Inscrit le: 17 Mar 2006 Messages: 996 Localisation: Grenoble
Posté le: 19 Sep 2006 0:33 Sujet du message: Le livre de Mango sur Atatürk
Je reproduis ici ce chapitre sur l'enfance et les origines de Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:
Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey
Andrew Mango
Chapter One
A Home in Europe
* * *
Atatürk was born in Salonica in 1880/1 into a family which was Muslim, Turkish-speaking and precariously middle-class. These basic facts require elaboration.
Muslims did not have surnames, except in the case of a few prominent families. Official identity was based on entries in population registers. These registers, which were kept more or less accurately in the second half of the nineteenth century, specified an individual's given name or names, the names of his or her parents, religion, place and year of birth.
It was customary to give a newborn baby a name when the umbilical cord was cut. This was known as the `belly name' (göbek ismi), and was chosen from among the honorific titles applied to the Prophet Muhammad or other names having a pious connotation. Later the child might be given a second or even third name, by which he or she would become known. The use of two given names was a mark of social distinction. Atatürk started life as plain Mustafa (`the Chosen', one of the appellations of the Prophet).
Dates could be recorded in two different calendars. For religious purposes, Muslims used a lunar calendar dating back to the Prophet's flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. For administrative purposes, a solar calendar was introduced in 1839. Known as Rumi (Roman), this also dated back to AD 622, but the day and month were the same as in the (Christian) Julian calendar. The Rumi year started on 1 March, whichcorresponded to 13 March in the (international) Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century, and to 14 March in the twentieth century. In 1917, thirteen days were added to the Rumi calendar. Thereafter, the day and month, but not the year, corresponded to the Gregorian calendar. In the official population register, Atatürk's birth was entered in the year 1296 in the Rumi calendar. That year extended from 13 March 1880 to 12 March 1881. There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the entry.
The day and month of Atatürk's birth are uncertain. His mother was later to say that she had given birth to Mustafa during the `forty [cold] days' of winter. But Atatürk himself quoted his mother to suggest that his birth was in the spring, adding `It might well have been in May'. This justified his choice of 19 May, the date in 1919 on which he landed in Samsun to lead the Turkish armed resistance against the Allies, as his official birthday. His entourage questioned his mother's surviving women friends from Salonica and duly confirmed that their leader's birth occurred `in the spring, probably in May'.
It was customary, particularly in families which boasted of Islamic learning, for the father to record the dates of birth of his children inside the cover of the family Koran. This was apparently done in Atatürk's family, but according to his mother, Zübeyde, there were two Korans in the house. The one in which the children's birth was recorded was lost.
In the story of Atatürk's life fact and legend are hard to disentangle, and Atatürk was the main author of his own legend. What he said was repeated by his friends and relatives, and much of what the latter said was meant to please him. The biographer thus comes across a corpus of sayings and stories, echoing each other, and usually serving a political purpose. The purpose cannot be disregarded. The most likely date of Atatürk's birth is the winter of 1880/1.
Atatürk's father was Ali Riza, a junior civil servant. He came from a local lower middle-class family. Ali Riza's father Ahmet was known as Hafiz Ahmet Efendi. The title `Hafiz' indicated that he had learned the whole of the Koran by heart; the title `Efendi', also applied to his son Ali Riza, designated him as an educated man. Hafiz Ahmet Efendi was apparently nicknamed `the fugitive' (kaçak). The explanation offered is that he had taken to the hills following the murder of the French and German consuls in Salonica in May 1876. The consuls were killed by a mob of Muslims who were infuriated when local Christians enlisted foreign consular help to prevent the conversion to Islam of a Bulgarian girl. After the great powers had sent warships to Salonica, the local authorities hanged the ringleaders of the riot.
There seems to have been a tradition of Islamic learning in the family, since Ali Riza's brother Mehmet (Emin) was also a Hafiz and taught in a Koranic primary school. Mehmet's son Salih appears to have carried on the tradition. The Ottoman civil service was originally manned by clerics. When the administrative reforms of the nineteenth century produced a demand for secular civil servants, many of these came from clerical families. Ali Riza exemplified this process at the lowest level of the administration. The son and brother of neighbourhood Koranic teachers, he became a junior civil servant.
Ali Riza was first employed in the department of pious foundations (evkaf). This job took him to small provincial towns where he inspected the accounts of charities. In 1876/7 he served as lieutenant in a volunteer battalion formed on the eve of the Russian-Turkish war. At roughly the same time he married. He also changed his job, transferring to the customs service. The exact dates of these events in Ali Riza's life are not known. They probably occurred at the end of the war in 1878.
