Bardakçı backs every claim about Atatürk's journey to Samsun with real Ottoman and Republican-era archival documents, dismantling both the 'Vahideddin sent him' and 'he fled alone' narratives that still dominate Turkish debate. A must-read for anyone who wants an objective, document-based take on one of Turkey's most contested historical questions.
While I don't agree with every opinion Murat Bardakçı holds, I respect him and consider him one of our country's valuable historians and researchers. This book tackles a question that has been debated in Turkey for years: did Sultan Vahideddin send Atatürk to Samsun, or did he go there entirely on his own, against impossible odds? There's serious disagreement on this between the more traditional and secular segments of our country, with each side trying to push its own version of events to the forefront.
What makes Bardakçı stand out in these debates, in my opinion, and what makes him worth listening to, is that every argument he makes is backed by physical, real written documents. Everything he claims has a source. For reasons I don't fully understand, he has access to both the Ottoman archives and the Republican-era archives, and in this book, he lays those documents out directly. Because of that, this isn't really a history book in the traditional sense so much as a book that dismantles most of the arguments still debated in modern Turkey. A large portion of the 400-page book is filled with these documents. In other words, it's not just "I saw the archives, trust me," he actually puts the documents themselves on the page.
The documents presented in the book show that the journey to Samsun was neither the commonly told story of Sultan Vahideddin directly instructing Mustafa Kemal Pasha to go and end the occupation, nor was it a decision Pasha made entirely on his own and in secret. According to the sources Bardakçı presents, the truth sits somewhere between the two: the journey was the result of a carefully planned preparation, made together by the highest levels of the state, in an attempt to find a way forward after the devastation of the war. In other words, both the narrative that "Vahideddin sent Mustafa Kemal to save the country" and the narrative that "Pasha secretly slipped away alone on a rudderless boat, fighting the waves by himself" are equally far from what the documents actually show.
If you want to form an objective opinion on this subject and verify it against actual documents, this is absolutely a book worth reading.
4 out of 5 stars.