Battlefields, New And Old

The last few days have almost been slightly depressing. Not that I haven't been having a good time, but the subject matter of the tours has gotten a little grim since I did back to back Troy and Gallipoli. So much historical death and destruction; You better believe this will be a history lesson! The hostel that I had checked into does tours of Troy but I wanted to cheap out and go it alone. Unfortunately Troy has a bit of a bad reputation for being in such poor condition so most cheap backpackers will cheap out at full strength and not go at all, so I failed to find anyone who would go there with me. Really the only reason to go there at all is because it conjures up such elaborate images in the hearts of those people back home who don't know that it's one of the least inspiring ruins in the Mediterranean.

I took a bus 30 minutes to the drop off point for Troy and found the entrance price to be cheaper than what the people trying to sell me all inclusive tours said it would be. That figures. The first thing to see in there is the famed Trojan Horse, or at least some crude approximation of it. This one was fun though because you can climb up inside of it like I did for the picture. Back in town, they had what the horse from the 2004 Brad Pitt movie Troy. The movie version looks best so that's the shape that most of the souvenir venders sell in model form.

Thankfully this site has the best sign placards yet, with pictures of what some of the rock piles might have looked like before they got buried with thousands of years of debris. Ah hell, let's launch into the history lesson. The troy that people know about is the one that was sacked by the Macedonians around 1000 BC. The story is pretty long (read the Iliad) but basically prince Paris of Troy abducted queen Hellen of Macedonia. The Greeks then launched an 8 year war to get her back and after a long and unsuccessful siege, they managed to break into the fortress by way of subterfuge. Of course in real life Troy was a rich city state that controlled access to the Dardanelles (waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean) and the Greeks went to war over trade, not Hellen, but the end result is the same. This Troy that was sacked by the Greeks is called Troy VII and there are a total of 9 versions of the city Troy that were built on top of each other over thousands of years. This happened because of needs to expand and enlarge the citadel and because an earthquake every few hundred years had flattening effects.

By the time the Byzantines came to rule Troy, it was no longer a wealthy or important city and probably the temples were long since destroyed. The city lapsed into decay and was abandoned and eventually a hill of dirt covered everything that was once Troy. One of the reasons that these temples were flattened, besides earthquakes, was that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the mining industry collapsed and the price of metal increased dramatically. This forced local people to tear down old stone temples to claim the iron braces that helped hold together the marble columns and ceilings. It's amazing how much metal was needed to hold these structures together.

In 1868, a wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann (who was obsessed with the Iliad) became convinced that this hill was the site of ancient Troy after meeting an English archeologist who had made a few test digs at the site and determined it to be of unnatural origin. From reading the Iliad, Schliemann believed this to be the area that it would have been and he paid to have the site dug up. In a controversial move to archeology majors, he dug a 10 meter wide trench straight through the heart of the hill until he hit bedrock. Not the slow methodical kind of digging we're used to seeing but rather a mad dash for anything that would make headlines. From there he found that there were different layers of the city and after finding some gold treasure he declared victory and carted his find off to Germany. The treasure was taken to Russia at the end of WWII and can now be seen in Moscow (I've seen it).

Wow, that was a lot of history. I could go on about the blind poet Homer and the Iliad but you can just go Google it if you care. I took a long stroll through the site and got some pictures of some walls, more walls, a small theater, and a bunch of carved marble slabs that would have been the roof of a great temple at some point. Eventually I got bored and overwhelmed by all the Japanese tour groups and had to take the bus back to town. After a stroll along the waterfront I went back to the hostel and tried to learn as much as I could before visiting Gallipoli the next day.

I already knew that it was the scene of a major WWI battle, but watching the movie Gallipoli staring Mel Gibson helped. They show it every night at my hostel. You see, Gallipoli was a huge disaster for the Allied forces in WWI and the Australians and New Zealanders in particular remember the event vividly. To summarize, it was a failed D-Day that stretched into a 9 month bloodbath. They celebrate ANZAC day on April 25th (the date of the first Allied landings) and it's like their 4th of July. It's traditional for Aussies and Kiwis to travel to Tukey for the holiday and get drunk and loud and overcrowded. Normally, between 10 and 25 thousand of them show up though it was low this year because of the volcano cancelling flights.

