Youth, death and Gallipoli – names, myths and meaning

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 1  14 April - 12 May 2008 ]

The legendary story of the ANZACs at Gallipoli tells of youthful heroes and tragic death – both poignant and pitiful – in a place long associated with death and heroes. Associate Professor in the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Classics and Archaeology, CHRIS MACKIE, is part of a team doing an historical and archaeological survey of the ANZAC battlefield for the Commonwealth Department of Veterans’ Affairs. He writes that understanding names and naming at Gallipoli can reveal layers of meaning.

If you are one of the many thousands of people who visit Turkey for the ANZAC Day Gallipoli ceremonies you will probably be struck by all the different names. There are the headstones marking the graves of soldiers who fell in the campaign, row after row in beautifully kept cemeteries and memorials.

There are the names in English and Turkish given to the various parts of the battlefield. Some of these have become famous in their own right – Anzac Cove, Quinn’s Post, Walker’s Ridge, Chunuk Bair, Gaba Tepe...

And there are the names that come from ancient Greek. People don’t usually associate ‘ancient Greece’ with Gallipoli, but Greek-speakers lived on the peninsula from about the 7th century BCE into the 20th century.

Before the Great War the proportion of Greeks in the total population there was quite high. Two censuses, in 1910 and 1912, suggest that there were about 80 000 Greeks living at Gallipoli, and about 30 000 Turks. Very little ink has been spilt on the population who dwelt on the peninsula prior to 1915, including the Greeks. They are the forgotten people of the Gallipoli histories.

The name ‘Gallipoli’ (Turkish ‘Gelibolu’) comes from the ancient Greek ‘Kallipolis’, which means ‘beautiful city’ or ‘beautiful town’. There were ‘polises’ (Gr poleis) throughout the ancient world. Naples or ‘Neapolis’ (= ‘New City’) is a famoius example, but many other settlements ended with the word ‘-polis’.

So when you use the word ‘Gallipoli’, you are speaking ancient Greek – after a fashion. You may not know it, but you are also evoking the idea of physical beauty (Kalli-). Originally it was Kallipolis itself that was meant to be beautiful, but because of the modern town’s size as the largest settlement, the name ‘Gallipoli’ came to identify (in English) the whole peninsula.

In ancient times the peninsula had a reputation for its attractive landscape and fertility. And its natural beauty had an impact on the soldiers of 1915 too.

Strange as it may seem now, many participants in the campaign took the time out to ponder the beauty of the Gallipoli landscape. As one historian puts it, “The beauty and strange serenity of the Peninsula, even during the most bitter fighting, were paradoxes which struck many who served in the Dardanelles”.

Another ancient Greek name is ‘Helles’, the cape at the tip of the peninsula where most of the British and French were based in 1915. It takes its name from an important Greek myth about two young siblings called Helle and Phrixus.

A wicked stepmother devises a plot to have the boy Phrixus sacrificed by his own father, but the children make their escape on a magical flying ram with a golden fleece. The ram carries them away, but the little girl Helle falls to her death into the sea below. The stretch of water where she landed was thus called the ‘Hellespont’ by the Greeks, or ‘Sea of Helle’ (ie, the Dardanelles); and the name ‘Cape Helles’ comes from the same story.

The names ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘Helles’, therefore, arise from Greek ideas of beauty and the death of the young. These same notions are central in Homer’s great epic poem the Iliad which describes the war for Troy - just across the waterway from the Gallipoli peninsula.

Beauty and young death go together in ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and in their own way they are there in the modern Gallipoli narrative too. As we approach ANZAC Day it is worth bearing in mind that the terrible events of 1915 were played out in an ancient landscape which was frequently fought over in other wars through time.

There are few better places in the world to witness the layers of disastrous human conduct in war than the Dardanelles region of modern Turkey.