The history of modern Turkey falls naturally into two periods: those of Ottoman Turkey and Kemalist Turkey. The foundations of Ottoman Turkey were laid, at least symbolically, by Osman, the eponymous founder of the dynasty in the closing years of the thirteenth century. Likewise, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk personifies the republic that he founded and shaped in the second decade of the twentieth century. He is the Republic’s symbol, pictured on stamps, coins and banknotes, portrayed on the walls of offices and homes, quoted in and out of season to buttress arguments, presented as a guiding star, an ideal to inspire and follow. But while we can only guess at Osman’s political choices and their influence on the state he is deemed to have founded, the influence of Mustafa Kemal’s policies on the development of modern Turkey is patent and his imprint on his people’s history is clear.

Many Turks, and some outsiders, would go further and argue that Atatürk changed the course not only of Turkish, but also of world history. One may dispute the wider claim, while conceding that he was both the founding father of a modern state and a harbinger of things to come – that Atatürk, the child of an empire, who thwarted the policies of other empires, was one of the first leaders to establish the limits of imperial power in the modern age, and that his demonstration of these limits at the end of the First World War acquired universal validity at the end of the Second.