Guide
The Republic Martyrs' Memorial sits on a commanding hill nine kilometres from Afyonkarahisar, on the İzmir-Antalya road. It was built in 1999 for soldiers and police killed in the conflicts of the republican period. Most of those dead are buried elsewhere — some in the Air Force cemetery, others in the cemeteries of the towns their families came from — so what stands here is largely symbolic. A few individual graves are here too, of people thought to have died during the fighting for the city.
The memorial makes more sense once you know that Afyonkarahisar was at the centre of the heaviest fighting of the War of Independence, and that thousands who came from across Anatolia to defend it were killed here. Several memorial cemeteries have been built around the province for them. Some hold actual burials and others are cenotaphs, because the burial grounds cover wide areas and it is often no longer known who lies where; symbolic sites were therefore raised at the places where the battles happened. Individual and mass graves without any monument at all also remain.
