A Mad Dash Through the Night to Gallipoli
And reminisces of Troy
I. Prologue
We must necessarily begin on a rooftop in The City of Light. Not a forgotten dirty rooftop with evil-looking air conditioning machinery, but a comfortable rooftop covered in carpets, bathed in warm lighting, sheltered by a canopy, inhabited by low couches. Unable to find a vacant room earlier, this hotel had agreed to let me spend the night on a couch on their comfortable roof/lobby.
I’d just returned from the tombs, where quite out of the blue, while I tried to photograph a tortoise, my auburn-haired Turkish lass had offered to meet me in Gallipoli. The tortoise photo didn’t really turn out, would the relationship?
But now I had a more difficult quest than battling turtles, I had to find a way to travel 396 miles across Turkey in the next 12 hours, at night. It was 8 pm, and she was already speeding south on a bus from Istanbul.
II. Through the Night
First I asked the balding man sitting behind the reception desk over at the other end of the roof. He glared at me over his reading glasses and said he could help me tomorrow.
“No I need to be there by the morning” I emphasized.
“Sorry I can’t help you till morning,” said the man, busying himself with reorganizing the desk. I narrowed my eyes in his general direction, suspecting he just wanted me to pay for another night.
Next, I tried to make sense of the bus routes but because they are all different companies serving different cities it was proving mind-bizorgling to plot an immediate overnight multi-city route between two non-major cities.
I emailed the travel agent in Istanbul who inexplicably seemed not to mind continuing to field questions from me even though being a cheapskate I hadn’t actually booked anything more than a bus ticket through them. In this case, despite being way past normal business hours, Ruta from True Blue Travel Agency called me back within an hour of my email and helped me plot out a hare-brained bus-jumping scheme to get to Gallipoli.
As I checked out, the sour-looking man behind the hotel desk seemed rather sullen that I had succeeded despite his lack of cooperation.
Step one: catch a local dolmuş (mini bus) to the city otogar (main bus terminal) where I have to be on a bus departing in an hour (10 pm). This end of town was dark and quiet. Nearby a grocer was wheeling his wares back indoors. I looked up hopefully at every passing vehicle. I began to fret.
Finally, the distinctive white minivan shape of a dolmuş came along going the correct direction. I flagged it down with my hand and hopped on with my seabag. “Autogar?” I asked the driver hopefully, and he nodded.
An uneventful wait at the otogar, and seven hours rolling through the night on a Turkish inter-city bus — like all inter-city Turkish buses, it would put Greyhound to shame. Comfortable seats, working AC, occasional brief stops at nice rest stops (well lit, well stocked with food and snacks), not packed in like sardines. And they always roll a tray down the aisle occasionally with complimentary snacks and tea or coffee, you know, like the airlines in America no longer do.
Arriving in Izmir, ancient Smyrna, at 5 am, what initially felt like a plenty-of-time hour-long layover turned frantic as I ran around the enormous terminal, up and down deserted echoing halls and lonely stairs, trying to figure out where and how to buy my ticket for the 6 am bus on Troy Lines to Çanakkale. Found Troy Lines hidden in the basement at 5:40, and he wanted to sell me a 9 am ticket. “No, there is a 6 am bus!” I insisted. He called his supervisor. They looked at their computer and scratched their chins. They sold me a 6 am ticket.
Finally, with literally less than two minutes to spare, I arrived at the 6 am bus with the correct ticket in hand. Four more hours smoothly whirring along the Turkish countryside as the sky slowly became a lighter shade of blue and the morning sun at last spilled over the hills to illuminate valleys and villages. “I’m just passing ‘Ana çıkış,’” I texted Asli the words on a large sign we passed. “That means ‘main exit’ you dork” she laughingly responded.
The giant replica horse at Troy slipped by out the window and I knew we were close. Just months earlier Asli and I had traveled there together. Happy fields of flowering sunflowers had surrounded us as we had made the short bus trip from Çanakkale to the Troy site.
For centuries the location of Troy had been a matter of speculation and search, its very existence often in dispute. In 1870 German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began excavations on what turned out to be the correct site of Troy, but destroyed much of the site due to his extremely rough methods, using dynamite (!!) and battering rams to quickly remove everything above the layer he thought was the correct one (it wasn’t) primarily just in search of shiny gold artifacts. The most famous Trojan War era layer in fact was one of the layers he blasted through.
Subsequent archeology has been more careful and in the current site, you can stroll amidst the historic walls and streets of Troy. As a history nerd, I marveled at being able to put my hand on the actual walls of Troy. There was also, quite naturally, a wooden replica Trojan Horse one could enter, because of course there was.
But back in the present, my bus was soon pulling into the Çanakkale otogar. I easily recognized it from our earlier trip to Troy. And after the briefest of stops my bus was pulling out of it again, not having given anyone time to even disembark. Normally I try not to act like a panicked and confused tourist, I like to think I’m pretty good at looking like I know where I’m going no matter how deep in a non-English-speaking countryside I am, but this quick departure from Çanakkale was deeply alarming to me.
