Boundary and divide: The antiquity of the Dardanelles

Abstract

‘All history has passed through the Hellespont, from the expedition of the Argonauts and the Trojan war down to the recent Great War.’ X iminez , A sia M inor in R uins , p. 91. So the Spanish traveller and author Saturnino Ximenez observed in 1925 – writing amid turbulent times in the region. The Hellespont, as he calls it, is the ancient Greek name for the passage of water that is now usually known in English as the ‘Dardanelles’ and in Turkish as ‘Canakkale Bogazi’. There can be few more important passages of water (plate 1.1). It both connects and divides. It connects the Mediterranean and Black Seas – ultimately linking Eurasia and the Caucasus in the north and east with Spain and North Africa in the west. And it separates Europe from Asia, and has therefore featured throughout time as a kind of natural border of ethnic difference. The Greek writers of antiquity saw the Persian crossing of the Hellespont into Europe in 480 BCE as a kind of breaking of natural law, and some of their narratives about it were constructed to make this point. These days, the passage from Asia to Europe, or vice versa, is rather more seamless. Canakkale and Eceabat are a kind of ‘twin towns’ on either side of the strait – places that become quite well known to visitors to the Gallipoli battlefields. Modern Turkey embraces its identity both within Europe and within Asia, and this dual profile has tended to dominate its recent history. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DARDANELLES IN ANTIQUITY For many people today the Gallipoli Peninsula is inextricably associated with one event: the attempt by the European Allies in 1915 to push through the heavily mined straits of the Dardanelles to support Russia. Of the campaigns fought in that battle, which took the lives of more than 125 000 Turkish and Allied soldiers, three are deeply embedded in the psyche of the contemporary nation states of Turkey, Australia and New Zealand: 18 March, when the Ottoman fortresses and batteries successfully fought off the second attempt by the British Royal Navy and the French Navy to break through the Straits; 25 April, the dawn landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), which launched the land offensive; and 10 August, when the Ottoman forces drove the Allied soldiers back down the slopes of Chunuk Bair, thus effectively thwarting their August offensive.