Nearly seven decades after the death of Turkey's founding father, the private life of Kemal Ataturk is to remain a closely guarded secret.

　　Hopes that his former wife's diaries and letters would at last be published were raised as a 25-year-old court order banning their publication expired. But the family of Latife Usakligil has unexpectedly refused to publish the papers, kept in the vaults of Ankara's Turkish History Foundation since her death in 1975.

　　"Her relatives do not want the documents to be released," the foundation's head, Yusuf Halacoglu, told the Guardian. "Nor [do they want them] to be handed to the public for private reasons which I am not in a position to make public."

　　Ataturk married Usakligil soon after creating the modern state of Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. The daughter of a well-to-do merchant from Smyrna, who had studied law in Europe, Usakligil was the embodiment of the social reforms the leader, 20 years her senior, so cherished.

　　Ataturk delighted in showing off his unveiled, emancipated wife as he sought to free women from patriarchal traditions and convert Muslim Turkey into a modern secular state.

　　But the marriage did not last. Feisty and outspoken, Usakligil had little patience for Ataturk's drinking habits and even less for his late-night soirees. According to the few accounts that exist, she tried to break up dinner parties and, if she had retired, banged on the floorboards to let her husband know it was time for bed.

　　Exasperated, the leader sent word to his cabinet that the two-year liaison be officially dissolved. Usakligil was escorted to a train by his ministers and never heard of again.

　　To the surprise of many, she kept a vow of silence.

　　Debate over the papers has raged in Turkey for weeks. There is, say officials, just one man still alive in Turkey who read the documents before they were sealed in 1975 - an old historian who has kept his promise never to reveal them.