Ankara, Capital of the Resistance

While the imperial capital lay under Allied occupation and its government accepted the partitioning Treaty of Sevres, the Turkish national resistance gathered in the Anatolian interior and made the modest provincial town of Ankara, a dusty railway town on the central steppe beneath an old Byzantine and Seljuk citadel, its centre. There, in April 1920, the Grand National Assembly opened in a plain two-storey building that had been a club of the Committee of Union and Progress, with Mustafa Kemal as its president, and declared that sovereignty belonged to the nation and that this assembly, not the captive sultan's government in Istanbul, represented it. From this unassuming base, served by a single telegraph line and surrounded by the ox-carts and poverty of a wartime provincial town, the nationalists organised and directed the War of Independence of 1919 to 1923 against the occupying and invading armies, above all the Greek army advancing across western Anatolia. Their victory overturned the Treaty of Sevres, secured the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and led to the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey that same year, with Ankara, not Istanbul, as its capital, a deliberate break with the imperial and Ottoman past. This scene depicts Ankara around 1921 as the working capital of the resistance, the plain assembly hall, the telegraph office and the carts on the steppe beneath the citadel.