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7 - Forming the Ottoman battlefield
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- By Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Reyhan Körpe, 18 March University, Muhammet Erat, 18 March University
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 138-158
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Summary
Turkish measures to defend the Gallipoli Peninsula and the strategy that was implemented to counter a likely landing operation were above all influenced by the peninsula's physical features. It was necessary to reshape the battlefield from the outset. Troops were deployed according to the likely landing locations. Trenches, artillery, machine gun nests, communication lines, rear-guard connections and other requirements were arranged and shaped according to the topography. Some field works, such as trenches, artillery sites and access routes in the Arı Burnu area, had already been constructed during the Balkan Wars. These were improved and extended after the likelihood of another war emerged. When preparing the area for war in 1915, the Turks were able to take into account advantages the Arı Burnu geography had offered during previous deployments of soldiers there. In that regard, they had the advantage over the Anzac soldiers who would land in the area.
Arı Burnu consists of two capes, namely north and south Arı Burnu, and the slopes of Kocaçimen Tepe (Hill 971), with ridges running parallel to the coast towards Gaba Tepe in the south. Arı Burnu was considered an important location within the Gaba Tepe landing zone. The coast near Gaba Tepe was the most appropriate location for landing the heaviest war vehicles, providing an obstacle-free disembarkation point and route. The Anzacs’ initial objective was to seize and hold Artillery Ridge (Topçular Sırtı) from Hill 971 to Gaba Tepe. But it was necessary to hold Arı Burnu, a natural fortification that dominated the Gaba Tepe coast and plain, to ensure safe landings. While Gaba Tepe was suitable for a landing, the Arı Burnu coast was steep and rugged, and inappropriate for disembarking, then operating heavy vehicles. It was impossible to land soldiers on the Gaba Tepe coast without first securing the Arı Burnu area. Prominent and effective natural defences dominated the land up to the strait and the sea. The Nara Cape and Mecidiye and Hamidiye strongholds were among the strategic locations that enabled long-range artillery (firing to 9000–13 000m) to enfilade the coastal area from the flanks and rear.
The deployment sites were on Conkbayırı Hill in the foothills of Kocaçimen Tepe and at points on the ridge that extends from Conkbayırı (Chunuk Bair) to Gaba Tepe, including Suyatağı, Kemalyeri, Göktepe and Kavaktepe.
8 - Artefacts from the battlefield
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- By Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Monash University (Melbourne), Michelle Negus Cleary, University of Sydney, Simon Harrington, The Royal Australian Naval College, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Reyhan Körpe, 18 March University, Muhammet Erat, 18 March University
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 159-191
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Material culture does not just exist. It is made by someone. It is produced to do something. Therefore it does not passively reflect society – rather, it creates society through the action of individuals.
Hodder & Hutson, Reading the Past, p. 6.The things humankind makes and uses at any particular time and place are probably the truest representation we have of values and meaning within a society.
Kingery, Learning from Things, p. ix.We live in a world of material things. Objects that we have manufactured (artefacts) and structures that we have built envelope our daily existence. They constitute the tangible and tactile expressions of our contemporary society, as they did for all past human communities. As such, artefacts reveal much about our thoughts and our actions. They inform on our preferences and purchasing power, our cultural affiliations and travels, and our stage of life and gender. In other words, artefacts have the potential to group people with something in common. Artefacts fill museums around the world, and together with standing monuments, they form a major component of the public face of archaeology. The rationale behind the study of artefacts in archaeology, then, can be easily understood. As objects made and used by people, they play a central role in a discipline that is concerned with material culture and how it can be utilised to make sense of human behaviour and achievements.
How far we can approach the ‘true’ meaning of material culture has been much debated, and need not detain us here. Suffice to say that, as evidence from the past, objects are worthy of study in themselves. For many, though, artefacts are seen as ‘fossils’: static and mute expressions of past actions, which are often displayed in serried ranks in a museum. This method is of limited value, for it obscures the cultural biography of an archaeological object, which has its own history of creation, use, deposition, post-deposition and recovery. We explained our project's recovery system in chapter 5. Here we touch on the first three stages of the lifecycle of the JHAS artefacts, although not with the same level of attention.
