I was picked up at my hotel shortly after 6.30am for my 2-day tour from Istanbul to Selcuk via Gallipoli, Canakkale, Troy and Pergamum. It turned out that there were only 3 others the bus picked up that morning – a man from China who was going straight through to Troy, and a couple form Marton - Jill and Tom Willis, who knew my parents in law, Howard and Joan Jones. I really enjoyed talking with them on the journey to Gallipoli, which was a 4-5 hour bus ride. Along the way, I realised that Tom and Jill were going back to Istanbul that night – and with the Chinese man going straight to Troy, I was the only one on my 2-day guided tour. (More of this later!)
After a nice lunch in Eceabat, we went on to Gallipoli. One of the first things we did was to visit the museum. I was particularly struck by a display of bullets that had been struck by other bullets – indicating the intensity of the gunfire with a hail of bullets coming from both sides. For some peculiar reason I didn’t take a photo of them! So here is a file photo from the internet (much lower resolution than mine I'm sorry to say).
My attention was also caught by a letter that one soldier had written to his family, saying that no one had been killed and only 3 people had been wounded in the withdrawal from Gallipoli in December, 1915. My grandfather Onslow, who died when I was around 18 months old, apparently used to say that he was one of the last people wounded on Gallipoli. He was riding on a gun carriage that was being taken off shore, when he was shot in the leg. So he was probably one of those 3 soldiers recorded as being wounded in the withdrawal.
Next, we drove down past Brighton Beach to ANZAC cove. It was noticeably steep just up from ANZAC cove, whereas Brighton Beach, where the troops were supposed to land, led to a low-lying plain and easier access to the summit of the mountain overlooking the peninsula. The reason they landed in the wrong place was apparently because the marker they were using to mark the landing spot washed down the coast in a storm before the date of the landing! That seems to have been typical of the shoddy planning of this campaign.
From there we went to the Lone Pine Memorial, which is particularly focused on the Australian forces. The next stop was to look at the closeness of the trenches at one point just next to the modern road to the top of the ridge. The Turkish and allied trenches at this point were no more than 8 metres distant from one another!
Next we stopped at the 57th regiment Turkish memorial (in Turkey the 57th regiment became famous because of the self-sacrifice shown by its soldiers. Not one man from the regiment survived the Turkish defence of Gallipoli). Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who appears on statues and posters throughout Turkey, is acknowledged as the father of the modern state. He was the first Turkish Prime Minister in the 1920s and was significant in the Gallipoli campaign as the Turkish officer commanding the defending troops (a German officer in overall command of the defence entrusted it to Kemal). Not only did he have great military ability, he had a remarkable ability to give words and meaning to the sacrifice that was being made by the Turkish troops. On the 57th regiment memorial, you can read the following words:
To the allied soldiers who died in the Gallipoli campaign and to their mothers, Ataturk wrote, “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent your sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives in this land, they have become our sons as well.”
From my brief time in Turkey I got the impression that Ataturk was one of the truly great leaders of the 20th century, not only successfully defending his country against various military incursions, but also reforming it and making it into a modern state. I look forward to reading more about him when I return to New Zealand.
Finally, we went up to the top of the hill to visit Chunuk Bair. When English and French troops landed at Souvla Bay, some distance away from this high point, after the first Gallipoli landing, the Turks concentrated their defence against them. (Here you can see Souvla Bay in the distance.)
While they were doing this, some New Zealand and Gurkha troops came up behind them and took Chunuk Bair, the highest point and chief objective of all the fighting in the Gallipoli campaign. The strategic view was that those who held Chunuk Bair would hold the peninsula. But the Turkish troops rallied and attacked time and again, so that without reinforcements the troops that had taken the position were in real difficulty. They held out for one day, and then on the second day they were pushed back by the Turkish soldiers – and the allied advance on the Gallipoli peninsula was effectively over. The stalemate that resulted led eventually to the withdrawal of the allied troops.
