Lest we forget: Gallipoli's history and myths revealed

I admit I was in two minds about visiting Gallipoli - and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

I was unsure why the Anzac beaches had become such a big draw for backpackers - it seemed a bit distasteful to me. But I had my own excuse to make the journey: it's my job as a historian to go to historical sites, stare at them and stroke my chin, as I wait for either a deeper understanding of the past to descend upon me or for a happy hour to begin at a nearby bar.

I couldn't get to Turkey on Anzac Day, but minibus tours of the battlefields run every day of the year. Although several different tours are apparently available, most of them seem to be repackagings of the same offering from Crowded House Tours.

You can either board a Crowded House Gallipoli day-tour in Istanbul and face about 16 hours' total driving time, or meet the minibus in the Dardanelles city of Canakkale at 11.30 am.

I choose to catch a coach to the peninsula the day before the tour. The journey takes five hours - half an hour longer than advertised - but Canakkale is far lovelier than I had expected.

Canakkale is a student town, awash with cheap street eateries and lively small bars, most of them crammed into narrow streets around the 19th-century clocktower. The waterfront is crowded with restaurants catering for older locals and families, who watch from their tables as ships ply the straits with the graceful determination of swans.

Just outside the ferry port squats Sons of Gallipoli, a single-storey multimedia centre where audio-visual displays tell the Gallipoli story from the point of view of ordinary Turkish soldiers. The screens do not work in an intuitive way, and you have to tap them in the middle to get anything going, but entry is free and it's worth a visit.

A little further along the esplanade stands the Trojan Horse used in the 2004 epic movie Troy. The giant prop dominates its unlikely location because Canakkale is also a starting point for trips to the Troy archaeological site where, apparently, there is not much to photograph except for a bigger and even more improbable model of a horse (with, er, barracks on its back - which might have been a bit of a giveaway for defenders of the city).

The Gallipoli tour makes a first stop at the Canakkale horse for selfies, mixing myth with history (and not for the last time).

At the port, Ibrahim the guide shepherds our group of 15 travellers onto the car ferry across the straits.

It's a glorious 25-minute voyage from Asia to Europe, approaching the less lovely town of Eceabat from the best possible vantage. The heart-shaped fortifications of the 15th-century Kilitbahir Castle watch over the straits, and a towering hill bears the Dur Yolcu memorial, a huge rock carved with a dramatic image of a Turkish soldier before a burning brazier and the words (in Turkish): "Traveller, halt! The soil you tread once witnessed the end of an era."

The ferry pulls in at Eceabat near the Memorial Park, the site of a complicated sculpture that rises from a statue of a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded Australian across the lines and is topped by a figure of Kemal Ataturk, the army officer at Gallipoli who became the founder of modern Turkey.

The tour proper begins with the meal break for the passengers from Istanbul, a dry and flavourless lunch of chicken, kofte, rice and chips which might be the worst food I have had in Turkey.

Ibrahim, who speaks unfeasibly quickly, canters through the story of the Dardanelles campaign, which was originally conceived by the British as an Allied naval offensive that would easily defeat the supposedly weak and poorly organised forces of the Ottoman Empire and conclude with the capture of Istanbul.

The Allies were driven back by Turkish artillery and shrewdly laid minefields, and the anniversary of the routing of the fleet on 18 March 1915 is celebrated in Turkey as a public holiday, Martyrs' Day or the Day of the Fallen Soldier.

As a historian, I am prepared - hoping, even - to be unimpressed, but Ibrahim knows his history far better than I had imagined he would, and he gives a largely accurate, nuanced and neutral picture of the Gallipoli campaign, although a couple of his ideas are fanciful at best. For example, he insists that the British executed the commander of the Royal Navy's minesweepers for his failure in the Dardanelles, although in real life he died in 1945, a peer of the realm.

Nor had I ever come across the idea that the Anzacs were warned to evade capture out of a fear that the Turks would eat them - but it's worth listening to the story to hear Ibraham's lip-licking punchline: "Australian soup... I like Australian soup."

Somehow, it had not occurred to me that most of the Anzac sites would be cemeteries, but the thing that the Anzacs did most often when they came to Gallipoli was die. About 130,000 military personnel from all sides, including 8141 Australians, were killed in the land invasion that followed the abortive sea attack.

The ground fighting began with the landing at the beach now known as Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 and ended in the Allied withdrawal from the peninsula under cover of darkness in January 1916.

On the tour bus, Ibrahim asks, "You know John Simpson Kirkpatrick?"

