Turkish Mass Graves

[swatt9r]

As I mentioned in another thread in a walking tour of Gallipoli last September I noticed several Turkish national flags raised on flagpoles (well seated) in the area behind Mortar ridge at Anzac. These flags mark the sites of turkish mass graves from 1915. Does anyone know under whose auspices this work is being done? Is it a university or equivalent of national heritage?

Stewart

[Eceabat]

Hi Stewart,

Most of the sites you saw marked with a Turkish flag are in fact battlefields cemeteries, formalised burial sites from during the campaign.

A number of experts went through old Turkish records and the well known Sevki Pasha map, drawn up on the orders of the chief of staff of the Ottoman Fifth Army in 1916 following the Allied withdrawal from the peninsula, to plot all of the sites of importance on the battlefields. This included most of the trenches of both sides as well as cemeteries. Before the Allied evacuations similar maps were drawn of the Allied cemeteries.

The current Turkish plan is to construct memorials near to the site of the original battlefield cemeteries. This has been done both in the valley below the memorial to the 57th regiment at Turkish Quinns and below Pine Ridge for example.

The actual work of putting up the flags and the later construction of the memorials is being carried out by the national park authorities.

Not surprisingly, there has been some controversy over some of this work, including damage done to the sites of the original burial grounds and unearthing of human remains. In addition, after a major row between some of the historical experts and the Turkish national park bureaucracy, which saw some of Turkey’s leading experts on the campaign cut their links with the park administration over the former’s opposition to some of the more horrendous proposals, the standard of critical historical study has fallen off.

However, at least these burial sites are now marked, and able to be visited by the general public, rather than by just the few historians who knew of their location.

If I recall, up to 30 Ottoman wartime cemeteries have either had memorials constructed or are to have them built.

Hope this answers the question.

Cheers

Bill

[swatt9r]

Bill

Thanks for the information. I seem to recall that muslims have to be buried within 24 hours of death. This would not have been possible for those turkish soldiers shot in no-mans-land. Do you know if they were buried separately?(if retrieved). Or were all the dead buried together?

Stewart

[Eceabat]

Stewart,

Under the terms of the peace treaties with first the Ottoman Empire and then the new Republic of Turkey, the Allies had the right to clear the battlefields of their dead following the end of the war. This work commenced almost immediately after the Allies began their occupation of the Gallipoli Peninsula at the end of 1918 and was followed by the mapping out and construction of the cemeteries and memorials we see today.

As was often the case, Turkish remains lay near or mixed with those of Allied troops. The Turkish remains were often moved and piled to one side for Turkish authorities to deal with later.

I believe that I am right in saying that most of these remains were not buried in proper cemeteries and little or no effort was made to identify the fallen (given that the remains had been piled up in large heaps in some cases, bones all mixed together, there would have been little chance of this happening anyway). I have seen a couple of gruesome photos of piles of remains of hundreds of Turkish troops.

Most of the burial grounds that having memorials erected on or near them date, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, from 1915, and many (though by no means all) have the names of those buried marked.

You are right in saying that normal Islamic practice calls for burial within 24 hours, this like many other sensible laws set down under Islamic code was a health precaution (for example, the law forbidding the eating of pork was mainly due to the fact that wild pigs that roamed in areas occupied by Arab peoples at the time of the writing of the Koran were infested with intestinal parasites and posed a health risk).

Cheers

Bill

[MartinWills]

I've recently been going through several accounts of the May Armistice at ANZAC following the Turkish attack of 19 May. There were perhaps 3,000 Turkish bodies cleared during the day. Accounts point to them being piled into gullys and the like and covered, this occuring some 5 days or so after the men died or were wounded to die later. Some accounts also refer to Turkish dead being buried in communication trenches between the Allied and Turkish lines (eg constructed as part of raids to try and push the lines forward). Some of the Mortar Ridge burials may have occurred then. In general the Turkish burials were more likely to be massed unamed graves but this was not necessarily always the case. After the evacuation a number of Turkish maps were drawn up and these show the lines as at the end of 1915 and can be quite useful in locating cemeteries as well as other features of the line.

It is good that known or identifiable Turkish burials are being marked in this way or otherwise commemorated even if the names of the dead cannot be identified. Both sides lost many brave men and we should remember them all. The Turkish way of doing this may be rather different from the Allied way but is still perfectly valid.