August 30, 2012
More things explained: Eceabat - the road to Can
THERE'S A FERRY from Eceabat to the larger neighbour of Canakkale, which you pronounce Chan-NAK-kally. It doesn't take long to sail but it does take long enough to get ready that we heard the Turkish anthem. On a crowded continent you get to know a lot of anthems even if you never know the words, and a lifetime of international bike championships means I have stood to quite a few of them. I don't think either of us had heard the Turkish anthem, however, and it was only when we were the only people on the ferry not standing up that we realised this was probably it.
So we stood and watched life come to a halt on shore - Turks are immensely proud of their country and don't treat its symbols lightly - and watched a naval officer in white tropical uniform and a full sword do something in the mid-distance that involved stiff walking and saluting.
Puzzled, we asked our neighbour what was happening. She turned out to live in Germany, to which she had moved with her parents at six months, and she was back on a periodic visit to the land of her birth.
'August the Thirtieth,' she said, 'is a national day in Turkey. Every year we celebrate the founding of modern Turkey.'
We thought that was the wresting of a nation from the Ottomans but she said it was more recent than that, that in the decades after the first world war Turkey had settled its problems with neighbouring Greece - presumably to Turkey's advantage - and that the boundaries had finally been defined.
I didn't say, because we're not sure of the history, but we suspected this was the moment of the nasty population exchange, as it was called then, or ethnic cleansing as we might call it now. Whatever the name, thousands of Greek-speaking people had been sent to Greece and thousands of Turkish-speaking Greeks had been sent to Turkey. Whether they liked it or not.
In fact, as we found from an Australian visiting the battlefields where his grandfather fought, many of those defending Turkey at Gallipoli spoke Turkish at best as a second language.
'This was an ethnic Greek area,' he said as we tried to see if it was really a wig he was wearing or if he had died his hair an improbable dark russet. 'So my grandfather was a Greek fighting for Turkey against Australia.' And some years later it was to Australia that he moved and in Australia that he died, which created a circular irony neither of us missed.
With the anthem over, the ferry set off across the strait and after a brief meeting with a map-less German with excellent English but a world leader in filthy white T-shirts, we set off to Can (Chunn) - straight into a gale that lasted until we stopped at 5pm with hardly any distance but a lot of fighting to stay upright and keep moving and around 750 metres of climbing.
Tonight we have camped in a wood of bushes and half-grown trees of mongrel appearance. The bells of goats across the road are clinking and we think our camping area is normally part of their area. But not tonight, thank goodness. Because a goat will eat anything, tent and panniers included.
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