The name of Ali Riza's wife was Zübeyde, and she was twenty years his junior. Her father, Sofuzade Feyzullah Aga, earned a living from farming and trade in the small town of Langaza (now Langadha) to the east of Salonica. The title Aga usually denoted landlords, but it does not seem that Feyzullah owned much or any land. He may have been a steward or bailiff on behalf of absentee landowners. This was certainly the case with his son Hüseyin Aga who ran a farm near Langaza.
Feyzullah's family is said to have come from the country near Vodina (now Edhessa in western Greek Macedonia). The surname Sofuzade, meaning `son of a pious man', suggests that the ancestors of Zübeyde and Ali Riza had a similar background. Cemil Bozok, the son of Salih (Bozok), who was a distant cousin of Atatürk and, later, his ADC, claims to have been related to both Ali Riza's and Zübeyde's families. This would mean that the families of Atatürk's parents were interrelated. Cemil Bozok also notes that his paternal grandfather, Safer Efendi, was of Albanian origin. This may have a bearing on the vexed question of Atatürk's ethnic origin.
Atatürk's parents and relatives all used Turkish as their mother tongue. This suggests that some at least of their ancestors had originally come from Turkey, since local Muslims of Albanian and Slav origin who had no ethnic connection with Turkey spoke Albanian, Serbo-Croat or Bulgarian, at least so long as they remained in their native land. But in looks, Atatürk resembled local Albanians and Slavs. Like his mother, he had blue eyes and fair hair. The nickname `Red' applied to his paternal grandfather suggests that the latter was also fair. When he took up Turkish ethnic nationalism, Atatürk claimed that his ancestors had been Turkish nomads (yörük) settled in the Balkans after the Turkish conquest. Nomads had certainly been sent by the sultans to newly conquered territories both to help defend them and to keep these unruly tribesmen out of harm's way. But there is no evidence that either Ali Riza or Zübeyde was descended from such Turkish nomads. It has been said in support of Atatürk's claim to a Turkish ethnic origin that many Turkish nomads are blue-eyed and fair-haired. One of Atatürk's friends at the War College, and a future opponent, Arif, who came from a leading family of the Karakeçili tribe in inland Anatolia, resembled him to the extent of being taken for his brother. However, blue eyes, fair hair, and European looks in general are more common among Balkan Slavs than they are among Turkish nomads in Anatolia. It is much more likely that Atatürk inherited his looks from Balkan ancestors, and his mother tongue from Turkish conquerors who had intermarried with locals for many generations. We do not know whether the Albanian Safer Efendi was a blood relative of Atatürk. But Albanians and Slavs are likely to have figured among his ancestors. Direct descent from Turkish nomads is not an essential ingredient of Turkish ethnicity.
Ali Riza and Zübeyde lived first in the bridegroom's family house in the Muslim Yenikapi (New Gate) neighbourhood in Salonica. They had relatives elsewhere in the city. Atatürk's contemporary and distant relative Salih (Bozok) lived in a compound of houses which had all been bought by his wife's family in the neighbourhood of Kulekahveleri (coffee houses by the White Tower on the waterfront of Salonica). Salih's cousin, Nuri (Conker), who was to become a loyal adjutant of Atatürk, lived next door. A third close companion of Atatürk, Fuat (Bulca), who was Salih's brother-in-law, also grew up in Salonica.
It was in the family house in Yenikapi that Zübeyde gave birth to three children: a girl Fatma, and two boys, Ömet and Ahmet. It is also likely that her fourth child, Mustafa (Atatürk), was born in the same house. Fatma died an infant. Soon after her death, Ali Riza was appointed customs officer on the Greek frontier, at a place known as Çayagzi (Mouth of the River) or Papaz Köprüsü (Priest's Bridge). His salary is said to have been 3 gold liras or 300 silver piastres a month. It was a reasonable amount — some twenty years later, Salih (Bozok) was paid 337.5 piastres as a young lieutenant. But officials rarely received their pay on time.
Ali Riza's harsh life, surrounded by brigands in a remote frontier post, has become part of the Atatürk story. It is said that Zübeyde joined her husband at Papaz Köprüsü and that her two surving children, Ömer and Ahmet, died there, probably at the age of three. Ali Riza is then said to have resigned from the customs service and to have become a timber merchant. However, the dates do not fit.
