Naval Postgraduate School

INTERVIEW: Historian Ryan Gingeras on Atatürk as 'heir to the Ottoman Empire'

The legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is still bitterly contested in today's Turkey. Approaching the centenary of the republic's establishment, the process of Westernization, secularization and modernization led by Turkey's nationalist founding father still provides the reference against which various political movements - whether sympathetic or antagonistic - define themselves.