Antipodean dialogical solidarity,travel,and the agentic power of commemorative genre: Australia and Türkiye's 75th battlefield remembrance of the Gallipoli campaign as an eventful moment

Abstract

Utilizing Beilharz's concept of the antipodean for developing social theory that reflects Australia's unique place in the world, this article examines the origins of Australia and Türkiye's current comprehension of the World War I Gallipoli campaign in its 75th anniversary remembrance. The article highlights the significance of travel as a ritual practice and cultural frame, both domestically and internationally, in shaping disenchantment and re-enchantment trajectories in how nations remember their past. Specifically, it is argued that this anniversary was an ‘eventful moment’ that allowed both Australia and Türkiye to redress a semiosis crisis in their national commemorative traditions through advancing relatively inclusive national memories. More recently the agentic power of travel, in this case connected to Australians’ commemorative exile from the battlefield, has afforded Türkiye's move to an Ottoman-era focused national identity and Australia’s return to a more ethnonational remembrance of war history.

Introduction

Working within Beilharz's (2015) conceptualization of the antipodean, the article analyses the 75th anniversary battlefield remembrance of the World War I (WWI) Gallipoli campaign by Australia and Türkiye, arguing that it is an ‘eventful moment’ (Sewell, 1996) for both nations, in the sense that it involves the making of history in ways that establishes new societal directions (Wagner-Pacifici, 2019). Beilharz conceptualizes the antipodean, via Smith (1979), as a way of conceiving Australia as having a distinctive relationship to history, the environment, and culture, born from tensions between the European origins of its colonial project, its geographic realities and the rich civilization of its indigenous people. For Beilharz this not only provides an avenue for developing a distinctive Australian sociology, one that draws on insights from across the humanities and social sciences, but it also aids social theory in providing a strategic case for comprehending the complexity of the contemporary world and contemplating alternative futures. In this article I highlight another way that the antipodean context shapes the world, through dialogical cultural dynamics.

The conceptual frame of the antipodean is both a nationalist and a global project. In part it is born of a desire that Australia has the confidence to recognize its own distinctiveness, to break away from its intellectual reliance on the Global North. However, rather than providing a binary comprehension of influence within a cultural imperialist model, the antipodean for Beilharz is more multidimensional, denoting the liminal position that Australia holds broadly in relation to the project of modernity as it emerged out of Europe. He writes ‘This ambivalence, this sense of being there, elsewhere, and here at the same time, we call antipodean’ (Beilharz, 2015). ‘Place matters’, he argues, ‘but it is constructed in traffic’ (Beilharz, 2015). In doing so Beilharz avoids the parochialism and isolationist sentiment that led to the demise of the Australian Studies project in the late 1990s (Smith and West, 2003). However, the antipodean also provides an alternative to the generality of much postcolonial scholarship, including as it has come to be commonly applied to Australia, in which anything seen as European is cast as destructive to contemporary social relations. In this way the antipodean thesis can account for diverse cultural imaginaries as they derive from national identification and the dynamics of the civil sphere (Alexander, 2016). In this way the antipodean differs from other geographically orientated theories as they stem from post-structuralist notions of power, including that of Australia's major social theory identity Connell (2007). Connell in her Southern Theory thesis largely dismisses the nation as a worthy category of identity, arguing social theory that seeks to involve systematic generalization inherently produces a reifying of peoples and cultures (Connell, 2007: 67–8, 207). This is despite that Connell's analysis in referring to North/South and Metropole/Majority binaries has itself an essentialist quality ‘from the outside’ (McLennan, 2013). In contrast, the antipodean provides a more productive basis to comprehend culture not only as webs of meaning, to use Geertz's metaphor (1973), but webs that are constantly broken and re-spun in an environment that not only its creators inhabit but one that can also capture other entities, often unintentionally.

Analysing Australia's remembrance practices on the WWI Gallipoli battlefields and its subsequent dialogical cultural engagements with Türkiye's history and political elites, the article illustrates the way in which the antipodean is not only significant in shaping Australia and its immediate region but also the ways that this can afford wider global transformations. Specifically, the findings point to the need to rethink social theories of disenchantment as it has been applied to nationalism and national identity within Global North social theory. While nationalism is most considered as a dependent variable within broader structural accounts of social change, typically assuming its demise, the article highlights the need to better appreciate the agentic power of ritual in shaping cultural engagement with national identities. In the case of Australia and Türkiye it is argued that a significant but somewhat unintended symbolic shift in commemorative remembering of national history flowed from the organization and performance of the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign in 1990.

National identity, travel and commemorations

In contemporary social theory the overwhelming focus on national identity has been with wanning affects, what Weber (1968) refers to as disenchantment, traditionally characterized by the desacralization of history and routinization of historical charisma. When nationalism is studied, it is overwhelmingly in relation to political orthodoxy, particularly as it relates to fear of immigration. This neglects both the diversity of nationalism and the way in which an embrace of cultural diversity and travel can result in its invigoration, and how these meanings are also subject to reimagining and co-optation. While re-enchantment of culture has been a feature of contemporary sociology since the end of the Cold War, this has overwhelmingly been associated with global consumption capitalism and transnational social movements. Little research has been undertaken on re-enchantment as it relates to the inversion of disenchantment with the nation and national history, even though we have witnessed a significant rise of right-wing politics in the West that has been orientated to recapturing lost national pride and a general shift in the Muslim world whereby national identities have become invigorated by becoming more orientated to religion (Greenfeld, 2011). While both developments are commonly cast nostalgically as returning to earlier forms of social organization, they involve the promotion of largely new forms of nationalism that do not have a historical precedent (West, 2015).

