It was almost noon on 25 June 1922, when a ship namedÜmit(Hope) slowly pulled up to the Zeytinburnu port in Istanbul. It was carrying hundreds of Ottoman-Turkish passengers – released prisoners of war – whose long and strange trip had started in a carrier with a Japanese flag from Vladivostok, Russia’s major port on the Sea of Japan. The passengers were Ottoman prisoners of war being repatriated after spending years in captivity in Siberia. Everyone was on deck. Those who hailed from the city or had deployed from there were seeing the capital of the Ottoman Empire, or...

This chapter does two things. The first quarter provides historical background, explaining why the Ottomans entered the Great War, how the war unfolded and how many prisoners were taken by other powers. The remainder of the chapter uses a comparative approach to examine the capture and captivity experiences of Ottoman prisoners in Russia and Egypt. The latter section explores the similarities and differences in the captivity experiences and analyses how they contribute to the project of nationalism. Conclusions reached in that section form the basis of the argument constructed in Chapter 2.

In late October of 1914, the Ottoman Empire...

Chapter 1 demonstrated that the circumstances of capture, conditions of captivity and experiences of Ottoman prisoners in Russia were significantly worse than in the British camps in Egypt. This chapter investigates how those differing circumstances influenced construction and understanding of identity, identification, tradition, culture and nation. In so doing, it argues that the inferior conditions of life in the Russian camps contributed to a contentious sense of community among Ottoman prisoners. However, the presence of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners, in close quarters with the Ottoman prisoners, was another significant reason for the hardening of boundaries around the concepts of nation,...

This chapter examines the hand-written prison camp newspapers in which the prisoners of war discussed, at length, the weaknesses in their nation, state, society and culture while they awaited the end of the war, and then their long-delayed repatriation. Their literary efforts were nothing less than an earnest self-examination of their society with its shortcomings and mistakes. In the prisoners’ formulations, these weaknesses had brought the nation to the brink of imminent destruction at the end of the Great War. As they diagnosed the causes of neglect, slumber and decline, they also offered hopeful suggestions for fixing those problems. The...

From neuro-psychiatrists to generalists to epidemiologists, nearly all doctors viewed soldiers returning home – whether from far away provinces or nearby battlefronts – as disease carriers. In 1915, Dr Mazhar Osman, the leading neuro-psychiatrist of the time, wrote that military service and wars in distant regions of the empire had always been an avenue for new diseases into Anatolia.¹ As a result, he stated, Anatolia had become home for a number of diseases. Because of their numbers and the lengthy time they spent in contact with foreign populations in distant and strange places, prisoners of war were usually singled out...

While primarily concerned with prisoners of war, this study must also examine the medical discourse concerning Ottoman soldiers who suffered nervous breakdowns at the front, or those who military-medical authorities accused of malingering. During the war, when medical professionals examined and diagnosed Ottoman soldiers who claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown, or war neurosis, they frequently used prisoners of war as a point of comparison. Neuro-psychiatrists initially insisted that since they did not see war neurosis and related disorders among prisoners of war, that non-prisoners’ claims to be suffering from war-related disorders were false. Therefore, the doctors perceived them...

We saw in the previous chapter that when in August 1915 Dr Mazhar Osman posed the question ‘Are Turks degenerate?’, he answered the question ambiguously but with hope for the future.¹ His answer was that Turks, like the peoples of many old nations, were ‘more or less’ degenerate, but that they could recover from this condition. However, this was based on the ultimately incorrect perception that war neurosis and other mental disorders did not exist among Ottoman troops and prisoners. As the previous chapter showed, by 1919 and 1920 they were ready to admit that these disorders did exist in...

In 1951, some thirty-three years after the end of the Great War and twenty-three years after first referring to the ‘living dead’ prisoners of war, Dr Mazhar Osman passed away at the age of sixty-seven. Despite the fact that in this book we have encountered his harsh views on prisoners of war, war neurotics, malingerers, women and other groups, he had done a great deal during his lifetime to advance the science of psychiatry and public hygiene in Turkey. Among other accomplishments, he created the first modern psychiatric hospital, founded the Green Crescent (Temperance Society) to curtail alcohol use, and...