Ankara: Chapter 15: About to Head South
Trip Start
Feb 08, 2008
1
25
121
Trip End
Sep 11, 2009
Ankara,
Ankara,
Turkey
Monday, March 31, 2008
About to Depart Ankara
Ok, it`s the morning that I expect to depart Ankara for Niğde (the soft g is silent).
Once Again, Lord Kinross
I have just breakfasted in the hotel cafe while finishing my reading of Lord Patrick Kinross' biography Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation. He concludes with this statement in an epilogue:
". . . What Atatürk left to the Turkey he had freed was strong foundations and a clear objective for her future growth. He gave her not merely durable institutions but a national ideal, rooted in patriotism, nourished by a new self-respect, and promising fruitful rewards for new energies. He created, by his deeds and his words, a personal myth, to feed the imagination of a people given to the worship of heroes. He infused them with a belief in the values of Western democracy, which they learnt sincerely to respect, differing only as to the means of achieving it. All that he gave them survives as a living force in the Turk of today.
Ataturk
"The logical outcome has been the emergence of the Turkish Republic as a reliable ally of the West. The soldier in Atatürk saved his country, confounding, as no other man at that time could have done, the designs of the European powers against it, and thus changing the face of its history. The statesman in him then won their acceptance of his country on equal terms, and ultimately its incorporation into the Atlantic Alliance, as a bulwark against Russia--its hereditary enemy--and an element of stability in the shifting Middle Eastern world.
"Such was the life`s achievement of Mustafa Kemal, 'Father of the Turks'."
The Mango Book
And that leaves me a little choked up as I pack up and head for the bus station.
P.S. A good concise biography of Ataturk can be found at this address:
http://www.intimets.sakarya.edu.tr/websites/turkey/ataturk.htm
