Gazi Hasan Uysal

Born in 1900 in Sındı, then a village, Hasan Uysal lost both legs in the War of Independence, which he joined at a young age. He returned home on state-issued prosthetic legs made of wood and reinforced with leather and iron; on those legs he worked his fields and raised eleven children from two marriages. He died in 1974. His century-old wooden prosthetic legs are preserved today in the family home by his grandson Sedat Uysal, awaiting display in a museum.

He is the most tangible memory of the price Datça paid in the War of Independence: a human will that left both legs to the homeland and went on producing, for a lifetime, in the village he returned to. The wooden prosthetics carried from generation to generation by his family are among the rare material witnesses of the peninsula's quiet history of heroism.