The big day
Sep. 6th, 2007 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineToday was the big highlight day: Troy then Gallipoli. First, the hostel is awful, the shower is awful, the breakfast was weird and skimpy (except, apparently, if you order vegemite. Apparently that's quite good here). This whole town is so Aussie focused it's hilarious.
Small tour group to Troy with a fairly knowledgeable guide who obviously knew more than he was telling. He dumbed down a bit for the group, and would have been quite fun to just wander about talking to. The real problem was that the guide was clearly aware we had to be back to 11:30, and was seriously rushing- that was too bad, I could easily have taken all day. The site is fascinating on several levels. The physical signage and materials available are good, better than anyplace else I've seen in Turkey (including Ephesus) despite the rather shoddy quality of the early excavations. I very much would love wandering around with a book and a map just myself. There's obviously an incredible amount there, and they seem to be working on restoration pretty continuously. Of course it brings out the romantic in me (again), and I had probably the biggest Geek-out moment of my entire life standing on top of the supposed Scaean gate looking over the plain to the sea, with the Scamander on the left. THE Scamander. It was great.
It's not like I have any fuzzy headed ideas of THE Helen standing right HERE wearing THESE very jewels- I have a much better, more realistic picture of the Iliad and Greek oral tradition than that, and a fairly realistic idea of bronze age living conditions to boot. It's just... the cultural weight of the place is immense, all reality completely aside. You can almost feel hundreds of years of story and poetry and awe pressing you down into the stones (or maybe, sweeping you away- your connection to the ground becomes tenuous, easy to see the line of the wine-dark sea past the horizon, with the rows of curved ships, but hard to feel your feet, easy to hear lyres and melodical muses and hard to focus on the click of cameras.)
So I am soft-headed, just in a slightly different way.
Gallipoli was odd. I'm quite interested in it, but from an entirely different, non-personal perspective, but this turned out to be basically a seven-hour Australian pilgrimage. I just didn't realize how hugely important it was to them, I had no idea.
The peninsula is much larger than I realized. The whole place is protected as a national park, and it's absolutely beautiful. Tour itself was a bit crap- there must have been 70 people, and it was slow and unwieldy. But the sights themselves were beautiful and peaceful and entirely more arresting than I expected. They have a huge monument with Ataturk's speech from the first memorial held here in the 30s, which proves at least that he had a hell of a speech writer-
Absolutely makes me bawl.
Many of the monuments (for the Kiwis, it seems) say "from the uttermost ends of the earth" and that hits hard- how very, astonishingly, far away from home these young boys actually were when they died. But it is also striking what a positive thing both countries have made of something that is Exhibit A under both war is hell and the utter pointlessness of WW1 in particular. There's this very strong sense that the Aussies and Turks were not fighting one another, but were both victims together fighting the horrors of war. The whole place is full of stories of them- the museum photo of the Aussie sharing his water with the wounded Turk, the stories of the Aussies throwing gifts for Muslim holidays across no man's land, trading milk for tobacco between the trenches, the statue of the Turk who carried the wounded Aussie back- stories of them holding little concerts, applauding the singers in the other trench. It's odd, but you are absolutely overwhelmed with the feeling that they were not enemies, but brothers in arms, and the enemy was the war itself. That, combined with the incredible feelings of national pride, of a national identity shaped in a crucible on BOTH sides, combined with the incredibly cordial relations between the countries now, combined with the meticulous upkeep of the whole park and the reverential pilgrimages it draws... I came with an interested intellectual detachment, and left more overwhelmed by emotion than I think I've ever been. It's a stunning, if draining, experience.
By the time I reached the graves saying "God hath given; God hath taken" I thought I had no more tears left in me. There is a sign, a huge sign pained onto the hillside, seen when you take a ferry across the straight to reach the peninsula. I couldn't get an exact translation there, but a few Turkish guys on the ferry patched together something like "Walk carefully here, traveler. Here there are hundreds of men in unmarked graves, and some of them may be beneath your feet."
