Çanakkale: The City of Foundation Myths

On the north-western coast of Turkey lies the port of Çanakkale. Positioned at the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, Çanakkale has great strategic importance and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has played host to decisive battles and power struggles. Two of these conflicts in particular have taken on a unique pedestal in the popular imagination; climactic events that have come to define national and cultural identities. These are the Trojan War (the Bronze Age) and the Battle of Gallipoli (1915). Both became foundation myths of the ancient and modern world.

By using the term 'myth' here, I do not mean 'fiction'; the reality of the First World War is not in dispute (unlike the Trojan War), but the moral and cultural force surrounding these conflicts has elevated these from mere historical events to foundational stories integral to societies' understandings of themselves.

Troy

Guarding the Çanakkale waterfront is a 46-foot-high wooden mock-up of the Trojan Horse from Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy (2004), gifted to the city after production. Archaeology is inconclusive, but the ruins of an ancient city widely claimed to be Troy lie just outside Çanakkale. The film is just one expression of the conflict between the Trojans and Greeks that has captivated the imaginations of generations. Homer's Iliad covers the tensions within the Greek camp, centred between Achilles and Agamemnon. The Odyssey, following the Iliad, traces the decade-long journey home of Odysseus from Troy. The characters become emblematic of the vices and virtues of the ancient world, encompassing self-sacrifice, glory, guile and honour, but also betrayal, pride, wrath and greed. 

In short, the Trojan War is the defining event in ancient Greek literature, a foundation for the Greek sense of superiority, as the victors of a decade-long conflict that arrests the attention of the Mediterranean. So potent and definitive is this foundation myth, that hundreds of years after Homer, the Roman poet Virgil sets The Aeneid, his landmark of Roman literature, in the fallout after the Trojan War. The Aeneid is for Virgil an epic poem to give Rome, and the new emperor Augustus, a lineage and foundation in the Trojan War. The hero is the Trojan prince Aeneas, who escapes the burning city on a divine mission to establish a new city, the second Troy. This will, of course, be Rome, and Aeneas' greatest descendent foretold in the poem is, of course, Augustus. Aeneas embodies the virtues of the Augustan age, with the central conflicts revolving around the questions of duty, piety and honour.

Virgil also provides in The Aeneid the origin of the conflict between Rome and Carthage, with Dido, Queen of Carthage a central figure in the poem. The Punic Wars (a series of conflicts between Rome and Carthage in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC) were what allowed for the rise of Rome as a superpower. Even these, Virgil says, are grounded in the aftershocks of the Trojan War.

It is from these Greek and Roman epics that Western literature finds some of its earliest and most central themes distilled. Until the Gospel, the radical story at the heart of Christianity, it was these myths that most embodied the virtues and ideologies of the age, and still reverberate in the values and questions of the modern era.

Gallipoli

In April 1915, British and ANZAC forces landed near Çanakkale, seeking to cripple the fragile Ottoman Empire and force them out of the First World War. This was the notorious Gallipoli campaign, which would claim around 130,000 lives. There were bloodier conflicts in the War, but the effects of Gallipoli seem almost unique in their power to capture and motivate a new sense of nationhood, on both sides.

The sacrifice and valour shown by Australian and New Zealand forces, fighting on a beach on the other side of the world from their home, has been termed the 'Anzac spirit'. Some have criticized such a view as simplistic or idealized, but even so, such debate shows how powerfully the myth of Gallipoli still resonates, over a century later.

Perhaps less familiar to the English-speaking world is the importance of Gallipoli in Turkey's sense of national identity. For a long time, the Ottoman Empire was seen as the "sick man of Europe", stagnant in a centuries-long decline. Gallipoli could have been the final blow, were it not for their successful defence of the peninsula. The Turks rallied under a commander named Mustafa Kemal, whose decisive maneouvres secured the Turkish victory. After the War, Kemal would again unite the disparate peoples of Turkey, leading them to victory in the Turkish War for Independence to establish the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Now known as Atatürk, 'father of the Turks', Kemal became the first President of Turkey, and his reforms and drastic action effectively created the modern state of Turkey as it is today. He is a hero, with statues and portraits of the man in almost every city square. Turkey celebrates its centenary this year, and as it prepares for election the centrality of Atatürk and the 'Çanakkale spirit' are once again front and centre of the national conversation.

Closing thoughts

Many places have been scenes for formative conflicts and events, such that merely saying their name is enough to communicate the ideas, values and identities bound up in them: Jerusalem. Hastings. Bannockburn. Agincourt. Yorktown. Waterloo. Red Square. Tiananmen Square. Normandy. Berlin. Hiroshima. Vietnam. It is fascinating that such a spot as Çanakkale has been witness to such definitive events of the ancient and modern world as Troy and Gallipoli, and the fact that both sites can be visited on the same day is enough to prompt any visitor with the question: What is your foundation myth?

Every hero needs an origin story. Every civilization has its great people and great moments that have come to define its culture and consciousness. For the West, the ancient world was defined by the Trojan War, and then the Gospel. The central story underwriting society, as it were, is in these stories. The legacy of the Twentieth Century, perhaps more than any other, was the addition of a chapter of global conflict to these foundations, chiefly the First and Second World Wars. These have so shaped the modern imagination that it is hard to view Western identity and culture through a prism that does not account for these atrocities.

I hope to discuss the impact of these as foundation myths in greater depth in a short series of articles. In so doing, I hope to gain a better sense of where we place ourselves and the times we live in, and the story we perceive to be unfolding around us. In the meantime, let me recommend three sources that will be pivotal in our investigation of this.

Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Abacus, 2019)

Holland makes a seminal case for the centrality of Christianity in the developments and crises of the West. His thesis, brilliantly and compellingly unpacked, is that the 'depth-charge' of the Gospel is the driving force behind the tumultuous millennia since Christ. 

David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013)
Also a fantastic documentary series, The Long Shadow traces the impact of the First World War in British and European politics, culture and imagination, forever changing our sense of self-identity and paving the way for the ideologies of the Second World War. I highly commend both book and series.

Alec Ryrie, 'Our Dangerous Devotion to the Second World War', BBC History Magazine, January 2021.
Easily one of the most insightful and important articles I can recommend here, Ryrie (Professor of Christian History, Durham University) makes the case that we have replaced the Gospel with the Second World War as the central moral tale at the heart of our culture. This demands to be read.