Turkey (Gallipoli and Troy)

We traveled by bus from Istanbul to the Gallipoli Peninsula through such a beautiful countryside, made all the more attractive by the Spring, that it was difficult to believe that it was a regular battlefield. Two major wars and many battles have been fought over that strip of land.

Most of the tourists on the bus were from Australia and New Zealand because Gallipoli has a special significance for Australians and New Zealanders. The heavy ‘Allied’ casualties suffered in the Battle of Gallipoli were the Anzac troops from Australia and New Zealand. (I am using the word ‘Allies’, because people are more familiar with it. “Entente powers” would not make much sense to many people.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallipoli

The link above will give you all the info. you need about the battle of Gallipoli.

The ANZAC cove. See how narrow the coast is and how steep the cliffs are.

The nationalities of the tourists going to Gallipoli threw up an interesting fact. Seven people were from OZ, who had lost a near relative in the battle of Gallipoli – a grandfather or an uncle and for them it was more of a pilgrimage. There was a British couple and we, the Indians.

No Americans. No Japanese either. Gallipoli is not high on the tourist map.

Our guide was not surprised that Australians, New Zealanders and British were visiting Gallipoli but he was surprised that we two Indians also were among the lot. He jokingly said that he was one Turk against so many ‘Allies’. Then he mentioned that some Indian troops (regiments from Punjab) had also lost their lives at the Battle of Gallipoli.

So, we eleven tourists practically represented the countries that had taken part in that fateful campaign.

The guide represented the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

The Anzac Cove, where the Allied troops landed by mistake, is just a small strip of sand surrounded by sheer cliffs, but it was sheltered from Turkish bombardment. Beyond the cliffs, the ground rises in hills upon hills.

There is a young growth of Pine trees on the hills. The older trees had vanished in the battle.

Pink Tamarisks line the seashore.

It was difficult to believe that the lovely, green countryside had seen the death of an enormous number of people, that its peace was shattered by the firing of canons, that the trenches had held dead bodies of soldiers.


Trenches

I am so glad that the state of war is comparatively short-lived while the state of peace persists much longer all over the world. (It is also true that the gains of centuries of peace are wiped out in a matter of days of warfare.)


Bunkers

Anzac Cove and Gallipoli makes one sad, introspective and ultimately, philosophical.


Turkish guns

For the Australians, it was a day charged with emotion as they found either a grave or a name on the War Memorial of their relatives. They kneeled down and offered a short prayer for the departed soul.

In the common cemetery, some names like ‘Sher Singh’ also crop up among the headstones.

After the Gallipoli visit, we boarded the ferry and crossed the narrow Dardanelles Straits to Canakkale, where we stayed for the night.

Troy

The next day was our ‘half-day tour’ of Troy in the morning.

Oh,Boy !! Was I glad to see a group of Japanese tourists at the site! I had really missed them.

Our Troy guide Mustapha Askin is a learned man. He is very passionate about Troy. He has written books about Troy and the following is his website.

http://www.thetroyguide.com/index.html

Troy came alive for us under his tutelage.

The day before, we had heard a lot about the Gallipoli battle but it had not touched our heart. The grand scale of that battle, with people dying in lakhs, had not moved us much because we could not see any glory in killing people with superior machine guns. Individual deeds of glory get just a passing mention in such a battle. All you remember about it is the numbers – so many Australians, so many New Zealanders, so many Turks died in the battle.

Maybe it needs a Homeric treatment to make it glorious.

However, the Trojan War, which happened long ago, and which also was a ‘world war’ for those times, is much more interesting for us, mainly because of the Homeric epic. We know the Greek and Trojan heroes by names and we know their personalities, their deeds, the events that took place, and we also know the interfering Greek Gods and their machinations.

I suppose, the smaller scale of the Trojan War makes it much more appealing and when it gets to individual combat -- say between Achilles and Hector or between Bhim and Duryodhan or between Karna and Arjun -- it becomes absolutely riveting.

(The superb illustrations in ‘Chandamama’, where we read the Iliad (translated in our own mother tongue) at the tender age of 7-8 years, must also have contributed to our interest in Troy.)

Thus, we could see in our minds eye, the ‘ten thousand ships’ anchored on the vast expanse of the seashore, we could see the ‘tall walls of the Ilium’, (Now reduced to much less height due to earthquakes) the well-guarded gates. We could visualize Achilles’ chariot dragging Hector’s body on the broad plain before Troy and could feel Priam’s and Hecuba’s anguish at the sight.

{ Mustapha pronounced ‘Achilles’ as ‘Akhilesh’, which sounded more like an Indian name rather than a Greek name. }

The visit to Troy was more of a literary ecstasy for us rather than just a visit to the archeological excavations by Schliemann. (More commonly called ‘the Digs’ or ‘the Ruins’.)

Mustapha told us that the treasure discovered by Schliemann was in Berlin museum, from where it had disappeared during the WWII, only to reappear at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. When he was in Moscow, he had made an appeal to the Director of Pushkin Museum that the treasure should be returned to Turkey.

At this, I politely pointed out to him that in that case, Turkey should also return to India, the famous Peacock Throne of Shah Jehan , which was looted by Nadir Shah from Delhi and which was supposed to be in Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Mustapha made a feeble attempt to recover the lost ground by saying that the Peacock Throne was ‘given’ by Nadir Shah to the Ottomans, while Russia had ‘taken’ the treasure.

“That is what the ‘give and take’ is all about” we said with a grin. Being a sport that he is, he too laughed.

The ‘fake’ Trojan Horse standing as a tourist attraction at the entrance to the ‘digs’, adds rather than diminishes the charm of the place, though the guide Mustapha made some scathing remarks about it. He thought it was a blot on the sacred landscape, but the tourists playing hide-and-seek inside the horse (including me) were having a whale of time. (or should I say ‘a horse of a time’)

Mustapha told us that the wooden horse made for the movie ‘Troy’ looked so old and dilapidated, that the tourists started thinking that it was ‘The Original Trojan Horse’ from the Trojan times.

Now it is somehow prevented from falling apart by tying the wooden planks together with ropes and graces the garden on the waterfront at Canakkale.

We came back from Troy and after the lunch, went to have a ‘dekko’ at the said horse.

Then the group of 6 people who were going to Selchuk was put on the public bus by the tour operators and to our delight, we discovered that the British couple were also bloggers and wrote on travelblog.org, where I too keep my travel-blogs as well as on Sulekha. They were starting on a round-the-world tour for two years.


One more Trojan Horse

At Selchuk our ‘transferman’ was absent, and I was quite upset. We had to take a taxi to the hotel and phone the tour operators to find out when they would be picking us up for the next day’s program.

One or two glitches always happen on a tour.