| Important events in 20th century Turkey.
From the late thirteenth century until 1922, Turkey was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, encompassing much of the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe. |
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| 1919 | Following the end of WWI, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the “Father of the Turks” — leads a military uprising against the occupying Inter-Allied Commission in what is known as the Turkish War of Independence. |
| 1920 | Turkish revolutionaries under Ataturk’s leadership form a parliament and declare Turkish sovereignty. |
| 1922 | The Sultanate is abolished, marking the official end of the Ottoman empire. Sultan Mehmed VI Vahdettin leaves the country. |
| 1923 | On October 29, Ataturk proclaims the Turkish Republic, and the westernization of Turkey begins. |
| 1928 | Turkey officially becomes a secular state. |
| 1934 | Turkish women are granted the right to vote. |
| 1945 | Turkey joins the United Nations. |
| 1952 | Turkey becomes a member of NATO. |
| 1960 | The Turkish Armed Forces stage a coup d’etat. Military rules lasts until 1961. |
| 1964 | Turkey becomes an associate member of the European Community. |
| 1971 | After three years of political violence, the Turkish government is overturned by a coup. |
| 1974 | The Turkish military intervenes after Greece sponsors a coup on the island country of Cyprus. Today, Turkey continues to occupy more than a third of Cyprus. |
| 1975 | The U.S. freezes its aid to Turkey due to its occupation of Cyprus. |
| 1980 | General Kanan Evren leads a military coup. Three years of military government rule follow. |
| 1982 | A new constitution of Turkey, modeled on the French Constitution, is enacted, making Turkey a secular republic. The constitution also provides for a strong president (elected for a seven-year term) who appoints the prime minister and who can dismiss parliament. |
| 1984 | The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) begins a bloody insurgency, fighting the Turkish army for an independent Kurdish state. The war lasts 15 years and claims more than 30,000 lives. |
| 1993 | Tansu Ciller becomes Turkey’s first female prime minister. |
| 1994 | The Islamic Welfare Party sweeps mayoral races across the country. |
| 1997 | A “post-modern” military coup removes Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and his Welfare Party government from power. |
| Dec. 16, 2004 | TA massive earthquake strikes Turkey. More than 15,000 people die, and another 40,000 are injured. |
| 2001 | Turkey experiences a banking collapse and a devaluation of its currency. |
| 2002 | The Justice and Development Party, with its roots in the Islamist Welfare Party comes to power. Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, who was jailed for four months in 1998 for reciting a religious poem, becomes Turkey’s prime minister and concentrates on Turkey’s bid for full E.U. membership. |
| 2005 | A Turkish court ruling upholds restrictions on the wearing of headscarves in and around public schools. |
| 2005 | In response to his remarks about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is charged, ex post facto, with violating a new law making it an imprisonable offense to “publicly denigrate Turkish identity.” After an international outcry, charges against Pamuk were dropped in early 2006. |
| 2006 | Turkish lawyer Alpaslan Aslan is charged in the shooting of 5 judges, which resulted in the death of one. Prosecutors claim that Aslan was protesting a controversial ruling which denied promotion to a public school teacher due to her wearing of a religious head scarf. |
Sources: : CIA World Factbook; NEW YORK TIMES; ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA online; NEWSWEEK; JURIST; THE NEW YORKER; BBC; TURKEY UNVEILED: A HISTORY OF MODERN TURKEY by Nicole and Hugh Pope.
