Moslems from Greece had to come to Turkey, and Turkish speaking Orthodox Christians, had to resettle in Greece. The Republic became a secular Republic, and all citizens had indeed the same legal rights, but there were to be officially recognized non-Moslem minorities, but no Moslem minorities, since the very construction of the Republic was based on the assembly of various largely Moslem groups into Turkey and "Turkishness". So at the very root of Turkish republican identity there was the memory of the heroic resistance against huge odds by the "tired warriors", the construction of a new homeland for Moslem populations from all over the larger region and their merging into a new "Turkishness". The misguided attempts to translate this identity into some ethnic-racial concept later on in the 1930s, became a source of confusion and problems. But I think one should not forget that Atatrk's Republic was a direct successor of a multi-ethnic Ottoman empire, and provided safe haven to millions of people fleeing persecution from various ethnic origins, refugees who were, however, all Moslems. It is this collective memory of survival in the face of a threat of annihilation that is the first strong dimension of identity that leads to the extraordinary longevity of Atatrk's memory. It also explains the strange co-existence in the Republican tradition, between assertive secularism and, yet, a "de facto" state religion. Note that this is in the end not that different from what was the situation in the United States for a long time: