Where did Mustafa Kemal Atatürk grow up and live?

📍Atatürk's Birthplace, İslahhane Sokağı 17, 54621 Thessaloniki, Greece

1881 – 1938

“I was born Mustafa in 1881 in Thessaloniki — then part of the Ottoman Empire, now in Greece — in a modest house in the Jewish quarter of a cosmopolitan Mediterranean port city. Thessaloniki was one of the most diverse cities in the Ottoman world: Muslim, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian, Dönme communities living in proximity, conducting business in half a dozen languages. That cosmopolitanism shaped me: the sense that identity was not fixed, that a person and a nation could remake themselves. I became a military officer, led the Turkish War of Independence after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, and spent the following fifteen years transforming a Muslim empire into a secular modern state. I gave myself the surname Atatürk — Father of the Turks.”

👍 LovedThe cosmopolitan Thessaloniki of my childhood — the sense that multiple identities could coexist and that change was possible. The Ottoman military training that gave me both discipline and a clear view of the empire's failures. The conviction that Turkey could be modern.

👎 DislikedThe violence of the independence war and its aftermath. The ruthlessness that the transformation required. The loneliness of a man who had remade a nation and had no peers.

Map showing where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk lived — Atatürk's Birthplace, İslahhane Sokağı 17, 54621 Thessaloniki, Greece

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's home at Atatürk's Birthplace, İslahhane Sokağı 17, 54621 Thessaloniki, Greece

📍 Street view today

Sources: Mango, A. Atatürk (1999), John Murray; Kinross, P. Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (1964), Weidenfeld & Nicolson