Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the soldier and statesman who founded the modern Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and transformed it through sweeping reforms into a secular, Westernizing nation-state. Born Mustafa Kemal in Salonica, then part of the Ottoman Empire, he trained as an army officer and rose to prominence as a brilliant commander.
He first won fame during the First World War, leading the successful Ottoman defense at Gallipoli in 1915, which repelled the Allied invasion and made him a national hero. When the empire collapsed in defeat and the victorious Allies moved to partition the Turkish heartland, Kemal organized and led a nationalist resistance, defeating foreign forces — most decisively the invading Greeks — and securing the country's independence.
In 1923 he proclaimed the Republic of Turkey and became its first president, a post from which he drove an astonishing program of modernization. He abolished the sultanate and the caliphate, separated religion from the state, replaced Islamic law with European-based legal codes, adopted the Latin alphabet, emancipated women, and pressed his people to embrace Western dress, education, and customs.
Forceful, authoritarian, and visionary, he reshaped almost every aspect of Turkish life within a single generation. The surname Atatürk — "father of the Turks" — was bestowed upon him by the nation he had remade. He died in 1938, revered as the founder of his country and a model for modernizing leaders across the developing world.