Çanakkale

i.The Strait and the Peninsula

Çanakkale province sits astride the Dardanelles — the narrow sea passage that the ancients called the Hellespont, the western counterpart of the Bosphorus, connecting the Aegean to the Marmara and onward to the Black Sea. The strait is sixty-one kilometres long and at its narrowest just over a kilometre wide; on the European shore lies the long, knife-shaped Gelibolu Peninsula, on the Asian shore the rolling country of the Troas. The provincial capital, the small port of Çanakkale, sits on the Asian shore at the narrowest point, opposite Eceabat on the European side. Two ferries cross the strait every twenty minutes; since 18 March 2022 the 1915 Çanakkale Köprüsü — a 2,023-metre suspension bridge whose main span of 2,023 metres references the centenary of the Republic — has carried the road traffic across.

The province also includes two Aegean islands: Gökçeada (ancient Imbros), the largest island of Türkiye, and Bozcaada (ancient Tenedos), small and famous for its vineyards. Both face the entrance to the Dardanelles from the south.

ii.Troy and the Bronze Age (3000–1100 BCE)

Six kilometres from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, on a low mound overlooking the alluvial plain of the Karamenderes river (the ancient Skamandros), lies the most famous archaeological site of Türkiye: the mound of Hisarlık, which conceals the layered remains of the city the Greeks called Troia and the Hittites — in their cuneiform-period sources — appear to have called Wilusa. The site was first occupied around 3000 BCE, contemporary with the early Bronze Age at Bayraklı/Smyrna and at Tepecik Çiftlik on the central plateau, and it carried a continuous succession of cities — Troy I through Troy IX — until late Roman times.

The Troy that has carried Homer's name through the Western imagination is the late Bronze Age city of Troy VI and Troy VIIa, occupied between roughly 1700 and 1180 BCE, a wealthy fortified centre at the entrance to the Dardanelles with massive cyclopean walls, a citadel of palaces and small temples, and a lower town with several thousand inhabitants. The destruction of Troy VIIa, dated to around 1180 BCE — a city-wide fire layer with sling-bullets and burnt human remains in the streets — corresponds, in the conventional dating, to the Greek-tradition Trojan War of the Iliad. Whether the war was a single event or the literary compression of generations of Aegean-Anatolian conflict is the long debate of the field; what is not in dispute is that something catastrophic ended the Bronze Age city at the mound that bears Homer's name. The standard recent treatment is Barry Strauss's The Trojan War: A New History (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

Modern excavation of Troy began with the German businessman-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1870. His campaigns — through 1873, 1878–79, and 1882 — opened the mound but also cut through much of the upper stratigraphy in their hunt for "Priam's gold"; the great hoard he reported finding in 1873 was carried to Berlin and from there, in 1945, to Moscow, where most of it still resides in the Pushkin Museum. Schliemann was succeeded at Hisarlık by the more methodical Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1893–94), Carl Blegen (1932–38), and the long, definitive campaign of Manfred Korfmann and the German Archaeological Institute (1988–2005), which more than tripled the known size of the lower town and rewrote much of the chronology.

iii.The Hellenistic and Roman Troas

Iron Age Troy (Troy VIII, c. 700–85 BCE) was a small Aiolian-Greek town that traded modestly on its Homeric reputation. After 334 BCE Alexander the Great visited the site at the start of his Persian campaign, sacrificed at the supposed tomb of Achilles, and — the tradition holds — re-founded the city as a sanctuary of Athena Ilias. The Hellenistic kings who followed enlarged it. Under the Romans, especially after Augustus claimed a Trojan ancestry through the Julian house, Ilium was a privileged free city of the province of Asia, with imperial benefactions and a substantial new building programme.

The wider Troas — the northwestern corner of Asia Minor between the Aegean and the Dardanelles — was thickly settled with Greek and Roman towns of which the most important were Alexandria Troas south of modern Ezine (one of Alexander's foundations, later a major Roman port and the place where Saint Paul received his vision of "a man of Macedonia" before crossing into Europe), Assos (the Aristotelian-period city near modern Behramkale, with its temple of Athena on the acropolis), Lampsacus (modern Lapseki, on the Dardanelles, where the Spartan Lysander defeated the Athenian fleet in 405 BCE to end the Peloponnesian War), and Abydos opposite Sestos at the narrowest part of the strait, where Xerxes built his bridge of boats in 480 BCE.

iv.From Süleyman Paşa to the Ottoman Centuries (1354 Gelibolu)

The medieval and early-Ottoman centuries reshaped the strait into a frontier between empires. In 1354 the Ottoman prince Gazi Süleyman Paşa, son of Orhan Bey, crossed from the Asian shore with a small force and seized the Byzantine castle of Gallipolis — the Greek-language name that became, in Turkish, Gelibolu. The crossing is recorded by the Valilik as "the first Ottoman foothold in Europe," and it opened the route for the European campaigns that would, within a decade, place the Ottomans at Edirne and within a century at Constantinople.

