Epilogue: Interwar Corlu

It goes beyond this project's scope to detail Thrace during World War II and later years. Suffice it to say that half of the Turkish army bivouacked in Thrace to wait for a shapeless enemy for years. So did the people of Thrace under martial law, feeding and sustaining a gargantuan army when they were destitute themselves. The war ended, martial law expired after seven long years, and the border remained intact. Yet the interwar legacies of marshaling development in Thrace, which treated the region as a blank space for allocating people and things with a view to defense and development, continued to live on.

Edirne emerged from the war so devastated that a mass of MPs petitioned, with success, to include this westernmost border city in the funding plan for the development of the country's eastern provinces. The Gallipoli Peninsula was so heavily fortified that farmers and fishers appealed for the reduction of military exclusion zones to make more space for economic activities. In Kırklareli, too, forbidden zones dotted much of the landscape to the detriment of tourism, agriculture, and industry. International travel, farming, and industrialization within these expansive zones required permission from higher authorities

After the war, a new crop of defense planners, this time also international, inherited the question of defending the vulnerable yet indispensable Thrace, as Turkey joined NATO during the Cold War. Military infrastructures of the interwar years were entrenched, and some new ones, including nuclear options, were installed in Thrace. The war never came, but nor did its shadow ever truly leave. It is in the shadow of war that borderland lives have continued to flourish and perish with a dovelike disquiet about an ever-imminent eclipse.

The results of marshaling development, the coordinated civilian and military activity within the five years up to the war, were remarkable. The vulnerable frontier of Eastern Thrace, where state sovereignty had seemed provisional, was transformed into the sovereign realm of Turkish Thrace, where a constellation of fortresses mushroomed, soldiers marched untrammeled, and 'culturally Turkish' citizens settled to work the land. 

The new defense posturing and increasing troop concentration informed Çorlu's urban development through and through. A journalist reported in 1935 that an unprecedented buzz of excitement pervaded Çorlu, where a military engineer drew up a new town plan while the Officers’ Club screened movies and served cheap meals to civilians. New military construction, including an imposing corps headquarters, a large-scale military hospital, barracks, and an Officers’ Club, proceeded with such great intensity that another journalist remarked that the constructive power of the Turkish army breathed a new life into Çorlu. The funds for building dual-use or civilian infrastructures, such as waterpipes, schools, livestock rearing facilities, a public library, and a weather station, were justified on the basis of Çorlu’s military significance. Even today, Çorlu’s main artery for car traffic is named after the city’s first corps commander, Salih Omurtak, in homage to these interwar legacies of militarized development.

Çorlu, once an insignificant town in Thrace, emerged from the war years as a regional hub and eventually the most populous city in Thrace, due mainly to the town's privileged position in military reorganization and migrant settlement. 

Thanks to Ashley Champagne for supervising the project. Without her patience and help, this project could only hope to become a published article for narrow academic audiences. Many thanks to Khanh Vo, Frank Donnelly, Cody Carver, and other brilliant scholars at Brown's Center for Digital Scholarship for their support of the project at its different stages. Thanks to Victoria Taborelli and Andressa Macena Maia for their great feedback, friendship, and fellowship on the digital path.

I hope my interlocutors and fellow citizens of Thrace will like the project, as they are both the project's heroes and intended audience.

And finally, thank you for visiting and supporting the project.