TURKEY'S 2ND PRESIDENT COMMEMORATED

The commemoration ceremony took place at Anitkabir, the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey.
Inonu family members, Presidency Secretary General Mustafa Isen, Turkish Parliament's deputy speaker Guldal Mumcu, State Minister Hayati Yazici, Ankara Governor Kemal Onal and several officials attended the ceremony.
Ismet Inonu (September 24, 1884–December 25, 1973) was a Turkish Army General, Prime Minister and the second President of Turkey. In 1938, the Republican People's Party gave him the title of "National Chief".
For more than half his life, Inonu was known as Ismet Pasha. He changed his name in the early 1930s when President Ataturk decreed that all his countrymen had to have surnames. Ismet Pasha decided to take as his surname "Inonu", from the central Anatolian town where he commanded the Turkish forces in his greatest battles as a general, known as the First Battle of Inonu and Second Battle of Inonu, victories which played an important role in the Turkish War of Independence.
He served as a military officer during the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman-Bulgarian front. During World War I, he served as a colonel and worked under Mustafa Kemal Pasha during his assignments at the Caucasus and Palestine fronts.
During the last days of World War I, he went to Anatolia to join the Turkish nationalist movement and was appointed the commander of the Turkish Western Army, a position in which he remained during the Turkish War of Independence. He was promoted to brigadier general after the "Battles of Inonu", in which he successfully defeated the Greek Army in western Anatolia during spring 1921. During the Turkish War of Independence he was also a member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara.
At the end of Turkish War of Independence, he was appointed as the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation at the Treaty of Lausanne talks.
His son, Erdal Inonu, was a Wigner medal winner mathematical physicist and a former deputy prime minister of Turkey, as well as the former leader of the Social Democracy Party and the Social Democratic Populist Party, and the honorary leader of the Social Democratic People's Party.