Fevzi Çakmak

Mustafa Fevzi Çakmak (12 January 1876 – 10 April 1950) was a Turkish field marshal and politician, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk one of the only two men to hold the rank of Mareşal in Turkey. Soldier of the Ottoman Empire's last wars and of the Turkish War of Independence, he was the Ankara government's Minister of Defense and then Prime Minister, and Chief of the General Staff from 1921 until 1944 — the Republic's first, and its longest-serving. ¹

He was born in Istanbul — the English article gives Cihangir, citing the parliamentary archive biography, the Turkish article's lead gives Anadolu Kavağı, and Wikidata gives Rumelikavağı, the Bosphorus village his family moved to in 1879 and from which his army name "Kavaklı Fevzi" derives; all three are Istanbul districts, and this record follows Cihangir for the district while recording the city without dispute. Educated at Kuleli and the War College, he graduated from the War Academy as a staff captain in 1898 and served in Rumelia and the Balkan Wars. In the First World War he commanded the V Corps in the defence of Gallipoli, where two of his younger brothers were killed, then the II Caucasian Corps and the Second and Seventh Armies. After the armistice he became the Ottoman Chief of the General Staff (December 1918) and briefly Minister of War (February–April 1920), while quietly easing the passage of arms to the national movement in Anatolia. ^{1 2}

Reaching Ankara in April 1920 — the Istanbul government sentenced him to death in absentia — he became Minister of National Defense and Deputy Prime Minister, then Prime Minister from 24 January 1921 to July 1922, and Chief of the General Staff from 5 August 1921. With Atatürk he planned the Great Offensive, and on 31 August 1922 he was raised to Mareşal. He remained Chief of the General Staff of the Republic until 12 January 1944, when he was retired by the age limit after twenty-three years in the post — still the longest tenure of any holder. Mentioned as a possible successor to Atatürk in 1938, he stood aside for İnönü; in 1946 he returned to parliament with the Democrat Party, then left it to co-found the Nation Party in 1948. ¹

He died at Teşvikiye, Istanbul, on 10 April 1950. His funeral became a public event: after state radio continued its music broadcasts, crowds protested in what became known as the Radyoevi incident, and hundreds of thousands attended his funeral prayer at the Beyazıt Mosque, carrying the coffin themselves; he was buried in the family plot at Eyüp Cemetery, and his family refused a later transfer to the State Cemetery in Ankara. ^{2 1}

His personal piety is often discussed in Turkish writing — a newspaper column of 2001, cited by the Turkish article for the funeral crowds, is titled "Was Fevzi Çakmak a Naqshbandi?" But discussion is not attestation: neither article's text names a school or an order for him, the Turkish infobox gives Islam generically, and Wikidata's generic Islam value is an imported one. Under the museum's two-source rule his faith is therefore recorded as unknown, with the Naqshbandi discussion preserved in his data record. ^{2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.