Mount of Olives

The Mount of Olives is a living testimony by the Turkish writer Falih Rıfkı Atay to the last days of the Ottomans on the Syrian-Palestinian front in World War I, during his tenure as an assistant officer to Cemal Pasha, the commander of the front and one of the three leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. Through his recollections, the writer covers the most important events of that period, and Cemal Pasha’s attempts to keep this region within Ottoman territory. In addition to the memoirs of an Ottoman officer during the first expedition to the Suez Canal in 1914, the desert wars and the attacks on Gaza. “Our youth should read the book Mount of Olives, which tells the story of the last periods of the Ottoman Empire.”