Daily History Challenge · No. 21 · Sunday 19 July 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 21: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Collapse and partition of the Ottoman Empire.
Act 1: Chain, against Walter Gropius Founds the Bauhaus in Weimar (1919 CE)
Before Walter Gropius Founds the Bauhaus in Weimar
Before Walter Gropius Founds the Bauhaus in Weimar
Before Walter Gropius Founds the Bauhaus in Weimar
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I ended an imperial state that had endured for over six centuries. Following the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) and the Allied occupation of Constantinople, the Empire's Arab provinces were divided among Britain and France, drawing on the secret wartime Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916). The San Remo Conference (April 1920) allocated League of Nations mandates: Syria and Lebanon to France, and Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, and Transjordan to Britain. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, would have partitioned Anatolia itself among the Allies, Greece, and a proposed Armenian and Kurdish state. Sèvres was never ratified and was overtaken by the Turkish War of Independence, leading to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the Republic of Turkey. The partition created the modern state system of the Middle East, with borders that frequently ignored ethnic, religious, and communal realities and seeded lasting regional conflicts.