The Apinautica - Turkey Final Section: Gallipoli
Continuing right along with this narrative. Once again LJ Idol both gave me motivation to get the next bit posted, and a theme. And in fact the theme was once again fortuitous -- "uncanny valley." Normally referring to creepy almost-lifelike dolls, I think it perfectly applies to what is going on here on the deeper level than sightseeing, facing a relationship that just isn't working like it once did.
( Immediately prior section)
I. Through the Night
8pm: “I need you here beside me” the girl I thought had broken up with me two weeks earlier is texting me. And she’s already bought herself overnight bus tickets from Istanbul to Çanakkale, the city beside Gallipoli.
“Can you tell me how to get from here to Çanakkale tonight?” I ask the bald man sitting at the frost desk at the other end of the rooftop lobby.
“In the morning I will show you” he grumbles, glaring at me over his reading glasses.
“No I need to be there by the morning” I emphasize.
“Sorry I can’t help you till morning,” he says, busying himself with reorganizing the desk. I narrow my eyes in his general direction, suspecting he just wants me to pay for another night.
I get out my laptop and try to make sense of the bus routes. They are all different companies serving different cities, to plot an immediate overnight multi-city route between two non-major cities is as challenging as escaping the famous Minotaur’s labyrinth.
I email the travel agent in Istanbul who has inexplicably seemed not to mind continuing to field questions from me even though being a cheapskate I hadn’t actually booked anything more than a bus ticket through them. In this case, despite being way past normal business hours, Ruta from True Blue Travel Agency calls me back within an hour of my email and helps me plot out a hare-brained bus-jumping scheme to get to Gallipoli.
The sour-looking man behind the hotel desk seems rather sullen as I check out that I had succeeded despite his lack of cooperation.
Step one: catch a local dolmuş to the city otogar (main bus terminal) where I have to be on a bus departing in an hour (10 pm). This end of town is dark and quiet. Nearby a grocer is wheeling his wares back indoors. I look up hopefully at every passing vehicle. I begin to fret.
Finally, the distinctive white minivan shape of a dolmuş comes along going the correct direction. I flag it down with my hand and hopped on with my seabag. “Autogar?” I ask the driver hopefully, and he nods.
An uneventful wait at the otogar, and seven hours rolling through the night on a Turkish inter-city bus - like all inter-city Turkish buses, it would put Greyhound to shame. Comfortable seats, working AC, occasional brief stops at nice rest stops (well lit, well stocked with food and snacks), not packed in like sardines. And they roll a tray down the aisle occasionally with complimentary snacks and tea or coffee, you know, like the airlines in America no longer do.
Arriving in Izmir, ancient Smyrna, at 5 am, what initially felt like a plenty-of-time hour-long layover turns frantic as I run around the enormous terminal, up and down deserted echoing halls and lonely stairs, trying to figure out where and how to buy my ticket for the 6 am bus on Troy Lines to Çanakkale. I find Troy Lines hidden in the basement at 5:40, and he wants to sell me a 9 am ticket. “No, there is a 6 am bus!” I insist. He called his supervisor. They looked at their computer and scratched their chins. They sell me a 6 am ticket.
I dash up the deserted stairs, and, with less than two minutes to spare, I breathlessly show my ticket and clamber aboard the 6 am bus. Four more hours smoothly whirring along the Turkish countryside as the sky slowly becomes a lighter shade of blue and the morning sun at last spills over the hills to illuminate valleys and villages.
“I’m just passing ‘Ana çıkış,’” I text Deniz the words on a large sign we pass.
“That means ‘main exit’ you dork” she laughingly responds.
The giant replica horse at Troy slipped by out the window and I knew we were close. Just months earlier Deniz and I had traveled there together. Happy fields of flowering sunflowers had surrounded us as we had made the short bus trip from Çanakkale to the Troy site.
For centuries the location of Troy had been a matter of speculation and search, its very existence often in dispute. In 1870 German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began excavations on what turned out to be the correct site of Troy, but destroyed much of the site due to his extremely rough methods, using dynamite (!!) and battering rams to quickly remove everything above the layer he thought was the correct one (it wasn’t) primarily just in search of shiny gold artifacts. The most famous Trojan War era layer in fact was one of the layers he blasted through.
Subsequent archeology has been more careful and in the current site, you can stroll amidst the historic walls and streets of Troy. As a history nerd, I had marveled at being able to put my hand on the actual walls of Troy. There was also, quite naturally, a wooden replica Trojan Horse one could enter, because of course there was.
But back in the present, my bus is soon pulling into the Çanakkale otogar. I easily recognized it from our earlier trip to Troy. And after the briefest of stops my bus is pulling out of it again, not having given anyone time to even disembark.
“We’re not stopping here??” I exclaim to my fellow passengers, jumping to my feet in alarm. Looking around all I see is wide brown eyes looking at me in surprise. Finally, a young woman a few rows back speaks up in English.
