Çanakkale province takes in both shores of the Dardanelles, and across the strait from the city lies the Gallipoli peninsula, where the First World War battlefields of 1915 are protected as the Gallipoli Historical Site. In the city of Çanakkale, on the Asian shore, Çimenlik Castle, built under Mehmed the Conqueror to guard the strait, is now a museum, and a mirrored bazaar and several small museums sit in the old streets. Beyond the city are Troy, the ancient cities of Assos and Alexandria Troas, the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus, Mount Ida and the islands of Bozcaada and Gökçeada. The visiting details for each are on its page on this site.
The Gallipoli Historical Site
The historical area covers 33,444 hectares, most of it inside the Eceabat district, on a peninsula with the Dardanelles to the east and the Aegean to the west and south. The ministry ranks the 1915 fighting here between the Entente powers and the Ottoman state among the biggest battles of the First World War, and the ground still holds what that fighting left behind: trenches, guns, fortifications and sunken ships. Its inventory includes 34 foreign cemeteries and monuments as well as 50 Turkish military cemeteries and 29 Turkish monuments and inscriptions, besides castles and gun batteries. The peninsula is a protected landscape as well, with coves, maquis and a salt lake at Suvla, and in 2014 the First World War sites of Çanakkale and Gallipoli were placed on UNESCO's tentative list.
The cemeteries took shape in stages. During the fighting, with the dead gathering in a narrow area, both sides had to bury them in mass graves rather than one by one. Once the armistice of Mudros was signed, the British started on cemeteries and memorials, and by the Treaty of Lausanne the number had reached thirty. The French had laid out a cemetery at Seddülbahir during the war and kept arranging theirs until 1930, while New Zealand's cemeteries were begun in 1919. When the Turkish War of Independence was over, the Turkish authorities ceded to the states concerned, separately and with no time limit, the ground holding the graves and memorials of British, French and Italian soldiers.
Memorials and museums on the peninsula
The Çanakkale Martyrs' Memorial, raised to the Turkish soldiers who died in the campaign, rises over Morto Bay from Hisarlık Tepe, where the strait opens to the sea: a canopy on four legs, 41.7 metres high. Feridun Kip, Doğan Erginbaş and İsmail Utkular won the design competition while still students. Building it took years. The foundation was laid in 1954, the public's money ran out when the granite had risen only twelve metres, and a newspaper appeal in 1958 paid for the rest; it opened on 21 August 1960. Nearby stand the Mehmetçik Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, along with a Turkish war cemetery.
On the Arıburnu front, the 57th Infantry Regiment of the 19th Division was the Turkish unit that met the Anzac advance on the first day of the landings and drove it back. Its memorial cemetery beside the Kabatepe–Conkbayırı road, built in 1992, is symbolic, the real one lying in the Çataldere valley; at the entrance stands a bronze of Hüseyin Kaçmaz, who died in 1994 at 108 as the country's oldest surviving veteran. On Conkbayırı, a bronze monument of 1993 recalls the attack Mustafa Kemal led there on 10 August 1915, and four cannonballs with a plaque mark where a shrapnel ball struck the watch in his breast pocket.
Two museums tell the story indoors. At Bigalı, north of Eceabat, the two-storey timber-framed house that Mustafa Kemal used as his divisional headquarters for fifteen days in 1915 is a house museum with lifelike figures. At Kabatepe, the Çanakkale Epic Promotion Centre, opened in 2012, is built wholly underground to suggest a burial ground; eleven reconstruction rooms take visitors through the fighting in a 65-minute sequence, real trenches and military vehicles stand outside, and Captain Eşref Efendi's bloodstained uniform is among the objects brought from the battlefield.
Çanakkale city: the castle and the museums
Çimenlik Castle, also called Kale-i Sultaniye, stands on the Asian shore facing Kilitbahir on the European side, and its thirty guns could reach across 1,250 metres of the strait. Süleyman the Magnificent strengthened it in 1551, and Selim III renewed it during the Napoleonic wars. On 18 March 1915 a shell from the British ship Queen Elizabeth broke a hole two metres wide in the north wall without exploding, and it still lies where it landed. The castle is a museum now, with guns from the Çanakkale battles in its courtyard; the inner castle is 42 metres by 48 and its walls are 9.5 metres thick.
In the town, the Aynalı Çarşı dates from 1890; its builder, Eliyau Hallio, was a prominent member of Çanakkale's Jewish community. Above its door are two inscriptions, in Ottoman Turkish and in Ladino written in Hebrew script, and its popular name, the mirrored bazaar, comes from the mirrors either side of the entrance; the city's well-known folk song mentions it. The City Museum and Archive, in a nineteenth-century building on Fetvane Street that ran for forty-six years as the Emek Hotel, displays more than three hundred pieces, many of them given by the city's people. The municipal Ceramics Museum occupies a soldiers' bathhouse of 1906 and puts Çanakkale ceramics beside the work of potters working today.
Troy
Troy, with its nine settlement layers stacked one on another, and the Troy Museum on the plain below the mound are at Tevfikiye in the central district. They have their own article on this site: Where was Troy, and what can you see there today?
Assos, the Smintheion and the Troad
Assos, at Behramkale in Ayvacık, is built almost wholly of andesite on a hill some 234 metres above the sea. Hermias, who took power there after the banker Euboulos, had studied under Plato and Aristotle in Athens and invited Aristotle and Xenokrates to the city. The Temple of Athena on its acropolis combines Doric and Ionic features, which the governorate reads as a meeting of the two shores of the Aegean, and the theatre below, built for 4,000, mostly survives. Assos joined UNESCO's tentative list in May 2017.
At Gülpınar, the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus worshipped Apollo as lord of mice, the god who protected farmers from them; its Ionic temple of around 150 BC has eight columns across each end and friezes on the Trojan War of the Iliad. Alexandria Troas, near Dalyan village in Ezine, was founded in 310 BC in Alexander's name inside eight kilometres of walls, and with the backing of Herodes Atticus it gained an aqueduct from Kaz Dağı and a bath of 123 by 84 metres. At Kemer in Biga, Parion was identified from its coins, marked with a gorgon's head and the letters ARI; digging since 2005 has uncovered a theatre, a Roman villa and an odeon.
Mount Ida, Kaz Dağı in Turkish, rises in the middle of the Biga peninsula; legend made it sacred, and ancient settlements ring it, Troy, Assos and Gargara among them. At Küçükkuyu, on the Çanakkale-İzmir road, the Adatepe Olive Oil Museum, in an old soap works, still presses oil by the dry method among tools gathered from the surrounding villages.
Bozcaada and Gökçeada
Bozcaada, ancient Tenedos, is reached by car ferry from Geyikli Yükyeri. Its castle was thoroughly restored under Mehmed the Conqueror and rebuilt almost from scratch under Mahmud II in 1815, and the island has vineyards, wineries and a grape-harvest festival in August. Gökçeada, once İmroz, is reached by ferry from Kabatepe. Its five Greek villages, Zeytinli, Tepeköy, Dereköy, Kaleköy and Eski Bademli, are protected as an urban conservation area, and the sea between Yıldızkoy and Yelkenkaya is protected as an underwater national park.