I was almost (almost, but not quite) too drained to geek out on the fact that I was, in fact, crossing the Hellespont. My god!
Small tour group to Troy with a fairly knowledgeable guide who obviously knew more than he was telling. He dumbed down a bit for the group, and would have been quite fun to just wander about talking to. The real problem was that the guide was clearly aware we had to be back to 11:30, and was seriously rushing- that was too bad, I could easily have taken all day. The site is fascinating on several levels. The physical signage and materials available are good, better than anyplace else I've seen in Turkey (including Ephesus) despite the rather shoddy quality of the early excavations. I very much would love wandering around with a book and a map just myself. There's obviously an incredible amount there, and they seem to be working on restoration pretty continuously. Of course it brings out the romantic in me (again), and I had probably the biggest Geek-out moment of my entire life standing on top of the supposed Scaean gate looking over the plain to the sea, with the Scamander on the left. THE Scamander. It was great.
It's not like I have any fuzzy headed ideas of THE Helen standing right HERE wearing THESE very jewels- I have a much better, more realistic picture of the Iliad and Greek oral tradition than that, and a fairly realistic idea of bronze age living conditions to boot. It's just... the cultural weight of the place is immense, all reality completely aside. You can almost feel hundreds of years of story and poetry and awe pressing you down into the stones (or maybe, sweeping you away- your connection to the ground becomes tenuous, easy to see the line of the wine-dark sea past the horizon, with the rows of curved ships, but hard to feel your feet, easy to hear lyres and melodical muses and hard to focus on the click of cameras.)
So I am soft-headed, just in a slightly different way.
Gallipoli was odd. I'm quite interested in it, but from an entirely different, non-personal perspective, but this turned out to be basically a seven-hour Australian pilgrimage. I just didn't realize how hugely important it was to them, I had no idea.
The peninsula is much larger than I realized. The whole place is protected as a national park, and it's absolutely beautiful. Tour itself was a bit crap- there must have been 70 people, and it was slow and unwieldy. But the sights themselves were beautiful and peaceful and entirely more arresting than I expected. They have a huge monument with Ataturk's speech from the first memorial held here in the 30s, which proves at least that he had a hell of a speech writer-
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. 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 in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
Absolutely makes me bawl.
Many of the monuments (for the Kiwis, it seems) say "from the uttermost ends of the earth" and that hits hard- how very, astonishingly, far away from home these young boys actually were when they died. But it is also striking what a positive thing both countries have made of something that is Exhibit A under both war is hell and the utter pointlessness of WW1 in particular. There's this very strong sense that the Aussies and Turks were not fighting one another, but were both victims together fighting the horrors of war. The whole place is full of stories of them- the museum photo of the Aussie sharing his water with the wounded Turk, the stories of the Aussies throwing gifts for Muslim holidays across no man's land, trading milk for tobacco between the trenches, the statue of the Turk who carried the wounded Aussie back- stories of them holding little concerts, applauding the singers in the other trench. It's odd, but you are absolutely overwhelmed with the feeling that they were not enemies, but brothers in arms, and the enemy was the war itself. That, combined with the incredible feelings of national pride, of a national identity shaped in a crucible on BOTH sides, combined with the incredibly cordial relations between the countries now, combined with the meticulous upkeep of the whole park and the reverential pilgrimages it draws... I came with an interested intellectual detachment, and left more overwhelmed by emotion than I think I've ever been. It's a stunning, if draining, experience.
By the time I reached the graves saying "God hath given; God hath taken" I thought I had no more tears left in me. There is a sign, a huge sign pained onto the hillside, seen when you take a ferry across the straight to reach the peninsula. I couldn't get an exact translation there, but a few Turkish guys on the ferry patched together something like "Walk carefully here, traveler. Here there are hundreds of men in unmarked graves, and some of them may be beneath your feet."
I was almost (almost, but not quite) too drained to geek out on the fact that I was, in fact, crossing the Hellespont. My god!