Existing constructivist theories of nationalism are limited in their ability to comprehend such developments. In the late twentieth century, the study of nationalism had taken a constructivist turn away from concern with primordialism to either focus on the how the past is interpreted by individuals and groups or the political use of national representation. Anthony Smith was influential in advancing this constructivist perspective through his concern with national identity as the ‘reproduction and reinterpretation by the members of a national community of the pattern of symbols, values, myths, memories and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and the variable identification of individual members of that community with that heritage and its cultural elements’ (Smith, 2010: 20). This intellectual shift saw a renewal of interest in nationalism as an object of study, one that broke away from methodological nationalism which simply assumed the prominence of the nation, to increasingly comprehend cultural distinction and diversity. However, the reductionist elements of such work also saw culture too frequently being cast as a mere reflection of the interests of elites, allowing for little comprehension of the way in which nationalism could play a role in bottom-up societal transformation.

Nationalism scholars working from this constructivist perspective would avoid deterministic logic in relation to observations around national commemoration and symbols, appreciating contingent and performative factors (Berezin, 2009; Edensor, 2020). The traditional focus on the role of the state in remembering the past would become supplemented with accounts of the way cultural industries and popular culture project and contest national identity. This perspective has most recently provided a powerful frame for comprehending the relationship between nationalism and populism (Bonikowski, 2017). However, this newfound constructivist perspective either focused on one particular nation, typically within the Global North or when other national cases were considered the analysis typically drew on theoretical assumptions and frames developed from the cultural and geographic context of the Global North or would adopt a dogmatic critique of foreign influence in a way which limited its potential to comprehend cultural diversity and empirically detail how cross-cultural influence actually happens, and the different meanings it can produce.

By contrast, the antipodean conceptual framework through its appreciation of liminal effects allows for an examination of national engagement as it can produce a range of social and political outcomes, these existing relatively independent of the interest of elites. In doing so the antipodean perspective allows for an accounting of the public's ambivalence towards official modern engagements with the nation as well as the embrace of new civic national categories, and how these provide significant contexts and resources for meaning-making. This includes meaning being produced ‘from below,’ involving groups other than traditional elites, and understandings of the nation that can advance social justice and equality (Calhoun, 2017; Eckersley, 2007). Through analysis of the 75th anniversary of the WWI Gallipoli campaign on the battlefield, it is argued that this antipodean perspective can simultaneously comprehend the production and reception of culture dialogically across nation-states.

National remembrance and semiosis crisis in Australia and Türkiye

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries signified a new dawn for Australian and Turkish commemorative engagement with the history of the WWI Gallipoli campaign. Central to this was the development of an array of new memorials on the battlefield and a skyrocketing number of visitors that were discursively framed in relation to pilgrimage. This remembrance environment and activity were activated by the 75th anniversary of the invasion landings on the battlefield in 1990. For both Australia and Türkiye this remembrance event occurred against a backdrop of growing disenchantment with established commemorative traditions. In Australia a declining attachment to the main national memorial holiday of Anzac Day (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), which corresponds to Australia's landing in Ottoman Türkiye to secure the Dardanelles Strait, had been widely discussed in the public sphere since the underwhelming 50th anniversary commemorations of WWI in Australia (Macleod, 2002). However, it was when the rise of ‘new nationalism’ in Australia during the 1980s, particularly evident in highly popular WWI based films such as such as Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), did not correspond with a reversal of a decline in attendance at Anzac Day services (Davison, 2003: 79), nor Anzac Day decreasing as a site of political protest (Elder, 2005), that the crisis of ritual semiosis fully ensured.

It was this semiosis crisis that saw Australian remembrance organizers utilizing battlefield pilgrimage as the main commemorative genre for the 75th anniversary remembrance. Travel and associated pilgrimage rhetoric of course was not the only commemorative genre option for Australian commemorative organizers in their attempt to address disenchantment with established commemorative genres used to remember Australia's military heritage. However, pilgrimage had certain advantages over alternatives. When the memory of World War II proved problematic for Australia's Anzac remembrance traditions associated with the ‘Great War,’ Australia as with other Western nations (Barber, 1949) sought to utilize living memorial remembrance forms, ones that have a utilitarian function such as named hospitals, and civic infrastructure such as drinking fountains and park benches. However, faced with the political upheavals from the late-1960s counter-cultural movements, the everyday or profane characteristics of this remembrance type had fallen out of favour. In the later decades of the twentieth century other ritual genres such as re-enactment and local ‘living history’ exhibitions had become widely utilized, largely due to their decentralizing character that were considered less likely to ignite political conflict. As Spillman (1997) outlines, such commemorative genres had been extensively used by the organizers of Australia's 1988 Bicentennial. However, the empowering of local organizers typically was not successful in avoiding national controversy over how the past was remembered and debate around the appropriateness of the commemorative genres used in doing so.

Such commemorative options also did not address the major issue faced by the government in relation to Anzac Day and the 75th anniversary, that the organizational authority of the established commemorative genre was with the Returned Services League of Australia (RSL), and as an organization they were seen as the primary inhibitor to a renewal of Anzac Day. Primarily Australia's main ex-service veteran organization since WWI, the RSL was understood as the barrier to remembrance being able to tap into a burgeoning new nationalism. A highly conservative organization, as reflected in its support for Australia's ties to the British monarchy and staunch positions against trade unions and socialism (Crotty, 2007), the RSL was in the early twentieth century anointed by the state as the custodian of Anzac Day. This decision was made largely due to a fear of potential radicalization within the war veteran community (Crotty, 2007: 189). However, by the 1980s the RSL's role in upholding a conservative nationalist conception of Gallipoli and Anzac, and the view of itself as the preeminent ‘servant of political and economic matters’ (Crotty, 2007: 186) in the country, had become politically problematic for nation building. Specifically, by extensively associating the Anzac spirit with veterans of the World Wars the RSL promoted ethnonational notions of national identity in ways that were opposed to the emphasis of new nationalism in Australia where the Anzac Spirit was being cast as a universal characteristic of citizenship in an increasingly multicultural Australia. As such the RSL was seen as limiting the ability of the Australian state to utilize the recent rise of popular nationalism for its political purposes.

