Established in 1920 by medical doctors and supported by religious and community leaders, the Turkish temperance society Yeşilay (the Green Crescent) was a major force associated with the country’s politics of temperance. It also contributed momentum to MPs in the nascent republic’s first parliament and a narrowly achieved prohibition on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol. To this end—and in concert with those MPs sympathetic to its cause, the society relied on a message that focused on public health, morality, anti-imperialism, and nationalism. Though Turkey’s prohibition lasted only four years—with its effective reversal in 1924, it paved the way for the subsequent 1926 introduction of a state monopoly controlling alcohol in the republic. Collaborating with international anti-alcohol organizations, Yeşilay also waged a hard-fought battle to prevent this reversal. To that end, American prohibitionist William Eugene “Pussyfoot” Johnson arrived in Turkey as an invited supporter and observer. Though prohibition was reversed, the society remained a powerful societal force in the republic through the activities of its countrywide branches and its regular publications. Opposing, for example, state profit-generating reductions in alcohol prices during World War II, it actively recruited journalists, physicians, intellectuals, and others to support its causes. Unable to change state policies through most of the twentieth century, however, it was compelled to resign itself to its lower profile role of combating an expanding range of addictions. Amid twenty-first century state initiatives—like the increased regulation of alcohol, however, its wider relevance has returned. This paper focuses on Yeşilay’s establishment and early agenda in order to interrogate Turkey’s early histories of temperance and to provide a foundation for understanding its contemporary role in Turkish politics and society. Sources for this research include historical newspapers, Yeşilay’s monthly magazine, public health journals, parliamentary and other state records, and memoirs.