a: Sardis

Ancient Lydia was a large area in the southwestern part of Turkey in Asia Minor, and Sardis was the ancient capital of the Lydians. Like all cities in the area, it has seen many masters. The most interesting era may well be that of the Lydian Empire from around 700 BC until 546 BC, when Croesus (563-546 BC), was king. He was the last ruler of the Lydians, and he was defeated by the Persians under Cyrus II. In turn, these Persians were later defeated by Alexander the Great. And when Alexander died, Sardis was ruled by Lysimachos, one of Alexander’s generals.

    Sardis is mentioned in Revelation 1:10-11 as the location of one of the seven churches of Christianity. “On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet,  which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.”  The ruins of several of these cities we visited and are mentioned in this chapter. By the way, Philadelphia, this city of Brotherly Love, is not the one in Pennsylvania in the USA, but about 26 miles southwest of Sardis. It is now known as Alasehir, but originally it was founded in 189 BC by king Eumenes II from Pergamon for the love for his brother, Attalus II, who also became his successor.

    Before he went into war against Cyrus II, Croesus had asked the Oracle in Delphi what the outcome of the war would be and the answer was “that a great empire would tumble”. He thought this portended victory, but in reality the great empire that tumbled was his.

    Croesus was a well-known king, because he coined the first gold and silver coins and was a benefactor to many. You may recall the saying: “as rich as Croesus”. Most of the coins are actually minted from “electrum”, which was an alloy of gold and silver. A lot of the gold came from the river Pactolus, which flowed through Sardis.

    There is the story of King Midas about the source of all this gold. He was probably king of Phrygia in the late 8th century BC, when Phrygia was at its zenith. Phrygia is not far to the East of Lydia. The capital of Phrygia was Gordium, famous because it was here that Alexander the Great hacked open the Gordian knot. Gordium was sacked in 695 BC and later became a subject of Lydia.

    Ovid relates in his Metamorphosus XI that the satyr Silenus, the foster father of the god Dionysus, was roaring drunk one day when he was found by some Phrygian peasants and taken to king Midas. King Midas treated him kindly to get him over his hangover, and a grateful Dionysus then granted him a wish. The greedy Midas said he wanted everything he touched to turn into gold. Dionysus initially demurred, but Midas insisted he knew what he wanted. So he was granted his wish. This made him ecstatic at first, as he applied his new-found powers to a large variety of items. But then he found out that the food he wanted to eat and the wine he wanted to drink all turned into inedible gold at his touch. And then his daughter also turned into a golden statue when he touched her.

    He had to beseech Dionysus to undo his powers, and the god relented. So he was ordered to take a bath in the stream Pactolus, to become normal again. In this process a lot of gold was deposited in the river. That is why this stream,  which flowed through the market-place in Sardis was said in antiquity to “carry golden sands”, which was in reality gold dust from Mt Timolus upstream.  And over the centuries, a lot of gold was mined from this river, and many citizens in Lydia became wealthy. The locals used lamb fleece to collect the gold; and this is probably the source of the legends of the Golden Fleece.

    Then there is the story of Candaulus and Gyges, kings of Lydia.  As described in Book I of the Histories by the great chronicler Herodotus, Gyges was not of royal blood, but a member of the Royal Bodyguard to Candaulus, who was then king. Candaulus was so proud of his beautiful wife that he insisted that Gyges see her naked and ordered him to hide behind the door in their bedroom to view her when she undressed for bed. Gyges did his best to decline the king’s invitation, but had no choice but to accept. But when she was naked, the queen saw Gyges when he slipped out. She was so incensed, that the next day she gave Gyges the choice. He would kill her husband and make himself king, or he would be put to death himself. He chose the easiest way out. In those days it was most humiliating to be seen naked.