In the context of significant social and political shifts occurring in Türkiye, as outlined below, travel to the Gallipoli battlefields as a genre of remembrance was attractive for the state as it was both: (i) a way to limit the established influence of the RSL in commemorative organizational matters; and (ii) consistent with the current popular culture engagement with the social memory of Australia's war past. To appreciate the way in which travel as a commemorative genre for the 75th anniversary worked to marginalize the RSL's control of Anzac Day it needs to be appreciated that the RSL had a long held a position of opposing pilgrimages to Gallipoli. This manifested itself through the RSL not sanctioning proposed pilgrimages, raising concerns over the rare few that would be undertaken, typically on the basis of those participating were inappropriate custodians of the Anzac legend (Scates, 2006: 86) and generally suggesting that travel and pilgrimage itself lacked authenticity and was an inappropriate remembrance form, characterizing it as a tourist-like activity that trivialized war (Scates, 2006: 84).

In the decade prior to the 75th anniversary a crisis of ritual semiosis around national remembrance had also emerged in Türkiye with the memory of Atatürk's charismatic state-led modernity of the 1930s having wanned in cultural significance. Years of significant political violence stemming from Cold War tensions between extremist groups on the political left and right, the rise in political influence of Islamic groups and international pressure on Türkiye to adopt more market-based reforms all challenged public perceptions around the ability of remembrance rites to maintain the foundational principals of the Republic. Not surprisingly, for the military led government that came to power in 1980 following a coup, justified by the need to re-establish the secular foundation of the nation, such social problems were thought best addressed by promoting nationalism. However, what was unexpected is that the Gallipoli campaign would be the prominent site for this endeavour, it being an Ottoman era event, the remembrance of which had been heavily suppressed as part of Atatürk's modernization efforts. This included the battlefield being designated a military zone that largely forbids visitation by anyone but select Allied delegations that were given access to the site as part of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (Part V, section 128).

Atatürk's regime and subsequent republican governments in Türkiye had also outlawed most remembrance genres that involved travel due to their direct association with Islam and their affordance of primordialism over modernism. The association between travel and Islam derived not only from the Hajj being a pillar of Islam, but travel being seen by Muslims as a way of achieving divine understanding of the world, something that contributed to the popularity of the travel literature genre of the riḥla (Almarhaby, 2019). With pilgrimage guides being one of the groups most resistant to the modernization efforts of the Republican state (Gökalp, 1915: 48), the political objective of the secular Republic had seen travel as a form of remembrance firmly cast as taboo. For example, Atatürk's 1925 law reforms included restrictions on Sufi hostels while enforcing that ‘. . . the graves of sultans and the shrines of dervishes are closed and the occupation of shrine custodian is voided’ (Lewis, 2000: 465).

Nationalizing and internationalizing Gallipoli

What then had prompted the Turkish republican governments in the 1980s to focus their nationalism efforts on Gallipoli? Atatürk, the founding father [sic] of modern Türkiye, had served as a Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the 19th Division in the campaign. While in the decade following the War of Independence Atatürk's role at Gallipoli was little mentioned in Türkiye (Aktar, 2016), heroic narratives of his leadership during the campaign were constructed by the Allies. In the subsequent decades these would come to be part of the collective memory around Atatürk in Türkiye (Aktar, 2016) and significantly rise in political significance in the 1980s, a time when the reputation of Atatürk started to be projected and understood in less authoritarian ways. As Özyürek (2006) outlines, this includes his image being represented on banal objects such as clocks that could be consumed in the home, a contrast to previous eras when his reputation was largely restricted to the political, military, and public domains.

The attraction of Gallipoli for Türkiye's lieu de mémoire (Nora, 1996) in this decade was also connected to the battlefield being on a peninsula awarded national park status in the 1970s. This not only provided certain tourism infrastructure to the region but symbolically keyed Türkiye into a heritage movement that connected new comprehensions of the natural environment with nationalism (Smith, 2004). While the national park movement itself placed greater heritage emphasis on nearby Ancient Troy than Gallipoli, for Republican politicians the connection between the two became part of a new nation building project for which tourism was central. While domestic tourism was not yet well established in the country, with motor vehicle ownership and disposable income only substantially increasing in the 2000s, the re-memorialization of the battlefield was politically significant to signify Türkiye as a tolerant modern society, the main objection to its application of membership to the European Union (Öztürkmen, 2005: 606).

The approval by Türkiye of Australia's request to undertake its main memorial services on the Gallipoli battlefields for the 75th anniversary and construct various new memorials for this event can be understood through this diplomatic and domestic political lens. The Anzac memorials though were distinctive in having a strong dialogical characteristic that acknowledged Australia's war history in the context of its former foes, frequently referencing Atatürk's heroics in the campaign as well as portraying Turks as an honourable and compassionate foe. The best known of these memorials is the Kabatepe Ari Burnu memorial, a large sandstone epigraph monument with an English-only abbreviated version of Atatürk's speech that was apparently given to a group of Allied pilgrims in 1934. Positioned in close proximity to the Ari Burnu Cemetery which was a symbolic site of the Anzac landings and used as the site of Anzac Day Dawn Services on the battlefields, the memorial states that ‘Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country’ and that there is ‘no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours’. This dialogical narrative not only sanctioned Australia's 75th anniversary commemorations but, as we will see below, it also worked to frame discourses of the battle during this event and subsequently provided a new historical lens for both Australia and Türkiye.

