GALLIPOLI
The second part of the Türkiye experience was a trip across to Izmir that I was able to achieve by doing a 3 day tour covering Gallipoli, Troy and Ephesus. I’m not huge on fine print or details so what I was unaware of were the other great places the tour covered including the house of the Virgin Mary, the ruins of the ancient city of Pergamon, the ruins of the Temple of Artemis and the tomb and church of St John.
It started off a bit oddly by being picked up early at my hotel into a full mini bus. We took off for Gallipoli and I thought there’d be an introduction etc but nothing. Anyway, long story short, this bus trip was just to get us to lunch where we met up with a couple of other bus loads and then we got on to the bus that was our tour with other people that weren’t even on the original bus. Turns out that this company do tours of many key sites and you can pick and choose what you see, where you start and where you end. Quite handy to be honest.
So, tour 1 – Gallipoli. Burak (?) was a young guy, shirt with no sleeves, tatts, cap on backwards, long hair. And I got caught in the first impressions trap. Turns out that this guy was incredibly good. Cracked gags that were actually half decent, was amazingly knowledgeable and drew on all sorts of favours to find a Kiwi soldier who died in the campaign for one of the ladies on the tour. He succeeded to put the pieces of the puzzle in place to find him and make this womans day.
As an Aussie you’d think there wouldn’t be much more I could learn about the invasion. Well that was wrong as wrong could be. When you get most of your information from popular culture I guess you’re bound to get things wrong. For example, the landing crafts were not shot up by Turks waiting in the hills. In fact, it was only a hunch by Atatürk that resulted in the Turks knowing the ANZAC’s were there and by then they were well up the beach hill. So one tick to the tour. The second tick was about how I reacted to it all. In 2019 I went to France and that moved me an awful lot. Now while I wasn’t moved as much I was moved more than I thought I’d be. I was looking at the beach they came up on, I saw the hill that they climbed, the patch of land they fought on at Lone Pine and I walked through the trenches they fought from and how close they were to each other. It was frightening to imagine and it resulted in some pretty sombre thoughts. I had a high appreciation of the lads that fought there before I visited but it grew even more after it.
However, there are two other significant things that I took away from there. One, we must never forget that this was an invasion. We invaded Türkiye. And for those people who claim Australia has never invaded a foreign territory prior to the Gulf Wars then you are wrong. We may have been under direction of England but we were an independent country at that time. So we must think of the Turks (or technically the Ottomans) at this stage. They sacrificed way more soldiers defending this peninsula. And remember that they were dragged into the war because England refused to hand over two battleships that the Ottomans had paid for. And when they took up an offer from Germany to supply alternative boats the English declared war. Not a few decades earlier the Brits and the Turks were allies and now they were not. Pretty sad what the Brits did to so called friends.
Secondly, Australia and New Zealand lost around 12,000 troops. Very wasteful and tragic, however, we lost 46,000 on the Western Front. And in Gallipoli the Brits lost 21,000 men and the Turks lost a staggering 87,000 in a battle they didn’t even really want to be part of.
Australia and New Zealand gained an identity at Gallipoli but we really need to be careful that the story doesn’t descend into mythology. It’s a good enough story to not need exaggerations. And I think we also owe a debt of gratitude to the Turks for allowing us to establish a place of pilgrimage (ie, monuments and renaming the beach ANZAC Cove). Could you imagine us allowing Japanese pilgrims come and celebrate the bombing of Darwin or the torpedoing of Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs?
And I think we also need to recognise the amazing words of Ataturk, Türkiye’s first leader and a soldier on the peninsular. The words he spoke about our troops are enough to bring any grown person to tears:
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 their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
What amazing words to say. Truly beautiful and is probably why so many Turks still love him.
The other beautiful story that comes from the post war is that of the Lone Pine tree. An Australian soldier took a pine cone home with him and grew it successfully. And then recently they took a cone from the Australian tree and grew it back at Lone Pine continuing a loop and cementing even further the ties between the 2 countries.
Gallipoli was never in my top 10 places to visit and it was just by a quirk of fate that I ended up going there. So glad I did. It is a pilgrimage and I loved hearing the facts of what actually happened there. That night I stayed in a beautiful waterfront hotel in Canakkale. Looked like a great town and a beautiful spot but it had been a very long day and I just could not get enough time to explore.
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