The cemetery was first established for British soldiers from the Crimean War, who died mostly as the result of a cholera epidemic in the first organized military hospital in modern history created by Florence Nightingale.

A bronze plaque, attached by the British community in Turkey on the plinth of the Crimean Memorial and unveiled on Empire Day, 1954, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s nursing service in this region, bears the inscription: "To Florence Nightingale, whose work near this Cemetery a century ago relieved much human suffering and laid the foundations for the nursing profession.

"Other monuments in the cemetery include a symbolic broken column in memorial of German Jäger officers who fell in the Crimea, and a British memorial, which was erected in 1855 initially in the Therapia Crimean Cemetery (today Tarabya in the European part of Istanbul), and later transferred here together with the graves of 18 personnel of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines who died in the sultan’s mansion in Therapia, which had been converted into a military hospital.

Among them is the grave of Sir Edward Barton, British ambassador of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) to the Sublime Porte between 1588 and 1596, who died in 1598 on the island of Heybeliada in the Sea of Marmara, and his remains were transferred later here.

Two other memorials of World War I are found in the cemetery, one bearing the names of a little over 200 soldiers of United Kingdom and Undivided India, who fell in various parts of Russia or on the borders of Turkey, and whose burial grounds could not be maintained.