Through the long Ottoman centuries Gelibolu was the empire's principal naval arsenal — the shipyard from which the Ottoman fleets sailed against Venice, Cyprus (1571), and the western Mediterranean — and the strait itself was the empire's strategic gate. Mehmed II built the two stone fortresses of Kilitbahir (on the European shore) and Kale-i Sultaniye (on the Asian, the kernel of the modern town of Çanakkale) in 1463 to close the strait to enemy fleets; both still stand. The town of Kale-i Sultaniye grew up around the Asian fort, gradually taking the name Çanakkale ("the ceramic-pot castle") from the famous local pottery workshops of the Ottoman period. The British and French navies repeatedly tested the Dardanelles forts through the 19th century without ever forcing the strait.

v.18 March 1915 — the Çanakkale Naval Victory

The First World War turned the Dardanelles into one of the central theatres of the early 20th century. With the closure of the strait by the Ottoman entry into the war on the Central Powers' side in November 1914, the British and French were cut off from the Russian Black Sea ports; the strategic argument for forcing the Dardanelles by naval action was the unblocking of that route. The Allied naval campaign opened on 19 February 1915 with the bombardment of the outer forts and continued through five weeks of progressively deeper minesweeping and gunnery duels.

The climax came on 18 March 1915. A combined Anglo-French fleet under Vice-Admiral Sir John de Robeck — sixteen battleships in three lines — entered the strait to force the inner Narrows. In the course of a single afternoon the French battleship Bouvet, the British Irresistible, and the Ocean were sunk by Turkish minefield and shore-battery fire; the battleship Inflexible and the Gaulois were severely damaged. By dusk the fleet had withdrawn, and the attempt to force the strait by naval action was abandoned. The date is observed annually in Türkiye as the Çanakkale Deniz Zaferi — the Çanakkale Naval Victory — and as Şehitleri Anma Günü, the National Day of the Martyrs.

vi.The Gallipoli Land Campaign — and Mustafa Kemal at Conkbayırı

The naval failure of 18 March drove the Allied command to switch to a land assault on the Gelibolu Peninsula. On 25 April 1915, British forces landed at Cape Helles at the southern tip of the peninsula, and a mixed Australian and New Zealand corps (the ANZAC) landed further north at what would be called Anzac Cove. The Turkish defence was conducted by the Fifth Army under the German general Liman von Sanders; the units that received the ANZAC landing on the central ridges of the peninsula were the 19th Division, commanded by the young Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

On the morning of 25 April Kemal led his troops up onto the Conkbayırı ridge — the line of high ground that commands the western face of the peninsula — and stopped the Australian advance. His order to his soldiers that morning is among the most-quoted lines in modern Turkish history: "Ben size taarruzu emretmiyorum, ölmeyi emrediyorum" — "I do not order you to attack, I order you to die." The Ottoman line on Conkbayırı held; the ANZAC and British forces dug in along the cliffs and never broke out of the narrow strip of shore they had taken. The campaign continued for nine months. On 9 January 1916 the last Allied troops were evacuated from the peninsula by sea; the casualties on both sides — Allied and Ottoman — totalled close to half a million men.

Mustafa Kemal emerged from the campaign as the most successful Ottoman commander of the war, and as a public figure of the first rank. The popular reading in Türkiye — and the reading the Valilik gives in its Atatürk ve Çanakkale page — is that the foundations of the Republic were laid on the Gelibolu ridges. The Edward Erickson volume Gallipoli: Command Under Fire (Osprey, 2015) is the standard recent English-language treatment of the Ottoman command.

vii.The Memorial Landscape — Şehitler Abidesi, Conkbayırı, and the Tarihi Alan

The Gelibolu Peninsula is today a single managed memorial landscape, the Çanakkale Savaşları Gelibolu Tarihi Alanı ("the historic area of the Çanakkale battles"), administered as a unified site by an autonomous agency under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The central memorial is the Çanakkale Şehitleri Abidesi on Hisarlık Burnu at the southern tip of the peninsula — a 42-metre stone pylon raised between 1954 and 1960, looking south down the Aegean. On Conkbayırı itself, the high point of the central ridge, are the Turkish monument to the 57th Regiment (the regiment Mustafa Kemal ordered to die holding the line, almost all of which did), the New Zealand National Memorial, and several smaller commemorative markers.

