Symposium
Gallipoli: History, Art & Literature

Dr Mehdi Ilhan

Topic: An Introduction to Turkish Sources on the Gallipoli Campaign

Turkish sources on the Gallipoli Campaign range from archival documents to newspaper reports, from photographs to memoirs, and from private letters to interviews with veterans. The Archival documents are mainly preserved at the Prime Ministerial (Basbakanlik) Archives in Istanbul and the Military Archives (ATASE) in Ankara. Although some of the documents preserved in these archives have been transcribed, they have not been thoroughly analyzed or studied with the exception of a couple of articles and some dim references in a small number of books. The documents preserved in the Turkish archives contain a full account of the activities of Ottoman forces as well as those of the Allies during the First World War. There are documents which concentrate solely on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. These documents include maps and sketches showing the position of soldiers and the strategy to be followed during the course of the battles, reports on victories and defeats (including the number of losses and casualties), intelligence reports regarding the positions of the enemy and their movements, and telegraphs and orders sent from the capital and the responses to them. My presentation will demonstrate, through a number of examples, how vital these documents are for historians and how they can be used to shed light on Western scholarship of the field.

Dr Mehdi Ilhan has a BA (Hons) in Arabic and Religious Studies from Leeds University, and a PhD in History from the University of Manchester. Dr. Ilhan is a specialist in History and Socio-economic History of the Ottoman Empire and History of Islam. He has taught Turkish Language at the University of Manchester, History at Ankara University, History and Turkish Language at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia (in Arabic) and History at Al al-Bayt University of Jordan (in Arabic).

Prior to taking up his appointment at the Australian National University in 2003, Dr Ilhan was Professor and Chair of the Department of History, Middle East Technical University, Ankara (1989-2003). His most recent publication is ‘The Town of Cankiri: Its Population and Development’ in Imber and Kiyotaki (ed), Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province, and the West Vol. 1 (London: IB Tauris, 2005).