How the Turkish Republic Was Founded

The Republic of Turkey was not born in a single moment. It emerged from four years of war, two years of political struggle, and a transformation that dissolved a six-hundred-year-old empire and replaced it with a modern nation-state. The founding story runs from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War to the proclamation of the republic in 1923, and it explains the shape of the country you see today. This article walks through that sequence: the occupation, the resistance, the war, and the political decisions that created the republic.

The Empire at Breaking Point

The Ottoman Empire entered the twentieth century weakened by two centuries of territorial loss and internal strain. It had lost most of its European provinces, faced pressure from nationalist movements among its peoples, and depended on foreign loans that gave European powers influence over its finances.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the empire joined the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The gamble failed. By the time the war ended in 1918, Ottoman armies were exhausted, Arab provinces had been lost, and the empire’s economy was ruined. The capital, Constantinople, was occupied by Allied forces, and the sultan’s government could only accept the terms offered.

The collapse was complete. The empire that had once stretched across three continents was reduced to a rump state in Anatolia, and even that was under foreign occupation and negotiation. For the Turkish population, the question was existential: would any independent Turkish state survive at all?

The Occupation After the First World War

The armistice of 1918 stopped the fighting but began a new struggle. Allied forces moved into Ottoman territory, and plans circulated for carving up Anatolia itself. Greek forces landed at Izmir in 1919, French troops entered the south, and Italian and British forces occupied coastal regions.

The sultan’s government in Constantinople accepted these arrangements, cooperating with the occupiers in exchange for keeping its throne. Many educated Turks saw this as betrayal, and resentment spread through the army officers, bureaucrats, and provincial leaders who had expected better after the war.

The occupation also produced a practical crisis. With the central government unwilling to resist, no institution defended Turkish lands or populations. Into that vacuum stepped local resistance movements, which began organizing in villages and towns, and a single determined officer who believed the country could still be saved.

Resistance Organizes in Anatolia

That officer was Mustafa Kemal, a decorated general from the Gallipoli campaign. In May 1919 he was sent to Anatolia on an official assignment, but he quickly turned the mission into something else: a nationwide call to resist the occupation.

He landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast and began traveling through Anatolia, meeting commanders, governors, and local leaders. Everywhere he argued the same case: the homeland could not be divided, the sultan’s government was not free to act, and the nation must organize its own defense.

Local defense associations, the Society for the Defense of Rights, multiplied across the country. Some were already forming before he arrived, but Mustafa Kemal gave them coordination and a common purpose. Within months, scattered resistance had become a movement with a leader, a program, and a growing claim to legitimacy.

The Congresses and a National Pact

In the summer of 1919, delegates from across Anatolia gathered in Erzurum and then in Sivas for congresses that defined the resistance. They declared that the nation’s borders would be drawn by the Turkish people themselves, and that the occupied homeland would not be divided.

The congresses produced a set of principles that became known as the National Pact. It insisted on the independence and unity of the Turkish homeland, the rights of the Turkish majority, and the opening of the straits to world shipping under conditions set by the Turkish state. These points became the movement’s negotiating platform.

The delegates also created a representative committee, with Mustafa Kemal at its head, effectively establishing a rival government to the sultan’s cabinet in Constantinople. The sultan’s government condemned the congresses and ordered Mustafa Kemal’s arrest, but the movement in Anatolia was already beyond its reach.

A New Parliament in Ankara

In 1920, the sultan’s government agreed to a peace treaty that would have partitioned Anatolia, and the outrage sealed the resistance’s legitimacy. Mustafa Kemal summoned a new parliament, the Grand National Assembly, which opened in Ankara in April 1920.

The assembly was extraordinary: an improvised parliament in a provincial town, representing the whole country under occupation. It declared itself the true representative of the nation, claimed authority over all Turkish lands, and elected Mustafa Kemal as its president. It also passed a law making resistance to the occupation a national duty.

