161. Today in 1920s Turkey: 19 April 1926 (Statue of Turkey’s First President)

Cover photograph of the Sarayburnu Monument, Haftalık Mecmua, 19 April 1926, no. 40.

Türkçe
Gazi Paşa’nın, Sarayburnu’na rekzedilmek üzere, Krippel tarafından yapılan heykelleri.

English
Gazi Pasha’s statue made by Krippel to be erected in Sarayburnu.

Comments:
The cover of Haftalık Mecmua’s 19 April 1926 issue features a full-page photographic print of a public monument being erected. The bronze portrait sculpture featured here represents the founder and first President, “Gazi” Mustafa Kemal Pasha and will become Turkey’s first full-body public sculptural representation of this important person. The statue, now known as the Sarayburnu Atatürk Anıtı (or Sarayburnu Atatürk Monument) is three meters tall and does not yet include its pedestal. In fact, the picture shows that at the time the photograph was taken the wooden planks propping up the giant statue are still affixed to it. This should come as no surprise as the sculpture only recently arrived in Istanbul from Vienna where it was cast. The opening of its packaging crate and its subsequent inspection was considered newsworthy enough to be featured in the brief snippet on the front page of a recent issue (2 April) of the daily gazette, Cumhuriyet (“The Republic”).

In the end, it took roughly six months from the date it arrived to the day of its public opening ceremony on 3 October 1926 for the monument to be erected and finalized. During this period the Istanbul-based press reported on any noteworthy developments related to it. On this particular week Haftalık Mecmua decided to set aside the magazine’s most prestigious surface, its front cover, for the acknowledgement of this fundamentally new feature to the city’s ever-changing urban fabric. Other stories on the subject of Atatürk monuments covered by Today in 1920s Turkey are the following:

24. Which City Houses the First Atatürk Statue?

105. A Monument to the Republic Opened in Taksim Square

106. Model for an Early Atatürk Monument That Was Never Made

159. A Very Important Statue Comes Out of Its Box

Photograph of the Sarayburnu Monument on the cover of Haftalık Mecmua, 19 April 1926, no. 40, page 1. Hakkı Tarık Us Collection, Beyazıt State Library, Istanbul.

Originally published at https://steemit.com on April 19, 2019.