Guide
The Dumlupınar war of independence cemetery was built in the Dumlupınar district of Kütahya by the Ministry of Culture in 1992, in memory of the Turkish soldiers who died in the battle of Dumlupınar. It opened on 30 August 1992, the seventieth anniversary of the great offensive.
The design was drawn by the architect Nejat Dinçel. The cemetery holds the gravestones of five hundred soldiers and a hundred officers whose names could be established. Besides the burial ground there are an open-air prayer area, a fountain for ablutions and parking.
One monument, the work of Haluk Tezonar, stands for the Turkish people in three figures — a young militiaman, a young woman with a child in her arms and an old man — and represents the whole nation's part in the war of independence. It stands opposite the monument showing the commanders of the war: Atatürk, İnönü and Fevzi Çakmak.
On the hill directly ahead as one enters the cemetery, reached by marble steps, stands a bronze figure of a soldier with a fixed bayonet on a marble base, standing for the soldiers whose names are not known. That monument is the work of Tankut Öktem.
The monument of the martyred father and son shows a son holding his fallen father. It was raised in memory of Kara Ali Çavuş of Çetme and his son, Corporal Mehmet. Ali Çavuş had gone to the Balkan war and fought on various fronts for eleven years; he met his son, then nineteen, at the battle of Dumlupınar and died on 31 August. His son died on 9 September at the head of the unit entering İzmir. The marble inscription beneath the monument tells that story and closes by remembering these men with gratitude. The monument is the work of Haluk Tezonar.
