Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Turkish politician

Moustache type: Pencil

Born: 19 5 1881 (Salonika, Ottoman Empire)
Died: 10 11 1938 (Istanbul, Turkey, aged 57, cirrhosis of the liver)




In 1935, as part of his drive to make Turkey a modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal passed The Family Names act, which required the population to adopt a surname. He chose Atatürk, which means “father of the Turks.” Atatürk’s name was well deserved. Having repelled the Allied forces at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, he then became Commander in Chief of the Turkish forces in their victorious War of Independence against the Allied powers, who had sought to divide up Anatolia between them. In 1923 he founded the modern Turkish state to replace the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and became the new country’s first president.

Kemal at once embarked on a huge-scale modernising drive which prescribed secularism, female emancipation, a Latinized alphabet, and educational and cultural reform. A personality cult around him remains in Turkey to this day.

Atatürk must be considered a super villain for moustache lovers. Whereas turncoats like Jeremy Bowen and Phil “The Power” Taylor simply removed theirs, Atatürk compounded the sin of shaving his by banning the moustache altogether in Turkey in a dress reform made even more nefarious by its banning of the fez hat.