8 - ‘Intimate’ Notes from Hell: Gallipoli Diaries by Tevfik Rıza Bey (1914-1916)

Summary

Abstract

In modern Turkey, the Battle of Gallipoli bears a dual meaning: it is an honourable victory of an impoverished, decaying empire against the strongest nations of the world and also an ‘(inter)national trauma’ caused by the loss of hundreds of thousands of young men. Tevfik Rıza Bey, who was drafted as a reserve officer during this battle, kept a diary/journal intime in French which could be read as both a testimony to this ‘(inter) national trauma’ by a humanist intellectual and also as heartwarming love letters to a beloved by an agonized soul under hellish circumstances. This diary is a ‘little (personal) history’ (diarist's private domain of ‘intimacy’) that fights against ‘the History’ which manifests as a destructive war constantly threatening to invade and swallow it.

Key-words: Gallipoli Battle, journal intime, French, (inter)national trauma, Turkish modernization

Throughout his assignment as a reserve officer at a wireless telegraph station in the Dardanelles during the Gallipoli Battle, Tevfik Rıza Bey, a Francophone Ottoman intellectual, kept a diary in French. The French equivalent of diary is journal intime which roughly translates as ‘daily notes of one's intimate feelings and thoughts’. In fact, journal intime is a highly appropriate term to apply to the diary notes of Tevfik Rıza Bey, since the author's main reason for writing in French - which was not only a foreign language, but also a language with a different alphabet to the Arabic letters that were then used to write in Turkish - was to keep the ‘intimacy’ or privacy of the author's ‘feelings and thoughts’ from others’ eyes, especially those of the censor. This diary of Gallipoli, consisting of four notebooks, was discovered in the trunk of his wife Belkıs Hanım following her death in 1969, along with 479 letters, of which 271 are written by Tevfik Rıza Bey and 208 by Belkıs Hanım. E. Yasemin Yuceturk and Oya Kommas, granddaughters of Tevfik Rıza Bey, were for a long time reluctant to give up these personal documents, due to their concerns about the need for respect of the privacy of their grandfather. Finally, the diary (or the journal intime) of Tevfik Rıza Bey could be published in 2012 in a rather limited edition entitled: Çanakkale Günlükleri (Gallipoli Diaries) thanks to the collaboration of V. Turkan Doğruoz and Raşit Gundoğdu (Kırklareli University) with Rıza Bey's granddaughters.