Mustafa Kemal, who remade this world,
whose portrait adorns all public places—
your mausoleum is Türkiye’s temple:
What did you dream of when Smyrna perished,
ravished, mutilated, murdered, and burned?
You, Pasha, might perhaps have stopped it.
You refused to wipe your feet on a Greek
banner laid on your doorstep to that end.
Your troops were told, tell them: “Be not afraid!”
Though fear would be the order of the night.
Was it because those killers were your kin?
Six hundred thousand fled old Ottoman
lands for Anatolia,* full of hate—
bashi-bazouks sprang up from Satan's mold.
You also lost identity and home,
stripped as an infidel of your birthplace:
Salonica was Thessalonikī now;
your mother and sister lodged in Pera,
Istanbul—you paid the rent. The rapists
were, in that respect, your tribal brothers.
Like them, you could not love the Levantine
Greeks sabered or the Armenians burned
that night. I guess you drank yourself to sleep!
Rakı drowned out the screams, the fire’s roar.
Westerners on their dreadnoughts in the Bay
looked on in horror, but at last you slept
—only to wake to unrelenting dawn
and memories that you could not forget—
such as the guilty waken, going down.
*After the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated by its former subject provinces Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia, almost losing even its capital, Istanbul. “L’Anatolie est pour ainsi dire saturée de émigrants,” Fabrice Monnier writes in his biography Atatürk: Naissance de la Turquie moderne (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015), 57.
Mustafa Kemal, who abolished both the Islamic caliphate and the Ottoman sultanate, commanded that the Turks use a Latin alphabet, discard their tarbooshes, wear European hats, and adopt surnames—choosing for himself the name Atatürk, “father of the Turks”—opera lover and ballroom dancer, died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 57 at 9:05 a.m. on November 10, 1938, at which precise time, with flags at half-mast, two minutes of solemn silence have ever since been observed throughout Türkiye.
Rakı is an alcoholic beverage made of twice-distilled grape pomace and flavored with aniseed. A bashi-bazouk was an Ottoman irregular soldier.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
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