1927 Map of the Partition of Turkey and Modern Turkey

This is an extremely rare 1927 map of Turkey, in Ottoman Turkish, based on the map employed in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's October 1927 Nutuk, his foundational speech delivered at the second congress of Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi. This legendary thirty-six-hour speech covered the events from the start of the Turkish War of Independence to the 1923 foundation of the Republic of Turkey. The speech outlined the evolution of modern Turkey after World War I (1914 - 1918), and was adopted as the official national narrative: a status reinforced by Turkish law criminalizing slights to Atatürk (1881 - 1938). As this narrative (and consequently, this map) begins with the partition of Turkey under the Treaty of Sévres, they elide the events preceding that partition - notably, the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

The Map

The map shows the territory of what by 1927 had become the Republic of Turkey, but with the results of two key treaties marked out. Firstly, the partition as per the 1920 Treaty of Sévres: the French, Greek, and Italian occupation zones can be seen, along with the French and British Mandates in Lebanon and Syria to the east, and the Zone of the Straits (to ensure free navigation of the Bosporus, the Dardanelles, and the Sea of Marmara.) In addition, the map shows the results of the Treaty of Lausanne, which superseded Sévres in 1923 and officially defined the borders of the Republic, including the demilitarized region on the border with Greece and Bulgaria.

Publication History and Census

This map was printed by Vienna commercial publisher Elbemühl Graphische Industrie A.G. in 1927, either following Atatürk's speech or in support of it. It is extremely scarce. We see no examples in dealers' catalogs or auction records, and we find only one example listed in OCLC, at Harvard University.