Touring around Turkey: Gallipoli

We’ve started our 6-day tour around Turkey with a small-group local guide company. But first, we needed to drive over 4 hours from Istanbul to the Gallipoli peninsula.

Our starting point was Anzac Cove, where the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps made their landings in the Gallipoli campaign—their first engagement in World War I. We had seven Australians on our minibus, some coming with names or gravesite locations of relatives.

Our tour focused only on the battle sites of the Anzac contingent, which also included Maori people and Indian Gurkha soldiers. The British and French made their landings farther down, at the tip of the peninsula. As most know, the campaign resulted in disastrous bloodshed on both sides—Ottoman/German and Allies. And was unsuccessful from the Allied standpoint —ultimately resulting in evacuation.

Our guide did a great job of providing a balanced insight into the strategies, victories, and challenges faced by both sides. Sometimes walking, sometimes driving, we retraced the footsteps of the Anzac forces as they aimed for higher ground, always under the watchful eye of the Ottoman army.

While we had the beautiful beach landing sites to ourselves, as well as most of the cemeteries, by the time we got to the highest ground, with the largest cemetery (and statue of the Turkish general and founder of the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk), the site was mobbed with children on school field trips.

At the end of this sobering , but informative tour, we took a short ferry ride to get to our hotel in Çanakkale (with massive numbers of schoolchildren!). Another excellent Turkish dinner featuring pastry-wrapped fish and saffron shrimp, was slightly marred by the fact that the restaurant allowed smoking 🙄Read more