What's that, you want me to tell you more of the history? It would be my pleasure. In WWI, Turkey (the Ottomans as they were then known) sided with the Germans. The Russians were with the Allies and Britain wanted to supply them through the Dardanelles so that they could open up a South Eastern front against the Germans. The plan was to make an amphibious landing at Gallipoli and to march north and take control of Istanbul. Doing this would both take Turkey out of the war and open up the supply route. In the first try, Churchill (who was admiral of the English Navy at the time) sent a combined fleet to sail up the waterway and shoot the hell out of any Turks. They ran into sea mines and several large cannons that the Turks took from their outdated ships and moved to land. Several battleships were lost and the Allies retreated. A couple months later they came back with an army and on April 25th the ANZACs (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) landed and took control of a thin strip of land. The spot they landed (a steep cliff) was not so good and they were pinned there for many months. The British and the French (as well as a bunch of Indians) landed at different sites and over the course of the battle they didn't make too much progress. It was trench warfare at its worst and in some places the trenches were as close as 8 meters.

The first site on the tour was Kabatepe, where most of the Ottoman Army was waiting for the invaders. It was a wide easy beach and the obvious point of attack but the Allies never landed there, instead choosing a point about 4 km to the North. It's also the site of the first of many Allied cemeteries. It's said that Gallipoli was the last of the 'gentleman battles' where both sides respected each other. There were periodic ceasefires to remove the bodies and there are some stories about a Turkish soldier who carried a wounded Australian back to the Allied trench and then went back to his own. This story was told by a former Australian Prime Minister so it's probably true in some form.

Next we went to ANZAC cove where they actually did land. The government built a wide road through the area that really destroys what the place would have looked like, but the tour buses can get through more easily I guess. It's really stupid. Anyways, when the ANZACs landed, the Turkish commander on duty, the soon to be famous Mustaffa Kemal (Attaturk), would not wait for orders from his general and ordered his 3000 men to attack. They didn't care for the idea since there were over 10000 invaders on the beach, but Mustaffa gave this order: "I don't command you to fight, I command you to die, because in that time our reinforcements will arrive" and as legend goes they all fought to the last man. It was a good move since it contained the invaders at the beach.

After that we went to another cemetery and then yet another high up on a mountain ridge called Lone Pine. All the other trees were cut down to make trenches. The Australians held this point for a while and there were some intense battles. The Mel Gibson movie highlights a famous moment when 4 successive waves of Australian youths charged from the trenches and were all cut down before making it to the other side. Gruesome stuff. One soldier sent home a pine cone from the tree, which later died, and it's the grandson of that tree that's growing there now, brought back from Australia by a veteran.

Finally we visited a site where Mustaffa Kemal was hit in the chest by a piece of shrapnel, while giving a speech, but was saved by the pocket watch over his heart. There were also some old trenches nearby, but they're like 90 years old so it's no surprise that they're not in great condition. We finished up with a short trip to a museum with lots of photographs, bomb shells, and uniforms to look at. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day, but I had made friends with a couple Aussies on the tour, and a young German guy named Micheal so we all went out for dinner and beers. Michael just traveled down from the Balkans where I'll be going after Greece so I tried to get some advice from him but he never actually left any of the capitols that he traveled between. He was just interested in drinking it seems, but I still liked him.

The next morning I got up early and caught the ferry out to the island of Gokceada. It's Turkey's largest island (they lost most of them to the Greeks in 1925, another story) though most of the inhabitants are Greek Orthodox which is very unusual. After getting to land I took a bus to the North side of the island which is popular for its beach but upon arrival I see no beach. There is a small strip of hotels next to a harbor and there are some nearby hills to climb up.

I climbed one of them in the afternoon heat and found the landscape to be a mixture of scree (loose rock fragments on a slope) and thorn bushes. I think the buses look really cool though so I'm not disappointed. They come in different shades of grey and green and aren't something that I'm going to tackle in my sandals and shorts so I didn't get as far as I would have liked.

After that I went back to my hotel room and took a long nap before parking myself at the only cafe with internet for dinner. I've been here for hours drinking cherry juice and catching up on emails. The sunset was lovely and in the evening several venders started selling jewlery near the water and a few dozen Turkish tourists showed up. I thought that I was the only one in town during the day. Tomorrow I'm going to hitchhike inland and explore some of the other valleys. After that I'm going to head up to Istanbul to meet Sam at the airport. I've got to say that I'm pretty excited to see her... I could use some company and I can't think of anyone better to fill that role. Also, it's been almost 4 months since I last saw her and it's been pretty tough for me. Yep, good things are on the horizon.