The story
A marble memorial with the soldiers’ names and dates of death and two lines of Turkish verse, and a crescent and star on the gate.
- 1The marble memorial with the soldiers’ names
- 2The Turkish and Arabic plaques at the gate
- 3Two lines of Turkish verse
In the First World War the British held Turkish prisoners in a camp at Sidi Bishr. Delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited it on 6 January 1917 and described it on the sea shore among sand dunes and palms, 15 kilometres north-east of Alexandria. It held 430 officers, sixty of them there since February 1915, 410 orderlies, 10 imams and 20 civilians, with a mosque inside its fence.
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According to a study in the Turkish journal Akademik Bakış in 2014, the prisoners came from the Palestine front. Those who died, 13 officers among them, were buried in part of the camp, and the British later built a small tomb inscribed with the officers’ names. The present cemetery was laid out in 1941 on 925 square metres; more than 500 soldiers lie there, and the Turkish military attaché in Cairo looks after it.
Two plaques at the gate, in Turkish and Arabic, read “Cemetery of the Turkish Martyrs in Alexandria”. The district’s table lists the “Turkish cemeteries” in Sidi Bishr among its archaeological sites.
