Gallipoli - Saturday 13 April

Reflecting on the Turkey of 40 years ago and today, one thing illustrates the changes wrought in the country, for which Australia can claim some responsibility: the changed attitudes to Gallipoli. The Turks now celebrate it as much as we do.

Some forty years ago, we struggled to get more than a handful of Australians and a few Turks, to join us on 25 April on the Gallipoli peninsular.  In those days very few Turks recalled the events of 1915 with the same reverence that we showed to the battle on the peninsular - only the very old and some military historians  

Now, thousands of Australians crowd onto this thin strip of European Turkey stretching out into the Aegean Sea. Such has been the impact in Turkey of our massive, and now fairly ordered and sober, celebrations, that the Turks have adopted the event as their own, inspired at least in part by the way we conduct them.  They now describe their defense of the peninsular, including their successful blockade of the Dardanelles that preceded it, as a ‘turning point’ in their short history as an independent nation. A young school boy we met at the markets in a remote Turkish town in Anatolia, responded with a cry of 'ANZAC!' when we told him we were from Australia.  The Attaturk Mausoleum in Ankara now features the Gallipoli defense in a diorama that is the exact counterpoint of one in the national war memorial in Canberra - viewed from the heights rather than the beaches. 

The defense of the straits and the peninsular was certainly the basis upon which Mustafa Kemal [Attaturk] built a reputation for heroism and which formed a springboard for his campaign in the 1920’s for Turkish independence and recovery of territories.  There is, in this sense, a curious parallel between Turkish and Australian history: Gallipoli was a glorious lost battle for the ANZACs and a victory for the Turks; but Australia and its allies won the war. The Turks lost every other battle of the First World War in which they were engaged and went down with their German allies in the overall conflagration.  But we both celebrate the battle: the Turks as a turning point as I said and we as the coming of age of a nation federated just 14 years before the landings at ANZAC Cove. Sharon and I posed for this photograph identifying the Cove with the beaches in the background. The landscape and the memorials are as memorable and moving as ever.

Into Greece

After Gallipoli we travelled north up the peninsular into European Turkey and then crossed the border into Greece.

We stayed for two nights in Kavala, which is nearby to the ancient town of Philippi.  We were picking up the footsteps of Saint Paul who has crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Thrace.  Here, Paul delivered his first sermon in Europe and converted his first European, a fairly well off woman by the name of Lidia, a 'god-fearer'.

Kavala is in the most Moslem part of Greece due to its 400 years or so as part of the Ottoman Empire. villages in teh country side seem to feature as many mosques as churches and I heard Turkish being spoken in the town.