Advertisement
Published: February 6th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Near the sea..in a castle
The summer wind was extremely refreshing :) I am here for 1 week already. It't time for my first trip outside the city. So we got together: about 50 people - to go to visit TROY..and other places related to Turkish history. The trip from Eskisehir to Canakkale (the starting poing of our 3-days history lesson) is 8 hours. Once there..you can smell the perfume of the sea. We crossed the Dardanelles with a ship. The view was absolutely breathtaking.
The water was dark green and the wind was caressing our smiling faces. How can I describe that Dardanelles crossing-over trip?! Great! Absolutely beautiful! And since our trip's purpose was to discover the history of that part of Turkey...soon we started to see a huge Turkish flag on the hill. Soon we reached Gallipoli, the starting point. That place is now a national park and has a lot of cemeteries, monuments and trenches. Everywhere you walk..you walk on history...Since this happened quite fast, please forgive me for the unaccuracy of the dates..they are in random order in my head 😊
In a nutshell, we visited Kılıtbahir Castle (great walls!!) also called the "Lock on the Sea", lots of cemeteries (31!) where have been burried young
Canakkale shore
Heading away from the Asian side soldiers from all over the world: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, France. For me, the most impressive was the 44 m high monument that stood as a guardian for the memorial stones scattered all around it. The History teacher that was our guide told us many things about all this and about the courage of the Anzacs who protected the land from invaders during the WWI and WWII..but the 40 degrees weather deleted most of the info from my brain.
Second day we went to visit TROY..the root of all Greek stories and to see the Trojan Horse that people say Brad Pitt touched when he came here for the movie "Troy" 😊) All the time we were travelling by bus, parallel with the sea. The heat of the day and the colour of the water made everybody in the bus feel very sleepy. One could smell the sweat..phuhahahaha..with all that water we only knew that we are moving around Aegean Marmara Sea..one with white and soft sand, the other with rocks that made your feet hurt. When we finally reached the City of Troy..it was 2 pm. The sun was killing us..
At the entrance was a
Fortress
..sorry, I forgot its name :( replica of the supposingly Trojan Horse. We all took pictures there. (I don't have them now 😞 I will attach some later, after I write more in the blog). Then we saw what we craved so much for: the walls, the stony bridges, altars for Atena - the protector of the city. The guide told us that there are 9 ancient cities discovered (one on top of each other) and many things written in Homer's "Iliad" are said to be precise. It was amazing, even if one might say there was "a bunch of stones scattered over a field in a torid summer day"...
Third day was more relaxing..I guess everybody was tired after 2 days of history lessons...hehehe...after the "beach break" we went to Assos: a lovely small city on a hill..in the top, after 40 awful minutes of walking uphill, we saw it: the Temple of Atena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. We were supposed to see the sunset there. The temple is almost destroyed, but it's beauty and charm still catches you. The 180 degrees view was magnificent. We could see the Greek islands around and the water's colour was of a vivid green. After we
Turkish symbols
..I was bored on the boat enjoyed a romantic sunset, we went back to our bus.on the stony roads were lots of merchants trying to make us buy hand-made jewellery and apple-candy sweets. It was amazing to see the buildings as well..and think that Aristotle lived here once. Last stop before going back to Eskisehir was "Küçükkuyu Olive Oil Museum". Apart from the old machines of preparing the olive oil, they had a small shop where there were various things prepared from olives from butter to perfumed soap.
And back to Eski...8 hours again...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.055s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0236s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
levent
non-member comment
...
"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 where they lie side by side here in this country of ours You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well." Mustafa Kemal ATATURK