Remembering the Gallipoli Campaign - The Landings and Before

 As Anzac Day comes around once again, I thought that this year I would look at the Campaign through the eyes of those who were there. While we tend to think the Gallipoli campaign was mainly an Australian and New Zealand affair, we must remember that many other nationalities were involved, including Newfoundland which was then a Crown Colony

separate from Canada. This was also to be the Newfoundland Regiment's first overseas adventure. John Gallishaw in Trenching at Gallipoli describes recruitment in St. John's: "From the posting of the first notices bearing the simple message, "Your King and Country Need You," a motley crowd streamed into the armoury in St. John's. The city brigades, composed mostly of young, beautifully fit athletes from rowing crews, football and hockey teams, enlisted in a body. Every train from the interior brought lumbermen, fresh from the mills and forests, husky, steel-muscled, pugnacious at the most peaceful times, frankly spoiling for excitement. From the outharbours and fishing villages came callous-handed fishermen, with backs a little bowed from straining at the oar, accustomed to a life of danger. Every day there came to the armoury loose-jointed, easy-swinging trappers and woodsmen, simple-spoken young men, who, in offering their keenness of vision and sureness of marksmanship, were volunteering their all."  After training in Scotland and at Aldershot, came the long-awaited day "when Kitchener himself pronounced them "just the men I want for the Dardanelles".

        It was on 27 February 1915 that the first shots were fired in the Gallipoli air war. A Turkish Captain Cemal lifted off in an: "outdated Blériot had a large wheel attached to the joystick; the cockpit resembled the product of an illicit affair between a motor vehicle and a Da Vinci sketch. It was all leather steering-wheel and bird-like wings. On his lap Cemal carried four round hand grenades. These were similar in size to a cricket ball  except that each had a wick, was filled with explosive and was bound in a hard metal case. Cemal puffed on a cigar as he coaxed his Blériot out to sea, both hands on the wheel.                                                                                       

            Before long he had found it: a British warship, belching black coal smoke as it steamed out of range of the coastal gun batteries. In what can only be described as a David and Goliath moment, Cemal turned the wheel towards this grey monster. The wings warped in sympathy with the tension on its wires, the tail fin turned and the Blériot gracefully pointed its nose at HMS Majestic. With his left hand Cemal picked up one of the bombs nestled in his lap and brought it towards his face. The fuse spat as it met the glowing cigar end. Like a pilot of old he tossed the sizzling bomb down towards the ship below. With a crack, the metal ball split apart, but not over the wooden deck. Coolly Cemal dropped three more bombs while flying in a large gentle loop. Honour satisfied and both hands now back on the wheel, Cemal returned to the grass aerodrome outside Çannakale. He had managed to eke out of the Blériot a top speed of 60mph on his triumphant flight home."  Hugh Dolan - Gallipoli Air War.

        Planning for a land invasion on the Gallipoli Peninsula began in early March, although it was hoped that the British and French Navies would be able to disable the forts along this waterway and secure access to the Sea of Marmara leading to Constantinople. Sir

Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton takes up the story: "Next morning, that is the 12^th instant (12 March 1915), I was working at the Horse Guards when, about 10 a.m., K. (Lord Kitchener) sent for me. I wondered! Opening the door I bade him good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “we are sending a military force to support the Fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have Command.”              … my knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil; of the Turks nil; of the strength of our own forces next to nil. Although I have met K. almost every day during the past six months, and although he has twice hinted I might be sent to Salonika; never once, to the best of my recollection, had he mentioned the word Dardanelles.            I had plenty of time for these reflections as K, after his one tremendous remark had resumed his writing at the desk. At last he looked up and inquired, “Well?”  Sir Ian Hamilton - Gallipoli Diary

            On the 18th March 1915 the British and French navies, under the command of Admiral John de Robeck, began their bombardment of the Turkish forts along the Dardanelles. Initially the attack went well: "Then as Bouvet turned, Admiral de Robeck could see from his bridge a large explosion on the starboard side of the vessel. And with the explosion came fire and haze, haloed in black smoke that curled up thickly. The fires grew denser, and the smoke rose higher.