    But the Lydians were indignant at the murder of Candaulus, so Gyges sought to justify his ascendancy to the throne by petitioning for the approval of the Oracle of Delphi. He didn’t have any Super PACS to plead his case, so he opted for the direct approach. He greased the process by offering expensive gifts to Delphi, including a huge amounts of silver ornaments and vessels of gold of various kinds, the most noteworthy being 6 mixing bowls of gold weighing thirty talents, or nearly 2500 lbs. Money talks, now as well as in ancient times.  So the Oracle duly confirmed Gyges as the rightful King.  But because there was murder involved, the Priestess of the Shrine foretold that his dynasty would fall in the fifth generation. That was when Croesus was king.

    Sardis is also the place where the Persian Expedition started, as described so well by Xenophon. Here, in around 402 BC, 10,000 Greek soldiers joined Cyrus in his expedition to unseat his brother Artaxerxes to win the Persian Empire after the death of their father Darius. But Cyrus was killed in the battle of Cunaxa, which was located well in Persia close to Babylon, (now Syria) So the Greeks were stranded there, thousands of miles from home. They had to fight their way back to Greece.

    The main avenue of Sardis was an imposing 55 feet wide and lined with shops.

    There were the remains of the largest synagogue is Asia Minor. The timber roof and many columns are all gone, but the altar and many of the mosaics on the floors are still visible. If they were in better shape, they would probably have been carted off to some distant museum.

right: Closeup of some of the mosaics on the floor of the Jewish synagogue.

    In the same area is a huge bath house - gymnasium complex. Athletics were performed on a grassy lawn in front of this complex. The large, still standing structure is called the Marble Court.

left: The Marble Court with the grassy field in the foreground.

     It is interesting to note that the inscription on the entablature (large horizontal beam above the capitals of the fluted column) are still in ancient Greek.  These buildings were originally built in the 1st - 3rd century AD, and are Roman structures. Written Greek was derived  from the script used in Miletus as early as 600 BC, but still used at that time.

right: In this Roman structure the inscription on the entablature is still in ancient Greek

    In the north of Sardis are the remains of the Temple of Artemis, the 4th largest temple dedicated to this important deity.  It was started in the 3rd century BC by the Greeks and finished in the 2nd century by the Romans. The columns in this temple were huge, as can be seen from the picture.

left: The massive columns in the ruins of the Temple of Artemis in Sardis.

    At one time there were 96 columns in two rows on each side of the temple. These two rows were needed because the size of the temple required a heavy roof.

    In the middle of the building was the treasury, and there was an inscription telling the story of a man who borrowed money from the Temple and could not repay the debt. He then became a slave for 20 years.

    Ordinary people could not come inside the Temple. Access was only granted to the front antechamber, where they can offer their gifts. And graciously accepted and used by and for the priests, for sure. After all, they were the one-percenters of their time.

    b: Kuşadasi and Ephesus.

From Sardis we drove North to Kuşadasi. It was a long but beautiful drive over the Bozdaǧ mountains with marvelous views of the Sardis Valley. We could see the Pactolus River, where King Midas bathed to rid himself from his golden touch. It was a bright, sunny, and cloudless day, reminding us that Herodotus said that “Nowhere does the sun shine more brightly than in Ionia.. “. Finally we saw the “wine-red” Aegean Sea, as Homer describes it, come into view. But the sea was dark-blue, reflecting the color of the skies. The “wine-dark” sea appears many times in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and it is still a matter of conjecture why Homer used this color to describe the water.

    Our stay that evening was in the Festival Kuşadasi Resort, on the shores of the sea. The hotel had a large private beach, but the water was still too chilly to swim. Most of the guests in this hotel were young and French. We were expecting the place to be overrun by Germans. Maybe it was just a fluke.

    Today, in 2012, Kuşadasi is a very busy cruise ship terminal, disgorging thousands of tourist for day trips visiting neighboring Ephesus. Close by is the Basilica of St. John, built on the site where St. John wrote his scriptures.

    On the road to Ephesus, we saw a town where bottle shards have been mounted on the chimneys to prevent storks from nesting. But there were other chimneys where the stork is welcome. A stork can build a nest in 8 days.  During the day, the female stork stays on the eggs; during the night, the male stork keeps the egg warm. As the baby chicks grow, they can fall out of their nests. Solicitous homeowners often put a blanket under the nests to cushion the fall. Nevertheless, if more than three chicks hatch, the fourth is left behind, when the storks move away.