In the lead up to the 75th anniversary, Türkiye also began to construct its own new battlefield memorials, expanding its sparse memorial presence on the battlefield. Many of these new Turkish memorials continued the Republican tradition of deifying Atatürk. Such works though are significant for the social transformation to national identity that would later come as they worked to nationalize late-Ottoman history, encouraging what would become an understanding of the campaign as an event that took the nation on a path towards national consciousness and independence (Aktar, 2016). The Turkish memorials on the battlefield constructed for the 75th anniversary also broke with Republican remembrance genres through the establishment of a war remembrance tradition orientated to the civil sphere (Winter, 1995), something that the nation had not previously held because of conflation in the remembering and memorialization of the Republic and War of Independence, and the associated central focus on Atatürk.

As detailed below, most memorials that contributed to this movement would be initiated after 1990, once the symbolic potentialities of Gallipoli had become evident in the performance of the 75th anniversary. However, indications of Türkiye's nascent war remembrance genre were evident in the array of memorials established in 1980s designed by architect, Ahmet Gülgönen, the winner of a national design competition. The most prominent of these memorials, all of which use the traditional form of an epigraph, was the Mehmetçik Kitabesi Conkbayiri monument. While the jurors of the design competition appreciated Gülgönen’s epigraph designs due to their minimalist impact on the landscape (Yilmaz, 2008: 151), the Mehmetçik Kitabesi Conkbayiri is the grandest with the arrangement of five epigraph monuments to signify a hand. While Gülgönen’s design competition submission only spoke of the symbolism of the hand in secular ways and the inscriptions themselves are concerned with Atatürk's heroics with some reference to the 57th Regiment, many tourist guides interpret the hand as an act of prayer turned upwards to Allah.

Both Anzac and Turkish memorials built around the 75th anniversary are significant in facilitating the rise of Australian visitors to the battlefield throughout the 1990s and the meanings that would come to be associated with this rite. However, it was the 75th anniversary pilgrimage on Anzac Day that would initially spark the Australian public's awareness and interest in travel to Gallipoli. Five days before Anzac Day, a letter to the editor in a major Australian broadsheet newspaper noted that ‘The old men's 75th anniversary trip to Gallipoli is getting Anzac Day more airtime and a better image than it has in years’ (Campbell, 1990: 12). The Anzac Day Dawn Service at Gallipoli was seen live on Australian television at lunchtime via satellite. The promotion of the event was particularly strong in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation media outlets, perhaps due to his father's critique of British command in the latter part of the campaign having become part of Australia's popular history. However, Australian companies broadly had attached themselves to the anniversary in a way that previously would have been problematic and controversial with the RSL likely criticizing such acts as denigrating the reputation of Anzac. The veterans, for example, flew to Türkiye with the Australian airline Qantas in a Boeing 747-300, renamed the ‘Spirit of Anzac’ for the trip and given flight number QF1915.

The event though would more broadly influence how Anzac could be understood. In the discourse that surrounded the 75th anniversary pilgrimage, there was an overt recognition that it was an occasion for revising how Australia's military past is legitimately understood. For example, in his speech on Anzac Day at the Lone Pine cemetery the then Prime Minister Hawke (1990a) stated that ‘the ANZAC tradition, forged in the fires of Gallipoli, must be learned anew, from generation to generation’ and that ‘Its meaning can endure only as long as each new generation of Australians finds the will to reinterpret it—to breathe, as it were, new life into the old story: and, in separating the truth from the legend, realise its relevance to a nation and a people, experiencing immense change over the past three-quarters of a century.’ The role of travel is central to this direct reshaping of historical meanings. The established Australian commemorative tradition for Anzac Day in the decades prior to 1990 had been characterized by commentary about the levels of political and cultural commitment to veterans, questioning the future of the rite with the reduction of the World War veteran population and the extent of national patriotism in the current population. In contrast, the use of travel for the 75th anniversary shifted attention to how individuals experience commemoration and the emotions of participants in the ritual. This can be seen in the series of questions Australian journalists asked the Prime Minister Hawke (1990b) following the Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli, such as how he feels, what was he expecting, what part of the ceremony did most affected him, did he cry, what difference was there between being at Gallipoli and what he had previously read about the campaign, what did it mean being at particular sites on the battlefield.

While the 75th anniversary was designed to be a carefully staged political performance, central to which was the return of the ‘original Anzacs,’ veterans from WWI including those who served at Gallipoli, as well as government representatives and other dignitaries from Australia, travel dynamics saw disruption caused by the unexpected presence of hundreds of young backpackers who, as part of their global tours, had reportedly travelled for days across Europe to be on the battlefield for Anzac Day. These travellers though had already been travelling to Türkiye in greater numbers because of the burgeoning options for budget travel in the country resulting from Türkiye's promotion of the international tourism sector and were not put off by the lack of mass tourism infrastructure in nearby towns and villages to the battlefield. Despite the relatively small number of backpackers, in Australian newspapers this was seen as confirming a healthy state of patriotism and the continuing cultural relevance of Gallipoli. For the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, these ‘young people … weren’t there just as tourists. You could tell that in listening to them and talking to them. It was with a sense of pilgrimage that they were there’ (Hawke, 1990b). To the surprise of Turkish representatives and to their hosts in nearby towns, these young Australians were also engaged in various types of boisterousness, a key element of the Anzac Day tradition in Australia, where, following the end of official ceremonies, veterans and the public engage in gambling and drinking rites. As explored below, such civil sphere engagements with national history would be important in shaping future Turkish remembrance traditions though they would also contribute to Australia's current commemorative exile from the battlefield.

