Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Turkey on Thursday to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the death of the country's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Sirens sounded at 9:05 local time to announce a minute's silence, and traffic was stopped on Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge. A state ceremony was also held in the Ataturk Mausoleum in the capital Ankara, where he was laid to rest.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised Ataturk at the ceremony, saying the country's influence should spread beyond its borders.

Ataturk died on November 10th 1938, aged 57. He founded Turkey as a secular republic in 1923 from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.