ATATURK OR ATAJEW?

Despite intensive research, the ancestry of the politician named Atatürk long remained an enigma to scholars. Andrew Mango called Mustafa Kemal’s ancestry a “vexed question” in his 2002 Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, and confessed that much remained uncertain, with some evidence to support either Turkish or Albanian/Balkan descent.^[6]Biographer Lord Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross cryptically stated, “To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage.”

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