Atatürk Evi (Atatürk's House), Bigali, Gallipoli
Didn't know where Ari Burnu was…
On Gallipoli, the back road into the old Anzac area lies north through the village of Büyükanafarta. On this road is the small Turkish village of Bigali. Australian historian Les Carlyon has written a colourful description of ‘down-town’ Bigali:
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- Atatürk Evi (Atatürk’s House), Bigali, Gallipoli, Turkey.
… a seedy old village, lived-in and worked hard: narrow streets, an avenue of mulberry trees, crowing roosters, stone walls that lean like petrified drunks, tumbledown sheepfolds. Its back streets carry the wool and ammonia smell of sheep. Turkeys, their wattles quivering like matrons in high dudgeon, pick grass along the verges of the roads.
[Les Carlyon, Gallipoli, Sydney, 2002, p.31]
- Portrait of Mustafa Kemal c.1915. [J00288]
Despite Bigali’s ‘tumbledown’ nature, a good Turkish coffee can be had in the little café on the main square and then, off to the left along a long straggling narrow street at number 126, is one of the most significant houses in the district, the Atatürk Evi (Atatürk’s House). It was here that Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal, commander of the Ottoman Army’s 19th Division, lived on 25 April 1915. And it was to this house that the news came on the morning of 25 April that the ‘English’ (Australians) had landed at Ari Burnu off to the west. Kemal, on his own initiative and sensing the significance of the landing, ordered his division forward over the rugged countryside between Bigali and the coast.
Kemal himself set off from Bigali with the 1st Battalion of the 57th Regiment.
He sent one company out to lead 100 metres in front of the others and he, characteristically,
went along at the head of that company with a map in his hand. As Zeki Bey, the
commanding officer of the 1st Battalion later told Charles Bean:
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- Mustafa Kemal (fourth from left) with some of his officers and staff of the Anafarta command. Kemal was promoted full Colonel in August 1915 and given command of all Turkish forces in the northern sector of the Gallipoli front. [AWM P01141.001]
Mustafa Kemal didn’t know where Ari Burnu was; on the little maps which we then had it was not marked by name. ‘Bee Point’ was perhaps the name given to it by the garrison of the 27th Regiment. Decent maps were then being prepared, but they weren’t ready.
[Zeki Bey, quoted in Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1090, p.135]
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- Mustafa Kemal seated in a car in which he was being driven to inspect Turkish defences. [AWM A05288]
Kemal would not have known it that morning as he set out from Bigali but he was marching to his destiny. Now 34, he had been sidelined by the rising political leaders of Turkey, the ‘Young Turks’, in these final years of the crumbling of the old Ottoman Empire. The coming Gallipoli campaign made Mustafa Kemal. He emerged from that victory as probably the best known of the Turkish commanders on the spot. Within years of the end of World War I, he was President of the new Republic of Turkey and seen as the saviour of his people in a post-war world where the great powers had carved up the old Ottoman Empire for themselves.
Today, Kemal, or more correctly Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Father of Turks) is the best known Turkish leader of all – both of the country and of the Turkish forces at Gallipoli. In Bigali, as you sip your Turkish coffee in the local café, a bust of Atatürk gazes out over the scene. Similarly, in public places all over Turkey there are statues and portraits of Mustafa Kemal. All that lay in the future on that morning when Kemal rose in his house in Bigali to the news that the ‘English’ had landed at Ari Burnu. Not surprisingly, the house has been turned into a museum in memory of Kemal and in it his clothes are laid out – dressing gown, socks and shirt. The rooms are furnished just as they would have been when he lived there. So while, in Carlyon’s words, this might be a ‘seedy old village’ it was from this very ordinary little dot on the map that the man who took Turkey into the modern world set out to do battle with the Anzacs.