Kemal Atatürk was a Turkish nationalist leader and the founder and first president of Turkey. He was born in 1881 in the Ottoman Empire and attended military school, graduating in 1905. Atatürk led a nationalist revolution in 1919 resisting Allied forces, established the Turkish government in Ankara in 1921, and created a secular republic of Turkey in 1923 of which he was the first president. He instituted revolutionary social and political reforms to modernize Turkey along Western lines.