The peninsula contains thirty-one Allied cemeteries — British, Australian, New Zealand, French, and Indian — administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and a corresponding network of Turkish şehitlikler (martyr-cemeteries). The most visited Allied site is Anzac Cove with the Lone Pine memorial on the ridge above it; the Anzac Day commemoration each 25 April brings Australian and New Zealand visitors to the peninsula by the thousands. The Turkish commemoration is on 18 March at the Şehitler Abidesi.

viii.UNESCO 1998 — the Archaeological Site of Troy

In 1998, UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Site of Troy on the World Heritage List under cultural criteria (ii), (iii) and (vi). The inscription rationale identifies the mound of Hisarlık as "the most significant demonstration of the first contact between the civilisations of Anatolia and the Mediterranean world" (criterion ii), as a site of exceptional cultural importance for the profound influence of Homer's Iliad on world literature (criterion vi), and as the type-site for the four-thousand-year archaeological sequence of a single tell in northwest Anatolia (criterion iii). The on-site Troya Müzesi — a large, cube-shaped corten-steel museum a kilometre from the mound, opened by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2018 in observance of the European Year of Cultural Heritage — carries the finds from the long succession of excavations.

ix.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Çanakkale was rebuilt slowly. The 1912–13 Balkan Wars and the 1915–16 Gallipoli campaign had devastated the peninsula and the strait towns; the province was reorganised under the new administrative law of 1924; and through the 20th century it grew modestly, with its economy resting on agriculture (olives, wheat, tomatoes), fishing, ceramics, and — increasingly — historical tourism. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 568,966, slightly below the 570,499 reported in 2023 — one of the few Marmara provinces showing a small demographic contraction. The metropolitan municipality covers twelve districts, including the two Aegean islands of Gökçeada (~11,000) and Bozcaada (~3,500). The largest district by population is the manufacturing centre of Biga (~94,000) on the Marmara coast; the central district of Merkez carries about 204,000.

The new 1915 Çanakkale Köprüsü — the longest-main-span suspension bridge in the world when opened on 18 March 2022 — has shortened the road journey from Istanbul to the southern Marmara coast and the Troas dramatically, and is now the principal land approach to the province for visitors from the European side.

x.What to See, in Order

For the Bronze Age layer, the route starts at the Troya Müzesi at Tevfikiye village (the modern museum opened 2018), then the short walk through the trees to the Hisarlık mound itself — the citadel walls of Troy VI, the East Gate of Troy IX, and the open trench sections marking the nine successive cities. From Troy the road runs south through the Troas to Alexandria Troas (with the late-Roman baths), and on to Assos at Behramkale, where the small Temple of Athena (530 BCE) crowns the acropolis and the modern hill-village of stone houses tumbles down to the small harbour. The Aegean island of Bozcaada — a 35-minute ferry from Geyikli on the coast — is the natural second-day excursion, for its vineyards and the small Genoese castle.

For the 1915 layer, the visitor takes the ferry from Çanakkale to Eceabat on the European side and a half-day tour of the peninsula: the Şehitler Abidesi at Hisarlık Burnu, the 57. Alay Şehitliği on Conkbayırı, the Lone Pine and New Zealand memorials, and Anzac Cove. The Çanakkale Savaşları Gelibolu Tarihi Alan Başkanlığı Tanıtım Merkezi at Kabatepe houses the central interpretive museum. For the urban layer, in Çanakkale town the Çimenlik Kalesi (Mehmed II's 1463 Kale-i Sultaniye) holds the Naval Museum, with the replica minelayer Nusret — the ship whose midnight mine-laying on 7 March 1915 sank three Allied battleships eleven days later — moored alongside.

The strait where Bronze Age Troy faced the open Aegean, where Süleyman Paşa first crossed into Europe in 1354, and where a young Mustafa Kemal turned the tide of the First World War on the ridges above Anzac Cove.

For the Ottoman frontier-town tradition of which Gelibolu was the founding moment, see Edirne; for the imperial capital that prosecuted the 1915 war, see İstanbul; for the Anatolian capital that emerged from it, see Ankara. For Türkiye's straits and coastlines, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.