Turkey - Lest We Forget

September 11-15, 2007

Turkey was awesome! We went primarily to visit Gallipoli and to spend a few days in Istanbul. After meeting a handful of locals and travellers, we realised there was so much more of Turkey that would be great to see. The locals were all so friendly and generous and they made you feel more like another local than a tourist.

One of the first things that intriegued both of us about Turkey was the muslim culture, including the call for prayer that belted out of all the mosques in Istanbul 5 times a day over loud speakers. The mosques themselves were very grand and unique structures. This was the first time either of us had visited a predominantly muslim country so it was all new to us.

Of course, at the first available opportunity, we began our study into the difference between doner kebabs and souvlakis. The doner kebabs we got were made from meat from a rotating spit (similar to a gyros in Greece) either wrapped in a pita or in a bread roll. Shish kebabs on the other hand were made with meat cooked on a scewer (like a souvlaki in Greece). And they are all yummy! The doner kebabs weren't served with any sauce, but the meat was well flavoured and they included basic salad like tomato, lettuce and onion. In Greece they usually included the meat, tomato, lettuce, onion, hot chips and lots of tzaziki sauce. There it is. The myths of souvlakis, gyros and kebabs all figured out!

So we spent a day in Istanbul before our Gallipoli tour and we saw some unique buildings including the Aya Sofya (pictured above) which was built in the 6th century as a church. It was the biggest cathedral in the world for almost a thousand years and has a massive Byzantine dome. In 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque and a lot of the interior was covered up or removed. It is now a museum.

The Blue Mosque is just across the park and is just as grand but in other ways. It was built with 6 minarets which prompted them to add a 7th minaret to Mecca. Another very interesting building was the Basilica Cistern, an underground and partly underwater basilica which was built in the 7th century.

Anyway, enough of the boring stuff... the Spice Bazaar is apparently the second biggest undercover market in the world, behind the Grand Bazaar, also in Istanbul which we were saving for later. If only you could attach smells to a blog because that was the best thing about this place. The dried apricots and turkish delight were also pretty good! When we returned from our Gallipoli tour we had a whole day devoted to wandering around and shopping in the Grand Bazaar. We didn't come close to looking at everything but we let a few local shop owners try and sell us exorbitant persian carpets and big, heavy bowls and plates that were impossible for us to send home. It was fun looking though! And of course we didn't leave completely empty handed.

Our Gallipoli tour started early in the morning, jumping in a little van with about 10 others for a 5 hour trip. Our local guide, Zaf, was a legend. He was a new grad archaeologist/tour guide on his third gallipoli tour, but he'd graduated from comedy school a long time ago. His side-kick Murat the bus driver was funny also, but not so much when he was being pulled over by the police for hooning past them on the motorway at about 130km/h!?

It is hard to describe the feelings we had on our way to Gallipoli. It felt like we were going to see on of the most important sites on our trip, a site that we might not visit again. For a couple of non-religious Aussies it felt maybe like we were going to see something like what the Vatican is to Roman Catholics? It just felt very important and spiritual in a way. The Gallipoli peninsula itself was a bit different to what we expected as well. There are 31 cemeteries and a number of memorials including theAustralian Lone Pine Memorial all spread out over a vast area amongst the cliffs, beaches and hilltops. We saw John Simpson Kirkpatrick's grave of Simpson and his donkey fame, but I found myself feeling for Private G Bowerman who was buried next to him. There were thousands of headstones and no way that you could even look at all of them in the time we had. The trenches dug by the soldiers in the early stages of the Gallipoli campaign are still there today, overgrown and filled in by wind and erosion in places, but reconstructed and preserved in other places. You could walk down onto the beach at Anzac Cove, the exact place where the Anzac troops landed. Standing with my feet in the water trying to comprehend what those blokes would have been thinking when they were in the same place 93 years ago.

The Gallipoli museum was home to some pretty incredible and moving items. Including just a few of the shells and remains of shrapnel found in the years after the war, items the soldiers would have used in everyday life, the picks and spades they used to dig the trenches, boots that were found with toe bones still in them and a soldier's skull with a lead bullet lodged in the cranium. There were moving photos also including one of 2 Aussie soldiers, father and son in the trenches together, one of the Allies playing a game of cricket and another of an Aussie soldier feeding water to an injured Turkish soldier (pictured).

One of the most beneficial things about the tour for us was learning more about the Turkish involvement and how the friendship between Turks and Anzacs has developed since WWI. It was a very important time in history for both of our national identities. A moving quotation from Ataturk is remembered at a monument near Anzac Cove (pictured).

We had a breif visit to the ruins of the ancient city of Troy on the second day of our tour. Glad we had a guide here because the site today has archaeological remains of 9 cities that were built on top of each other over the centuries, the first city was built over 4000 years ago! Without a guide you could easily miss the key archaeological features and spend half your time climbing the replica of the Trojan horse (we did this too)!

The real adventure of our tour started on the way home when we heard a high-pitched squealing as we where hurling along the motorway at over 130km/h then a few seconds later we were fish-tailing with a blown out tyre. We all piled out of the bus as Murat the driver and Zaf chatted about what to do. Moments later we realised that we weren't carrying a spare.

Next thing Zaf was sitting on the back of a tractor, getting a lift from the guys who worked in the brick factory across the road where we pulled over, in the middle of no where in Turkey! He got a lift to the nearby petrol station to pick up a spare tyre. When they returned about 30 mins later, they came back not with a spare wheel, just the tyre.

So they jacked the bus up, took the blown tyre off. Turns out the replacement tyre was too small. Didn't matter, we put that on to get us to the petrol station to get a better fit. Once we got the the petrol station, the best they could give us was an old, worn out tyre of the right size. So we settled for that to get to the next petrol station where we hoped to find a new tyre.

Upon arrival, we had to wait 20 minutes to find out that they didn't have a new tyre to fit so we had to settle for the one we had. We washed the bus and decided to drive back to Istanbul (a bit slower than 130km/h) with the dodgy tyre we had. We all joked (Murat and Zaf included) about re-naming the tour company to 'Bad Tyre Tours' or instead of touring Gallipoli and Troy, doing hop-on-hop-off tours of petrol stations! It was an adventure and we got home safely, but much later than expected.