Tourists walk among the headstones at Ari Burnu Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula yesterday. Photo / Alan Gibson
Tourists walk among the headstones at Ari Burnu Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula yesterday. Photo / Alan Gibson
Away from the burial grounds, preparations for Saturday’s Anzac centenary were full steam ahead.
They came in their thousands to Gallipoli yesterday. They chatted and shared stories of their connections to the Anzacs as they walked in queues along the windswept roads of the peninsula.
And then, they stopped. They were silent for a time. Some cried, some knelt and placed poppies, some just stood. The silence started when they got to the cemeteries.
Gallipoli was buzzing yesterday. Construction workers banged and built, erecting staging, seating and lighting for the big event on Saturday.
Tour buses, most of the day nose-to-tail on the main road to Anzac Cove, were full of people eager to see where the action was 100 years ago, their anticipation palpable.
But the buzz stopped in the cemeteries. The rows of graves in such a beautiful and serene setting were sobering. They are all pristine, the stonework precise and the surrounding gardens manicured to perfection.
Against the greens of the grass and scrub-covered hills and gullies, and the browns of the exposed areas the graves almost shone.
Away from the busy main road with its clanging and yelling of the construction workers, the sacred sites were peaceful, some even silent apart from the rustle of the crisp wind through the surrounding scrub.
The graves hold many stories. An Aussie soldier, aged 16, at Walker's Ridge. Another, a 20-year-old buried at Ari Burnu, with the inscription: I have fought a good fight.
Thousands walked between the immaculately kept rows of headstones adorned with poppies and alternating New Zealand and Australian flags, wearing a path in the lush grass. They came to honour the dead - those they knew and more importantly those they did not.
Away from the burial grounds, preparation for Saturday's Anzac centenary were full steam ahead.
Turkish police gathered in clusters, speaking hurriedly to each other, presumably about their role in the mammoth commemoration machine. Camouflage-clad soldiers wandered the perimeter of the service sites and hundreds of portable toilets were trucked in for the 10,500 attendees, VIPs and dignitaries expected to start converging on the peninsula tomorrow.
A New Zealand flag flutters among the headstones at Ari Burnu Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula. photo / Alan Gibson
Ferries to the peninsula to and from Canakkale, the city on the other side of the Dardanelles Strait, were packed. In the morning with excited visitors sipping on steaming sweet Turkish coffee to counteract the bitterly cold sea breeze, and in the evening with weary and sombre faces, the mark of a true understanding of what Gallipoli is and was.
It is a beautiful place - lush and green, surrounded by seemingly endless blue ocean. It is hard to imagine the Gallipoli of today as a place of death, of pain and trauma, and fear. A place where dead bodies were used to bolster trenches when sandbags ran out, where soldiers carried their dead brothers down steep inclines under fire just to make sure they would be buried with their comrades.
What it was will never be forgotten. But what it is today - a place to reflect, remember and honour those who lost or risked their lives for their country - is something for which we should all be grateful.
