Aug. 17 – Left Istanbul, driving along the sea of Marmara to the Gallipoli Peninsula, an area where a major battle campaign that involved the Aussies, Kiwis and Allied troops took place during WW1 when it tried to invade it. The Ottoman forces led by Mustafa Kemal repel the attacks and Canakkale has taken its place in history as "Canakkale meaning impassable". Mustafa Kemal, who later became Ataturk, became the founder and president of modern Turkey. It was portrayed in the film by Mel Gibson, when he still has the OZ accent. Since most of the people in our group were from down under, the rest of us were left no choice but to watch the video or take a nap. To honor the 500,000 soldiers who gave their lives at Gelibolu (Gallipoli), this peninsula has been made a national park of remembrance. Later, we were all invited to the beach house of Selim for a swim at the Anzac Cove, a welcome respite from the heat and all that day of driving. We left late afternoon at the seaport Ecebat and crossed the Dardanelles waterway via ferry boat to Canakkale where we spent the night.

Aug 18. - Another important battle that took place in this province was the mythological war of Troy. Here, one can see the ruins of city walls in addition to a replica of the Wooden Horse of Troy.

Until the end of the 19^th century, Troy was believed to exist only in Homer’s Iliad. Henrich Schliemann thought Homer’s descriptions too vivid to be mere fiction. In 1817, he used his fortune and the Iliad to find Troy. Schliemann uncovered four ancient superimposed towns (nine have been found since). He also found treasures which he attributed to Priam, the King of Homer’s Troy. Schliemann abandoned his excavation and returned to Germany with his find. The treasures actually date from an earlier period. Most of them disappeared during the second World War. According to Homer’s Iliad, this is the town of Illium, where a 10 year war all for the love of Helen raged during the 1200’s BC with Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Patroclus and Nestor on the Greek side and Priam, Hector and Paris on the Trojan side. The war finally ended when the Greeks invaded Troy using the famous wooden horse. The inhabitants of Troy can be dated to the Bronze Age 3000-1800 BC (Troy I trough Troy V). Of the settlement’s nine levels, Troy VI is the city presumed to be Illium. In 1987, excavations resumed at the Schliemann site. Despite the havoc wreaked by Schliemann’s amateur excavation techniques, the site still has much potential that is just being tapped. Even more than in beauty of Aphrodisias or Ephesus, there’s a very real sense in Troy’s jagged, layered remains of the enormity of the task of reconstructing past civilizations.

Pergamum, (105 kms north of Izmir) is one of the major sites antiquity in Turkey. This ancient Hellenistic site has remarkable remains from the Greco-Roman and Byzantine periods. A great center of culture, Pergamum was the rival of Ephesus in the field of commerce, and of Alexandria in the fields of learning and arts. Pergamum was the city that invented parchment after Egypt cut off the supply of papyrus. The ruins date back to the Attalid who ruled during the height of artistic and scientific discoveries in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Unfortunately, most of the ruins from the Acropolis were taken to Berlin where they are now displayed in the Pergamum Museum. Only the monumental foundation of the Altar of Zeus remains, as well as the Temple of Athena dating to the end of the fourth century. The most significant ruins are the great library of Pergamum that once housed over 200,000 volumes and restored theater built into the steep, hillside that seated 10,000. According to Selim, water for the city, which is set on a rocky mountain some 350 metres above sea level, was provided by a triumph of ancient engineering which carried water through an aqueduct 3km from the mountain Madra Dagi which rises to 376 metres. At the vantage point, Carmelita decided to have our picture taken with winds gusting at 15 mph with nothing but sheer cliff 3 ft away from where we were standing.

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