Commemoration begins for the Ottoman martyrs

Abstract

The Mehmet Cavus Monument had originally been built in 1915 by Commander Mehmet Sefik Aker at the site of Cesarettepe to honor sixty of the Ottoman soldiers who had been killed there in his 19th Division. The less organized commemoration of Ottoman troops who died or were wounded at Gallipoli, when compared to the more systematic efforts undertaken by the Allied countries to bury and commemorate their Gallipoli dead immediately after the war ended, has been noted in many studies of the campaign. In the late Ottoman Empire, prior to World War One, there were very few state-commissioned public monuments to commemorate collectively those who died fighting for the sultan. Stylistic and iconographic choices made by most architects of the earliest commemorative Ottoman monuments generally followed the architectural trends for commemorative monuments in Europe, which was itself quite traditional in the 1920s.