Railway to Muttalip Cemetery in Eskisehir

Railway to Muttalip Cemetery in Eskisehir
The railroad adventure of the Germans in the Ottoman lands begins with the concession of the Anatolian Railway. Eskişehir station of the Anatolian Railway was a crossroads. It was 313 km from Eskişehir Haydarpaşa, 264 km from Ankara and 430 km from Konya.
There was an advertisement for the Anatolian-Ottoman Railway Company in the Sabah Newspaper dated 21 Zilkade 1309. "This is the declaration of the train that will move from Haydarpaşa to Eskişehir starting from the sixth Saturday of June 1308." The first train reached Eskişehir in 1894, which is located on the Istanbul-Baghdad railway route. Now it was possible to reach Istanbul in 15 hours by train, in 10 hours from Ankara, and in 14 hours from Konya.
Under the conditions of that day, travel by train was carried out during the day and not when it was dark. When a train departing from Istanbul in the morning arrived in Eskişehir, it did not go any further and the passengers were spending the night in Eskişehir hotels. Especially the Austrian "Aunt Tadeus" hotel was near the station and was a preferred place for train passengers.
The most important symbol of the change in the city was the station. Because Eskişehir Station, which is accepted as the “center-general” of Anatolian Railways, was established on 80 decares of land. In this area, apart from the station, there was a warehouse for locomotives coming from Ankara Konya Haydarpaşa, wards for mechanics, ticket buying place and a large stone factory known as the traction workshop. With this factory, which was opened in 1894 and where 420 workers worked, a "business culture" developed in the form of going from home to work in the morning and returning home from work in the evening, and a group of workers gradually began to form in Eskişehir.
In Max Schlagintweit's travel book, Travel in Asia Minor, he describes Eskişehir during the years when the railway reached the city. The city consists of two parts, the old and the new, in the valley of the Porsuk river. Only Turks live in the old city. In the new city, Tatars, Armenians and Greeks, Germans and Franks reside around the station, in addition to the Turks and the immigrants from Rumelia.
Hilmi Duman, the Retired Movement Inspector, who entered the Anatolian-Baghdad Railways and Ports Administration in 1927 with an examination, shot in the places where he worked between 1927-1958 (Akşehir, Mersin, Adana, Güneyköy, Afyon, Uşak and Malatya). In the photographs he donated, we see that the culture of his workplace friends to attend the funeral ceremony of the deceased railroad in formal dresses has been formed.

Railway to Muttalip Cemetery in Eskisehir
The culture of taking the corpses of the railway workers who died in Eskişehir to the Muttalip Cemetery by train, before the modern station building of Eskişehir was put into operation with a local ceremony on 04.11.1955, continued for many years. Below, we convey the oral testimonies of those who lived in this culture.
Doctor Cengiz Elburus
“The station and railroad should be told longer. Those who have not lived those days may find it difficult to believe. But in Eskişehir, the railways had a special, very special locomotive and wagon. When one of the staff or relatives of the company passed away, this wagon was arranged according to the funeral and was transported to the cemetery by a special line with that special locomotive. This delicacy cannot be found anywhere in the world or in other cultures. The locomotive would attach the carriage carrying the dead relics and relatives to its back and pull the whistle arm to the end. This painful crowing was heard even in the most remote areas of Eskişehir, and Fatiha was recited to the deceased. The cemetery was the location of the park at the beginning of the current Muttalip Road. This particular rail line existed until recently. Then they lifted it.
Retired CTC Dispatcher Faruk Gönkesen from TCDD
“The funeral of the railroad driver who was bathing in the Gümilcine mosque (Hoşnudiye Mahallesi, Ambarlar Sokak, Eskişehir) opposite the old station building was brought to the station. The relatives of the funeral who gathered in the coffee house of Hakkı Abi, who were in the station, would welcome the body. Some of the funeral owners would get on next to the coffin loaded on the black wagon behind a wagon hauled by a steam locomotive. The funeral train, which goes on a second line parallel to the railway between Eskişehir and Ankara, would stop when it reached the Muttalip pass. The corpse, taken from the wagon, was buried in the Muttalip Cemetery on the north side of this passage where the Necatibey Primary School is located. Then the cemetery was moved to the south side of the line. I started working in the railways in Eskişehir in 1952. The same ceremony was held for the funerals of the railroad who passed away at that time. With the opening of the Eskişehir Sugar Factory in 1933, the line that was previously used only for funeral transport was extended to the factory and started to be used in beet transportation.

Retired Railroad Wife Necmiye Gönkesen
“Our house was close to the Muttalip cemetery. 1939 is my childhood years. As soon as we heard the whistle of the train locomotive that brought the funeral, we would run to the side of the line. The funeral owners would give the children money and make them happy. It was a part of our childhood joy to watch the beet trains passing this line.
As a result of developing and changing urbanization, the transfer of railway funerals to the cemetery was abandoned before the transfer of Muttalip cemetery from the south to Asri Cemetery.
The line, which only reached the Sugar factory in 1933, was built in military transports that extended to the Air Supply Base in the following years. In 2005, within the scope of the works carried out within the scope of taking the Eskişehir railway underground within the scope of the High Speed ​​Train project, the railway line called "the road to sugar / airplane" was dismantled and removed.

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