Gallipoli

For other uses, see Gallipoli (disambiguation)

Gallipoli peninsula (Turkish: Gelibolu Yarımadası, Greek: Καλλίπολις/Kallipolis) is located in Turkish Thrace, the European part of Turkey, with the Aegean Sea to the west and the Dardanelles straits to the east. The name derives from the Greek Kallipolis, meaning "Beautiful City".

Satellite image of the Gallipoli peninsula and surrounding area

History

Antiquity, Byzantium and crusaders

Kallipolis, or in Latin Callipolis, was a city in the southern part of the Thracian Chersonese ("Chersonesus Thracica" in Latin, now known as the Gallipoli Peninsula), on the right shore, and at the entrance of the Dardanelles.

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I fortified it and established there very important military warehouses for grain and wine.

Charles G./Pace, Edward A./Pallen, Con Herbermann In 1304 it became the center of acrusader state created by the Almugavares, or Catalonian routiers, who burned it in 1307, before retiring to Cassandria.

Ottoman era

After the devastating 1354 earthquake, the Greek city was almost abandoned, but swiftly reoccupied by Turks from Anatolia, the Asiatic side of the straits, making Gallipoli the first Ottoman possession in Europe, and the staging area for their expansion across the Balkans.

The peninsula which was inhabited by populations of the Byzantine Empire was gradually conquered by the Ottoman Empire starting from thirteenth century onwards until the fifteenth. The Greeks living there were allowed to continue their everyday life. Gallipoli (in Turkish, Gelibolu) was made the chief town of a Kaymakamlik (district) in the vilayet (a Wali's province) of Adrianople, with about 30,000 inhabitants, Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Jews.

Gallipoli became a major encampment for British and French forces in 1854 during the Crimean War, and the harbor was also a stopping-off point on the way to Constantinople.

The peninsula did not see any more wars up until World War I when the British Empire allies trying to find a way to reach its troubled ally in the east, Imperial Russia, decided to try to obtain passage to the east. The Ottomans set up defensive fortifications along the peninsula with German help.

Battle of Gallipoli

In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland, Gallipoli is the name given to the Allied Campaign on the peninsula during World War I, usually known in Britain as the Dardanelles Campaign and in Turkey as the Battle of Çanakkale. It was an Allied attempt to push through the Dardanelles and capture Constantinople (now Istanbul). On April 25, 1915, as part of an allied force of British and French troops, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed at Suvla Bay at the western end of the Peninsula (today officially called Anzac Cove). The campaign was largely successful for the Turks and the Germans and a catastrophe for Russia which eventually would lead to civil war partly due to this unsuccessful campaign.

ANZAC forces evacuated on December 19, 1915 and the other elements of the invasion force a little later. There were around 180,000 Allied casualties and 220,000 Turkish casualties. This campaign has become a "founding myth" for both Australia and New Zealand, and Anzac Day is still commemorated as a holiday in both countries. In fact, it is one of those rare battles that both sides seem to remember fondly, as the Turks consider it a great turning point for their (future) nation as well.

Many mementos of the Gallipoli campaign can be seen in the museum at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia, and at the Auckland War Memorial Museum in Auckland, New Zealand. This campaign also put a dent in the armour of Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, who had commissioned the plans to invade the Dardanelles. He talks about this campaign vividly in his memoirs. A small artillery detachment was sent by Greece to aid the battle, led by Antonios Georgiadis (in some accounts Antonios Pispas, as he later changed his surname).

The Gallipoli campaign also gave an important boost to the career of Mustafa Kemal, who was at that time a little-known army commander but later was promoted to Pasha. Mustafa Kemal exceeded his authority and contravened orders in order to halt the Allied advance and eventually drive them back. His famous speech "I do not command you to fight, I command you to die" shows his courageous and determined personality. He went on to found the modern Turkish state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

ANZAC Day

On April 25, 2005, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, government officials from Australia and New Zealand, most of the last surviving Gallipoli veterans, and many Australian and New Zealand tourists travelled to Turkey for a special dawn service at Gallipoli. Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, and the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark were also in attendance, and Clark was accompanied by the official NZ defence force party, veterans of several past wars and 10 New Zealand college students who won the New Zealand 'Prime Minister's Essay Competition' with their works about Gallipoli. Attendance at the ANZAC Day dawn service at Gallipoli has become popular since the 75th anniversary. Upwards of 10,000 people have attended services in Gallipoli.

Until 1999 the Gallipoli dawn service was held at the Ari Burnu war cemetery at Anzac Cove, but the growing numbers of people attending resulted in the construction of a more spacious site on North Beach, known as the "Anzac Commemorative Site".

In 1934 Atatürk wrote a tribute to the ANZACs killed at Gallipoli:

"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 now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway 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."

This inscription appears at the ANZAC memorial at Anzac Cove.

Influence on the arts

The Battle of Gallipoli is the subject of a 1981 movie, entitled Gallipoli, directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson. The film has been criticised for portraying the campaign as a mainly Australian one^{[citation needed]}. In fact twice as many British troops died at Gallipoli as ANZACs. Eric Bogle wrote in 1972 his famous And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda after having watched, in Australia, a parade of elderly veterans of the Gallipoli campaign. Versions of this song were later separately recorded by June Tabor and The Pogues, as well as Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy.

The BBC produced a television series, All the King's Men, (not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren), that focused attention on a regiment (the "Sandringham Company") that was decimated at Gallipoli and which was composed of men who were servants at King George V's estate in Sandringham, Norfolk.

The campaign is also the subject of a 2005 documentary, also named Gallipoli, by the Turkish filmmaker Tolga Örnek, showing the bravery and the suffering on both sides through the use of surviving diaries and letters of the soldiers. For this film he has been awarded an honorary medal in the general division of the Order of Australia.[1]

Ecclesiastical history

Callipolis remains a Roman Catholic titular bishopric in the former Roman province of Thrace. Callipolis was a suffragan of Heraclea. Lequien (I, 1123) mentions only six Greek bishops, the first as being present at the Council of Ephesus in 431, when the See was united to that of Coela (Coelia or Coele), the last about 1500. His list could easily be increased, for the Greek Orthodox See still exists; it was raised in 1904 to the rank of a metropolis, without suffragans, after the manner of most Greek metropolitan Sees. Lequien (III, 971) also gives the names of eight Latin bishops, from 1208 to 1518. (See Eubel, I, 269, note.) There are numerous schools and a small museum; a large cemetery is the resting place of many French soldiers who died of disease (chiefly cholera) during the Crimean War. The port is poor and trade unimportant, for want of roads. A Catholic mission was conducted in the Ottoman days by Assumpionist Fathers; there are also a number of Armenian and Greek Catholics, with priests of their respective rites.

Footnotes

(incomplete)

• This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. [2]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Mango, Andrew. Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey. New York: Overlook Press, 2002 paperback. ISBN 158567334X

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