    Ephesus used to be a harbor, but the sea is now many miles away because the harbor silted over from deposits from the little Macander River. Silting is rapid; the calculated rate is something like 3 1/2 meters/year. After some 2000 years, the town is now some 7 kms from the seashore.

    There is a lot to see in Ephesus and I refer to the many guidebooks, where more comprehensive descriptions are available. I will just be covering some random points of interest to me, and I will sometimes digress.  The first large section close to the tourist entrance is the Audium, a small amphitheater seating about 1200, which is where the city Parliament convened. Just as in our modern days, they also observe politics and graft. An example is that in front of the leather tanning shops were vessels where passersby could use as urinals. This urine was used to tan leather, but then the neighbors complained of the stench. The leather tanning guild responded by donating leather seats to the Audium for the members of Parliament to sit in comfort during sessions. And the piss pots stayed where they were.

    The name Ephesus may have come from the time the legendary woman warriors, the Amazons, established the city and named it after one of their queens, Apassos. Lysimachus, mentioned earlier here as the general of Alexander the Great who became the ruler of this area after his death, had as first wife Nikea, who wanted a city named after her. That was in 320 BC and that was how Nicea was founded. But then his second wife, Arcione, also wanted a city named after her. So Ephesus was renamed Arcione. Even a famed warrior as Lysimachus had to keep the peace in the family. But well after Arcione was safely dead, the city was again renamed Ephesus.

    The city was large; it had two agoras, one for political and one for commercial purposes. It was here that Demetrius, a jeweler, rallied against St. Paul, because Christianity was taking away his business of people buying his silver images and statuettes of Artemis. St. Paul worked as a tentmaker in Ephesus, but is of course best known for his preachings in the Great Theater. And he also spent some time incarcerated in a building up on the mountains.

    The commercial section was huge; it already had a double piping systems in place; one for clean water, and one for dirty water and waste.   Heraclitus lived here. “Panterai, panterai,” he said for immortality, meaning that everything changes. The Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World, was here. It took ten years to built the edifice, in around 560 BC, and bankrolled by the aforementioned Croesus. It was destroyed by arson in 401, and only the foundations and a stump of a pillar now remains. The remaining pillars are now in the Aya Sophia in Istanbul.

    Then there is the story the Seven Sleepers, a group of young Christians, who hid in a cave just outside Ephesus to escape persecution during the reign of Emperor Decius. They fell asleep, and only woke up some 300 years later, under the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius II, without having aged at all. When they woke up, they sent a man to get some food from the village. But the shopkeeper did not recognize the coins proffered, became suspicious and notified the authorities. Interestingly, this story has been reported not only in many Christian sources, including the Roman Martyrology, an exhaustive list of the saints recognized by the Church, but in the Qur’an as well.

    “How did they do it?”, a sceptic would say.  “Just believe it”, the Church will say. Well, if you can believe that, you should also believe this.  Physics tells us that time goes slower in a location of higher gravity. All you need to imagine is that an alien spaceship took them for a short trip to a Black Hole in space, where gravity is immensely larger than on earth. And since time is inversely proportional to gravity, they would age only a few hours, while the world would have gone merrily on in those 300 years. And if you think this is a farfetched idea, then how do you explain what was reported.

left: The main road towards the Library of Celsus, seen in the distance. It was packed with tourists. Well, during its apex, there would be just as many citizens walking this street in Ephesus as tourists do now. Some 250,000 people lived there in the first century BC.

right: Section of a frieze of the Temple of Hadrian, which always elicits a lot of admiration from the onlookers.  They are beautiful, but these are actually casts; the original is in the Ephesus Museum.

    The high point of Ephesus is also the most photographed site, the Library of Celsus, originally built in 125 AD, in memory of Mr. Celsus, obviously. The facade has been meticulously reconstructed.  Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaenus served as Governor of Roman Asia in the Roman Empire. When he died, the 90,000 talents he left behind was used to design this library and which is also his tomb. At one time it had as many as 25,000 volumes.

