Mustafa Kemal Atatürk And The Turkısh War Of Independence Accordıng To Croatıan Sources

Abstract

The topic of the Turkish War of Independence and especially Atatürk's departure to Samsun has not been widely researched in Croatia. This is why the aim of this paper is to partially contribute to the mentioned research. This paper is a study of the impact of the aforementioned events in Croatian press and publications and it researches to what extent the Croatian public was aware of what was transpiring in Anatolia in 1919 and what was the attitude of Croatian press towards these events. The importance of May 19, 1919 event became a known fact long after the event, it thus did not echo in the Croatian press as the beginning of the war of Turkish liberation, and this is why it was not given enough place in the Croatian press. Nevertheless, in the 1930s and in the later decades there was a lot of information on the aforementioned topic in books, periodicals, and encyclopedias printed in Croatia. The reason for this is the fact that the Croatian public started to view the May 19, 1919 event and the later events of the Turkish War of Independence as an independence movement and support them as such.