The ship trembled and lost way, and the men began scrambling about her decks. More explosions began to shoot fire and smoke upwards. It was apparent to the Admiral that the ship had been badly struck and was in deep trouble. The fires burned, the damage control parties could not stifle them, and then, a moment later, another explosion occurred, and Bouvet swung over to her starboard side, trembled and turned, to capsize and sink before the startled eyes of the assembled fleet.                                                                                                                                De Robeck watched and waited. He was proceeding according to plan. About twenty minutes later, the reserve line of six battleships passed by the others and moved in to engage the forts. Only one Turkish fort was sending up any shells at all at the time, and they concentrated on it. Suddenly there was an explosion against the side of Irresistible, and that caused the forts to start firing furiously on her. The firing continued until 4.11, the ships working over the fortifications but not stopping the Turkish return fire. At that moment, Inflexible, the old flagship, hit a mine – just as Admiral de Robeck was noting with considerable satisfaction that the personnel of the forts seemed to be fleeing."                                   Edwin P. Hoyt - Disaster at the Dardanelles 

        Henry Morgenthau Sr, the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire took a close interest in the developments on the Dardanelles: "Let us suppose that the Allies had returned, say on the morning of the nineteenth, what would have happened? The one overwhelming fact is that the fortifications were very short of ammunition. They had almost reached the limit of their resisting power when the British fleet passed out on

the afternoon of the 18^th. I had secured permission for Mr George A. Schreiner, the well-known American correspondent of the Associated Press, to visit the Dardanelles on this occasion. On the night of the 18^th, this correspondent discussed the situation with General Mertens, who was the chief technical officer at the straits. General Mertens admitted that the outlook was very discouraging for the defence.                                            “We expect that the British will come back early tomorrow morning,” he said, “and if they do, we may be able to hold out for a few hours.”                                                          General Mertens did not declare in so many words that the ammunition was practically exhausted, but Mr Schreiner discovered that such was the case. The fact was that Fort Hamidié, the most powerful defence on the Asiatic side, had just seventeen armour-piercing shells left, while at Kilid-ul-Bahr, which was the main defence on the European side, there were precisely ten."                                                                                 “I should advise you to get up at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” said General Mertens, “and take to the Anatolian hills. That’s what we are going to do.”

       Ambassador Morgenthau then makes an interesting assessment: "Yet it is my opinion that this exclusively naval attack was justified. I base this judgement purely upon the political situation which then existed in Turkey. Under ordinary circumstances such an enterprise would probably have been a foolish one, but the political conditions in Constantinople then were not ordinary. There was no solidly established government in Turkey at that time. A political committee, not exceeding forty members, headed by Talaat, Enver and Djemal, controlled the Central Government, but their authority throughout the empire was exceedingly tenuous. As a matter of fact, the whole Ottoman state, on the eighteenth day of March, 1915, when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution."            Henry Morgenthau Sr - Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

As the day of the invasion approached, Sir Ian Hamilton addressed the troops from the island of Lemnos:     "21^st April 1915.                                                                                                                Soldiers of France and of the King                                                                                    Before us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war. Together with our comrades of the Fleet, we are about to force a landing upon an open beach in face of positions which have been vaunted by our enemies as impregnable.                                                    The landing will be made good, by the help of God and the Navy; the positions will be stormed, and the War brought one step nearer to a glorious close.                                        “Remember,” said Lord Kitchener when bidding adieu to your Commander, “Remember, once you set foot upon the Gallipoli Peninsula, you must fight the thing through to a finish.”                                                                                                                            The whole world will be watching your progress. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the great feat of arms entrusted to us."

         And on the 23rd Sir Ian showed his sensitive and poetic side: "Nunc Dimittis, O Lord of Hosts! Not a man but knows he is making for the jaws of death. They know, these men do, they are being asked to prove their enemies have lied when they swore a landing on Gallipoli’s shore could never make good. They know that lie must pass for truth until they have become targets to guns, machine guns and rifles huddled together in boats, helpless, plain to the enemy’s sight. And they are wild with joy; uplifted! Life spins superbly through their veins at the very moment they seek to sacrifice it for a cause. O death. Where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?                                                        A shadow has been cast over the wonders of the day by a wireless to say that Rupert Brooke is very dangerously ill – from the wording we hear there can be no hope."  Sir Ian Hamilton - Gallipoli Diary

