The legacy of Turkish journalist Zekeriya Sertel (1890-1980) is often overshadowed by that of his wife, Sabiha Sertel, a notable leftist, considered by some to be the first female journalist of the Turkish Republic. Zekeriya was peripheral to centers of power at several notable moments in Republican history. The son of an agha in the Balkans, he experienced both wealth and privilege but also the violence and displacement at the end of the Ottoman Empire. From his involvement as Directorate General of the Press in the early republic to his complicated involvement with the Communist Party of Turkey during the Cold War as a close friend and collaborator of the poet Nazim Hikmet, he served, often with significant friction, several masters. I am developing this paper as part of a larger project on Zekeriya Sertel. I hope to use this to think through educational and social “formation” in the context of violent political change and cultural anomie between empire and republic. Using a transnational microhistory approach, this paper utilizes memoirs and other ego documents to chart and examine Sertel’s migrations on the eve of the Balkan Wars, his studies at the Sorbonne during the Great War, and his Crane scholarship to Columbia during the Turkish War of Independence. After several decades of discussion about the “deep-rootedness” of the Kemalist project and current questions about the future of Turkish secularism, I think it is worthwhile to reevaluate the elites that formed Mustafa Kemal’s cohort. What did they believe they were being cultivated for? How did they envision the future? And what can the fallout between a young press minister and the nascent Kemalist government tell us about the dynamics of political involvement in the 1920s? There does not appear to be any works in English that focus on Zekeriya Sertel. However, there is a recent English-language translation of his wife Sabiha Sertel’s memoirs Roman Gibi. Thus, this project will be original research on a notable Turkish media figure but will also help address questions related to the republic's formation.