Dominic Sandbrook

And in 1908, a group of officers in the army, a little bit like the Meiji Restoration in Japan, a group of army officers who were fed up with this, they were generally European-born, so they were from the Balkans.

They were from precisely the part of the empire that was beginning to fragment.

And they were called the Young Turks, and they decided they wanted to reverse the decline of the empire.

They seized power in effectively a coup, and they turned the Sultan into a puppet, and the Young Turks now run the empire.

And how does that go?

Well, it doesn't go terribly well, because just four years later, the First Balkan War breaks out in 1912.

And by the following year, the Ottomans have lost pretty much all their Balkan provinces except for Eastern Thrace.

So that's the bit right next to Constantinople.

And some of the possessions they lose are what are now Northern Greece, right?

Yeah, Northern Greece, North Macedonia, parts of sort of Bulgaria, Serbia and so on, Albania.

Exactly right.

And he is one of many people, hundreds of thousands of people, actually, who are driven out of their homes, who lose their homeland, who are murdered, who are killed, and so on and so forth.

These are Albanian and Turkish Muslims.

And this guy in particular, he was born in Salonika, as it would have been called at the time.

He's an army officer.

He fought against the Bulgarians in Thrace.

And his name is Mustafa Kemal.

And we'll be coming back to Mustafa Kemal later on.

Have you seen this house?

I have in Thessaloniki.