Episode Details

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took a defeated, occupied empire and built a secular republic from its wreckage in less than a decade. He abolished the caliphate, replaced Arabic script with Latin letters, banned the fez, gave women the vote, and remade Turkish identity so thoroughly that the country he created bears almost no resemblance to the Ottoman state that preceded it. No other twentieth-century leader reshaped a nation's culture as completely.

This episode traces Ataturk from his military career through Gallipoli, the Turkish War of Independence, and the radical secularization program that remains the most ambitious social engineering project in modern history.

• Ataturk's military rise and the defense of Gallipoli that made him a national hero
• The Turkish War of Independence and the expulsion of occupying forces after World War I
• The abolition of the caliphate, the alphabet reform, and the forced secularization of Turkish society
• The personality cult, the drinking that killed him at fifty-seven, and the legacy Turkey still fights over