Architectural Memorialisation of War: Ars Memoriae and Landscape of Gallipoli Battles

Abstract

This dissertation examines the change in the understanding of memorial architecture through an analysis of different attitudes to commemorate Dardanelles Campaign in the boundaries of Gallipoli Peninsula National and Historical (Peace) Park. Memorialisation process at the Peninsula, which has continued from the end of the war onwards (1916), has undergone a transformation from traditional to counter approaches pivoted on the Gallipoli Peace Park International Ideas and Design Competition. Parallel to the changes in memorial architecture in the world, the approach of erecting a conventional dominant monument to exalt suffering and to glorify death has superseded by the approach of highlighting the war remains and the memory of battlefields to protest the warfare. In this process, not only the function and the form of memorials but also remembering proposed to individuals by memorialisation have changed. This dissertation questions the pre-suppositions of traditional and counter memorial architecture with a new method of analysis. This method is derived from classical memorising technique of ars memoriae (the art of memory). By means of this method, this dissertation analyses war memorials in the battlefields of Gallipoli aiming at revealing similarities and disparities among different memorialisation approaches.Keywords: memory, collective remembering, war memorial, counter-monument, art of memory (ars memoriae), Dardanelles Campaign, Gallipoli Peninsula.