Atat

Atatuerk's Legacy

Istanbul's mosque-capped hills were ablaze with light for a three-day and three-night celebration last week. Chains of brightly colored bulbs stretched from minaret to minaret of the treasured Mosques of Ayasofia, Suleiman the Magnificent, Mohammed the Conqueror. Below, in the four-mile stretch of the Golden Horn the Turkish fleet lay at anchor, with ship searchlights playing nightly over the city.

At Istanbul's Dolmabaghche Palace, from whose mullioned windows one can look out over the Bosporus to Asia Minor, there lay sick abed a medium-sized, lean, 59-year-old man with receding colorless hair and a cultivated, fixed stare. The celebration was held because 15 years ago this soldier-statesman -- born simple Mustafa, then called Mustafa Kemal (Perfection), later renamed by Turkey's legislators Kamal Atatuerk (''Perfection, Father of All Turks") -- had pronounced: "I decide that Turkey become a Republic with a President."

Last week Kamal Atatuerk, having long suffered from a hard, dissolute, energetic life, had again fooled the doctors who have often warned him that nights spent in bars, cheap night clubs and bordellos would mean death. He was said to be out of danger, and the celebration became more a tribute to Turkey's first and, so far, only President than to the Republic itself.

Had El Ghazi ("The Victorious") died last week, he would have left to the people he ruled so firmly a legacy unmatched by any other 20th Century ruler in material, social, educational accomplishments. Realizing that national prestige paid dividends. President Atatuerk, with the driving force of a dictator, built up a modern, mechanized army. That made Turkey sought after by Germany, France and England, as a powerful Near Eastern ally. His Government doubled the country's railroad mileage, started sugar and textile factories, coal and iron industries to make Turkey more self-sufficient. He ordered electrification and reforestation programs and began to build a merchant marine. His policy of "Turkey for the Turks'' largely eliminated the foreign capital, dominant during the Sultans' time.

But these deeds were as nothing to his turning of the face of Turkey from East to West. The abolition of the veil, fez, the institution of polygamy meant the abandonment of the nation's Moslem past. The substitution of civil, criminal and commercial codes of law copied from Western models for the old sheria laws led to the abolition of special privileges for foreigners. The writing of a new language with a new alphabet made literacy a privilege of the masses rather than of priests and intellectuals. Turkey in 1938 is a westernized nation.

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