How an assembly in Ankara made Türkiye before the state existed

What Anatolia held before the Turks arrived

The archaeological record on the territory of Türkiye opens long before any state. Göbekli Tepe is close to 12,000 years old, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2018; the Neolithic settlement at Çatalhöyük had been inscribed in 2012. Farmers from Anatolia began migrating into Europe around 9,000 years ago.

Writing arrives with clay tablets from about 2000 BC found at Kültepe, the archive of an Assyrian trading colony, and the tablets show a crowded linguistic map. Hattian, Hurrian, Hittite, Luwian and Palaic were all in use, and Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language. The Hittite kingdom ruled central Anatolia from its capital at Hattusa between about 1700 and 1200 BC; UNESCO inscribed the site in 1986. Phrygia, Urartu around Lake Van, Lydia, Caria and Lycia came after it.

Greek settlers founded Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna and Byzantium on the western coast, Byzantium by colonists from Megara in 657 BC. Anatolia was then incorporated into the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and Alexander took it from Darius III between 334 and 330 BC. Rome held the peninsula from the second century BC. In 324 Constantine chose Byzantium as the new capital of the empire, and the city became Constantinople.

The territory of the modern republic was the core of the Eastern Roman Empire from then until the late Middle Ages. Ecumenical councils of the early church met on it, among them Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. By the early centuries AD the local Anatolian languages had died out and Greek had replaced them.

How the Seljuks and Ottomans made Anatolia Turkish

Turkic rule came from the east. The Seljuks, a dynasty from the Kınık branch of the Oghuz Turks, founded their empire in Greater Khorasan after defeating the Ghaznavids at Dandanaqan in 1040 and took Baghdad in 1055. In 1071 they defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, and the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was established in Anatolia after it.

Turkification took several centuries. It ran through migration, intermarriage and conversion to Islam, and orders of Islamic mysticism such as the Mevlevi took part in converting a population that was then diverse and largely Greek-speaking. A second wave of Turkic migration came in the thirteenth century as people fled the Mongols, who defeated the Seljuk sultanate at Köse Dağ in 1243. By the start of the fourteenth century the sultanate had gone and Anatolia was a patchwork of principalities, the beyliks.

One of them, in Bithynia on the Byzantine frontier, was led by Osman I, from whom the name Ottoman derives, and its founding is dated to about 1299. His son Orhan took Bursa in 1326 and made it the capital. Edirne, taken in 1361, was the next. On 29 May 1453 Mehmed II took Constantinople, which became the third capital and ended the Byzantine Empire. UNESCO inscribed Bursa and Cumalıkızık in 2014 under the title "the Birth of the Ottoman Empire".

Ottoman power peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Suleiman the Magnificent took Belgrade in 1521, won at Mohács in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529. The retreat began with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, under which Austria took Hungary and Transylvania, Venice took most of Dalmatia and the Morea, and Poland recovered Podolia. The Ottoman period lasted more than 600 years, and Britannica dates its end to 1922.

Why the empire tried constitutions before the republic

The Ottoman state experimented with representative government half a century before the republic existed. The Tanzimat reforms began in 1839. Sultan Abdülhamid II, who took the throne on 1 September 1876, appointed a committee of 28 under Mithad Pasha to draft a constitution, and he promulgated the Kanun-i Esasi on 23 December 1876, the first constitution adopted by a Muslim state.

The parliament it created opened on 19 March 1877 and sat for a little over three months. The sultan kept the veto and the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, and when the chamber sent ministers for trial before the Supreme Court he dissolved it on 28 June 1877. A second parliament, elected in January 1878, removed the grand vizier without the authority to do so. On 14 February 1878 the sultan adjourned it indefinitely and set the constitution aside.

It came back by force. Officers of the Committee of Union and Progress rose in Salonika, and the constitution was reinstated on 23 July 1908. Parliament deposed Abdülhamid on 27 April 1909, and amendments that August made ministers answerable to the chamber and limited the sultan's power to dissolve it. The Grand National Assembly's own history of the period counts seven constitutional amendments in this second constitutional period and records that every parliament of it was dissolved.

Around these institutions the empire was shrinking. The European provinces were lost in the First Balkan War of 1912 and 1913, and around 400,000 Muslims fled with the retreating Ottoman army. Across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between five and nine million refugees, depending on the estimate, moved into Anatolia and Eastern Thrace from the Balkans, the Caucasus, Crimea and the Mediterranean islands, and the centre of the empire moved to Anatolia with them. The Hamidian massacres of Armenians in the same decades claimed up to 300,000 lives.

What the First World War did to Anatolia

After the coup of 1913 the Three Pashas controlled the Ottoman government, and in 1914 they took the empire into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers. At Gallipoli, between February 1915 and January 1916, Ottoman forces stopped the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles. Mustafa Kemal commanded the 19th Division there and was promoted to colonel on 1 June 1915. In the Caucasus the Russian army held the advantage from the start, especially after the Battle of Sarikamish.

