Yakup Satar

Yakup Satar — Biography

Yakup Satar was born on 11 March 1898 in Crimea; when he was only five, his family fled to Eskişehir to escape the Russian Empire's pressure on its Turkic population. Conscripted into the Ottoman army in 1915 after the empire entered the First World War, he was trained in a secret unit that instructed soldiers in the use of poison gas before being sent to the Baghdad front. He was taken prisoner by British forces during the Second Battle of Kut in February 1917, spent roughly two years in captivity, and after being freed in a prisoner exchange returned to Eskişehir and joined Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's forces in the Turkish War of Independence.

A holder of the Medal of Independence, Satar became one of the last two surviving veterans of that war after the deaths of Ömer Küyük and Veysel Turan; following his own death, the retired colonel Mustafa Şekip Birgöl remained the sole living veteran, and he too died that same November. Satar's wartime memories and daily life, together with those of Küyük and Turan, were recorded in Nesli Çölgeçen's documentary Son Buluşma (2007).

Satar died on 2 April 2008 at his home in Eskişehir, where he lived with his daughters, at the age of 110, and is regarded as the last surviving Ottoman veteran of the First World War.