Guide
The Artvin Atatürk statue stands on Atatepe, a hill south of the town commanding three valleys. It shows Mustafa Kemal Atatürk walking over rocks; the source describes the moment both as Dumlupınar and as the photograph taken by Etem Tem at Kocatepe in Afyon just as the Great Offensive was beginning.
The statue is twenty-two metres tall and weighs fifty tonnes, which makes it the largest statue of Atatürk anywhere. It is a steel structure clad in copper, built by the Sıtkı Kahvecioğlu Foundation between 2010 and 2012 and handed over to the Artvin municipality in 2016. Beside it stand a flagpole sixty metres high and a flag of 216 square metres.
It was built on four dönüm of land belonging to the regional forestry directorate and allotted to the provincial youth and sports directorate. The figure rises from a sixteen-sided building with a steel-clad roof, two columns inside which form the legs of the statue. Forty tonnes of steel and ten tonnes of copper went into it. The work was carried out in a year by the Georgian sculptor Jumber Jikia with a team of a hundred, and it was unveiled on 19 May 2012.
The statue itself is twenty-two metres and its base thirteen. The legs weigh nineteen tonnes, the body eighteen and the head nine. Inside, 1,480 pieces of steel construction were made up out of fifty-two steel tubes. The giant trial moulds are displayed on the ground around the statue.
Legal difficulties left the site unused for five years. In 2016 the municipality leased it and had a tourist facility built on the land, with a viewing terrace, a restaurant and cafeteria and a shooting range. The complex, called Atatepe, opened in 2017, and municipal officials said the place would also be used for open-air concerts and sporting events. In 2018 it drew thirty-five thousand people and was the most visited place in Artvin that year.
In 2020, on the 101st anniversary of Atatürk's landing at Samsun, two sportsmen, Cengiz Koçak and Ferdi Toy, set out to fly between the statue and the flag beside it as a token of their gratitude and affection. The two jumped from Genya mountain under a parachute flown by Toy, and Koçak passed between the statue and the flag and landed, as they had planned, on the bank of the Çoruh.
