On The Heels of Achilles

Trojan horse (no, not the original)
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By Dan

Leaving the sleepy fishing village of Assos on November 5, we drove another 100 km. or so north and east to the town of Canakkale, which is on the southern side of the Dardanelles. For those of you who were asleep on that day in geography class, the Dardanelles are the narrow straits that separate Europe from Asia, and connect the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. (Istanbul and the Bosphorus, 300 km. to the east, are the other narrow spot separating the two continents.) So, all commerce going from the Med up towards Russia and Central Asia runs through this narrow stretch of water, and anybody with an army trying to get from Europe to Asia or vice versa needs to cross near here. Because of this key location, Canakkale and its environs have been the site of a whole lot of pushing and shoving for the last three millenia or so.

Trojan walls (yes, the original)
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First things first, though, and let’s talk about our accommodations. In our continuing efforts to experience every possible sort of sleeping alternative, we signed up for two nights at ANZAC House, which is a hostel in Canakkale. Truthfully, it wasn’t the classic hostel that I remember from 20 years ago, where you have to do a chore as part of the price, and the loudspeaker blasts you out of bed at 7:30. There were dorm rooms, although we got a “family room” that was more private and plenty spacious. (Not knowing how 20-somethings behave in the middle of the night these days, we figured that the kids didn’t need any education in that area just yet.) Abby managed to sleep walk her way off of the top bunk one night, but appears to have suffered no permanent damage as a result. The bathrooms were shared and across the hall, so we got to do plenty of sharing in that department. It was fun to hang out in the lobby and chat with the various folks coming through. I am increasingly amazed and pleased at how well the kids can jump right into things with strangers from foreign lands, and carry a conversation just fine. In fact, they even are getting comfortable enough that they’ll pull the legs of folks they haven’t known for more than a few minutes. Grayson really had a young woman going, trying to convince her that her snoring had kept him awake even down the hall. I don’t think that we’ll go out of our way to do a lot of hostelling, but it was a good change of pace (and money saver).

Cemetery at ANZAC Cove, Gallipoli
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We woke up on our first full day in Canakkale, ready for a long day of sight-seeing. Because of the distances, etc., we had signed up for a package tour to visit the area’s two main sites. But, after stepping foot outside, I was ready to call it all off and crawl back into bed. The temperature had dropped a bunch, and the wind was howling. Remember, we were putting on our swim suits first thing in the morning and swimming all day in the Med a week ago. Suddenly, it was 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind was blowing 35-40 miles per hour. That’s about 5 above zero with the wind chill, by my reckoning. There hadn’t been room in our bags for parkas and snowsuits, so we were getting by on fleeces and wind breakers. But, we soldiered on. . . .

In the trenches
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First stop was Troy, of Trojan War, wooden horse, Achilles, vulnerable heels, the Iliad and the Odyssey, USC Trojans (hiss. . .), Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, etc., fame. Yep, it’s a real place. Apparently, an amateur German archaeologist named Heinrich Schleimann was convinced that Troy existed, and showed up with shovel in hand in the late 19^th century. He had his German translation of Homer’s Iliad in hand, and just followed the descriptions of hills, plains, etc. After a little poking around, darned if he didn’t start turning up marble pillars and stone walls. It turns out that, like a lot of ancient stuff we’ve seen, there wasn’t just one city here. In fact, the experts believe that there were at least 12 separate cities built on the same site. When one faded into oblivion, for whatever reason, a generation or two later a new city would be built, often using some of the prior city as foundations. This makes it very complicated for archaeologists, who often might have to destroy newer stuff as they work their way down to the older. The pros do it right, and generally probably have a basic set of principles they follow. Heiny, on the other hand, had missed Archaeological Ethics 101 in school, and took the bulldozer method. He tossed aside Roman and other more recent stuff, as he pursued the city of King Priam with laser focus. Fortunately, he didn’t do too much damage, but it made for some interesting thinking. Truthfully, Troy was a little hard to follow, because there were so many different things piled on top of each other, and I was too busy trying to keep warm to catch everything that was being said. But, it was certainly worth a visit. For those of you who caught Brad and Orlando in their togas, I don’t think that the real Troy was quite as fancy as portrayed in the movie, and the walls definitely weren’t as high, but it did give you the basic idea. . . .

One of many Gallipoli memorials
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Back in Canakkale, we hopped on a ferry for the 10 minute ride across the Dardanelles to the Gallipoli Peninsula. Any Mel Gibson fan knows where we’re headed now. During World War I, while tragic losses of lives were occurring in the trench warfare in France and Belgium, an equally tragic scene was unfolding at Gallipoli. Apparently, over the course of nine months in 1915, as the British and their allies tried to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula, and thus control of the Dardanelles, access to the Black Sea, etc., there were no fewer than 500,000 casualties on both sides. Worst off were the Australian and New Zealand forces, who were called upon to support the king, boarded their ships to go help out, and ended up being used as cannon fodder by the British. In one of the great ironies of war, ANZAC forces spent months shooting at Turks fighting for the Ottoman Empire and vice versa. None of them had any particular beef with anybody else, and it was all rather absurd. The fighting was really awful: in many places, the trenches for the two sides were only 8 meters across, so an ignited hand grenade might make two, three, or even four trips back and forth before exploding. But, it was apparently a very human experience, too, with both sides often performing acts of kindness, generosity, and humanitarianism (when they weren’t shooting at each other).

For Australians and New Zealanders, Gallipoli is much like the Normandy beaches and D-Day for Americans: a place where large numbers of young men died within the last century, fighting bravely for their country. You could really see how moving the experience was for the Aussies and Kiwis with whom we visited the site. The sad distinction between Gallipoli and Normandy is that while at Normandy, the deaths were for a good cause that ultimately was successful, many of the deaths at Gallipoli were due to poor military leadership, they soldiers didn’t really have anything against the people they were fighting, and ultimately, it was all a waste, because the Allied forces withdrew after nine months. So, the message is as much about the folly of war as it is anything else. Obviously, an important message. A half-day course on Gallipoli should be required for every person in a position to commit troops to combat. A sobering thought, as Turkey gears up for military action against the Kurdish separatists in the east, American soldiers are dying in increasing numbers 1500 miles southeast of us in Iraq, and our president continues to demonstrate a complete inability to solve problems, or at least reduce bloodshed, American and otherwise.

I’ll now step down from my soapbox. And, for the record, despite the significant political tension between Washington and Ankara right now, the Turkish people – even Turkish navy guys guarding a military museum that Grayson and I visited -- have been incredibly warm to us.

By the way, kudos to Christina, whose last entry received an Editor's Choice flag from www.realtravel.com.  I'm so jealous, and feel major pressure to keep up!