Dialogical discourses and the rise of neo-Ottomanism

The 75th anniversary was the beginnings of a significant growth in the next two decades of travel to Gallipoli by young adult Australians. As has been argued elsewhere (West, 2015), rather than this travel reflecting a rise in patriotism resulting from other political and material forces, it was the travel rite itself that initiated this movement and subsequent re-enchantment of Anzac in Australia. This occurred not only through the 75th anniversary spectacle creating greater public interest in Australia's war heritage but establishing a travel rite that was seemingly orientated to young Australians without military attachments, with this audience then affording further dialogical memories of the past, central to which was a cosmopolitan notion that Australians and Turks were never true enemies. A range of new social memories emerged from battlefield tourism led by Turkish tour guides in which the Anzacs and Türkiye were part of a symbolic pairing, contrasted with a profane coupling of Britain and Germany, who were seen as forcing Australians and Turks to be involved in a war for which they had no malign intent. This framing was not only significant for those who undertook travel to the battlefield but its reporting in the public sphere allowed for Australian veterans to be recast in post-heroic ways (Schwartz, 2008), as victims of war rather than as perpetrators of violence. This occurred using contemporary trauma and therapeutic discourses that established new public sympathy for veterans. As Twomey (2013) argues, this discourse worked to marginalize feminist and peace protests. Ted Matthews, the last survivor of the Australians to land on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, is indicative of this historical revision. Passing away in 1997, he was frequently profiled in the few years before his death in ways that portrayed him as having no animosity towards the Turks, not only following but during the war, with him stressing that he never fired a shot during the campaign. This sentiment was typically evidenced through the media attaching photos of him with Turkish veterans as part of his involvement in the 75th anniversary pilgrimage to Gallipoli.

Such historical interpretations were not only normalized for visiting Australians to the battlefields, but for the increasing numbers of Turkish visitors on the battlefields, something that stemmed from both the rise of domestic interest in the campaign but also because of increased economic prosperity and associated domestic Turkish tourism in the decade after the 75th anniversary. This era saw a series of Turkish battlefield memorials erected. As there were still relatively few formal histories of the battle from a Turkish perspective, these sites took on a role of not only trying to embed current meanings but establish them. Below I examine two of the most prominent memorials. The first memorial to be examined is that to the 57th Infantry Regiment, the focus of which was a cemetery to individual members (see Figure 1). While the role of this military unit which was under Atatürk's command had been referenced in Turkish social memory previously, no prior memorial had provided specific attention to individual soldiers within the unit. This shift can in part be explained through the 57th Regiment memorial mimicking the egalitarian memorial design of the nearby original Anzac memorials, including the prominent Lone Pine cemetery. With pilgrimage and remembrance in mind, the first Anzac memorials constructed in the 1920s used religious iconography and uniformly accompanied cemeteries. These cemeteries were bounded by walls, for symbolic purposes as well as to protect the graves from the weather. The 57th Regiment memorial would follow such design principals and even follow the Anzac genre in using stone-faced pedestal grave markers instead of headstones. Such dialogical dimensions of this memorial are significant in understanding the willingness of a Republican government to utilize religious iconography, as it was legitimized by mimicking memorial genres of secular Western nations. Unlike the Anzac memorials, however, the graves in the 57th cemetery do not correspond to the specific locations of individual corps with Turkish dead largely remaining in mass graves. However, it was the individual identification of soldiers which is more significant for social memory in Türkiye as it had an effect of sanctioning prayer on the battlefield.

Figure 1.

57th Infantry Regiment Memorial and Symbolic Cemetery.

The election of the social conservative Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government in 2002 gave such memorials a new social and political significance. The AKP since 2005 has also been active in further memorializing the battlefield as part of its ‘Geography of Martyrs’ project that has constructed eleven cemeteries on the battlefield with numerous others proposed. The 57th Regiment memorial though became the sacred destination for its political movement of neo-Ottomanism and a symbol for new AKP promoted commemorative rituals on the battlefield. Below I explore two of these rites, the 57th Regiment re-enactment march that sees Turkish youth marching along the 8-kilometre route that the Regiment took to defend the highlands from invading Anzac troops and state sponsored martyr tourism from across Turkish municipalities, including lesser economically developed regional areas constituted by citizens who otherwise could not afford to engage in travel.

The 57th Regiment re-enactment was initiated as a response to the large number of young Australians and New Zealanders who visited the battlefield for Anzac Day on the 90th anniversary in 2005. Established by local university students as a secular rite, it was designed to be a type of counter-performance to Australians and New Zealanders walking from the Dawn Service at the landing site to the heights where the major Anzac cemeteries such as Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair are located and services held. While marching has long been a standard mode of republican commemoration in Türkiye, the notion of re-enactment in which you could engage in remembrance relatively independent of the state and in an enjoyable way was unique, something that contributed to the event growing rapidly in popularity (Atabay et al., 2016: 232). Such was its success that by 2011 the re-enactment would come under the organizational control of the AKP. This saw the event transformed with new traditions introduced such as praying for the martyrs, group prayer twice daily, recitation of Qasidas (hymns) honouring the Prophet Muhammad, recitation of the Qurʾān by a distinguished cleric, a lecture from a well-known Islamist public orator and recitation of Mehmet Akif's poem ‘To the Çanakkale Martyrs’ that frames the battle in terms of a Holy War (Ayhan Aktar, personal communication). However, even with this religious context being imposed, travel and leisure remain central with living history displays peppering the route, and youth from around the country being fully financially covered to engage in this rite, with most being attracted as much by a tourist-like experience in this region as a patriotic one.

