Gallipoli

Over here, the Turks' defence of the Gallipoli Penninsula and the Dardanelles against the Allies in the First World War is seen as the first victory in the country's battle for independence, which ran from 1919 to 1923. This has a lot to do with the fact that the lieutenant colonel credited with the Turkish success at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, later led the independence fight and became the first president of modern Turkey.

More than 40,000 soldiers from Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and India died in the nine-month Gallipoli campaign in 1915 before it was finally abandoned. Also among the Allied dead were 49 soldiers from the British colony of Newfoundland. On the other side, the Turks lost close to 80,000 men.

Mustafa Kemal later became known as Ataturk, which translates as "Father Turk," and there are statues of him in every town, avenues are named after him, and his image hangs in just about every business. In 1934, he said something particularly conciliatory about the Allied war dead and I'll repeat it here...

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

And now, on to some business from my last post. I'm hardly surprised most of you figured I would be too scared to venture onto the catwalk shown in the picture. But you were wrong -- it was the only way to get to another section of the fortress, so I walked the entire length of it!