Philippa Stevenson: ‘Beautiful city’ hosted our ugly nightmare

In the 5th century BC, Greek general Miltiades led the Athenians and their allies to victory over the Persians at Marathon, a battle recalled today in the race run in memory of the soldier who carried the news 42km to Athens.

The Battle of Marathon is considered the single most important in Greek history because, had the Athenians lost, all the later culture and accomplishments of the Greeks would probably have been altered.

In his career, Miltiades also ruled the Greek cities of the Chersonesus Thracia, or Gallipoli Peninsula, in what we now know as Turkey. One city was Kallipolis, Greek for "beautiful city". Gallipoli is an Italian word; the modern Turkish version is Gelibolu.

Like much of Turkey, where East meets West, the Gallipoli Peninsula has been fought over many times.

In 1356, the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine fortress there, giving the Turkish empire its first gain in Europe. The Ottomans expanded the fortifications and the city became an important defence post for their capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul).

As we remembered yesterday, the Anzacs and other British Empire soldiers fought on the peninsula in 1915 in what we and the Australians know as the Gallipoli Campaign, Britons think of as the Dardanelles Campaign and Turks call the Battle of Canakkale.

It seems everybody, no matter from what age, has shed blood on the scrubby but strategic stretch of land. It must have been trampled by footwear from hand-tooled sandals to Doc Martens, fought over with weapons from spears to cannons, and rolled beneath the wheels of chariots and air-conditioned buses.

Perhaps the Turks, at the behest of the Aussies, have been a bit enthusiastic with their earthmoving for the road above Anzac Cove but I wager that Kiwi and Aussie pilgrims this year will still have found much to absorb them.

Doubtless, they will have been as moved by their experiences as those who've gone before, including the 16,000 or so I shared April 25 with in the first year of the new millennium. We might have come in those air-conditioned buses, our hardship might have been no more than a cold, sleepless night on hard ground, but it takes no imagination at all to see what our forebears were up against on that bleak and inhospitable coast.

Today, in Turkish hotels and pensions, people will be struggling to write of the experience in their travel diaries with words that are inadequate to convey the depth of their feelings.

My diary records the physical things of the 2001 dawn service, which began at 5.30am.

"It was so dark," I wrote, "I had to use the torch to see the programme but as the ceremony went on it got lighter and lighter. The hills emerged first black against the sky and then, as more light came, in more detail."

All I managed to record about the emotions that gripped my insides and dried my throat until I could only squeak the National Anthem was that "the service was very moving and I blubbed a bit through it".

Really, I don't need the diary to transport me back to Gallipoli. Neither do I need the one from a year later to take me back to the Somme in France where, among too many, I found the grave of my great-great English uncle who died there, aged just 28, in 1916.

As the only member of his family who has ever dropped by for a chat, that also struck me hard.

You take one look at the gravestones, calculate the ages - as young as your kids, or perhaps a few years either side of your own tender age - you grow quiet, you cry, and you know you'll never forget them, their tragically short lives, their blasted battleground or resting place.

If we do no more than continue to carry their memory home in our hearts, at least we do that.