A few weeks ago I was hiking near Milas in western Turkey when I was invited into a village home in the advanced stages of collapsing about its elderly occupants. Beyond the overgrown garden and rotten staircase, however, the thickly-socked Mehmet and his wife had partially maintained the main room, at least to the point of hanging the walls with pictures of their large, long dispersed family. What caught my eye, however, was the portrait which hung in pride of place – of a former national leader whom the couple clearly held in deep regard. No prizes, you might think, for guessing that the portrait was of Kemal Atatürk, war hero and secularist ideologue, who emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire to found the Turkish Republic in 1923, zealously remaking the country along western lines – in terms of its civil code, calendar, dress and script - until his death 15 years later. Except that the portrait was in fact of the country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, who was toppled in Turkey’s first military coup in 1960, and executed the following year.
Menderes, who took his surname from the nearby valley of the classical Meander where his family’s landed interests lay, oversaw the liberalisation of the Turkish economy in the 1950s, albeit at the expense of record trade deficits and ensuing economic and social unrest. What further alienated him from the ‘Kemalist’ establishment, however, was that he assiduously courted Islamic traditionalists smarting from decades of zealous secularisation. Under Menderes the call to prayer was once more permitted to be made in the traditional Arabic. Religious schools were opened. Islamic periodicals were published. Many of the country’s mosques were reopened; the portrait in Mehmet’s house pointedly showed the raven-haired Menderes, in the dark glasses and brilliantine of the period, presenting an architect’s model of a newly commissioned mosque to his cabinet colleagues.
In the years following his execution by the military, self-styled guardians of the secular state, such images of Menderes, accused among other things of abandoning the country to the forces of reaction, were formally proscribed. In later decades, however, popular outrage led political opportunists to facilitate the man’s gradual rehabilitation. Universities, institutes and other organisations are now named after this hero of democracy, as is the airport of the country’s third city; a flight between Izmir’s and Istanbul’s airports, literally from Adnan Menderes to Atatürk, may remind passengers of the classic opposition between devout conservatism and constitutional secularism, one which continues to define Turkey. With conservatism by all accounts currently winning out.
The coup which led to Menderes’ execution in 1961 set in train a pattern whereby the Turkish military repeated intervened in national politics whenever they felt the country’s secular constitution was under threat. The governing Islamic party was repeatedly proscribed, only to prove itself hydra-headed, reappearing time and again under another name, and always with additional popular support. Levels of democratic support for the ruling Islamic party of Recep Tayip Erdoğan are now such that the military appears cowed; the democratic process may finally be assured in Turkey.
As we left the house, my guide told me that many devout country people saw Adnan Menderes as a martyr to their values.
‘The governing Islamists know this,’ he added. ‘The secular freedoms are increasingly under attack. Some provinces are extending their alcohol bans.’ Erdoğan’s AK Party, economically self-confident and increasingly ambivalent towards a debt-crippled Europe, now seems intent on extending the same programme of social conservatism which cost Menderes his life. Some commentators are even beginning to look out for the signs of a logical corollary to this process and to the rehabilitation of Adnan Menderes; the eventual dismantling of the cult of the man who remains on the coins, banknotes and walls almost 75 years after a premature death brought on, in part, by cirrhosis of the liver.
We left the village by Atatürk Road. The sign was rusty and uncared for.
In the years following his execution by the military, self-styled guardians of the secular state, such images of Menderes, accused among other things of abandoning the country to the forces of reaction, were formally proscribed. In later decades, however, popular outrage led political opportunists to facilitate the man’s gradual rehabilitation. Universities, institutes and other organisations are now named after this hero of democracy, as is the airport of the country’s third city; a flight between Izmir’s and Istanbul’s airports, literally from Adnan Menderes to Atatürk, may remind passengers of the classic opposition between devout conservatism and constitutional secularism, one which continues to define Turkey. With conservatism by all accounts currently winning out.
The coup which led to Menderes’ execution in 1961 set in train a pattern whereby the Turkish military repeated intervened in national politics whenever they felt the country’s secular constitution was under threat. The governing Islamic party was repeatedly proscribed, only to prove itself hydra-headed, reappearing time and again under another name, and always with additional popular support. Levels of democratic support for the ruling Islamic party of Recep Tayip Erdoğan are now such that the military appears cowed; the democratic process may finally be assured in Turkey.
As we left the house, my guide told me that many devout country people saw Adnan Menderes as a martyr to their values.
‘The governing Islamists know this,’ he added. ‘The secular freedoms are increasingly under attack. Some provinces are extending their alcohol bans.’ Erdoğan’s AK Party, economically self-confident and increasingly ambivalent towards a debt-crippled Europe, now seems intent on extending the same programme of social conservatism which cost Menderes his life. Some commentators are even beginning to look out for the signs of a logical corollary to this process and to the rehabilitation of Adnan Menderes; the eventual dismantling of the cult of the man who remains on the coins, banknotes and walls almost 75 years after a premature death brought on, in part, by cirrhosis of the liver.
We left the village by Atatürk Road. The sign was rusty and uncared for.