Ataturk's love affairs

[Gizem]

As we all know; Ataturk was an extremely charismatic and handsome man, which is why he broke many hearts throughout his life. His love life was much complicated and it is still a mystery which of the girls he had an affair with was his true love.

The story of unfulfilled love between Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and a beautiful girl from Bitola Eleni Karinte, called Balkan Romeo and Juliet by many, happened at the end of XIX century but still attracts attention and is an inevitable tourist attraction in Bitola. Tourists from Turkey travel thousands of kilometers to visit the Memorial Room of Ataturk in Bitola Museum, take photos under Karinte’s balcony where this huge love saga took place, and read the letter she wrote to Ataturk.

Young cadet Mustafa came from Thessaloniki to Bitola in 1896 to study at the Military Academy. He often went strolling down Sirok Sokak, so one afternoon, just before Easter in 1897, he noticed beautiful Eleni sitting on the balcony of her father’s house, the rich merchant Eftim Karinte. Their house still stands on the corner of the street opposite Epinal Hotel. The young girl, his peer, was not indifferent and she looked upon the tall, handsome, blue-eyed cadet. Mustafa went past their house every day and young Eleni waited for him on the balcony. They were burning with strong, yet forbidden love. One day Eleni ran away from the house through the basement and they left Bitola together but her father, Eftim, found them and locked the girl in the house. Later he bought another house in Lerin (Florina), took her there by force and was determined to marry her to another man.

“Somewhere, sometime,

Many years have passed, I am still waiting to hear from you. If you ever receive my letter, remember me, see my tears on the paper. Years and events pass, there are many things said about you. If you love another woman when you read my letter, tear it up and ask her if she believes that one Eleni Karinte from Bitola wasted all her life waiting for a man with whom she only spent a day. If you love that woman as much as I love you, don’t tell her anything, I wish her to be happy as you are. But if you remember the girl on the balcony, and don’t love any other woman, I want you to know that I am waiting for you and will wait until the end of my life. I know that you won’t forget me and will be back…”

This is an excerpt from a letter believed to have been written over a century ago by Eleni Karinte to young Mustafa Kemal who attended Bitola Military Academy. The Memorial Room in honour of the great Turkish reformist is situated in Bitola Museum and Institute, the same building where the Military Academy used to be. Photographs, sketches from battles, a library, a bust, a wax figure – room full of secrets from the life of Ataturk, the great reformist.

“It has been a year since he grabbed me from you, locked me in the house and wouldn’t let me out for a whole month. I didn’t cry because I knew that all those locks and prison are in vain. I saw the man he wants me to marry only once and he asked if I could love him. I said no, I can only love my first love. I haven’t seen him since then. My father hasn’t forgiven me and I haven’t forgiven him either. Your Eleni Karinte who will always love you and wait for you forever.”

Eleni never married. She lived well into old age and every year she received several cheques from abroad until the end of her life. She died at the age of 80 in Lerin.

Mustafa Kemal became the first President of Turkey, founder of the new modern state and was given the name Ataturk – father of the nation. He married Latife Hanam but their marriage only lasted for two years. Ataturk and Karinte never met again.

[Gizem]

Ataturk left his heart in Bulgaria



In 1913 Ataturk was appointed to Sofia as the military attaché. During his assignment in Sofia he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. His duty as the military attaché ended in January 1915. During his stay in Sofia the First World War had started and Ottoman Empire had become obliged to enter in this war. Mustafa Kemal was appointed to Tekirdag to organize the 19 Division.

Mustafa Kemal clad in the uniform with which he was dressed at the ball of his meeting with Dimintrina:



Ataturk left his heart in Bulgaria. The founding father of modern Turkey asked for the hand of Dimitrina Kovacheva twice

Everything in modern Turkey is connected with the name of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) - the founder of the Turkish Republic and its first president. There's hardly a place in the country without a monument to this remarkable historical figure whose name actually means "the father of the nation", because he is the one who shows his country the way out of the darkness of feudalism and religious fanaticism and turns it into a modern state.

A new documentary - a co-production of International Film Service (Sofia) and TRT Turkish National TV - tells the story of Ataturk's love for Bulgaria and a Bulgarian girl whose name was Dimitrina Kovacheva.

On a foggy November day in 1913, Mustafa Kemal arrived in Bulgaria in his capacity of a military attache. He was a tall, handsome and communicative man with European manners. French magazines used to describe him as one of the most charming and stylish men in the world of diplomacy. Mustafa Kemal was fascinated by the cultural life in Bulgaria.

Once, in a Sofia casino, he met a beautiful Bulgarian girl, Dimitrina Kovacheva, the second daughter of General Stilian Kovachev, former Defense Minister of Bulgaria. She had just returned from Switzerland where she had studied literature and music. The girl often gave charity concerts and Kemal Mustafa used to attend them with the greatest pleasure. At a New Year's ball he invited her to dance and everybody admired the wonderful couple. This was the beginning of a romantic love story.

