Divided Spaces, Contested Pasts

The Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey was the site of one of the most tragic and memorable battles of the C20th, with the Turks fighting the ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corps) and soldiers from fifteen other countries. This book is about the history of its landscape, its people, and its heritage, from the day that the defeated Allied troops of World War One evacuated the peninsula in January 1916, to the present. It also examines how the wartime heritage of this region, both tangible and intangible, is currently being redefined by the Turkish state to reflect a faith-based rather than secularist narrative about the origins of the country. As the centennnial of World War One is to be commemmorated in 1915, this volume provides a timely and fascinating look at what has happened in the last century to a landscape that was devasted and emptied of its inhabitants at the end of World War One, how it recovered, and why this geography has again become a site of contested heritage. It highlights many facinating aspects of the past heritage of the peninsula that have not been adequately told about Gallipoliâs post-war past: the archaeological excavations conducted by the French government shortly after the end of World War One, the monument building undertaken by the Ottoman and early Turkish Republic governments to commemorate their dead, the demographic and cultural upheavals that occured on the peninsula due to the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the subsequent migration of Turks from the Balkans to the peninsula during the 1930s, the joint efforts of the Turkish Forest Ministry and the US National Park Service to create one of Turkeyâs first national parks on the peninsula in the late 1960s, and the attempts to establish the peninsula as an international Peace Park in the 1990s. In the final chapter, the history of the Gallipoli peninsula is brought up to the present and the book investigates how its wartime heritage is again being contested and redefined through several projects undertaken in the last decade by the Turkish government.