The Armenian genocide was carried out during and after the war. War Minister Enver Pasha blamed the defeat at Sarikamish on Armenians siding with Russia, and the Committee of Union and Progress then adopted a policy the History of Turkey account describes as "now broadly recognized by scholars as the Armenian genocide". The empire's Armenian subjects were deported to Syria, and estimates of the dead run from about 600,000 to 1.5 million. The Turkish government has refused to acknowledge the events as genocide and states that Armenians were "relocated" from the eastern war zone. Campaigns against the empire's Assyrian and Greek minorities are recorded alongside it.

The Armistice of Mudros, signed on 30 October 1918, ended the fighting and opened Ottoman territory to occupation. Enver and the other Unionist leaders fled to Germany, and Sultan Mehmed VI chose to cooperate with the Allies. Allied troops occupied parts of Istanbul in December 1918, and on 8 February 1919 the French general Franchet d'Espèrey rode into the city in a procession Britannica compares with Mehmed II's entry in 1453. Italian troops occupied Antalya and Marmaris. On 15 May 1919 Greek troops landed at İzmir, and most historians date the war of independence from that landing.

How an assembly in Ankara overturned Sèvres

Who called the assembly into being

Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast on 19 May 1919. The date mattered enough to him that, asked later for his date of birth by an encyclopaedia, he gave 19 May 1919. Associations for the defence of rights were already organising across Anatolia. The Erzurum Congress, which opened on 23 July 1919, and the Sivas Congress after it drafted and ratified the National Pact, which claimed the Ottoman lands inhabited by Turks when Mudros was signed and revoked the capitulations, the legal privileges foreign powers had held inside the empire.

The last Ottoman Chamber of Deputies met in Istanbul on 12 January 1920 and endorsed the National Pact in secret on 28 January. Allied forces took control of Istanbul on 16 March 1920 and sent leading nationalists to Malta, and the sultan dissolved the chamber on 2 April. Kemal had already announced, on 19 March, elections for a new parliament with extraordinary powers that would meet in Ankara, 480 kilometres from Istanbul, and he invited the members of the dissolved chamber to join it.

The assembly opened on 23 April 1920. Of its 324 members, 115 reached the first sitting, and the deputy for Sinop, Şerif Bey, used the phrase "Grand National Assembly" in his opening speech. It held legislative and executive power together. It elected Kemal as its speaker on its second sitting day and formed an executive committee under him on 25 April.

What Sèvres would have done

The Allied settlement came that summer. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, confirmed the Arab provinces as League of Nations mandates for Britain and France and divided much of the remainder among Greece, Italy, France, Britain, Armenia and Georgia. Smyrna was to hold a plebiscite on staying with Greece and the Kurdish region one on independence, and Constantinople and the Dardanelles were to pass under League of Nations control. Ferid Pasha signed it for the sultan's government. The Ottoman Senate refused to ratify it, so did Greece, and it never came into force.

The Ankara assembly answered with a constitution. The Teşkilat-i Esasiye Kanunu of 20 January 1921 ran to 24 articles and declared that sovereignty belonged to the nation without reservation or limitation. In the assembly's reading that made the sultan's signature at Sèvres unconstitutional, because the sultan was not elected, and the text became the legal basis on which the war was fought.

How the war was decided

The fighting ran on several fronts at once. In the east the nationalists defeated Armenia in late 1920 and fixed the frontier by the Treaty of Alexandropol of 3 December 1920 and the Treaty of Kars in 1921. France and Italy negotiated with Ankara and withdrew their troops from Anatolia. In the west İsmet Pasha held the Greek advance at the İnönü River on 10 January 1921 and again between 27 March and 1 April.

After a Greek victory at Kütahya-Eskişehir the Turkish army fell back to the Sakarya River, close enough to Ankara that the artillery could be heard in the city. On 4 August 1921 the assembly granted Kemal its own powers as commander-in-chief. The battle on the Sakarya lasted 21 days, from 23 August to 13 September 1921, and ended in Greek withdrawal. The Great Offensive opened at Dumlupınar on 26 August 1922 and retook Greece's gains within three weeks, and the Armistice of Mudanya followed on 11 October 1922.

What Lausanne settled and what it left open

The assembly abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922, ending 623 years of Ottoman monarchy, and Mehmed VI left the country aboard HMS Malaya on 17 November. The conference at Lausanne opened on 21 November with İsmet Pasha leading the Turkish delegation under instructions to refuse any proposal that compromised Turkish sovereignty. It broke down on 4 February 1923, when the British foreign secretary Curzon left on the Orient Express, and resumed. The treaty was signed on 24 July 1923 after seven months of negotiation, by Turkey on one side and by Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on the other. Britannica calls it the final treaty concluding the First World War.

Lausanne also fixed the European border on the Maritsa River, where it had run before 1914, and made the border with Greece and Bulgaria demilitarised. Turkey recognised British possession of Cyprus and Italian possession of the Dodecanese, and the Allies imposed no control over Turkish finances or armed forces. An accompanying convention provided for a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the last Allied troops left Istanbul on 4 October 1923.

