation. In 1930 a Greek-Turkish friendship agreement was signed in Ankara by the two men; four years later, Venizelos proposed that Kemal be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
It was in the spirit of détente that the municipality of Thessaloniki gave the house to the Turkish state in 1935. “That the house of Atatürk exists at all is extraordinary,” said Richard Jackson, a retired US diplomat, recalling the hostilities between the countries when he served at the American consulate general in Thessaloniki in the 1970s. “That it has become such a shrine for secular Turks is one of those remarkable but little known asides in Greek-Turkish history.”
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The surge in Turkish visitors to Thessaloniki – the museum has seen a four-fold increase since the Covid-19 pandemic – reflects the uptick in numbers visiting Greece more generally. In recent years the longtime foes, at loggerheads over maritime and territorial disputes and the war-split island of Cyprus, have pursued an array of initiatives to ease tensions.
A relaxation of visa requirements has been among the bilateral cooperation accords signed by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The Aegean islands close to Turkey’s western coast have reported a dramatic influx of Turkish tourists this summer, and descendants of Muslim families uprooted in the 1923 population exchange are frequently among those returning to Thessaloniki.
“The climate has much improved,” said Pantelis Filippidis, who heads the commercial association of Thessaloniki. “You hear and see Turkish visitors everywhere and it’s really helped the local economy. The area around Atatürk’s house was very depressed before, but now it’s thriving. On a people-to-people level Greek and Turks get along wonderfully. Trade unites; all the rest is political games.”
But under Erdoğan, Turkey’s most influential leader since Atatürk, many of the reforms have been reversed, with the ruling Islamist-rooted AKP party lifting restrictions on religious education and allowing headscarves to return to the public domain as both have moved to change the character of the country.
By contrast, Atatürk had ensured that, before their short-lived liaison dissolved, his wife, Latife, who had studied law in Europe and was fluent in English and French, donned western attire as the embodiment of the social reforms he so cherished. One of his adopted daughters, Sabiha Gökçen, became the world’s first female fighter pilot.
“For many Turks there is a fear that many of Atatürk’s reforms are under attack because of Erdoğan’s more pious policies,” said Ifantis. “There is no denying that [Atatürk] is very much a part of the DNA of modern Turkey but the country is changing, and that may play a role in so many people now wanting to visit his birthplace.”
