Ali Rıza Efendi

Common card · No. 289458

Ali Rıza Efendi (1839–1888) was an official, and the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the husband of Zübeyde Hanım. He was born in Selanik (modern Thessaloniki in present-day Macedonia, Greece), back then the most important city in the Ottoman Empire in Europe after Constantinople/Istanbul. Ali Rıza's family comes from Kodžadžik, in Centar Župa Municipality near the border to Albania, today in North Macedonia, where there is a memorial house. He is thought to be of local descent: Albanian or Slavic by some scholars such as Andrew Mango, Lou Giaffo, Ernst Jaeckh, etc. However the village where his family was born still has Turkish majority population, and Falih Rıfkı Atay, a journalist and close friend of Atatürk, claimed that he descended from Turks of Söke, in Aydın Province of Anatolia. According to other historians such as Vamık D. Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz, Hasan İzzettin Dinamo, etc: Ali Rıza's ancestors were Turks, ultimately descending from the Turkic nomads called Yörüks of Söke...

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