“We’re not stopping here??” I exclaimed to my fellow passengers, jumping to my feet. Looking around all I saw was wide brown eyes looking at me in surprise. Finally, a young woman a few rows back spoke up in English.
“We’re headed into town now”
“Oh. Thanks.” I said with relief, sitting down a sheepishly.
Asli was waiting for me next to the same seaside cafe we’d dined in before. It looked out on the Hellespont, the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, the gap through which Jason voyaged after the Golden Fleece, a gap which had flummoxed Persian, Roman, and Ottoman armies, staring from their castles across the gap at their enemies. And most famously to the modern consciousness, the Allied ANZAC armies in World War I had valiantly and futilely thrown themselves against it.
Across the gap today, one sees on the Gallipoli Peninsula an enormous clearing in the forest, onto which has been sculpted a Turkish soldier amid flames, valiantly holding a rifle while gesturing to the words “Dur Yolcu” — “Halt wayfarer!”
III. Memoriams.
The next day Asli and I took the ferry across the strait and (for 70 lira a person) joined a tour group of Aussies to visit the ANZAC memorials. The Turkish guides were respectful, the Aussies quiet and serious. The slopes upon which the ANZACs had fought were rugged and steep. The wind gently rustled amid the pine trees, and I looked at them and thought “I wouldn’t have pictured pine trees here.” And I looked out at ANZAC Cove and thought “well there’s certainly less beautiful places to fight trench warfare.” The cove was broad, blue, and serene.
Just after 4am on April 25th 1915 — the ANZACs approach the dim silhouette of shore in the dark of night. Steamboats had taken them as close as 75 yards from the beach, but the last approach is to be done in small boats each rowed by four Royal Navy sailors. There is silence except the splish splish of the oars and gurgle of water against the hulls. Would there be an uncontested landing or were they about to have to fight for every inch?
A single gunshot rings out, and a silhouette appears on the ridge and calls something out in a foreign language (“Dur yolcu!” perhaps?). Moments later there’s a crackle of gunfire and flashes from the platoon of 70 Turks that have been in position on the ridge for over an hour already. Bullets splash in the water like rain, crack into the sides of the boats. Someone cries out from a hit to the arm, another trooper slumps over dead. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in “Constantinople by nightfall” as promised.
In the cemeteries, rows upon rows of clean white squares mark the British, Australian, and New Zealand fallen. On a hilltop called “Lone Pine” a large memorial contains a wall with the names of all the ANZAC fallen. It brought to mind the American Vietnam War wall. Looking at all the graves and names, one may well ask why a young man from Brisbane would have to die in Gallipoli. And to a degree, it’s from exactly that question that the modern Australian nation arose (though it was already an independent state since 1901)
I learned there was a French landing at French Cove. Did you know the French landed in Gallipoli? Do the French know French landed at Gallipoli? I fancy they are the forgotten of the forgotten.
“The sunflowers are all dead.” I observed as the bus wound its way back to the ferry platform.
“Hm?” responded Asli absently.
That night we couldn’t find a comfortable bar. Everywhere was deserted, playing irritating music. We had some raki and called it a night in a state of vague annoyance.
IV. The Other Side
The next day Asli and I once again took the ferry across the strait and (for 7 lira a person) joined a Turkish tour to visit the other side of the trenches, the Turkish side. The guide proudly told us tales of heroism: of the Turkish soldier who lifted 250-pound shells by himself to fire his cannon after the rest of his gun crew had been killed; how commander Ataturk had ordered a unit to make a suicidal stand until re-enforcements could arrive (“Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.”) and they did. In my personal opinion the Gallipoli attack would have succeeded if it weren’t for the unanticipated factor that they were facing the then-unknown most inspiring military leader of WWI in Mustafa Kemal “Ataturk” (the latter name being given to him later as “father of the Turks”).
We stand by a statue of a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded ANZAC back to his lines, based on another story from the war. The reconstructed trenches wind along the top of the bluff, off to our left and right, and below the turquoise waters of yet another bay the British landed in gleam. It’s easy to picture the men sitting in these battlements, staring down at that same bay down below, as strange men from half the world away swarmed their beaches.
Another famous quote from Ataturk inscribed on a monument at Gallipoli exemplifies the almost-strange lack of lingering animosity between the Turks and Anzacs: “The heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives on this country’s soil! You are in the soil of a friendly country now. Therefore rest in peace. You are side by side with the little Mehmets. The mothers who send their sons to the war! Wipe your tears away. Your sons are in our bosom, are in peace and will be sleeping in peace comfortably. From now on, they have become our sons since they have lost their lives on this land.”
It seemed to me the foundations of a good novel are here. A story of an Australian man and a Turkish man, both called to war, called to try to kill one another on the rugged Gallipoli peninsula in 1915. Fighting for a soon-to-break apart British Empire and a soon-to-disintegrate Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans win the battle and lose the war. And a parallel story, of the grandson of one and the granddaughter of the other, who fall in love in 2013.