The popularity and significance of the 57th Regiment re-enactment correlated with a limiting of commemorative access for Australians to the battlefield through restricting the numbers of who could attend the Anzac Day Centennial through a ticketing of the event. The 90th anniversary was a turning point in this regard. With some 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders in attendance (Inglis, 2005) for the 90th Anzac Day at Gallipoli, it caused the planned centennial commemorations to become a site of increasing controversy and diplomatic incidents. This included Australian media panics around reported poor behaviour of Australians at the dawn ceremony, the use of popular culture in the event and Turkish reconstruction of the battlefields. Much of these controversies were fuelled by the RSL. The rising popularity of Gallipoli within Australian social memory had also seen academics, commentators and politicians draw attention to the historical connections between Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide (Manne, 2007). This included the New South Wales parliament passing a motion in May 2013 recognizing the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

Such incidents and controversies not only threatened the newly found political significance of the 57th Regiment re-enactment in Türkiye but the sacredness of the battlefield more broadly in the burgeoning Turkish war remembrance genre. This is particularly the case as the AKP had also established a travel rite that sponsored the full costs of citizens from around the country to visit the battlefields through municipality run bus tours. Commonly referred to in Türkiye as martyr tourism, at the time of the Centennial anniversary these tours saw an estimated one million Turks visit the battlefield per year (Yanikdag, 2015: 107). However, this commemoration cannot be understood separate from that previously established by Australia or at least Turkish perception of Australia's visitor practices. It is not only that Anzac travel rites preceded Turkish traditions but that without an established war commemorative genre, Türkiye needed to dialogically draw from other examples while also indigenizing them. For example, it was the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies head, Başaran Ulusoy who had originally proposed to the AKP that they should move away from sponsoring school visits to the battlefield in favour of municipality tours that target the general population (Yildiz, 2016: 46). In Ulusoy's own words, in 2002 he approached the government with the idea of broad-based battlefield tourism at Gallipoli after viewing Anzac ceremonies:

‘[L]ast year (2002) I attended the Dawn Service Ceremony with the grandchildren of Anzacs. During the observance my eyes met the hills where our martyrs lie. I did not see a single soul praying for our Mehmetcik which deeply saddened me. I could not hold my tears, in that moment I promised myself, next year I will bring Türkiye here! … [F]rom now on we will not envy the grandchildren of Anzacs who travel thousands of kilometres every year to respect their fallen heroes.’ (‘250 Bin Sehit Sizi Bekliyor’ 2003 cited in Yildiz, 2016: 46)

The desire to symbolically protect the 57th Regiment re-enactment and martyr tourism from Anzac commemorations though was not only due to their increasing association with prayer and Islam but also in how these commemorative genres worked to elevate ordinary martyrs in ways that displaced the traditional commemorative concern with the heroics of Atatürk that had developed in conjunction with Allied commemoration. This included drawing attention to ancestry as it related to war heritage in a way that had not previously occurred in Türkiye with its commemorative tradition being on the ‘myth of youth’ (Lüküslü 2016), a Republican tradition in which young people are seen as carriers of the ideals of the Republic, a symbol typically contrasted with the late-Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe.’

The commemorative emphasis on ancestry can be seen in many of these 57th Regiment re-enactors wearing special vests designed for the day bearing the slogan: ‘Grandpa, here I come!’. This sentiment is also found in the burgeoning genealogy industry in Türkiye. İsmail Yetimoğlu, the chairman of Türkiye's Private Detectives’ Association and the founder of Maviay Investigations, describes its rise by noting that ‘[p]eople from nearly every part of society are interested in finding out about their family trees’ (Kayayerli, 2016). The focus on family allows for an emotional relationship to war suffering in a way not possible within the romantic Republican heroic narrative that celebrates Turkish victory. While the death of Turkish soldiers is a key dimension of the Republican history of Gallipoli, this occurs as part of a larger narrative in which they sacrificed themselves for the nation to emerge. In contrast, the concern with individual micro narratives among ordinary soldiers allow for the history of Gallipoli to be framed in relation to a tragic narrative and an unresolved national project.

From the perspective of the AKP and its supporters, martyrdom is typically understood in terms of romanticizing pre-war village life. Significant in this social memory narrative is the prominence of women. The centrality of women to the new Turkish collective memory of Gallipoli promoted through martyr tourism is most evident in presentations by guides who commonly refer to mothers and wives as the ‘unknown heroes’ of the Battle. For example, one guide emphasizes his appreciation for the sacrifice of their sons being martyred by stating that ‘I shall kiss the soles of their feet. I shall hold them dearer than anything … rest assured your path is to God’ and ‘Raising their sons with a special spirituality … these mothers did not expect their sons to return from the battlefield because they were sacrificial offerings devoted to God and to our fatherland. A mother who sent her son to the Gallipoli front dreams of her son being martyred’ (Ergun, 2018). Such sentiment corresponds with the audience of the municipality run martyr tours, with most participants being women, in part reflecting a reduction in the female labour force participation rate from 72% in 1955 to 32.5% in 2016 (Karaalp-Orhan, 2017).