Biographies situate Papaz Köprüsü just below the southern slopes of Mount Olympus, on the new frontier between Greek Thessaly and Ottoman Macedonia. But Thessaly was ceded to Greece on 24 May 1881 — at least two months after Atatürk's birth. Atatürk must therefore have been a few months old when Ali Riza first went to the new frontier as a customs officer. But the pink house in which Atatürk is said to have been born in Salonica was built with the money Ali Riza made as a timber merchant. His profits allowed him also to engage a maid and a wet-nurse for his baby son.
The most likely explanation is that Ali Riza was a customs officer and a timber merchant at one and the same time. Far from resigning from the civil service, he probably used his official appointment to engage in private trade. The main job of the customs and excise officer was to prevent the unauthorized export of timber from the Mount Olympus area to Greece. The forests belonged to the state, and the Ottoman forestry service was supposed to issue felling licences to villagers. In the circumstances, a customs officer would have been ideally placed to acquire timber from the local Christian villagers and to ship it to Salonica, a more prosperous city than any to the south of the frontier with Greece. Ali Riza is said to have had a partner in Salonica, a timber merchant called Cafer, who sold the logs. This theory would also explain how Ali Riza got together the money to build himself a new house in Salonica.
According to Atatürk's younger sister, Makbule, who was a small child at the time of her father's death, Ali Riza had to make repeated short trips to the frontier after his resignation in order to obtain timber, but he soon found that local Greek brigands demanded exorbitant bribes, failing which they set fire to the logs. It seems more likely that Ali Riza did not spend much time at the frontier and did not take his family with him, that he made short trips officially as a customs officer, but in effect to obtain and ship timber, and that after some initial success he fell out with local villagers (or brigands, as the two terms designated largely the same people) who wanted the timber for themselves. He is then said to have complained to a senior Ottoman official in Salonica, by the name of Ali Pasa, who advised him to seek another occupation. Thereupon he took up the trade in salt, which as a state monopoly offered openings to a man in the excise department. Ali Riza is unlikely to have resigned from the civil service, where appointments were often sinecures. His family does not seem to have suffered any hardship until his death, and he may well have received his salary of 3 gold liras a month to the end of his days.
The house which Ali Riza built in Salonica was situated in a neighbourhood called Ahmetsubasi (or Kocakasim). It is this solidly built, three-storey, pink-painted house on a slope leading down to the waterfront which has been designated as Atatürk's place of birth and preserved as a museum. Like all well-to-do Muslim houses, Ali Riza's new family home was divided into two: one wing was used as private family quarters (harem), and another served as a reception area for male visitors (selâmlik).
After giving birth to Mustafa, Zübeyde bore two daughters of whom the first, Makbule, survived, and the second, Naciye, died. Thus of the six children of Zübeyde's first marriage, only two survived.
Ali Riza died at the age of 47, when Mustafa was 7 or 8 years old. His widow attributed his death to the failure of his commercial schemes: `The late lamented became very distressed when his business went badly in his last days. He let himself go. He resigned himself to his fate and faded away. His illness grew worse. There is no way he could have survived. When I became a widow, I was a 27-year-old young woman. I was given a monthly pension of two mecidiye [silver coins worth 20 piastres].'
Ali Riza's fatal illness has been attributed to `consumption of the bowels', aggravated by drink. In any case, family tradition recorded him as a failure.
Dancing went on in the lower rooms, the apartments of the upper floor were reserved for cigarette-smoking, cards and conversation, while refreshments and supper were served under brightly illuminated trees and among the flower-beds of the garden attached to the school-house. The Governor-General, Dervish Pasha, and his son were present, and though they naturally did not condescend to join the dancers, moved about continually among them, and appeared to take a great interest in the proceedings. The Greek Archbishop made a distinguished figure in his tall cylindrical hat and black robes, seated side by side with the Jewish Khakham Bashi [Hahambasi], or Chief Rabbi, in black and white turban. Ball dresses, however, were conspicuous by their absence; for, aware that the entertainment was to be partially al fresco, the European ladies had avoided low dresses, and many of the Salonica Jewesses, who had subscribed their liras, presented themselves in their brilliantly coloured native costumes, profusely adorned with seed pearls and gleaming with diamonds.
My first memory of childhood concerns the problem of my schooling. This caused a bitter dispute between my parents. My mother wanted me to go to the neighbourhood [Koranic] school after initial prayers. My father, who was an official in the [customs and] excise department, was in favour of sending me to Semsi Efendi's school, which had newly opened, and of having me educated in the new manner. In the end, my father found a clever way out. First, I started at the neighbourhood school with the usual ceremony. This satisfied my mother. A few days later, I left the neighbourhood school and was entered in Semsi Efendi's school.
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