Ziya Gökalp, although generally known within the narrow scientific community, remains unknown to the broader Greek public, as there has until now been no thorough work shedding light on and revealing the most significant aspects of his work.

However, beyond the Greek translation of his main work The Principles of Turkism (Turkculugum Esaslari), there has until recently been a lack of a comprehensive and detailed analysis of his entire oeuvre. Also unknown to the Greek public is his collection of poems titled Poems and Folk Tales (Siirler ve Halk Masallari), the correspondence with his family from his places of exile in Lemnos and Malta Letters from Lemnos and Malta (Limni ve Malta Mektuplari), as well as his equally important work Turkification - Islamization - Modernization (Turklesmek, Islamlasmak, Muasirlasmak), all making up the corpus of the author.

Finally, to fully understand Gökalp's ideas related to Turkism, the reader-researcher must keep in mind and definitely refer to the vast amount of written material in Gökalp's published articles where his fundamental ideas are disseminated.

The gap in Greek literature concerning the work of Ziya Gökalp is now being filled by the present remarkable and valuable work of Mr. Aristotelis Mitraras, who has poured out, with full responsibility and scientific seriousness, the essence of his knowledge, both regarding the work of the father of Turkish nationalism and the political and social developments in modern Turkey.

The author, starting from 1850, during the period of the Tanzimat, unfolds step by step the thread of modern Turkish history, focusing his attention on its main milestones: The Young Ottoman movement and the efforts to establish the First Constitutional Reform (1876), the controversial period of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1908), the rise of Turkish nationalism, the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the Second Constitutional Reform, the Balkan Wars, World War I, the War of Independence, and the founding of the Turkish State by Kemal Atatürk (Kemal Ataturk), Kemalism as a political system of governance and the imposed authoritarian regime, the multi-party system, and the dominance of the Democratic Party of Adnan Menderes (Adnan Menderes) along with the military coups imposed every decade after the 1950s (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997).

However, with this work, Mr. Mitraras does not content himself with a mere recording of events, but tries to demonstrate how Turkish society has navigated for a century, having Gökalp's theories as an ideological compass, regardless of whether these (willingly or unwillingly) became the subject of study by the Turkish bureaucratic elite of 'official thought' in the past.

Meanwhile, in the present work, the reader will learn about the ways in which Gökalp's ideas of Turkish nationalism were adopted by the Republican People's Party (CHP) and incorporated into the Constitution.

Ioannis Th. Matzis, Department of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies, University of Athens. [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]