“We’re headed into town now”
“Oh. Thanks.” I said with relief, sitting down a sheepishly.
I step out of the bus in the center of town, just beside the Hellespont, the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, the gap through which Jason voyaged after the Golden Fleece, a gap which had flummoxed Persian, Roman, and Ottoman armies, staring from their castles across the gap at their enemies. And most famously to the modern consciousness, the Allied ANZAC armies in World War I had valiantly and futilely thrown themselves against it.
Across the gap today, one sees on the Gallipoli Peninsula an enormous clearing in the forest, onto which has been sculpted a Turkish soldier amid flames, valiantly holding a rifle while gesturing to the words “Dur Yolcu” - “Halt wayfarer!”
“Meet me at the cafe we ate at before” she had said, it’s barely 100 feet from where I disembarked from the bus, and there she is.
“What do you mean you thought we’d broken up?” she’s soon asking
“Well I thought your ‘please don’t contact me’” message was pretty clear.
“I was just getting distracted wondering if you were about to message me is all.” she explains.
But things aren’t fixed. That evening we sit at a bar in awkward silence, it’s hard to imagine now how the conversation had once flowed so seamlessly.
II. Memoriams.
The next day Deniz and I take the ferry across the strait and (for 70 lira a person) joined a tour group of Aussies to visit the ANZAC memorials. The Turkish guides are respectful, the Aussies quiet and serious. The slopes upon which the ANZACs had fought are rugged and steep. The wind gently rustles amid the pines, and I look out at ANZAC Cove, broad blue and serene, and think “well there’s certainly less beautiful places to fight trench warfare.”
Just after 4am on April 25th 1915 - the ANZACs approach the dim silhouette of shore in the dark of night. Steamboats had taken them as close as 75 yards from the beach, but the last approach is to be done in small boats each rowed by four Royal Navy sailors. There is silence except the splish splish of the oars and gurgle of water against the hulls. Would there be an uncontested landing or were they about to have to fight for every inch?
A single gunshot rings out, and a silhouette appears on the ridge, calling something out in a foreign language. Moments later there’s a crackle of gunfire and flashes from the platoon of 70 Turks that have been in position on the ridge for over an hour already. Bullets splash in the water like rain, crack into the sides of the boats. Someone cries out from a hit to the arm, another trooper slumps over dead. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in “Constantinople by nightfall” as promised.
In the cemeteries, rows upon rows of clean white squares mark the British, Australian, and New Zealand fallen. Deniz is always a few steps ahead of me, moving on like a restless ghost when I come to the sign she’s reading. On a hilltop called “Lone Pine” a large memorial contains a wall with the names of all the ANZAC fallen. It brings to mind the American Vietnam War wall. Looking at all the graves and names, one may well ask why a young man from Brisbane would have to die in Gallipoli. And to a degree, it’s from exactly that question that the modern Australian nation arose.
“The sunflowers are all dead.” I observe as the bus wound its way back to the ferry platform.
“Hm?” Deniz responds absently.
In the evening we can’t find a comfortable bar. Everywhere is deserted, playing irritating music. We have some raki and call it a night in a state of vague annoyance.
III. The Other Side
Deniz and I once again take the ferry across the strait and (for 7 lira a person) join a Turkish tour to visit the other side of the trenches, the Turkish side. The guide proudly tells us tales of heroism: of the Turkish soldier who lifted 250-pound shells by himself to fire his cannon after the rest of his gun crew had been killed; how commander Ataturk had ordered a unit to make a suicidal stand until re-enforcements could arrive (“Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.”) and they did.
We stand by a statue of a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded ANZAC back to his lines, based on another story from the war. The reconstructed trenches wind along the top of the bluff, off to our left and right, and below the turquoise waters of yet another bay the British landed in gleam. It’s easy to picture the men sitting in these battlements, staring down at that same bay down below, as strange men from half the world away swarmed their beaches.
Another famous quote from Ataturk inscribed on a monument at Gallipoli exemplifies the almost-strange lack of lingering animosity between the Turks and Anzacs:
“The heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives on this country’s soil! You are in the soil of a friendly country now. Therefore rest in peace. You are side by side with the little Mehmets. The mothers who send their sons to the war! Wipe your tears away. Your sons are in our bosom, are in peace and will be sleeping in peace comfortably. From now on, they have become our sons since they have lost their lives on this land.”
We ride the bus together back to Istanbul, silently side by side, looking out the window. I miss the she she used to be. Did that person ever exist, or had I made her out in my mind to be someone other than who she was. For that matter, how different was I than the person she had perhaps mde me in her mind, during the years of long distance communications before we’d ever met? Could I ever have been that person? Would I have wanted to.
At the airport she kisses me goodbye, just quickly but I'm surprised to receive it at all. I turn and go through security. One last glimpse of her from the other side, she’s small amongst the crowd and is soon lost from view.