Turkish Script Reform (1928)

On November 1, 1928, the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed a law replacing the Arabic script that had served Ottoman Turkish for six centuries with a modified Latin alphabet. By January 1, 1929, all public signage, newspapers, official documents, and schoolbooks had switched. A population that had been literate in one script woke to find itself functionally illiterate in another. The reform was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's most radical modernization measure—more disruptive than the abolition of the caliphate, more consequential than the adoption of Western legal codes. It severed Turkish culture from its literary past, rendered the entire archive of Ottoman literature inaccessible to the next generation, and transformed thousands of scribes, calligraphers, and scholars into obsolete specialists. The calligrapher Hamid Aytaç—who had spent decades mastering the ligatures, proportions, and aesthetic subtleties of Ottoman chancery script—watched his expertise severed from its medium. He continued to practice, teach, and produce works of increasing refinement for the rest of his life. But the institutional support had vanished. The knowledge was becoming arcane.