Although we hear a lot about the ‘headscarf issue’ in Turkey, there is little written about the legal genealogy of the ban which many secularists back by quoting a law that dates from 1925. This is a law that actually focuses not on what women, but what men wear: it stipulated that Turkish men should stop wearing their turbans and fezes and wear the ‘shapka’ as a token of their devotion to the country’s cause of progress and westernization. The historical transformation was jump started by the often-related anecdote of Atatürk addressing the provincial town of Kastamonu saying ‘My dear sirs, this is a hat!’ This paper aims to bring forth other ‘remembrances’ of this event and its aftermath in contemporary Turkey, from newspaper articles to films, particularly the book ‘?apka’ by Mustafa Çetin Baydar and the film ‘Hür Adam’ (depicting the life of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi). I will look at how the contemporary political climate makes a re-reading of these historical moments possible, and how the figures who stood against the ban are re-configured as representatives of public opinion that were crushed- calling into question the ‘democratic ideals’ that the new republic was supposed to be invested in. While the republican propaganda war against women’s head coverings was carried out on the premise of women’s emancipation, the rationale behind the hat revolution was harder to articulate for the republican elites. The rhetoric for the adoption of the hat amounted to a public-relations effort directed at convincing ‘developed nations’ and Turks themselves that they belonged in Europe. This direct intrusion into personal space caused the thitherto low-key resistance against secularizing reforms to become more vocal and organized and I will look at what kind of discourse the resistance used and how that discourse is re-articulated in today’s public narratives and cultural products. The other authoritarian law of 1925, Law on the Maintenance of Order dealt almost exclusively with cases that violated the ‘shapka’ law, and the resistance to the hat itself became the battle cry against both the European powers that had brought about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the secularizing elites of the state. The cases ended mostly with exile, imprisonment and hanging of 19 religious figures, including ?skilipli At?f Hoca. Looking at these examples and their invocation in today’s political and cultural discourse, my paper aims to contribute to the re-reading of early republican history today.