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.

After being soundly defeated in the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was forced to sign the Treaty of Sevres in which its dominion was substantially reduced, its administration placed under foreign supervision, and its ‘Turkish’ territory apportioned into foreign zones of occupation. Only the Turkish War of Independence largely prevented this fate, and helped establish the Republic of Turkey. Given these circumstances, it is unsurprising that in the aftermath of these wars the bulk of Turkish state-sponsored remembrance focused on celebrating the triumph of the Turkish War of Independence rather than rehashing the traumas of the Ottoman First World War experience. Fast-forward to present-day Turkey, however, and one First World War event is not simply remembered by Turks, but often exalted as the episode which laid the foundations of the Turkish nation. Relying on government documents and newspaper articles obtained from Turkish and British archives as well as participatory fieldwork on the Gallipoli Peninsula, this paper will detail a history of Turkish national remembrance of the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli – one of the most dramatic, albeit one of the few, major Ottoman victories in the First World War. Beginning in the early Republican period, I will explore how and why Gallipoli was neglected by the Turkish state as both an event worthy of remembrance and as a memorial site in favor of more ‘Republican’ events and spaces and in sharp contrast to extravagant foreign memorialization efforts on the peninsula. Subsequently, I will demonstrate how Gallipoli’s potential as a site of reconciliatory remembrance began to be exploited for gain with Turkey’s new allies during the Cold War, unexpectedly spurring grassroots Turkish nationalist sentiments around the event too. Finally, I will describe Gallipoli’s ascent in the Turkish national imagination in the post-Cold War period to its illustrious status today among both public officials and private citizens. The presentation will broach the following questions: How has the battle’s First World War heritage, and in a similar vein its Ottoman heritage, impacted its remembrance in Turkey? Where have Gallipoli and the First World War ranked in the hierarchy of events in the Turkish national imagination vis-a-vis other events of import, and why? Which aspects of the battle have been selected or come to the fore and which have been forgotten, and why? Does remembrance of the battle in Turkey actually constitute as remembrance of the First World War?

The arrival of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Palestine in late 1917 ushered in the end of the disastrous war years that saw a large decrease in the local population as a result of the war, disease and famine. Yet, do people remember anything of World War One in Palestine? The first part of this paper, relying on a variety of written and oral sources including diaries and a collection of interviews conducted by the University of Bethlehem in the 1980s, will highlight how the local urban population of Palestine remembered episodes of the war. Forced military conscription, forced labor, confiscation of foodstuff and other resources, the spreading of infectious diseases, seem to be just some of the most common memories. However, regardless of the religious and political affiliations, it seems that the memory of the war years by those who experienced it focused on 1915, known as Sanat al-Jaraad (the Year of the Locusts): every single source available of that period reported the total destruction caused by this invasion. If the end of the hostilities meant that order was restored and starvation tackled, on the other hand the conclusion of the war saw agitation fermenting among Arabs and Zionists. The second part of the paper, relying on multiple memoirs, will show how the memory of the war was superseded by the memory of the emerging conflict between Arabs and Zionists. As a corollary, this paper will show the importance of looking at this period as one of transition. It will be suggested that histories written until a few years ago simply divided Palestine’s Ottoman and British eras, de facto missing the possibility of analyzing the war period and including it in a larger historical assessment. The last part of the paper will focus on Jerusalem to question whether memories of the war have survived to this day. Through a series of interviews conducted locally and involving an ample variety of subjects, it will be shown that despite the still visible impact of the war on buildings, planning, and other urban aspects, memories of the war remain quite feeble. The final goal is to provide a preliminary answer to the question of why the war, considered by many to be a pivotal moment in the region, seems today almost forgotten.

This paper problematizes the question of a collective Syrian memory of the First World War in two ways: first, by counterposing a number of texts (oral and written) created during and after the war—including but not limited to Muhammad Kurd cAli’s Khitat al-Sham; "Remembrance of the cId al-istiqlal al-suri: A Collection of Speeches and Poems Delivered on the Occasion of the cId al-istiqlal"; Gertrude Bell’s dipatches from Syria; T.E. Lawrence’s “The Destruction of the Fourth Army”; cAdil al-Sulh’s Sutur min al-risala: tarikh haraka istiqlaliyya qamat fi al-mashriq al-carabi sana 1877; Hasan al-Qaysi Nasr’s Qabsat min al-turath al-shacbiyya: Macarik wa-qasa)id; Mustafa Tlas’ L’histoire politique de la Syrie contemporaine: 1918-1990; and textbooks used in Syrian secondary schools during the 1990s—I shall trace the differences between contemporaneous accounts and later inscriptions of events that took place during the war. I shall also analyze the shifting focus of and tropes used by those later accounts, counterposing official and unofficial, didactic and folkloric renderings. Then I shall look at the debates about collective memory and historical memory in which historians have engaged since the publication of Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, situating the notion of a Syrian collective memory within that context and exploring the value of collective memory as an investigative category and the possibility of reconstructing a distinctly Syrian collective memory of the war.