Guide
The Çanakkale Martyrs' Memorial stands on Hisarlık Tepe, above Morto Bay at the mouth of the Dardanelles, on the Gallipoli peninsula within the Eceabat district of Çanakkale. It was raised in memory of the Turkish soldiers who died in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, during the First World War. Four legs carrying a canopy, it rises 41.7 metres and was designed by Feridun Kip, İsmail Utkular and Doğan Erginbaş. The foundation was laid on 17 April 1954 and the memorial opened on 21 August 1960. Around it stand the Mehmetçik Memorial, the Turkish Garden, the memorial to Mustafa Kemal at Çanakkale, the Wounded Soldier Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Turkish war cemetery.
The peninsula saw one of the bloodiest battles in history. The British lost 205,000 and the French 47,000; different figures have been given for the Turkish losses, and according to the casualty reports the Fifth Army command submitted to the deputy commander-in-chief they came to 213,882 in all. The scale of the losses made burying the dead a serious problem for both sides: with bodies accumulating in a narrow area, they had to be buried in mass graves rather than singly.
After the Armistice of Mudros the British began building new cemeteries and memorials at various points. Following the Turkish War of Independence the Turkish government agreed to cede to the states concerned, separately and without limit of time, the land holding the graves of British, French and Italian soldiers who had died in the war and the memorials raised to them. The British raised the number of cemeteries and memorials they had begun in the occupation to thirty by the time of the Treaty of Lausanne. The French, who had built a cemetery at Seddülbahir during the war, went on making new arrangements until 1930, and the New Zealanders began their own cemeteries and memorials from 1919.
For the Turkish dead no memorial was raised at Gallipoli for a long time. The one concrete step in that period was the rebuilding in 1934 of the Sergeant Mehmet Memorial, the first Turkish memorial on the peninsula, made by piling up stones gathered in the area; the gendarmerie training school built it. Until the Martyrs' Memorial was raised, all the official ceremonies of Turkish delegations were held where that memorial stands.
A competition for a memorial was held by the Ministry of National Defence in 1943, and thirty-seven projects were entered in 1944. The winning design was by Feridun Kip, Doğan Erginbaş and İsmail Utkular, then students at İstanbul Technical University. For want of money it could not be carried out for a long time. The matter came before parliament several times and returned to public attention when the National Turkish Student Union applied to the governor of Çanakkale and to the government in April 1952. The Ministry of Public Works accepted the application and work began, with the decision that the winning project would be built. A nine-member committee to assist the construction was set up under Emin Nihat Sözeri; it was decided to build on Hisarlık Tepe in reinforced concrete faced with granite. The committee's appeal for help turned into a large public campaign, and the foundation was laid on 17 April 1954.
The work then stalled. Months later the materials being used were found to be defective and of poor quality, and the contract was cancelled. The work was put out to tender again and was meant to be finished by July 1958, but salaries had been paid during the stoppage and the price of materials had risen, so that the money collected from the public ran out in 1957 — by which point the foundations had been reinforced and the granite had risen only twelve metres. Public interest revived after the Milliyet correspondent Necmi Onur reported that the memorial had been left half-built and the paper's columnist Refi Cevat Ulunay wrote about it. On 18 January 1958 the paper announced a nationwide appeal to finish it, supported by other organs of the Turkish press. Begun with a target of 100,000 lira, the campaign closed on 18 March 1958 having raised 1,686,251. The body of the memorial was completed on 18 September 1959, and it was formally opened on 21 August 1960, the forty-fifth anniversary of the victory at Anafartalar, by the chief of the general staff, General Cevdet Sunay.