Whereas the 57th Regiment memorial has in recent years been utilized in ways to oppose the secular cosmopolitan narratives originally advanced by the Republican parties and Australia, the next memorial to be examined highlights how this humanitarianism sentiment has also afforded new Islamic conceptions of nationalism. The Respect to Mehmetçik Monument was unveiled in 1997, depicting a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded Allied captain from No Man's Land to the safety of An Allied trench. As originally quoted on the memorial's plaque, the story was referenced to the diary of First Lieutenant Casey, who later would become Australian Governor General. Echoing the dialogical cosmopolitan sentiment which was evident in the above quote from Atatürk's 1937 address to Allied pilgrims, Casey was thought to refer to the ‘courageous and beautiful act of the Turkish soldier has our love and deepest respect to this brave and heroic soldier.’ Reference to Casey though was later deleted as no such account has been found in Casey's diary. However, this has not stopped the memorial working as a symbol to Australian tourists, reinforced by creative historical narration of Turkish tour guides, that the battle is littered with compassionate and friendly exchanges between Turks and the Allies. However, for the AKP this memorial would also become symbolically significant, as evident in it being chosen as the main images for the Centennial of the war, adorning AKP government political promotions and memorabilia associated with the anniversary, including an official Turkish government postage stamp (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Respect to Mehmetçik Monument Stamp for Centennial.

The Respect to Mehmetçik Monument was originally used to advance the cosmopolitan image of secular republicanism and soften perceptions of its militaristic character. However, this notion of cosmopolitanism and internationalism would also allow this symbol to become associated with the AKP political project of neo-Ottomanism. Neo-Ottomanism is used here to refer to cultural engagement and positive identification with a reimaged Ottoman era (Ergin and Karakaya, 2017) with Türkiye seeing itself as the principal inheritor of the Ottoman Empire's cultural and political legacy. For the leader of the AKP, Recep Erdoğan, the Respect to Mehmetçik Monument image connects with the Islamic conception of brotherhood as a community of believers and Gallipoli being a model for not only Turkish national identity in resisting Christian invaders but the role of Islam expressing ‘brotherhood to the whole world.’ For example, in awarding student prizes at a Centennial essay contest named ‘The Spirit of Çanakkale and Youth,’ President Erdoğan spoke of the exemplary characteristics of Gallipoli, emphasizing that it ‘differs from other wars in its featuring of humanitarian values beyond the military and political logic of war’ (Anadolu Agency, 2015).

This symbolic connection between the Republican humanitarian social memory of the Gallipoli campaign and Islamic cultural understandings of the Ottoman era as cosmopolitan and transnational was not an isolated occurrence. Rather, it formed the central historical projection and AKP-promoted narrative of the Centennial, combining key aspects of secular nationalist mythology and Islamic worldviews. Neo-Ottomanism in this respect is certainly a reflection and way to promote the decline in political authority of secular nationalism in Türkiye through encouraging an Ottomanizing of national identity. However, the use of the Respect to Mehmetçik Monument and other dialogical based collective memory related to Australia's 75th anniversary commemorations is equally an acknowledgement that Islamic visions do not have the power to completely shift secular traditions to the periphery of Türkiye's central value system. The AKP heavily promoted but ultimately failed commemorations for various Ottoman-era anniversaries, such as the conquering of Istanbul by the Ottomans in 1453 and the birth week of Prophet Muhammed, did not capture the public's imagination in the way Gallipoli has with its dual connections to both Atatürk and Ottoman cultural heritage.

The centrality of Gallipoli remembrance for neo-Ottomanism is also evident in the prominence of the Battle following the 15 July attempted military coup in 2016 in which President Erdoğan successfully called upon the public to resist the military's attempt to take power (Altınordu, 2017). For example, Erdoğan hosted a large rally in Istanbul's Taksim Square in the immediate aftermath of the military standing down, showing scenes on large audio-visual screens from a political advertisement made for the Gallipoli Centennial emphasizing the suffering of ordinary soldiers and the grief of women, and an image of Erdoğan praying at a recently built cemetery on the battlefield (Callaghan, 2016). In the lead up to the 2017 Victory Day on 18 March, Erdoğan would further articulate his preferred link between Gallipoli and 15 July, one that by this stage had been reinforced through a film produced for students about 15 July by the Ministry of Education in 2016, stating that ‘the atmosphere during the 15 July coup attempt showed us all how fresh and alive is the fighting spirit which entombed the world powers in Çanakkale (Gallipoli) … Just like … in Çanakkale (Gallipoli), on the night of 15 July, the most modern weapons were helpless against the faith and determination of our nation’ (Gundogan, 2017). Such symbolic connections to Gallipoli are significant as they take 15 July outside of the sphere of domestic politics and provide it with an international relevance that it would not otherwise demand.

In Nora's (1996) sense, war memorials at Gallipoli such as those explored above, provide a lieu de mémoire, a physical space that affords and affects certain social memories. However, their meaning only comes through accompanying commemoration practices. In this context the commemorative isolation from the battlefields that Australians have experienced since the 90th anniversary, has consequences for Australian social memory and nationalism. Whereas the social memory of Australia's military heritage of Anzac promoted by the Gallipoli pilgrimage had become a basis of renewed national identity, its decline has seen a return of the type of ethnonationalism that had originally caused the semiosis crisis of national remembrance. For example, restrictions placed on the numbers for the Centennial Anzac Day on the battlefields saw the initiation of a ballot that privileged those who were decedents of veterans who fought at Gallipoli, as well as from veterans from other wars, war widows, and current members of the military. Not surprisingly, media reporting of these ceremonies was then dominated by profiles of these participants and their ancestors for whom they were there to honour. The symbolic logics of decent (Zerubavel, 2012) as they relate to perceived authenticity also meant that this media also had a particular focus on older Australians in contrast to the pilgrimage-related emphasis on ordinary Australian youth on the battlefield being the new carriers and custodians of the Anzac legend.