Three questions were settled later. Mosul was deferred, and a League of Nations agreement between Turkey and Britain confirmed it in the British mandate of Iraq in 1926. The straits commission Lausanne set up was replaced by the Montreux Convention in 1936. Hatay voted in a referendum in 1939 to join Turkey.

How the assembly rewrote Turkish law and dress

The republic was an act of the assembly. At Kemal's request an early election was held in April 1923, and when the new government resigned after a dispute with the chamber he proposed a republic. The majority agreed, and on 29 October 1923 the assembly proclaimed that the form of government was republican, with Ankara as the capital, Kemal as the first president and İsmet as the first prime minister.

The caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924. The constitution of 20 April 1924 ran to 105 articles and kept legislative and executive power in the assembly, which could remove the government at any time while the government had no power to dissolve the assembly. Law was then imported whole: the Swiss civil code in 1926, which brought civil marriage and monogamy, followed by German commercial law and Italian criminal law. The Gregorian calendar and the metric system arrived in 1926.

On 10 April 1928 the constitution was amended to drop Islam as the state religion. Women received the right to vote and stand for election on 5 December 1934, and on 5 February 1937 the constitution described the state as republican, national, populist, statist, reformist and laic, the six principles Britannica groups under the name Kemalism. The Surname Law of 1934 gave Kemal the surname Atatürk; İsmet took İnönü, after the river where he had held the Greek army. The reforms met armed resistance among some Kurdish and Zaza tribes, in the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925 and the Dersim rebellion of 1937. Atatürk died on 10 November 1938 and İnönü succeeded him.

The constitution in force carries the reform laws of those years forward. Article 174 of the constitution of 1982 lists eight of them and states that no provision of the constitution may be read as making them unconstitutional.

Why soldiers kept rewriting the constitution

Türkiye stayed out of the Second World War for almost all of it. It signed a treaty with Britain in October 1939, traded with both sides, bought arms from both and sold chrome to Germany against Allied efforts to stop it, conferred with Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo in November 1943 and broke off relations with Germany in August 1944. It declared war on 23 February 1945, a step that made it a charter member of the United Nations. Soviet demands for bases on the straits brought the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Türkiye joined the Council of Europe on 9 August 1949, fought with the United Nations forces in Korea and joined NATO in 1952.

One-party rule ended after 1945, and Britannica records that governments since the 1950s have come from multiparty elections based on universal adult suffrage. The army interrupted them repeatedly, and after each intervention the constitution was rewritten. On 27 May 1960 the military arrested Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, President Celal Bayar, the ministers and every member of the assembly, and a Committee of National Unity took the assembly's powers. A constituent assembly convened on 6 January 1961 drafted a text that voters accepted by 61.17% on 9 July 1961. It created a two-chamber parliament and a Constitutional Court and set out economic and social rights for the first time.

A military memorandum of 12 March 1971 forced extensive changes to that text, and the coup of 12 September 1980 suspended it and dissolved the political parties. The constitution drafted under military rule passed by referendum with 91.37% of the vote on 7 November 1982. It made the parliament a single chamber, and its first provisional article made the head of the National Security Council president of the republic for seven years. A further memorandum followed in 1997.

Outside the constitution, two conflicts ran through the same decades. After the Greek military coup on Cyprus in July 1974 Türkiye invaded the island, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was declared in 1983. In 1984 the PKK began an armed insurgency against the Turkish state; the PKK declared a ceasefire in 2025.

What the vote for an executive presidency changed

Türkiye applied for membership of the European Economic Community in 1987, joined the customs union in 1995 and opened accession negotiations with the European Union in October 2005. The president was elected directly by voters for the first time in August 2014.

On 15 July 2016 a coup attempt failed after a few hours. According to the Turkish government, 13,251 people were in prison as of 2024, arrested or convicted in connection with it. In April 2017 voters narrowly approved constitutional amendments that replaced the parliamentary system with an executive presidency and abolished the office of prime minister, transferring its powers to the president. While voting was under way the Supreme Electoral Council lifted the rule that each ballot carry an official stamp, and opposition parties claimed that as many as 2.5 million unstamped ballots were counted. The new system came into force with the elections of 24 June 2018.

Article 4 of the constitution forbids even proposing an amendment to its first three articles, which fix the republican form of the state, the characteristics of the republic, including its loyalty to the nationalism of Atatürk, and the language, flag, anthem and capital. In 2022 (May in one Wikipedia account, July in another) the government asked other states and international bodies to call the country Türkiye. The assembly prints at the foot of its website the sentence "Egemenlik kayıtsız şartsız milletindir", that sovereignty belongs to the nation unconditionally, which is the principle of the constitution it adopted in January 1921, before there was a republic for it to apply to. Türkiye: politics covers the institutions as they now stand.