   Contrary to stories in some guidebooks, Cleopatra did not take any of these volumes from this library to Alexandria. This would have been a miracle, because she lived more than a century earlier.

left: The Gates of Augustus, to the right of the Library of Celsus, very often overlooked by visitors. They were built by 2 persons who were freed slaves.

     Then there is the renowned painter Apelles of Kos, of whom it was said that he was the only person who Alexander the Great allowed to paint him. An oft-repeated tale was that when painting one of his concubines, Campaspe, he fell in love with her. And Alexander the Great graciously gave her to him as a mark of appreciation. Alexander obviously had more than one concubine, but it was still a very classy gesture. In the House of the Faun in Pompeii, there is a painting depicting the Battle of Issus, where with a smaller force, Alexander decisively defeated the Persian Army under Darius II. This mosaic was presumably made after a painting by Apelles. But I digress.

    One day, in the amphitheater of Ephesus, Apelles was in competition with Kallimakos1, who had made such a life-like looking painting of a nature still-life, that the birds went for the grapes in the painting. Apelles than said that it was easy to fool animals, but that it takes a great artist to fool humans. Then he parted the curtains of his painting for the audience to see.

    The canvas was blank.

left: The amphitheater of Ephesus

    As you leave the ruins of the city, you walk down Via Mares, the old road to the port. This road was lighted at night by torches made from the narthex plant. This was the first example of street lighting. These torches  would burn for 5 - 6 hours.

    In the distance you could see, during the day obviously, on a distant mountain, the building where St Paul was said to have been incarcerated.

left: A Narthex plant (Ferula communis), a tall herbaceous perennial, used in antiquity as the material for torches.

    Ephesus slowly declined in power because (a) the harbor had silted over, (b) the rise of Christianity made the worship of Artemis redundant, (c) there were earthquakes, and (d) many other bad things in life. Those things happen. 

1: The name Kallimakos may be incorrect; it could have been Antiphilos, another painter who was known to be at odds with him..

    c: The Virgin Mary’s Tomb.

    Some 10 miles away from Ephesus in the mountains is a house attributed to be the Virgin's last house where she lived and where she also died. This is obviously a major Christian site. But there are other places who jealously claim the same honor. After all, one should consider the financial fallout of being able to set up lucrative commercial shops and other tourist services for the great unwashed masses coming here on pilgrimage or just out of curiosity.

right: The Virgin Mary’s Tomb

    Just in Jerusalem there are two and in Antioch there is one place claiming to be the final resting place of the Virgin. They contemptuously detract the Ephesus location, because why would Mary travel so far from Jerusalem. “To be near John”, saith the Ephesus crowd.

    Ephesus claims this is the real place because:

1. (a)when Jesus was dying on the Cross, he said to Mary: “Behold Thy Son”. And then he addressed John and said: ”Behold Thy mother”. St. John moved and lived here in Ephesus and Mary came along with him. Here in Ephesus St John wrote his Gospel. And St. John died here. ”Not true”, saith the detractors triumphantly, “Jesus never specifically mentioned the name John to take care of Mary” when he was on the Cross. “Aren’t they getting picky”, would you say.?
   

2. (b) The 3rd World Eucharistical Council met here in 431 to proclaim Mary to be the Mother of God.
   

3. (c)A German stigmata, Anna Emmerich, described in detail the house, the small spring nearby, and the view of the Aegean Sea in the distance, even though she had never been out of Germany.
   

4. (d)The remnants of a 1st century building was found in the indicated place, below the ruins of the 4th century church. And to rub salt in the wounds of the other sites, the local population celebrate, since time immemorial, an “Ascension of Mary” Day on August 15 each year.
   

