THE MYTH OF “THE BATTALION THAT VANISHED” AT GALLIPOLI AS A PARADIGM OF PANTHEISTIC ECOLOGY
BİR PANTEİSTİK EKOLOJİ ÖRNEĞİ OLARAK GELİBOLU’DA “SIRRA KADEM BASAN TABUR” MİTİ

Author : Şebnem KAYA
Number of pages : 239-251

Abstract

With its overwhelmingly monistic viewpoint, ecocriticism, like the natural sciences it benefits from or shares with, adheres to a priori phenomena, marginalising, for the most part, the supernatural. Yet this study which does not conceptualise the natural and supernatural in contradictory terms postulates that – though rejected by science because it lacks the “regularities of nature” – the supra-physical correlates with natural or physical phenomena and therefore can be considered within the scope of ecocriticism, referring as proof to “the battalion that vanished” at Gallipoli, Turkey, reportedly on 12/21/25/28 August 1915. That day, during one of the bloodiest battles of the Dardanelles Campaign, a British troop marches into an unusually low-slung cloud and disappears forever. Eyewitnesses interpret and document what they saw as divine intervention, and in time, albeit on the periphery of World War I, the nebulous event turns into a myth inseparable from the literary ecology, as well as the collective (environmental) memory, of both the Turkish and Allied sides. This study is intended to ruminate on the mentioned hard-to-comprehend event as a myth once and still being verbalised and written about by the many, adopting a dualistic approach like “Clouds do not swallow men, the case of ‘the battalion that vanished’ excepted.” While not downplaying the materiality of the happening – by touching upon such meteorological issues as the atmospheric conditions conducive to the formation of clouds and the features of different types of clouds alongside the topography of the battlefield – the study, using as its base the Gallipoli soldiers’ accounts and subsequent derivative narratives, highlights the metaphysical dimension of the ecologically mysterious event, calling attention to the likelihood that the natural and the supernatural may segue into and complement each other and the Divine may manifest Himself through material nature, a course conceivable to call “pantheistic ecocriticism.”

Keywords

Myth, “the Battalion that Vanished,” Gallipoli, pantheistic ecocriticism, Buket Uzuner, The Long Whi

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