ABSTRACT

As a monumental historical event, the Dardanelles Campaign retains its vivid place in the public memory and the imagination of the Turkish people. Thus, from the very beginning, the struggles in the Dardanelles were interpreted carefully both within and outside Turkey. Only when the political situation changed did the nature of the arguments relating to Gallipoli take a dramatically different turn. One of the significant consequences of the First World War was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Religious tour guides had told the story of the Gallipoli Campaign with purely spiritual terms as if the war was a jihad won under the command of the caliph. During the Republican period, a variant of the story which underlined the name of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk as the Hero of Dardanelles dominated the Turkish literature of the war. In some extreme versions, the Kemalist narrative nearly reduced the whole story of the war to Atatrk's presence and achievements on the battlefield.