    Well, are there winners? Yes, all the manufacturers of cheap religious trinkets in Bangladesh and elsewhere, because there is an advantage in having more than one site. The total demand for your products will be larger.

    d: Smyrna, now Izmir

    It was another beautiful day in Ionia, where the sun shines brightly, as we left Kuşadasi on our way to Pergamon. We drove by Selchuk, a town close to Ephesus. Selchuk is an ancient town. Here was an Ottoman Castle, the foundation of which was laid in the 1st century AD. Close to it is the Basilica of St. John, where St John wrote his scriptures.

    We then drove through Izmir, the 3rd largest city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara. In ancient history this city was called Smyrna. Homer was born here around the 8th century BC. St. Polycarp was burned here for heresy. In those days it also had the best university in Asia Minor, called the University of the Aegean.

    Smyrna was besieged by the Persians under Xerxes on his march to conquer Greece. The city fathers asked and were granted two days to deliberate the surrender. But the population decided to abandon the city and the city fathers dropped an iron anchor in the harbor and proclaimed: “we will return when this bar floats on the waters”. They left and went further south and eventually settled in Marseille. When Xerxes came back two days later, he found the city deserted.

    The Turkish War of Independence started here in Izmir. The war was waged by the Turkish Nationalists against the Allies, after the country was partitioned following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. But then the Allies retreated and left it to the Greeks to control the area.  Here, on May 15, 1919, the Turkish journalist Hasan Tahsin fired the first shot for Independence. The city was almost completely destroyed in this war, mostly between the Greek occupational forces and the Turkish nationalists.

     Izmir is a large, industrial city today.

left: Kemal Ataturk and his Turkish forces enter Izmir in triumph. Painting by Ahmet Akbulut (1869 - 1938)

    e: Pergamon

    In the afternoon we arrived in Pergamon, an ancient Greek City, located to the north and west of the modern city of Bergama. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon during the Hellenistic Period under the Attalid dynasty (281-133 BC). The Book of Revelation notes Pergamon as the location of one of the seven churches of Asia.

    At the entrance we passed the monumental Red Basilica dedicated to the Egyptian deities, most probably Isis and/or Serapis. It was constructed from brick by the Romans in the 2nd century AD, but seemed to have been destroyed soon afterwards. It was rebuilt in the 4th century AD. The temple was large, 200 feet long and 85 ft wide. It felt unusual to have a temple here dedicated to an Egyptian deity.

    The road went up a steep hill to reach the Acropolis of Pergamon. On the top is the Temple of Trajan, with next to it the Palace of king Eumenes II (197 - 159 BC)

    The temple is partly dug into the hill, and partly cantilevered out, supported by a barrel vault construction. From the terrace of the Temple, one can see the smaller Temple of Dionysus some 100’ below on another plateau.

right: Ruins of the Temple of Trajan. In the lower front parts of the barrel vault construction are visible.

left: This is a sketch I made of Ancient Pergamon. The top left shows the general disposition of the buildings. The bottom half shows the barrel vault construction of the Temple of Trajan.

right: Barrel vault construction below Temple of Trajan for structural support

    Next to the palace of king Eumenes is the Library, which at one time had as many as 200,000 volumes. It was becoming a threat to the eminent position of the Alexandria library, which had some 700,000 volumes, so the Egyptians prohibited the export of papyrus to Pergamon, to discourage famous scholars from jumping ship from Alexandria to Pergamon.

    Eumenes II, not to be outdone, then ordered his people to come up with a substitute.  They did, and developed parchment, made from the skin of an unborn sheep and then treated with a variety of chemicals. Many of these documents were taken by Marc Anthony as a gift to Cleopatra.

    Halfway down the hill from the Library is now an open field with just a few columns. But here once stood the magnificent Altar of the Temple of Zeus.

At the end of the 19th century, Germans excavated the acropolis and collected thousands of fragments from the site of the Altar. These were then shipped to Berlin, where the Altar was painstakingly reconstructed. You can now see the white marble Altar in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

    It is a superb monument and it is also the most famous item in the Museum. The two pictures shown we took several years earlier when we visited Berlin.

left: Here, where now red poppies and other wildflowers bloom, was the site where the magnificent Altar of the Temple of Zeus once stood.

below: The restored Altar of Zeus.  Part of the Telephos Frieze of the  Altar is shown above. These monuments are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum on the Inseln-Museum in Berlin. One can imagine the superb quality of the original altar.

