The Ottoman Empire was one of the belligerents most severely affected by World War I. Over a period of four years, Ottoman army saw combat on eight different fronts, mobilizing approximately 2.9 million men. The extraction of these men from society and the economy, coupled with the state’s increasingly ruthless intervention in the everyday lives of the Ottoman people, placed an unendurable burden on their shoulders. This burden became even heavier as a result of the unprecedentedly large number of casualties. By the end of the war, there were very few families and presumably no villages or neighborhoods throughout the empire that had escaped from the terrible effects and death toll of the war. This traumatic experience gave birth to a distinct culture of war and of its remembrance. Separate from the official war culture, it featured its own symbols and representations, offering ordinary Ottomans an alternative means of interpreting and remembering the war and alternative channels to express their feelings about it. Notwithstanding a small number of significant exceptions, the Ottoman people did not leave behind individual records through which historians could trace the meanings they attached to war and death. Furthermore, no serious attempt has been made to collect and publish their narratives about the war and their lives on the Ottoman home front, given the disinterest in ordinary people’s experiences and memories of war. In the absence of more conventional historical sources, this paper is based on numerous songs, ballads, and laments collected by folklorists in the decades following World War I. They offer perhaps the best evidence that the Ottoman people developed a way of understanding the war, which was noticeably different from the official understanding. These songs and laments provide historians with an invaluable glimpse into the experiences and feelings of the home-front population during and after the war, subjects that have been omitted from official histories, but which may have dominated local memories throughout the empire. They reflect, collectively, how the Ottoman people perceived and remembered the war and its disastrous impact. In the absence of monuments and memorial sites for public remembrance and mourning in the Ottoman Empire of the sort that were erected throughout Europe, these songs and laments became the primary “sites of collective memory and mourning” for the Ottoman people. By drawing on examples from across the Ottoman Empire, this paper will examine this complex and dynamic phenomenon.