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Coffee fo Kahve. Ataturk moved the capital from cosmopolite Constantinople to raw Ankara and changed Constantinople's name to Istanbul. Though he personally abhorred emancipated women (they argued, instead of saying yes), he begged Turkey's women to unveil, and most did. He abolished the Moslem sheriat (law) and took the best from Europe to replace it—Switzerland's civil code, pre-Fascist Italy's penal code, Germany's commercial code.
Though he made haste, he had an intuitive awareness of his people's gait. The old Turkish alphabet had become an esoteric nightmare of cumbersome Arabic scrawls; its difficulty contributed to illiteracy at home and incomprehensibility abroad. Kemal talked first to U.S. Educator John Dewey, then sat down with linguistic experts and worked out a new, simple Latin, A-B-C alphabet of 29 letters. Where new concepts lacked ancient symbols, he simply used Western forms: automobile to otomobil; coffee to kahve; statistic to istatistik.
Blackboards went up in the National Assembly, and Kemal himself gave the Deputies their first lesson. He went to the countryside and guided the gnarled hands of peasants who had never held a pencil before, as they wrote clumsy signatures in the new script. This patient teaching took five years; then abruptly he switched from precept to fiat. He gave civil servants three months to master the new script—or find new jobs. He had not been to Istanbul since 1919; now he returned in style and with a purpose. He sailed into the Golden Horn on the Sultan's yacht, triumphantly marched past cheering crowds. He summoned Istanbul's elite to the Sultan's palace to a ball, and stood before them in full evening dress on a raised platform, chalk in hand, before a blackboard. For two hours he explained the new language, then the music blared, everyone drank, and the dancing went on until dawn. Nineteen twenty-eight became the Year One of Turkey's new cultural life.
Oy Birligile. Ataturk liberated law, education and marriage from the mullahs; turned mosques into granaries; switched the day of rest from Friday to Sunday; tossed out the Islamic calendar and ordered in the Gregorian calendar of the Western world. He made suffrage universal, adopted the metric system, ordered all Turks to take on last names, took the first census in Turkish history. Harems were forbidden and monogamy became the law.
The most familiar phrase in the Turkish National Assembly during these electric days was Oy Birligile, meaning by unanimous vote. Opposed, Ataturk was ruthless. One evening in 1926, he gave a champagne party for foreign diplomats; it turned into an all-night carousal. Returning home at dawn, the diplomats saw the corpses of the entire opposition leadership, among them Kemal's old friends, hanging in the town square.
But in his later years, after he had raised his people up, he decided to ease his dictatorship. He brought his ambassador home from France, ordered him to head an opposition, ordered his own sister to join it. The new Liberal Republican Party was so polite at first that Kemal demanded more vigor; when it became more vigorous he abolished it. "Let the people leave politics for the present," he said. "Let them interest themselves in agriculture and commerce. For ten or 15 years more I must rule."