North Beach on the Gallipoli Peninsula is the gathering place for thousands of Australians and New Zealanders on April 25 every year. Along with military and political dignitaries, at daybreak they remember the anniversary of the landing that took place on that fateful day in 1915.

A Turkish tourist guide spoke of his ambivalence about escorting people coming to Gallipoli for this commemoration. He couldn’t make sense of some young people’s excessive consumption of alcohol and drunkenness but he also recalled the way that many travellers were deeply moved by visiting this place of remembering.

A rite of passage, establishing identity by travelling to a site of national memories, a chance to connect with family members who fought at this place – there are many reasons for coming to Gallipoli.

Pilgrimage was once a holy action, motivated by the search for salvation, the seeking of forgiveness, or the desire to fulfil a vow made for oneself or for others. The spiritual intent for the pilgrim was primary, although the secondary dimensions of companionship, adventure, the encounter with different people and places were also present.

Going to Gallipoli is a form of secular pilgrimage that can tap into some of the deeper instincts associated with spiritual pilgrimage. The medieval pilgrims went to sacred places, sanctified by their association with saintly and devout people from the past either in person or because of their relics. Acquiring merit through association with holy people and places, devotion, and the sacrifices connected with journeying, reinforced the medieval ideal of pilgrimage.

Modern secular pilgrimages to sites of memory, such as Gallipoli, are shorn of their theological motivation. There is a sense, however, in which Gallipoli has become a sacred place not only because of past memories but because of the way in which it contains the remains, the relics, of those who were killed here. The memorials with the lists of names of those who died and the cemeteries with their headstones lined up in military precision are mute witnesses to the conflict and carnage that raged over this precipitous landscape.

For family, visiting the place where relatives are named and memorialised, there’s a strong sense of connection between the living and the dead, the present and the past. Thousands of kilometres from their homeland these sons, brothers, uncles, grandparents of Australian and New Zealand families are remembered on stone where they lived and died.

Bruce Scates, in his study Return to Gallipoli, points to “three enduring features of a pilgrimage” which capture the experience of many visitors. There is a “journey across a ‘sacred’ landscape, a moment of catharsis as that ‘instinctive tribute’ is made by the graveside, and a great sense of fellowship with all who make (or ‘share’) the journey”.

One of the young Australians in our group had just run with the bulls in Pamplona. On his way home he diverted to Gallipoli and was deeply moved by the landscape, the graves and memorials, and the joining with other Australians and New Zealanders who shared the communal memory of Gallipoli. Pamplona symbolised the continuing exuberance of youth that led some Anzacs in the past to fight; the pilgrimage to Gallipoli brought together the affective impact of place, remembrance and history.

Gallipoli is a sobering place where questions from the past haunt the modern pilgrim. Why on earth did the Anzacs come to this forbidding landscape? How far were they the pawns in the plans of British naval and military strategists? What, if anything, did they achieve?

The presence of our Turkish guide is a reminder that the Anzacs were invading someone else’s country, and that the Turks were defending their homeland. The Turks held the high ground against the seaborne soldiers who had to struggle under fire across the rocky shallows to the narrow beach (and the wrong one at that) before they could find any shelter from the steep cliffs.

The enmity of the past is replaced by stories from our guide about the respect which Turks and Anzacs had for each other. Myth, legend, fact and fiction intermingle in ways similar to stories told about the holy saints of old. The statue of a Turkish soldier carrying an injured Australian points to a redemptive act. But can individual actions of humanity cancel out the thousands of deaths and the brutal realities of conflict?

Standing at Chunuk Bair, it was possible to see the glimpse of the Dardenalles that Colonel William Malone and his New Zealand men briefly gained on August 8, 1915, when they reached the highest point achieved by the Anzacs. The capturing of the Dardanelles was in sight, but John Crawford in No Better Death writes: “By afternoon, Chunuk Bair was an absolute charnel house”.
Today two memorials are on the heights; one of Musatafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, the architect of Turkish victory on Gallipoli and the father of modern Turkey; the other in memory of the New Zealand soldiers. Atatürk’s memorial recounts how he was saved from shrapnel by his pocket watch.

The New Zealand memorial is a lone white obelisk with the simple inscription: “In honour of the soldiers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force 8th August 1915 ‘From the uttermost ends of the earth’.”

Below the summit is the Chunuk Bair Cemetery. Eight of the 10 graves are memorials to New Zealanders. I placed a poppy beside the grave of Private Basil Ernest Mercer, aged 19, from the Wellington Company – one of the few soldiers who fought here to find a marked grave. A teenager killed in the prime of life.

Close by is a memorial listing the names of 632 men whose bodies were buried in a mass grave. Among those named is William Malone. So much bravery and heroism on both sides, but for what? It seems today to have been an action of futility.

My wife’s great uncle, Horace Prattley, landed on Gallipoli on August 8 when the life-and-death encounter was taking place far above the beach at Chunuk Bair. He recorded in a small diary: “Hospital at beach & large quantity of wounded. Just before our departure from the >> beach, the enemy poured shrapnel on us & continued most of the way up the hill.” Horace Prattley survived Gallipoli, being invalided to Lemnos. His health restored he was sent to the Somme where he was killed on October 1, 1916.

Lone Pine, Shrapnel Valley and Plugge’s Plateau are names etched into the historical consciousness of Australia and New Zealand. How could this place so far distant from home create our sense of national identity? There’s a sense of both connectedness and disjunction, and the pilgrimage to Gallipoli has messy edges and leaves more questions than answers.

Near Anzac Cove at Burnu Point on the Katabe Airburn Beach Memorial, the famous words of Kemal Atatürk from 1934 are inscribed:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets. To us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours…You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

The embrace of the New Zealand and Australian dead by Turkey speaks of reconciliation and hospitality.
The pilgrimage to Gallipoli is a salutary reminder of the cost of conflict. There is no romance in old battlefields where people have been killed. The memorials to the dead remind us of lives lost and the need for peace in our world.

Allan Davidson teaches church history at St John’s College in Auckland.