Atatürk, İnönü and other surnames given in 1934

How did Atatürk get his surname?

The Surname Law expected everyone to choose their own surname. For the President, parliament passed a separate law.

Law No. 2587 was passed on 24 November 1934 and published in the Resmî Gazete no. 2865 on 27 November 1934. Its title is “Law on the Surname Given to Our President, Whose Given Name Is Kemal”. Article 1 is one sentence:

“The surname ATATÜRK has been given to our President, whose given name is KEMAL.”

Article 2 says the law takes effect on publication. Article 3 says the Grand National Assembly will carry it out. That is the whole law: three articles. At that point the Surname Law itself had not yet taken effect. It was waiting for 2 January 1935.

Can anyone else take the surname Atatürk?

No. A month later came Law No. 2622, passed on 17 December 1934 and published in the Resmî Gazete no. 2888 on 24 December 1934.

Its first article says the surname ATATÜRK, given by Law No. 2587, “belongs to his person alone”. Nobody may take or use it as a given name or a surname, and nobody may give it to anyone else.

Article 2 goes further: no one may take or use a given name or surname formed by adding another word before or after “ATATÜRK”.

Article 3 makes the law apply from 24 November 1934. In other words, the ban was backdated to the day the surname was given.

Who gave İsmet Paşa the surname İnönü?

İnönü was not given by law. Atatürk gave it himself.

A 2025 study in the journal of Dokuz Eylül University’s Graduate School of Social Sciences (Alan and Polatoğlu) states that Atatürk gave İsmet Paşa the surname İnönü on 26 November 1934. It relies on the newspapers Hâkimiyeti Milliye of 26 November 1934 and Akşam of 27 November 1934. According to the same study, Atatürk linked the name to İsmet Paşa’s role as commander in the battles of İnönü.

The Official Gazette bears this out. The decree of 24 December 1934 that put the Surname Regulation into force is signed by the prime minister as “İsmet İnönü”. The President signed the same decree as “K. Atatürk”.

Whom else did Atatürk give surnames to?

Atatürk is known to have given surnames to many people around him. But the lists in circulation are long and mostly unsourced. Here we report only the examples covered in a peer-reviewed study. Alan and Polatoğlu (2025) discuss these people:

• Fahrettin Altay. While in Iran as arbitrator in the Iran–Afghanistan border dispute, he congratulated Atatürk on his new surname. Atatürk’s reply, as the study reports it, was: “And you have become Altay!” Altay’s own memoirs are cited as linking the name to his height and the Altai mountains.
• Tevfik Rüştü Aras. The foreign minister was given the surname Aras by Atatürk.
• Saffet Arıkan. The study says the surname Arıkan was given by Atatürk.
• Celâl Bayar. The surname Bayar was likewise given by Atatürk.
• Salih Bozok. Atatürk’s chief aide-de-camp and member of parliament for Bozok (Yozgat). Atatürk gave him the surname Bozok in 1934, after his constituency.
• Fahri Korutürk. By his own account, he had not yet taken a surname when he met Atatürk at a restaurant in Ankara, and Atatürk proposed “Korutürk”. The study dates this to 1935.

The readings of what these names mean are the study’s own interpretation. Here we only report who received which surname.

Could officials assign surnames too?

Yes, but that is a different thing from an “assigned surname” in this sense. Article 8 of the Surname Law gave the senior civil administrator the power to name anyone who did not choose a surname and children of unknown parents. The 1934 regulation said that for anyone who had not chosen by 2 July 1936, the governor, district governor or their appointee would choose one.

There is no collected official record of how many people received a surname this way, or which surnames. So we can only say a particular surname was “given by an official” if there is a document for that family.

Do these surnames show up in today’s statistics?

Law No. 2622 means nobody else can take “Atatürk”. Surnames ending in “-türk”, such as Öztürk, are a separate matter: the ban covers only names made by adding words to “Atatürk” itself. Öztürk is among the most common surnames in Türkiye in TÜİK’s ADNKS data.

Altay, Aras, Bayar, Bozok and the rest are carried by many families today. That a surname was given to a famous person in 1934 does not mean everyone who carries it now is related to that person. Different families may have chosen the same name independently.