"War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors" - Koselleck

According to Koselleck (2002),  after the French Revolution, war memorial originated as an independent genre within the new emerging bourgeois memorial cult. First of all, the religious interpretation of death declined in order to functionalize the memorial for political and social terms. Secondly, the memorials were not reserved only for great aristocratic personages but also for simple soldiers as an act of democratization. Thirdly, the memorials were moved from the churches into open spaces and into the landscape. Although acknowledging the importance of the conscription, Koselleck does not enlist it as a necessary prerequisite, considering the recruitment system in the British Army and the Boer War (1899-1902) memorials.

In the case of Edirnekapı Martyrs' Cemetery (1926), in addition to individual donations and membership fees, the association was mainly supported by state institutions (Republican People's Party, Ministry of National Defence, Directorate of Wakfs, State Railways General Directorate, Rescuing General Directorate, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, Türkiye Ziraat Bankası, Türkiye İş Bankası, Sümerbank, Istanbul Chamber of Commerce and Industry, etc.) and municipalities, showing also the lack of a national bourgeois class in the new republic. The graveyard and the monument were designed after the Western model in terms of functionalization and democratization. (heykeltraş bilgisi ekle). However, in terms of spatial transition, it's not possible to talk about a detachment from religious buildings. As Eldem (2005) mentions, keeping graveyards outside of Istanbul was a conscious urban policy since the end of the 15th century and this Ottoman policy was seriously different from Western applications. The Edirnekapı Cemetery was already existing before the fallen soldiers of WWI were buried there. 

It's also not so easy to refer to a decline in Islamic interpretation of the death but a transformation of it in the name of the nation-state. As distinct from the Western use of the Christian term 'martyr', the equivalent Islamic term 'şehit' was totally instrumentalized in the favor of nationalism and militarism. According to Kreiser (2013) despite the high rank of death as a 'şehit' in Islam, war memorials and memorials were almost unknown before the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Kreiser (2013) suggests that while a modern representation is imported from the West, there was no direct import and no full convergence because the Kemalist regime was not able to use Islamic terminology and rituals. As an example, he gives free journalist Zekeriya Sertel's unrealized proposal for a national monument (1925) using religious terminology in favor of nationalism. Although Sertel's vision was never materialized, it approached the European idea of a "national monument" as a direct continuation of religious cults through patriotic ceremonies. Turkish military graveyards and war memorials always made great use of the martyrdom myth and never lost the connection with an Islamic afterlife. While making balanced use of religious terminology, these patriotic ceremonies never substituted the religious cult. 

giriş için belki:

As a Turkish citizen, born in 1984 in Istanbul, the term 'şehit' had no religious connotations for me and was equal to a fallen soldier in relation with the ongoing war with PKK in Southeastern Turkey. I didn't know exactly why people were dying but every night, when we were having a family dinner, I was hearing the anchor person on TV or reading the subtitles with the number of dead people of that day. On one side, there were terrorists who were "captured dead" and there were Mehmetçiks who "became martyrs". We were hearing the word 'şehit' everyday and anywhere. It was in the school curriculum, in the street names, on TV and radio.*dipnot: Of course, the use of the term şehit does not belong to the state only. Alevis have a different and more intense culture of martyrdom than Sunnis, Guerilla warriors of PKK are also called şehit by themselves. Even people, who died during Gezi Uprising in 2013, were called şehit but this usage was contentious and not common. However, this paper is focusing on the notion of martyrdom only as an ideological state apparatus in Althusserian terms.