10 - Remembering Gallipoli from a Turkish perspective
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- By Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Reyhan Körpe, 18 March University, Muhammet Erat, 18 March University
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 222-243
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The Turkish cemeteries at Gallipoli developed in a different manner from those of the Anzacs, and the ceremonies mirrored marked shifts in public opinion and the political circumstances of the time. In this chapter, we first discuss how Turkish commemoration ceremonies have evolved over the last century, after which we examine the monuments themselves.
18 MARCH NAVAL VICTORY COMMEMORATIONS AND VISITS TO THE CEMETERIES
Ceremonies held during the war period
The Ottoman victory at Gallipoli (Çanakkale Muzafferiyet-i Azimesi) was acclaimed throughout the empire and beyond. Celebratory gatherings and ceremonies were held across the empire, and especially in Istanbul. Caliph-Sultan Mehmet Reşat received the title Gazi (Veteran) to mark the victory, while the German Kaiser decorated the Çanakkale Fortified Zone Commander, Cevat Pasha. For his part, Cevat, anxious to proclaim the heroism of the gunners in the naval victory of 18 March 1915, obtained the approval of the Ottoman Supreme Command to rename the Dardanos Battery the Hasan-Mevsuf Battery in recognition of the bravery of the gunners Hasan, Mevsuf Bey and their friends.
The first commemoration of the 18 March victory in the Dardanelles was held one year on. On 12 March 1916, Nihat Pasha, commander of the Çanakkale Fortified Zone, issued an order for a military ceremony to take place on the anniversary of the naval victory ‘to cherish the memory of the soldiers who fell on that date’. This military ceremony and a parade would follow a religious ceremony. The Ottoman warship Yavuz came from Istanbul for the ceremonies, which were held in the Hastane Bayırı, Anadolu Hamidiye, Dardanos Bastion and Erenköy–Seddülbahir areas and were attended by Nihat Pasha, accompanied by Merten Pasha and Cevat Pasha. A German officer made the following statement during this first commemoration:
Passing through the sloshy pastures we are heading to a silent cemetery, the final resting place of four German and three Turkish heroes in the outskirts of the Dardanos Hills. When I first saw the graves a couple of weeks ago, they were surrounded by a mysterious palisade, with uniformed German and Turkish stonemasons working with hammers and chisels behind it. Today many hands have decorated it with flowers and trees, and spring flowers have blossomed over both the German and Turkish mass graves. Both have magnificent marble grave monuments erected over them. The inscriptions tell the names and heroism of the new March soldiers.
3 - Recording the battlefield: First steps
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- By Richard Reid, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Reyhan Körpe, 18 March University, Muhammet Erat, 18 March University
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 36-58
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Two of the most important sources for understanding what the Anzac battlefield looked like shortly after the campaign are the maps produced by the Turkish cartographer Mehmet Şevki Pasha and the material collected in 1919 by the Australian Historical Mission and the Australian War Records Section. Şevki Pasha's detailed maps, produced in the immediate aftermath of the Allied evacuation of December 1915, are an invaluable source, allowing for detailed comparison between the recently deserted Turkish and Allied trenches and what has survived today. Indeed, without these maps, verifying the modern recording of the old trench positions would be much more difficult. The diaries, sketches, maps, drawings and photographs produced by the Australian Historical Mission in 1919 created a large collection still to be fully exploited in modern interpretations of the battlefield landscape.
In the JHAS encounter with the modern terrain of ‘old Anzac’, it was important to understand something of the workings of these first efforts to document that landscape. It became evident, for example, that Şevki Pasha had not recorded everything. There were surviving trench lines that he, and his aides, either did not consider worth mapping or were unable to record in the time they had available. Similarly, it was well outside the remit of the Australian Historical Mission to make detailed note of trench lines and other key positions. That said, the Turkish maps and the Mission's collections could well be valuable starting points for further archaeological and historical investigation of the battlefield features surviving at Gallipoli today. They would certainly, if used imaginatively, enhance efforts at modern site interpretation.
AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL MISSION, FEBRUARY–MARCH 1919
Charles Bean spent virtually the whole of the 1915 campaign at Gallipoli as Australia's official war correspondent. On Saturday 15 February 1919, now the nation's official historian, he returned to Anzac: ‘… my heart bounded … the place seemed to have been abandoned only yesterday.’ Bean observed that the eastern slopes of Second Ridge were still crowded with the excavated terraces where the Ottoman soldiers had lived; saw that a maze of trenches still led up to the front line on the Lone Pine plateau; and experienced again, as he went along Second Ridge, how close to each other the Ottoman and Anzac trenches had been.