Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: Turkey’s First World War Legacy

The Dardanelles is a strait barely two kilometres wide at its narrowest point, yet for three thousand years it has shaped the fate of empires. In April 1915, this stretch of water and the ridges above it became the setting for one of the twentieth century’s most consequential military campaigns, one that forged national identities on both sides of the fighting. Travellers who walk the Gallipoli Peninsula today find a landscape still quiet with cemeteries, trench lines, and memorials, a place that rewards a slow, guided visit rather than a rushed stop. On Odyssey Traveller’s small group tour of ancient Turkey, a crossing of the Dardanelles and time spent at Gallipoli and ANZAC Cove form a deliberate, reflective close to a journey through the country’s deeper past.

The Dardanelles: A Strait Fought Over for Millennia

Ancient geographers knew the Dardanelles as the Hellespont, the narrow channel separating Europe from Asia and connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and, beyond it, the Black Sea. Whoever controlled this waterway controlled trade and troop movement between two continents, which is precisely why the ruins of Troy sit so close to its western shore. The same strategic logic that drew Bronze Age powers to the region drew the naval planners of the First World War. In early 1915, the Allied powers attempted to force a passage through the strait by sea, hoping to open a supply route to Russia and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. When the naval assault failed against Ottoman minefields and shore batteries, the campaign shifted to a land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula, the finger of land forming the strait’s northern shore.

The 1915 Landings: ANZAC Cove and the Peninsula Campaign

On 25 April 1915, Allied troops came ashore at several points along the peninsula, including a small, steeply banked beach that soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps found themselves clinging to after landing slightly north of their intended position. That beach became known as ANZAC Cove, and the date is now commemorated annually as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. Ottoman forces, defending their homeland under commanders including a young Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, held the high ground above the beaches. What followed was eight months of static, brutal trench warfare across a landscape of ridges and gullies barely suited to either side’s plans.

The campaign’s key engagements, at Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair, and the Nek, are remembered for their scale of loss relative to the ground gained or lost. Historians estimate total casualties on both sides at well over a quarter of a million. By January 1916, the Allied forces had withdrawn, one of the campaign’s few unambiguous tactical successes was the near-flawless night evacuation itself. For Turkey, the successful defence of the peninsula is remembered as a formative moment in the emergence of the modern republic under Atatürk’s later leadership.

Walking the Peninsula Today

The Gallipoli Peninsula is now a designated historical national park, and its cemeteries, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission alongside Turkish memorials, are spread across a compact area that rewards an escorted, well-paced visit. At ANZAC Cove, the narrow beach and the ridge rising sharply behind it make the tactical difficulties of April 1915 immediately legible in a way no photograph fully conveys. Lone Pine Cemetery, shaded by descendants of the original lone pine tree, and the Chunuk Bair memorial, with its sweeping views over the strait, are among the sites most visited by Australian and New Zealand travellers tracing family or national history. Turkish memorials at sites such as the Mehmetçik statue commemorate the Ottoman soldiers who defended the peninsula, offering visitors a more complete picture of a campaign that shaped two nations at once. Just across the strait, Kilitbahir Fortress, built by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in the fifteenth century to guard the Dardanelles, is a reminder that this narrow crossing was fortified long before 1915, and it remains one of the most striking viewpoints over the water.

A Shared Legacy: Turkish and Allied Memory

What distinguishes Gallipoli from many First World War battlefields is the way its memory is shared, and shared with unusual grace, between former adversaries. Atatürk’s words to the mothers of fallen ANZAC soldiers, inscribed on a memorial at ANZAC Cove, are among the most quoted reconciliation statements to emerge from any twentieth-century conflict: “Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace… You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace.” That sentiment shapes how the peninsula is presented today, not as a monument to victory or defeat, but as shared ground where visitors from Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and France walk the same paths and read the same names.

Visiting Gallipoli, Turkey with Odyssey Traveller

Understanding Gallipoli properly takes more than a single afternoon, and it benefits enormously from a guide who can walk you through the sequence of landings, the topography that dictated them, and the differing ways Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand remember the campaign. On our complete ancient Turkey itinerary, the Dardanelles crossing and Gallipoli Peninsula form Day 20 of a 21-day journey that begins in Istanbul and moves through Anatolia’s Neolithic, Hittite, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman history before arriving here. Travelling in a small group, with a maximum of sixteen participants and solo travellers welcome throughout, allows time to stand quietly at ANZAC Cove and Lone Pine without the pace of a larger coach tour. The night before the crossing, the group visits ancient Troy, itself a reminder of just how long the Dardanelles has drawn conflict, and travellers to the region often pair a Gallipoli visit with further reading on Istanbul’s own layered imperial history, the city the tour returns to on its final night.

Few places compress so much history, ancient and modern, into so small an area as the Dardanelles and the ridges above it. Standing at ANZAC Cove or reading the names at Lone Pine gives a fuller sense of the campaign than any account can on its own, and doing so as the final stop on a journey that began among Istanbul’s mosques and Anatolia’s Hittite ruins puts the events of 1915 into a longer, richer context.