    To the left of the Altar, and constructed in the hillside of the Acropolis, is the Theater. It has a capacity of 10,000, with the Royal Box in the middle and lower part of the Theater.

    f: The Asklepion

Across the Acropolis, on another hill, is the Asklepion, a famous healing center. Galen, one of the three most famous physicians of antiquity, worked here. For the record, the other two were Hippocrates in Athens (third century AD), and the Persian Avicena, in Isfahan, a province in current Iran (8th Century AD). As one enters the portal, the sign on the entrance facade reads tauntingly: “Death may not enter here”.

left: On the main street of Asklepion. In the distance, on the hill, is Pergamon.

    But since Death is functionally illiterate, he still comes there at the most inconvenient times. The attendants countered this by surreptitiously removing the recently deceased patients away at night and then describing the disappearance of the patients to their family as an act of the Gods.

    Treatment of the sick was by psychotherapy, interpretation of dreams, baths in radioactive mineral springs, herbs, and relaxation. Patients were encouraged to walk and to watch plays in the specially constructed theater seating 2000. The Center became especially well-known because of Galen (131 - 210 AD), who was born here, but studied in Alexandria and later in Greece. He became the foremost physician of this times. In 162 AD he moved to Rome to be the personal physician to emperor Marcus Aurelius.

right: The theater in Asklepion for the patients to watch plays and relax. This is obviously not a place for the penurious to find a cure.

left: A pillar in the middle of the town. Does it depict a snake? Or a sperm fertilizing an egg? If so, how did they know that already in 200 BC. Somebody must have good eyes.

    Medicine was already quite advanced in those days. Condoms were already being manufactured from sheep’s intestines.

 

  g: Troy

After lunch in Pergamon, we went on the long drive over the Mt. Ida mountain range to Troy. The highest mountain top here is 2300 meters. There were thousands of olive trees on the slopes, some of them centuries old. Their branches a few feet above ground are ever so often lopped off, so the trunk becomes larger and stronger with time. Olive trees are almost never cut down, and many people bury their treasures at the base of a particular tree, because the tree will still be there many years down the road.

    It was here on the slopes of Mt. Ida that Paris, son of king Priam of Troy, was herding his sheep when Hermes, on orders of Zeus, came to him.  Previous to that, the Goddess of Discord had rolled a golden apple to the assembly of gods with the note that it had to be given to the fairest of them all. And Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all claimed that honor.

    So Paris was given the golden apple and the job of giving it to the fairest of three goddesses. They were Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, who were in order, the wife of Zeus, the Goddess of wisdom, and the Goddess of love and beauty. Zeus, in his infinite wisdom as the head of the family, judiciously decided it was not his job to make the decision. He well knew that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

    Even goddesses were not askance to using bribes to gain their goals. Hera promised Paris power, Athena promised him wisdom and Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. There was no contest for a young male with raging hormones. And so Paris gave the Golden Apple to Aphrodite.

    And the most beautiful woman at that time was the incomparable Helen, wife to the Greek king Menelaus, who Aphrodite later helped Paris to seduce.  This was the beginning of the Trojan War, so majestically described by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Because of Homer, Troy is a place full of history, and we were looking forward to see it. But in reality there was not very much to see and photograph. It was just one excavation trench after another; they look very much the same. Troy is actually a multilevel city built on top of each other.

    Troy I,   2900 - 2500 BC, destroyed by fire

    Troy II,  2500 BC

    Troy III  2500 - 2280 BC

    Troy IV  2280 - 2100 BC

    Troy V   2100 - 1800 BC

    Troy VI  1800 - 1250 BC. This is the Troy of Homer’s Iliad

    Troy VII 1250 - 1025 BC

You can walk across the sites and the various excavations and they all look the same to the untrained eye.

right: As a sop to the tourist, there is this wooden structure of the Horse. So I climbed inside it, and waved from the top window.

left: This is a view from the ancient ramparts; one can imagine the harbor close by. That was centuries ago, and the land has silted over, moving the sea several miles away. The sea used to be at the road, which you can see as a thin white line between the purple patches in the distance in the picture.