Feeling sure that Dimitrina is the love of his life, Kemal Mustafa was well aware of the obstacles before a possible marriage: he was 11 years older than her and had many enemies among the Young Turks in his native country, who would have embittered their family life.
Nevertheless Mustafa Kemal decided to ask General Stilyan Kovachev for his daughter's hand. Dimitrina's father was sure that she would not accept the dogmas of a different religion. Mustafa Kemal was deeply embittered, but went on meeting secretly with the girl.

Different political events separated them for a while, but in 1915 Ataturk proposed to his beloved for a second time and received a second denial from her father. This time General Kovachev hurried to marry Dimitrina to an engineer from the town of Rousse. Hearing the news she fainted, then returned the man he loved the wedding ring he had given her. She obeyed her father's will and separated with Kemal whom she never forgot. As narrated by her sister Olga; Dimitrina uttered these words on her death bed: "Do you know, I saw him in my dream. I think I'm finally reuniting with Mustafa Kemal..."

[Turul Karom]

A very interesting story and information; thank you for sharing. The pictures and quotes especially are much appreciated. A very romantic, albeit heart-tugging, ending as well.

[Egyptian]

who cares.

[Gizem]

who cares.

Then buzz off.

[Thanas Django]

Ataturk had a penis? Who would have imagined.

[crazyladybutterfly]

so he used many women and threw them away ?? what a gentleman

[Wadaad]

so he used many women and threw them away ?? what a gentleman

He was a pedophile btw...

[Wadaad]

He was also gay, and I have sources:


Source: Grey Wolf, Mustafa Kemal, An Intimate Study of a Dictator
Author: H.C. Armstrong, 1933

pages 253-254:

(After divorcing Latife)

.... Then he went back to the long nights in smoke-filled rooms with his drinking friends - the "desperadoes" as they were nicknamed-his painted women and the life to which he belonged.

After that he became shameless. He drank deeper than ever. He started a number of open affairs with women, and with men. Male youth attracted him. He made advances to the wives and daughters of his supporters. Even important men sent their women-folk away from Angora out of his way.
Source: Western Civilization, Islam and Muslims,
Auhor: Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi,
translated from Urdu version by Dr. Mohammad Asif Kidwai, M.A.,Ph.D.,
Academy of Islamic Research & Publications, Lucknow, 1969

page: 46

"He felt at home with the prostitutes and the homosexuals because they were so much worse off than he. The underlying sadism of his nature came out. He never credited people with feelings since he had none himself save the fundamental urge to conquer and see others submit to his will. He had to be at the top."

Jewish Mustafa Kemal's biographers, Irfan and Margaret Orga, wrote:

He has never loved a woman. He was used to the camaraderie of the Mess, the craze for handsome young men, [and] fleeting contacts with prostitutes, ... His body burned, for a woman or a boy ...

Jewish:

Freemason Mustafa Kemal, the Gay dictator and the alleged founder of the oppressive secular republic in Turkey was Jewish.

To this date, there is extreme confusion among Muslims and non-Muslims alike around the world regarding who was Freemason Mustafa Kemal, the Gay dictator of Turkey.

Recently, yet other evidences have surfaced that Gay Mustafa Kemal, the cruel dictator of Turkey, was not only a non-muslim doenmeh, but also a secret Jewish descendant of 17th-century Jewish false messiah Sabbatai Tzwi (Zevi)! The evidence comes not from tracing his genealogy, but from the statements he himself made. Check out the following:

Subject: Freemason Dictator Mustafa Kemal confesses his Jewishness
Source: Forward, A Jewish Newspaper published in New York, January 28, 1994

WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL

"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed

By Hillel Halkin

ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask, I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday, Jan. 24, on the first visit ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.

Ms. Keinan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of their arrival, and asked what my second question was.

"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"

"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's national hero.

Excited and Distressed

I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so glad you called again," said Ms. Keinan, who now sounded excited and a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"

Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it too?

Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up," she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"

I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one.



Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:

Secular Father

The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name. The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers:

"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science.

"In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the (Islamic) school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ...

"Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."

Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "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."

Learning Hebrew

Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor:
" 'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one with the bottle of arrack?' "
" 'Yes.' "
" 'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.' "
" 'What's his name?' "
" 'Mustafa Kemal.' "
" 'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes."

Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided:

"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."

During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:

" 'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "

And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."

Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith:

"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."

It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.

Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it reflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, in his book on lost Jewish communities, "The Exiled and the Redeemed":

'Saintly Offspring'

"Once a year (during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday') the candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional birthday. ... It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as saintly."

Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-21, and its descendants, many of whom are said to be wealthy businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have assimilated totally into Turkish life.

After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the father of the 'Father of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept



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[crazyladybutterfly]

He was a pedophile btw...

you wouldn't have called him pedophile if they were girls and of the same age.