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Dr. Mehmet Oz 121 interesting to note that Esat and his son Kemalettin had different surnames. Mehmet’s aunt told us that when Turkish law required its citizens to adopt surnames in 1934, Esat chose the name of the Islamic sect to which he belonged , “Sunbulluk,” while Kemalettin chose “Atabay” in honor of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. The difference in these surnames signifies a tremendous generational gap between the two men. Ataturk, one of the great leaders of the twentieth century, had taken control of Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. A singularly brilliant man, committed to modernization at almost all costs, Ataturk completely remade Turkish society—restructuring the government, changing the written language, and secularizing what had for centuries been an Islamic state. The results proved deeply polarizing to the Turkish people (Ataturk’s policies are still a source of tension today)— and one can see this in the choice of surnames in Mehmet’s family. Mehmet ’s great-grandfather Esat showed himself to be a traditional Ottoman, looking to the Islamic past, while his grandfather Kemalettin embraced Ataturk’s secular Turkish Republic, looking to the future. “I never thought of that before,” said Mehmet, when I asked about these diverging worldviews. “Absolutely they had different last names. There must have been a big divide there. As a devout Muslim, Esat probably was very conflicted about Ataturk. He spent fifty years of his life before Ataturk brought a republic to the country. Whereas my grandfather was of the modern generation: he had been educated to be a pharmacist, he believed in Western medicine. Ataturk was showing him the future, and he was going to rebel against the old school. The names make perfect sense, and I think reflect their personalities.” He considered further: “I don’t know if it’s quite as clear as that. I didn’t know much about my great-grandfather. But I know there was some scandal around this, because he was an artist and a writer. So he lived in Istanbul, which was the cosmopolitan hub of the world, in his opinion. And my great-grandmother, his wife, wanted to go back to Duzce, where her family was from, and live a more humble life. And so they ended up living apart from each other for a good part of their existence, which of course was unheard of back then.” I showed Mehmet a photograph of his great-grandfather—the first he’d ever seen. And suddenly the whole story made more sense. In the photo, Esat Sezai was walking along the Bosporus, dressed in an overcoat and a top hat. He looked so elegant, so refined. Neither of us could imagine him moving back to a rural village. “He wanted to be there,” said Mehmet, smiling. “I can’t say I blame him.” 122 Dr. Mehmet Oz Esat’s wife, Mehmet’s great-grandmother, was a woman named Zekiye Kuyumcu who was born in Duzce in 1888. Her ancestry contains some fascinating stories suggesting that her line may have been largely responsible for the wealth and success of Mehmet’s maternal ancestors. Kuyumcu means either “jeweler” or “goldsmith,” and Zekiye’s father, Mehmet’s great-great-grandfather, was a goldsmith named Hadji Ali Bey. He was born around 1840 in Krasnodar, which is part of the Circassian region of what is now southern Russia. He and his family were leaders of the Shapsugh tribe, one of the dominant Islamic tribes in the region. In 1864, the Russian army swept through this area, taking possession of the land. The “mountain dwellers,” as the Russians referred to Mehmet’s ancestors, were pushed out. They were given the choice of resettling in another part of Russia or moving south to the Ottoman Empire. Hadji Ali Bey, like many of his Islamic brethren, chose to go south. The event is known today as the Great Circassian Exile, and it resulted in large areas of northern Turkey, such as the Duzce Province, becoming populated by Islamic tribespeople from Russia. “I’m fascinated by that,” Mehmet admitted. “Isn’t it amazing how these huge shifts happen, and then they’re forgotten and swept away by the sands of time? Can you imagine if the Cossacks came gallivanting down the street, and we had to move right now? You forget that existed. These are all the shadows of our past. There had been family lore that...

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