As Türkiye celebrates its centenary this Sunday, one of the crucial festive locations to go to is a two-story home in northwestern Edirne. The home, devoted to the “father of all Turks,” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is transformed right into a museum by a pensioner Mukaddes Kokeralp Çırak.
The clocks in Çırak’s home nonetheless present the second trendy Türkiye’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died in 1938.
So do the calendars and plenty of different trinkets devoted to the person who constructed a brand-new nation out of the Ottoman Empire’s ruins 100 years in the past.
“He gave us the republic as a gift,” the 85-year-old stated, pointing to a statue of Atatürk seated in an armchair in her lounge.
After a lifetime of onerous work in Germany, the mom of two returned to Türkiye in 1985. She started accumulating objects associated to Atatürk upon her husband’s dying.
Çırak paid for some objects and gathered others, corresponding to calendars and notebooks that includes Atatürk which have been launched by banks and even the military by the years.
Her home is now a dwelling tribute to Atatürk, its partitions and even facade and backyard emblazoned with portraits, photographs and different tributes to the onetime discipline marshal.
Her storage serves as a warehouse for all of the photographs she now not has room to hold. She dusts them usually.
Çırak stated her ardour got here from her great-grandfather, whose household was near Mustafa Kemal’s in Thessaloniki, a Greek port metropolis that was as soon as a part of the Ottoman Empire the place Atatürk was born.
The household met Türkiye’s future hero when he was nonetheless an officer within the Ottoman Army, the place he was doing his navy service.
Çırak by no means misses official commemorative ceremonies and continuously visits faculties to speak about Atatürk with youthful generations.
She needs her assortment to be donated to a museum after her dying for Türkiye’s profit and the remainder of the world.
Source: www.dailysabah.com