No-one does.

"The man with the donkey," he says.

"The man with the what?" asks a New Zealander, as if he has heard something obscene.

Ibrahim tells us that the medic known as Simpson and his donkey saved the lives of 300 wounded men at Anzac Cove (which is highly unlikely, but that's another story).

Simpson is buried at the Beach Cemetery, along with 390 other Commonwealth servicemen. At Simpson's grave, Ibrahim asks if anyone knows the name of Simpson's donkey (which seems improbable, as even the name of Simpson appears to be new to them). "Murphy," he says. He points to the gravestone behind Simpson's, which commemorates a medic called "Murphy", and speculates that Simpson may have named his donkey after his mate. (There was more than one donkey, and other accounts name the animal as "Duffy" or "Abdul", so Simpson may have had an eclectic bunch of mates.)

Near the Beach Cemetery, a memorial stone stands like a billboard advertising Ataturk's famous words: "There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie, side by side here in this country of ours." Historians have since discovered Ataturk never said those words - and, in fact, he probably said the opposite - but they're nice sentiments and hopefully gave some comfort to the distantly bereaved when they were invented in Turkey in the 1950s and augmented in Australia in the 1970s.

One of the objectives of the Allied invasion was to gain command of the high ground at Chunuk Bair peak. On the hill today stands a massive bronze statue, the Ataturk Victory Monument, erected in 1993 to commemorate a pivotal moment in the Turkish mythology of Gallipoli. This is the spot where Ataturk ordered his troops to attack the British, just before dawn on August 10, 1915. Ataturk personally led the assault, signalling his men to advance by raising his whip.

British guns shelled the Turkish army from the sea, tearing them to pieces, but Ataturk stood in the line of fire, commanding the surviving soldiers to fight on. As iron rained from the sky, a piece of shrapnel struck Ataturk in the chest, where he carried a watch in his breast pocket. The shrapnel shattered the watch which, of course, saved the great leader's life, enabling him to continue his struggle to vanquish the Allies and become the founder of modern Turkey.

Ibrahim tells us that Ataturk took a direct hit and lived to tell the tale.

He pauses, then adds, "It just wasn't his time."

His timing is perfect.

Sorry.

It's at Chunuk Bair that we begin to intersect with much larger tour groups of Turkish people. We then merge with dense crowds of locals at the Turkish 57th Infantry Regiment Cemetery, where there is a bronze statue of the last surviving Turkish Gallipoli veteran, Huseyin Kacmaz, who died at the age of 110.

Read more on Explore:

There are still sights that I want to see on the peninsula, so the next day I return to Eceabat alone. I enjoy the ferry journey even more the second time around and quickly find a taxi driver to take me around the peninsula.

The main attraction I hope to visit is the Canakkale Epic Promotion Centre, which is supposed to use high-tech 3D simulation equipment to make visitors feel as though they are at the centre of the fighting at Gallipoli.

However, the immersive experience is unavailable, and the staff are uncommunicative and unsympathetic when I try to find out why. It turns out that it will only open for groups of 50 people - or, as my taxi driver helpfully suggests, one person willing to pay 50 times the entry fee.

I guess this shows the advantages of travelling with a tour company, whose staff at least know what is open and when.

Although the Crowded House tour does not go to every important Anzac site, it's certainly worth the money. And I should say that, on the day I board the Crowded House minibus, it's raining heavily in Australia. But in Gallipoli, which is supposed to be a windy place, the climate is temperate and calm.

My point is... everywhere I go, Crowded House doesn't take the weather.

I'm so, so sorry.

Getting there: I flew from Sydney to Istanbul with Etihad (from $1392 return). It was not a satisfactory experience. Next time, I'd fly with either Emirates or Qatar Airways. etihad.com

Getting around: Several coach companies make the journey from Istanbul to Canakkale. I went with Flixbus from Istanbul's Esenler Coach Terminal because there was supposed to be a toilet on board - but there wasn't. The one-way fare costs about $26. global.flixbus.com

Touring there: Crowded House Tours of Gallipoli from Canakkale cost about $80. crowdedhousegallipoli.com

Staying there: I stayed at the DoubleTree by Hilton Canakkale. The hotel is a 20-minute walk from town, with generous rooms, a pool, good views and a wonderful breakfast buffet. Rooms start at about $150 a night, but if I were to do the trip again (which I will) I'd probably stay somewhere more central. hilton.com

The writer travelled at his own expense.

Pictures: Getty Images; Shutterstock, Mark Dapin