The strait that launched a thousand ships, twice

Some stretches of water matter far more than their size suggests. The Dardanelles, the narrow strait that separates the Gallipoli peninsula in Europe from the Asian mainland of Turkey, is in places barely a mile across, yet it connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and, beyond that, the Black Sea, which has made it worth fighting over for as long as there have been fleets capable of using it.

A legend on the Asian shore

On the Asian side of the strait, low mounds near the modern town of Çanakkale mark the site of Troy, the city at the centre of Homer's Iliad and one of the most famous conflicts in Greek mythology, fought, according to legend, over the abduction of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. For centuries Troy was assumed to be a purely literary invention, until the German-born archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, working in the 1870s, excavated a genuine, ancient, walled settlement on the site, with multiple layers of construction and destruction stacked on top of each other across roughly four thousand years. Whether any single layer corresponds precisely to Homer's war remains debated among historians, but the mound is unquestionably real, and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Near the site, a large wooden horse built for visitors stands as a deliberately playful nod to the story, less an archaeological artefact than a reminder of how thoroughly Troy's myth has outlasted the certainty of its facts.

Armies that crossed it long before 1915

The Dardanelles had already seen its share of history-altering crossings well before the twentieth century. In the fifth century BC, the Persian king Xerxes ordered a bridge of boats lashed together across the strait so his army could invade Greece, an engineering feat recorded by the historian Herodotus and, according to his account, twice destroyed by storms before it finally held. A century and a half later, Alexander the Great crossed the same stretch of water in the opposite direction, from Europe into Asia, at the start of the campaign that would take him all the way to Persia and beyond, pausing at Troy itself to honour Achilles before continuing east.

A campaign on the European shore

Directly across the water, the Gallipoli peninsula holds a much more recent and better-documented conflict. In 1915, during the First World War, Allied forces, among them large contingents of Australian and New Zealand troops fighting together for the first time as the ANZACs, alongside British and French units, attempted to force the strait and open a route to Constantinople. The campaign, intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war quickly, instead became a months-long stalemate fought from trenches in difficult, hilly terrain, and ended in an Allied withdrawal after heavy losses on both sides. Among the Ottoman commanders who distinguished themselves in the defence was Mustafa Kemal, who would later found the Turkish Republic and take the name Atatürk.

A peninsula kept as it was

The Gallipoli peninsula today is largely given over to war cemeteries and memorials, maintained jointly by Turkey and the nations whose soldiers fought there, and the terrain itself, rugged and often still covered in scrub, makes it easier than most former battlefields to picture how the fighting actually unfolded. The scale of loss on both sides, and the particular significance the campaign holds in Australian and New Zealand national memory, has kept the site treated with unusual care by all parties involved.

Two conflicts, one crossing

It is a strange kind of symmetry that this narrow stretch of water should have produced both a foundational myth of Western literature and one of the defining tragedies of the twentieth century, on opposite shores within sight of each other. Itineraries that link Troy with Gallipoli, on the way between Istanbul and the Aegean coast further south, tend to let the two sites speak for themselves rather than draw the comparison too hard. The strait itself, busy with shipping and utterly unremarkable to look at from a passing coach, does the rest of the work simply by being exactly as narrow, and exactly as strategically placed, as it always was.