Without the focus of travel and pilgrimage as it relates to youth and experiences of cultural difference, war commemoration has returned as a genre problem (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991: 391) in Australia. Centennial organizers sought to address this in several ways. The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (from 2013 to 2015) most prominently would attempt to re-create the dynamics of the Gallipoli travel tradition by providing AU$100 million to establish a museum and educational centre on the site of the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in northern France where Australian forces played a key role in halting the 1918 German offensive on the Somme, something that helped turn the course of the war. However, despite its website's claim to offer the visitor ‘a moving experience,’ including using interactive media and immersive experiences, the staged authenticity of the place and lack of accompanying trans-generational travel ritual does not afford the sense of communitas that has underpinned the rise of the Gallipoli pilgrimage and its role in heightening cultural engagement with Anzac. Certainly, the failings of this site and other recent efforts at Anzac remembrance has allowed for commemoration itself to be heavily critiqued in the public sphere, with its symbolic function frequently seen as a contributing factor for Australia's failure to address the needs of contemporary veterans from the post-2001 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Australian Centennial organizers also sought to address the return of a commemorative genre problem through a decentralization strategy, hoping to encourage new civil engagements and entrepreneurial remembrance forms through providing open grants for locally organized activities. Despite such a hope, that included a belief that this funding would see active engagement with the Centennial by ethnic organizations, it resulted in a substantive return to conventional remembrance practices and stakeholders. For example, the main community commemorative remembrances were funded through Saluting their Service grants. Out of the 725 projects listed on the Department of Veterans’ Affairs website, 499 were undertaken by established groups in the veteran ex-service community, or those which had direct associations with the military, with a huge 333 of these being given to sub-branches of the RSL. Other recipients of the scheme were also traditionally orientated, including local historical societies, local councils, schools, and retirement villages. Most of these projects were orientated to restoring war memorials or reproducing traditional remembrance forms. This was not only the case for ex-service groups such as the RSL but various organizations were also provided funding for the construction of largely traditional memorial forms such as remembrance gardens, examples of which there are already no shortage in the community. In other instances, funding was given simply to erect a flagpole to fly the Australian flag without any immediate symbolic connection to war. While such remembrance genres were innovative and meaningful following WWI, the further proliferation of these forms contributed little to ritual participation and narrative re-imagining of Australia's war history in a way that makes it relevant for new audiences and activation of the civil sphere.

Conclusions

Theorizing events as a type of liminal turning point that directs socio-political change is relatively common in cultural sociology; however, in contemporary scholarship this has mainly concerned emergency episodes such as terrorism incidents, pandemics and climate disasters (Jacobs and Townsley, 2014; McCormick, 2020; Smith and Howe, 2015). In contrast, the crisis examined in this article refers to a systemic loss of public confidence in semiosis associated with the production of ritual meaning that underpins national solidarity and societal integration (Smith, 1996). In Habermas’ terms such crises occur when the legitimation system, which in this case concerns national remembrance traditions, ‘does not succeed in maintaining the requisite level of mass loyalty’ (Habermas, 1975: 46). While such crises develop incrementally, there are junctures that spark fear of the crisis having permanent structural effects and prompt political attempts to redress contributing factors. It is argued in this article that special anniversaries can provide such a juncture, an occurrence that causes the state to attempt ‘repair’ (Alexander, 2006) connections between national mythology and performative symbolic action in remembering the past. However, in a globally interconnected world the actions of one nation have dialogical effects on others. In the case of Australia's decision around the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli Battle in 1990 the article has outlined its significant implications for how Türkiye would come to remember its national and imperial history, and in turn how shifts in Türkiye's remembrance practices have had significant effects on national identity in Australia.

Through the study of Gallipoli remembrance practices the article has highlighted the importance of the antipodean sociological perspective. As conceived by Beilharz (2015), the antipodean perspective avoids both a simple comprehension of the Australian nation in terms of Global North social theory and a parochial perspective in which global forces are either studied one directionally stemming from the metropole, seen only in ways that are detrimental to social relations, or are unaccounted for in the social analysis. Australia's influence on how Türkiye remembers its past demonstrates how the liminality of the antipodean not only shapes Australian identity but dialogically it can have a transnational influence. Australia's influence in the case of Gallipoli is not one that emerges from a position of national hegemony but rather creative experimentation around an event born out of a series of political performative failures whereby war commemoration practices did not connect with emergent nationalist sentiment. However, the selection by the Australian state of travel as a commemorative genre would be significant for Türkiye which was also concerned at the prospect that nationalism would continue to wane without its ability to embrace new symbolic engagements with history. For both nations, the 75th anniversary provided them with a cultural template for the further use of travel rites and pilgrimage rhetoric in ways that sought to re-enchant national remembrance. However, the success of this commemorative practice produced significant unanticipated longer-term consequences. In the case of Türkiye, it afforded the rise of a new post-secular neo-Ottoman nationalism. For Australia, the re-engagement with Anzac mythology that stemmed from travel to Gallipoli would be lost with the ritual practice and associated meanings subsequently fuelling diplomatic controversies and a reduction in commemorative access to the battlefield, prompting the return of a crisis of ritual semiosis as it relates to the remembrance of Australia's most sacred historical event.