Cutting a shroud for a nation: Sèvres

I was in Thessaloniki last week.

While visiting the house where Atatürk was born, after a while, one stops looking at history and starts looking at Mustafa Kemal himself. To a child born in that house in 1881...

There is a tree in the garden. It is said to be a tree planted by Ali Rıza Efendi, under which little Mustafa used to play. While standing beneath it, for some reason, I thought of Söğüt. That great tree that grew in Osman Gazi's dream in the founding narrative of the Ottoman Empire, whose branches spread across the world... The idea of an empire that grew under the shade of a tree in Söğüt would come to an end centuries later in the life of a child playing under another tree in Thessaloniki; that child would build a new state from the ashes of the collapsing empire.

History, of course, had no such plan. But sometimes, history presents us with symbols more powerful than documents.

I left the house and walked the streets of Thessaloniki. The sea, the city opening up to the shore, the rhythm of the streets, the scent of the Aegean... Strangely, I thought of İzmir, even Karşıyaka. Mustafa Kemal lost Thessaloniki, where he was born. His mother, Zübeyde Hanım, was laid to rest years later on the other side of the Aegean, in Karşıyaka.

Of course, we cannot say "she was buried in Karşıyaka because it resembled Thessaloniki." There is no historical basis for this. Zübeyde Hanım passed away in İzmir on January 14, 1923, where she had come due to health problems.

But after seeing Thessaloniki, one cannot escape the romanticism of this coincidence:

On one side, the city where you were born... On the other, the city where your mother was bid farewell to eternity... The same Aegean between them. This is why it takes on another meaning when Mustafa Kemal says, at his mother's graveside, that he finds solace in her resting in the soil of İzmir, whose liberation became the goal for the entire nation. Because to understand Mustafa Kemal, one must look not only at the wars he won but also at the cities he lost.

And then to Sèvres...

Signed on August 10, 1920, Sèvres was much more than a harsh peace treaty placed before a defeated empire.

İzmir and its surroundings were being arranged in favor of Greece, an Armenia was envisioned in Eastern Anatolia, a mechanism that could extend from autonomy to independence was being established for regions where Kurds lived in large numbers, the Straits were being left to international control, the Ottoman army was being severely restricted, and economic and legal sovereignty was being besieged by capitulations.

When you looked at the map, the reality was very stark: A land was being left to the Turks, but a sovereign state was not. This was the curse of Sèvres.

The issue was not just sharing the land. It was taking away a nation's right to decide its own future.

Mustafa Kemal's objection began exactly here.

Who would decide the fate of a nation?

London?

Paris?

Athens?

The surrendered will in Istanbul?

Or the nation itself living in Anatolia?

"The independence of the nation shall be saved by the determination and resolve of the nation itself."

This statement is not just a beautiful sentence of the National Struggle. It is the shortest political answer given to Sèvres. For this reason, Sèvres was first rejected in the minds.

In Erzurum, in Sivas, in Ankara... Then in İnönü, in Sakarya, in Dumlupınar.

And finally, on September 9, 1922, in İzmir.

History has a strange symmetry. Thessaloniki, where Mustafa Kemal was born, was now a city of another country. But İzmir was no longer under occupation. A few months later, Zübeyde Hanım would be laid to rest in Karşıyaka, on the opposite shore of that liberated city.

A son could not reclaim the city of his birth. But he did not allow the city where his mother rested to belong to someone else.

I read this not as a cause-and-effect relationship, but as a powerful symbol that history has placed before us.

Thessaloniki was the memory of a lost homeland. İzmir became the symbol of a homeland that was not allowed to be lost.

And when it came to Lausanne, the political will that Sèvres had been placed before was no longer at the table.

Today, 106 years have passed since Sèvres.

While standing in Thessaloniki under that tree said to have been planted by Ali Rıza Efendi, this was perhaps what was on my mind:

A tree in Söğüt had become the symbol of the birth of an empire. Under another tree in Thessaloniki, a child was playing who would see the end of that empire and build the Republic in its place.

One was the story of a beginning. The other was of a new beginning.

In between were centuries, lost cities, wars, and Sèvres, which had been placed before a nation.

The answer to Sèvres was a future drawn by others.

Mustafa Kemal's answer was much simpler:

The fate of the Turkish Nation would be determined by the Turkish Nation itself.

The National Struggle was the process of having this sentence accepted by the world, first on the battlefield and then in Lausanne.