The pages of the illustrated journals Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), Sevimli Ay (The Adorable Monthly), Resimli Persembe (Illustrated Thursday) and Resimli Hafta (Illustrated Weekly) sought to engage a Turkish public that was learning to cope with a revolutionary time. While each journal had a somewhat different tactic, each strove to educate the reader about the broad world around it and employ the influence of Western culture to aid Turkish society’s advancement towards a modern society. This essay will discuss the birth of these journals through the story of their proprietors, Mehmet Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel, with the aim of elucidating both the transformation of the Turkish press, but also the diversity of oppositional culture in the Early Turkish Republic. In this time these journals reacted frequently to revolutions of all kinds, massive social and political reform inside Turkey as well as a vastly changing West (and North) in the fallout of World War I. The Sertel’s vision was influenced both by leftist political currents and the development of positivist sociology, and this is evident in their journalistic efforts. This essay delves into the intellectual transformation of the Sertels from 1919, when they were helping formulate an intellectual response to the Greek invasion of Izmir to their return to a remade Turkey in 1923 after a four year journey to New York to study at Columbia University. Upon their return, their views were in both harmony and opposition to the unfolding Kemalist vision coming from Ankara. Where Mustafa Kemal was in many was fashioning Turkey according to an ethnogenerative, and thus anti-Western vision, the Sertel’s proffered a vision of modernity that was a nearly direct translation of Western culture and education. In this way, we can come to understand the origins of a leftist opposition to Kemalism apart from the hard-line Communist elements that have received much more attention in scholarship of this period. By assessing evolution of these intellectuals both in occupied Istanbul and following that in New York this essay intends to broaden our understanding of Western influence in the Early Turkish Republic as well as reevaluate the formative experiences of what would become two of Turkey’s most prominent leftist intellectuals.