    One can imagine Achilles and Hector fighting here, at the base of the city walls. And from the top of these city walls, poor Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache, was thrown to his death, so that he could not avenge the death of his father when he grew up.

   h: Gallipoli

Troy was a destination steeped in history, the fertile source of blockbuster movies so beloved in Hollywood, but the site itself was disappointing. So, after a few hours we left Troy for our hotel in Çanakkale, only some 25 kms away. From hotel Akol, we had a nice view of the Dardanelles, the harbor, and the ferries plying the waters across the Straits.

    The Dardanelles are now called the Àanakkale Bogazi, which is about 1.4 kms wide at its narrowest.  In ancient times the Strait was called the Hellespont. It is usually very windy and not that easy to cross, but Xerxes of Persia crossed here with his army on a bridge of pontoons in 481 BC. Alexander the Great duplicated the feat some 150 years later.

right: This is the location where the straits are at its narrowest and where Xerxes of Persia and later Alexander the Great crossed with their armies on a bridge built on pontoons.

    Turkey under the Ottoman rule had rather unwillingly joined Germany in WW I. In March 1915 Winston Churchill started the Gallipoli campaign by assembing a large armada to steam up the Dardanelles with the intention of capturing Istanbul, thinking it would be easy. But big guns on shore and floating mines sank several ships and forced the fleet back.

    A month later Allied forces landed on the west shores of the Gallipoli peninsula to capture the gun positions. The Gallipoli campaign lasted 9 months, with huge losses on both sides, before the Allied forces retreated.  Great Britain suffered 200,000 casualties, with 36,000 dead. French casualties of 47,000 were half their total contingent. Australia lost 8,000 men, a huge number for the sparsely populated country. Turkey threw in 500,000 troops, half of which became casualties with more than 50,000 dead. Turkey lost a whole generation in vain, because many of these were officers and academically trained people.

    A simple, moving plaque at the Gallipoli Museum state that “In 1921, no students graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Istanbul University. These students, who would have graduated, joined the 8th division to fight in Gallipoli and they were all killed.” As Ken, the Australian in our group said: "We will never know whether  one of these doctors would have found a cure for cancer or some other dreadful disease and save many lives ...."

    And all these deaths were in vain. Because two short years later Germany lost the war and so did Turkey by default. Allied warships entered the Dardanelles and occupied Istanbul. And the Allied Forces then chopped up Turkey in parts to be distributed to the victors.

    People in England and France seldom talk about the Gallipoli campaign, (the campaign they lost) but hundreds from Australia and New Zealand come back every year for commemorative ceremonies around the well–tended  graves. 

left: The well-tended graves of the fallen Anzac soldiers in Gallipoli.

    Turkey made a big effort in healing between them and the Anzac forces. You see that in the the well–tended graves of Anzac fallen soldiers; the annual ceremonies on Anzac Day, drawings and statues of Turkish soldiers aiding wounded Anzac soldiers, and vv.

right:    This is the beach where the Anzac troops landed. A Turkish regiment, under Kemal Pasha, was waiting in the hills above. Kemal Pasha, later known as Kemal Atatürk, later led the fight for independent Turkey and is considered the father of the country. He was the first President of the modern Turkish republic.

    On a large wall in Gallipoli, he left the following inscribed message:

    “ Those heroes that shed their Blood

    and lost their lives,

    you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

    Therefore rest in Peace.

    There is no difference between the Johnnies

    and the Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side

    here in this country of ours.

    You, the Mothers,

    who sent their sons away from far away countries,

    wipe away your tears.

    Your sons are now in our bosom

    and are in Peace.

    After having lost their lives on this land, they have

    become our sons as well “

                                Atatürk 1934

   

The folly of war.