Where the Dardanelles narrows — Troy is on one side, Gallipoli on the other, and the world's most consequential straits between them
Çanakkale is a Turkish city on the Dardanelles strait that commands some of the most historically charged geography on earth. Within 30km of the city centre lie the ruins of Troy (UNESCO World Heritage Site 1998) — nine superimposed cities spanning 3,000 years, the archaeological site that Heinrich Schliemann began excavating in 1870 convinced he had found Homer's Ilios. Across the strait on the Gallipoli Peninsula lie the battlefields of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign — the Anzac Cove beaches, Chunuk Bair, and Lone Pine Cemetery, where 130,000 men died in eight months. The city itself, where th…
Çanakkale guarded the narrowest point of the Hellespont — the strait that Xerxes crossed on a bridge of boats in 480 BCE, that Alexander the Great crossed in 334 BCE to launch his Asian campaign, and that the Allied fleet failed to force in March 1915, leading to the land campaign at Gallipoli. The city itself was a Byzantine and Ottoman fortress town before becoming the provincial capital. Troy (8km south at Hisarlık) was excavated by Schliemann in 1870-73 and revealed nine superimposed settlements; Troy VI or VIIa (c.1250 BCE) is the most plausible candidate for the city of the Iliad.