Ankara and Ataturk

We wander around Ankara for a couple of days with Alice. Ankara is a big city of 2,000,000 or so and the capital of Turkey.

After winning a couple of wars  in the early 1920s (with inferior forces) against the British and then the Greeks, Ataturk became the first president of Turkey and launched an incredible number of enlightened reforms.

This is a picture of Ataturk's 1938 Cadillac sedan. He died in 1938, but his picture is everywhere in Turkey. I brought home a tile with his picture on it which I will hang in the RV.

Ataturk's memorial park and mausoleum makes the tomb of Ho Chi Mihn seem small and unappreciative. Ataturk reformed the Turkish alphabet, gave women rights, wrote geometry textbooks in the new alphabet, established representative democracy, deposed the Ottoman Sultans, made people adopt last names, abolished the wearing of the fez and other traditional traditional forms of Turkish dress.... and the list goes on.....

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk adopted the name Ataturk which means "the father of Turkey"....No one else can ever have that name...it is like retiring the number on a football jersey.

Ankara today.

Carol and Alice at the Ataturk memorial.

The new Turkish alphabet. The extra letters impart unambiguous phoneme sounds to written words...notice the double C, G, etc....

A new mosque in Ankara.

A taste of America....

Lions in Ataturk's memorial...