Poppies & Provisions in Gallipoli

The end of April is the time for poppies to pop up in fields. Throughout May, and well into the month of June, fields of green wheat stalks celebrate the spring, dotted red with poppies. The poppy is also the symbol of martyrdom. Ancient Greek and Roman tombs were ornamented with pods of opium poppies representing the final eternal sleep, death. It is no wonder that the sleep-inducing opium poppy is associated with death, which some consider as the deepest sleep, but the white and lavender-colored opium poppy flower has never been the symbol of martyrdom.

It is the striking blood-red field poppy that was associated with the quivering souls that dropped dead in battlefields. The battlefield of Waterloo is most striking when covered with a scarlet-red blanket of poppy flowers. The painfully beautiful poppy represents the fragility of human life. 

Life in the battlefield is a story of survival. Food and water supply is a major logistics problem, often not implemented as planned. Dr. Ahmet Uçar, who has conducted research on the battlegrounds in Çanakkale, gives interesting numbers based on the accounts of soldier's provisions on the Turkish side. The "Provisions and Forage Law" was the guide to determine the daily food intake of each soldier.

According to the official Turkish records, each soldier was entitled to 600 g of flour, 250 g of meat or 125 g of potted or cured meat such as past?rma, sucuk or kavurma, 86 g of rice, 10 g of oil, 20 g of onion and salt. The meat provision almost never met the ideal standard from the very start of the Gallipoli war. The registrars show that the amount was initially cut down to 62 g, and then further reduced to 31 g, and eventually the meat supply totally disappeared. The soldiers were also entitled to...