All of the above left me with feelings of sadness about the pointlessness of the campaign, admiration for Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish soldiers, admiration too for the bravery of the allied soldiers, dismay about some of the terrible decisions made by the allied commanders, all mixed in with a sense that this was an important visit to make – both as a New Zealander, and as the grandson of a veteran of the campaign.
After this visit I was taken to Eceabat and was handed a ticket for the ferry to Canakkale. The tour company obviously thought that doing a whole tour for one person was uneconomic, so without discussing it with me, they had decided that I would travel on public transport and have company personnel meet me at various points. The only trouble was that at some points they failed to meet me or to provide things that had clearly been part of the tour they had promised me. It was actually a bit of a comedy of errors, and not a disaster because I got to my destinations, but it was odd to have decisions made about changes to my tour without being consulted.
In naïve expectation that someone would be waiting to meet me off the ferry, I took the ferry to Canakkale. But after having waited for 20 minutes or so outside the ferry terminal I asked someone for directions to my hotel, the name of which I had been told, and the person kindly walked me over to it. It was 3 minutes walk away! The hotel was the nicest one I had stayed at so far – a boutique hotel in an old Turkish house. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
That night I watched the Mel Gibson Gallipoli film, had dinner and did some planning for my visit to Patmos. The next morning I was getting concerned when my guide for my Troy tour did not turn up at the right time, so the hotel receptionist kindly phoned the tour company and the guide arrived a few minutes later.
People had said that there was not much to see at Troy, but in fact my visit to Troy was one of the highlights of my trip so far. I had a personal guided tour, and the guide did a great job of explaining the site to me. I will not bore you with a lengthy description of his explanations, and the site itself does not have many grand monuments to show, but there is good evidence of the various stages of walls on the Troy ‘tell’ or mound.
Heinrich Schliemann was famously the first person to excavate Troy, in the 19th century. Archaeology was only in its infancy, and although Schliemann in some ways was ahead of his time, his basic approach was to look for the “treasure of Priam” that he thought was buried somewhere on the site. So he dug a trench that was rather like a bulldozer trench straight through the tell, obliterating virtually everything in its way, and destroying a lot of evidence in the process.
Eventually Schliemann did find some treasure and spirited it out of the country, contrary to an agreement he had with the Turkish government of the time!
The various ‘layers’ or ‘levels’ of the city are noted in the above picture. Scholars differ as to whether the Troy that was destroyed by the Greeks was the 6th or 7th level, with most scholars considering that the city that was destroyed was level 7B. Apparently the walls of this level were once around 22 feet high. Here are some remains from this wall.
Note the stones that have been specially chiselled to allow other stones to inter-lock with them (you can see 2 examples at the top left), thereby making the wall stronger.
The outlook from the tell gave a clear reason why Troy became a major city. It was within sight of the Hellespont, and therefore presided over important trade routes between Asia and Europe. The following picture shows the sea quite far away, but in ancient times it was much closer to the city.
Having studied both the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer when I took ancient Greek at university, it was a real pleasure to see Troy and to have the site interpreted for me.
After the tour, I was taken back to Canakkale to get a bus to Bergama (Pergamum) which was my next stop. Unfortunately I just missed the bus, and taking the next bus and going by public transport meant that I reached Pergamum shortly before 5pm. The person who met me off the bus was not a guide and told me that the Pergamum site closed at 6pm, so we raced up the hill and I took a quick look around this impressive site before connecting with my driver and being taken back to the bus.
(This is the Sanctuary of Trajan, built in the second century AD).
I was put on a bus to Izmir, and from there needed to transfer to a bus to Selcuk, where I was going to stay close to the ancient city of Ephesus. As I had missed out on both the guided tour of Pergamum and the lunch that had been a specified part of my tour, I contacted the tour company by mobile phone from the bus, to try and reach some alternative arrangement. I agreed with the company that I would get a guided tour and lunch for my planned Ephesus trip tomorrow, which I had been going to do independently. The bus conductor kindly guided me from the Izmir bus to the bus to Selcuk. and I got to my hotel around 10pm. The Nazar Hotel was a very nice budget hotel, and I was glad to be there, especially after the uncertainties of my travel that day.
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