Ankara became the headquarters of the national struggle, and the assembly provided something the resistance had lacked: legitimacy. Foreign powers now had to deal with a body that claimed to speak for Turkey, and Turkish soldiers had a government that stood behind them, even as the sultan in occupied Constantinople issued death sentences against its leaders.

The War on the Western Front

The greatest threat came from the west, where Greek forces advanced into Anatolia under Allied approval, aiming to secure the Aegean coast for Greece. The Turkish resistance, organized into a new national army, fought a series of battles across the western plateau through 1920 and 1921.

The low point came in 1921, when Greek forces pushed deep into Anatolia, and the capital itself seemed threatened. At the Battle of Sakarya, fought over three weeks near Ankara, the Turkish army held its ground, and Mustafa Kemal’s leadership earned him the rank of commander-in-chief and the title of marshal.

The tide turned. The army regrouped, received supplies from the Soviet republic and from within Anatolia, and prepared for a final offensive. The long defensive phase of the war was over, and the resistance had proven it could not be beaten by invasion.

Victory and the Armistice

The decisive offensive came in August 1922. Turkish forces attacked along the western front, broke through the Greek lines, and drove the occupying army back toward the Aegean in a matter of weeks. Izmir, the last major stronghold, was taken in September, and the invasion was over.

The victory changed the strategic situation completely. With Greek forces gone, the other occupying powers had no appetite for continuing the fight. Negotiations opened with the Allied powers, and an armistice was signed in October 1922, ending the war in Anatolia and beginning the formal peace process.

The military victory also settled the political question in Ankara’s favor. The sultan’s government, discredited by its collaboration and its inability to defend the country, had no role in the peace. The Turkish nation’s representatives in Ankara spoke for the country now, and the peace settlement would be negotiated on their terms.

Abolishing the Sultanate

With the war won, the Grand National Assembly moved against the remaining institution of the old order. In November 1922, it abolished the sultanate, ending six centuries of Ottoman rule. The last sultan left Constantinople quietly, and the empire formally ceased to exist.

The decision was both symbolic and necessary. The sultan’s government had opposed the national movement, and the two authorities could not both claim to rule. By abolishing the sultanate, the assembly removed the last rival to its legitimacy and cleared the way for a new form of government.

The caliphate, the religious office held by the sultans, survived for another year, kept temporarily as a matter of political prudence. But the empire itself was gone. The question now was what kind of state would replace it, and the answer was being formed in Ankara.

Proclaiming the Republic

The peace treaty signed at Lausanne in 1923 recognized the independence and borders of the new Turkish state. With international recognition secured, the final step came quickly. In October 1923, the Grand National Assembly proclaimed Turkey a republic, and elected Mustafa Kemal as its first president.

The proclamation was the culmination of the whole struggle, the moment when the empire’s defeat was converted into a new state’s foundation. The republic was declared with little drama in a single session of the assembly, but it marked the beginning of a decade of transformation that would remake Turkish society.

Ankara, not Constantinople, was chosen as the capital, symbolizing the break with the imperial past. The city had hosted the resistance, the war effort, and the assembly; now it would host the republic itself, and grow from a provincial town into the seat of a modern state.

The Foundations of the New State

The republic’s first years were spent building the institutions of a modern nation-state. A new constitution defined the country’s structure, a single system of secular schools replaced the old religious schools, and the legal system was reorganized along European lines.

The founders understood that independence required more than borders. A new alphabet was introduced so that ordinary citizens could learn to read, education was expanded rapidly, and women were given civil and political rights that they had never held under the empire. The changes were fast, deliberate, and sometimes forced.

The republic that emerged was a different country in nearly every respect from the empire it replaced: secular where the empire was religious, nationalist where the empire was multinational, and republican where the empire was dynastic. That transformation, begun in the war of independence and carried forward through the 1920s, is the founding story of modern Turkey.

All Over Information

The All Over Information editorial team researches and writes practical English-language guides to Turkey. Facts are checked against official and local sources before publication, prices are published as dated ranges rather than quotes, and guides are revised when things change. We accept no sponsored posts, paid placements or paid links.

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