Modern Turkey began in 1923, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a Turkish army commander-turned-statesman, whose radical secular revolution changed Turkish society forever. In a series of reforms beginning in the 1920's, Ataturk, whose portraits are still commonly displayed, burned all bridges with Turkey's religious and imperial Ottoman past, shutting down religious orders, doing away with Islamic courts, religious instruction in schools, removing the caliphate, changing the Ottoman ******, a mix of Arabic and Persian, to Latin letters, and rewriting criminal and civil law based on European legal codes.
Democracy came to Turkey in the 1940's, when the Turkish state allowed a multiple party system. Since then, the Turkish military, an elite, westernized institution that sees itself as the protector of Ataturk's legacy, deposed three elected governments, and executed a prime minister, Adnan Menderes, who headed Turkey's first opposition party.
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