- Title
- Introduction: Myth and memory of the Great War in Ottoman Turkey
- Creator
- Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Nunn, Pearl; Schmutz, Thomas
- Relation
- Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand p. 1-15
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- In many parts of the world, particularly in Turkey and Australia, the First World War remains a battlefield of conflict in myth and memory. Heroic tales and stab-in-the-back legends compete with commemorations of victories, losses and a genocide. In Canberra and Wellington, war memorials give Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Ottoman commander of enemy troops and later President of Turkey, a surprisingly prominent place. In Ankara, Istanbul, and other Turkish towns, streets, schools and mosques are named in honour of the memory of Talaat and Enver Pasha, who led Ottoman Turkey’s war regime and organized the Armenian Genocide. This genocide is commemorated in many other countries, including Armenia itself. Ottoman Turkey’s Great War is remembered by different states in wildly contradictory ways. Turkish war monuments are thus the epitome of the century-old inability to agree on common ways in which to commemorate these events and to honour the sufferings and sacrifices of the dead. This situation is paradigmatic of decades of ‘history wars’ with deliberate oblivion and selective memory-making.
- Subject
- first world war; Australia; Turkey; geonocide
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1506203
- Identifier
- uon:55827
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781788313773
- Language
- eng
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