THE LANDSCAPE OF GALLIPOLI: A PIVOTAL GEOGRAPHY

The Gallipoli Peninsula, with its rugged terrain and distinctive topographic features, forms a dramatic natural setting for the meeting of geography, history and archaeology. The peninsula, the straits of the Dardanelles and the Aegean coast have together comprised a strategic landscape for millennia. People have attempted to capture the pivotal geography of this region through myth, literature, history and, of course, cartography. To map a place is to have its measure, to know it and in some sense to own it; to capture its likeness on the page, even if capture of the land depicted proves elusive in reality. Gallipoli features in the earliest geographic texts and documents, from both West and East, in which the settlement and fortification of the region are graphically depicted along with the coastlines and mountainous topography.

On the Late Roman Imperial map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, mountains line the Gallipoli Peninsula while twin settlements face each other across the entrance to the Dardanelles. By the thirteenth century, the Gallipoli Peninsula appears as a waterway lined with towers rather than mountains, as drawn by a medieval clergyman on the celebrated Hereford mappa mundi in distant England. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman geographer, admiral and cartographer Piri Reis carefully delineated the coastlines of the Dardanelles and peninsula in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation). Captain Piri is thought to have been born in the town of Gelibolu, once the most prominent Ottoman naval port, where the Dardanelles open into the Sea of Marmara. His naval charts highlight the small harbours of the Dardanelles and Aegean coast, including Suvla Bay, and depict the twin fortresses of Sultaniye and Kilitbahir guarding the Narrows. Piri Reis begins and ends his cartographic circumnavigation of the Mediterranean at Gallipoli: ‘… starting from the fortresses of Sultaniye and Kilitbahir around Gallipoli, we have described this sea stop by stop and again ended with these fortresses, completing the cycle …’

The strategic location of the Gallipoli Peninsula is augmented by its complex physical geography. The landscape is defined by ridgelines, which also serve to structure military and historical descriptions of the battlefield, from the First Ridge directly above Anzac Cove to the Third Ridge extending between the headland of Gaba Tepe in the south and heights of Chunuk Bair in the north.