Atatürk's Ambiguous Legacy
As if nature had not been generous enough, history has endowed Istanbul with extraordinary beauty.
As if nature had not been generous enough, history has endowed Istanbul with extraordinary beauty. Its skyline is a parade of mosques, with pencil-like minarets that climb toward the sun, more than a few of them touched by the genius of Sinan (1489-1588), the Michelangelo of the Ottoman Empire. Its streets and avenues are graced by aqueducts, obelisks, and great churches that survive from the Byzantine era, including the spectacular domed Hagia Sophia, completed by the emperor Justinian I in A.D. 537. This is the only city in the world that has served as the seat of two great empires.
Yet the first thing a visitor to Istanbul today would notice is the dominating presence of modern Turkey´s founder, Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. A traveler arriving on the Turkish national airline would see the founder´s picture on the wall of the passenger cabin and his name on the façade of Istanbul´s perennially renovated airport. To reach the heart of the city he would take a taxi to Taksim Square, which is dominated by the imposing Atatürk Cultural Center. At some point he would have to cross Atatürk Boulevard; in almost every Turkish city the pattern is more or less the same. The personality cult surrounding Atatürk is perhaps as strong as the cults that existed in the Soviet Union, and is rivaled--though many Turks would consider it blasphemous to say so--by the officially orchestrated adulation that has been showered on some Arab leaders.