Turkey - Day 5 - In search of Troy

Mar. 24th, 2006 | 10:56 pm
music: Thumping of the music next door, clock chimes
Today was a dual adventure, Troy in the morning, the battle fields of Galipolli in the afternoon.
Breakfast was much better than the previous day's with several kinds of cheese, two kinds of eggs (scrambled and hard boiled) and marble cake and cheese rolls, and some kind of small round pastry. We were to meet our tour at 9.30, but it was much closer to 10.30 by the time they came and got every thing sorted out.

Troy was about what I expected, lots of walls and foundations, and sort of midlevel excavations. More than some places as the walls were pretty high and the foundations were maybe 3-4 feet high. The altar at the main shrine was mostly intact and showed 1,000 years of improvement in stone masonry from the bottom to the top. As one of the first archeological sites it had more than its share of bad decisions in archeology. What I did not know was the that the Romans had used the site and it had been occupied a lot longer than I thought, with the Greek period being fairly early in its career as a site. It used to be a port, but like Bruges, the port silted in over the millennia, and its now something like 7km from the water. There are some nice pictures from the site of the temple of Athena which overlooks what would have been the port. In the pre-being able to sail upwind days, you would have to wait at Troy for the wind to turnaround so you could go up the Bosporus.

After a few hours of wandering around Troy, we went back, to discover that we had to take the noon ferry back to Europe to catch the Anzac tour. this required a light jog to get there in time, but much to our amazement, the tour bus was waiting for us on the other side, and they had lunch and a litre of water as promised, and we wetn off on time.

This tour was much longer, and we visited the landing sights, and dozens of meticulously kept grave yards. The Commonwealth commissioner for grave sites has been busy. There are dozens of them. (see lots of pictures) No doubt they look especially nice becasue ANZAC day is only a month a way, and they were busy building stands for the big annual event. Apparently about 20,000 New Zealanders and Australians come every year for Anzac day.

We also saw a lot of the trench work which is still visible. Some of it has been restored, but a lot is just left over as ditches. Fairly recently a lot of trees have been planted, and apparently there is enough rain, but fires run through too often for the area to remain forested without help. There is a significant attempt to reduce erosion with the reforestation project. I'm not going to try and account for the battles but the high ground is rather high ground and steep, and you can see how territory captured on the first day before both sides got dug in made all the difference.

We took the ferry back to Asia, had dinner at the Seaside Bistro Cafe which was a glass box slightly out on the street. We had passed it several times because it looked expensive, but it was about the same as other places and the food was better, if slightly too European standard. I had become less and less well as the day progressed, so this was fine with me. Then we went back to the hotel and Nikita set up his machine as the wireless hub and amazingly it worked two floors away.