        The invasion fleet approached the Peninsula and tensions mounted: "Picture yourself on a ship that was more crowded with men than ever ship had been before, in a harbour more crowded with ships than ever

harbour had been crowded before, with more fears in your mind than had ever crowded into it before, knowing that in a few hours you would see battle for the first time. Having comrades crowding round, bidding you good-bye and informing you that as your regimental number added up to thirteen, you would be the first to die, remembering that you hadn't said your prayers for years, and then comforting yourself with the realization that what is going to happen will happen, and that an appeal to the general will not stop the battle, anyway, and you may as well die like a man, and you will feel as did many of those young lads, on the eve of the 25th of April, 1915. There was some premonition of death in those congregations of khaki-clad men who gathered round the padres on each ship and sang "God be with you till we meet again." You could see in men's faces that they knew they were "going west" on the morrow—but it was a swan-song that could not paralyze the arm or daunt the heart of these young Greathearts, who intended that on this morrow they would do deeds that would make their mothers proud of them.           Captain R. Hugh Knyvett     -    "Over There" with the Australians   

            Finally the Anzacs stormed ashore: "At 4.53 a.m. there came a very sharp burst of rifle fire from the beach, and we knew that our men were at last at grips with the enemy. The sound came as a relief, for the suspense of the prolonged waiting had become intolerable. The fire only lasted for a few minutes, and then a faint cheer was wafted across the water. How comforting and inspiring was the sound at such a moment! It came as a message of hope, for its meaning was clear: a foothold had been obtained on the beach.                                                                                                                                        At 5.23 a.m. the fire intensified, and we could tell from the sound that our men were in action. It lasted until 5.28 and then died down somewhat. It was impossible to see what was happening, although dawn was breaking, because we were looking due east into the sun, slowly rising behind the hills, and there was also a haze over the sea.                    At 5.26 a.m., astern, we saw the outline of some of the transports looming up as they approached the coast, conveying the remainder of the 1st Australian Division and the New Zealanders. The first news came with the return of our boats. A steam pinnace stopped alongside with two recumbent forms on deck, and a small figure, pale but cheerful, waving his hand astern. They were one of our midshipmen just sixteen years of age, shot through the stomach, but regarding his injury more as a fitting consummation to a glorious holiday ashore than a serious wound, together with a stoker and petty officer, all three wounded by the first burst of musketry, which caused many casualties in the boats just as they reached the beach. From them we learnt what had happened during those first wild moments. The tows had reached the beach, when a party of

Turks, entrenched on the foreshore, opened up a sharp fusilade from rifles and a maxim. Fortunately, much of this fire was high, but nevertheless many men were hit as they sat huddled together forty or fifty in a boat. It was a trying moment, but the Australian volunteers rose to the occasion. They neither waited for orders, nor for the boats to reach the beach, but, springing into the sea, waded ashore, and, forming some sort of a rough line, rushed straight on the flashes of the enemy’s rifles. Their magazines were not even charged, and they went in with cold steel; I believe I am right in saying that the first Turk received a Dominion bayonet in him at five minutes after 5 a.m., on April 25th.

 It was all over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench were bayoneted, or ran away, and a maxim gun was captured. Then the Australians found themselves facing foothills of loose sandstone, covered with thick scrub, and somewhere half-way up the Turks had a second trench strongly held, from which they poured a heavy fire on the troops below, and on the boats pulling back to the destroyers for the second landing party. Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but these Dominion soldiers went about it in a practical way. They stopped a few minutes to pull themselves together, to get rid of their packs, and charge their magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the hill without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost men, but did not stop, and in less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or in full flight. Thus were the first foothills above Anzac Cove seized."         Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett - The Uncensored Dardanelles    

         Further along the Peninsula, at Cape Helles, the former collier, the River Clyde was run aground at V-Beach. George Davidson, a medic with the Field Ambulance describes the horrific scenes as the ship came under fire: "The first few loads escaped with comparatively few casualties, but soon the fire was so hot and accurate that practically not a man got to the shelter of the 10 to 12-foot high sandbank beyond the narrow strip of sand. About 300 yards to our left was a high projecting rock, a continuation of the high ground that closed in that side of the long slope of V Beach, and from here came that infernal shower of bullets that was causing such terrible havoc. From the Clyde one could easily tell where the bullets were coming from by their sputter in the water.                                                              

         A constant stream of shells was being kept up all the time on this rock from the ships. The whole rim of V Beach, as it stretched backwards for 500 or 600 yards, was searched time after time by high explosives, each shell bursting with accurate precision 5 or 6 feet under the crest. But the mischief was not coming from this crest, it was from that infernal rock alone, but in spite of all their efforts our guns could not silence this machine-gun fire.                 It was an extraordinary sight to watch our men go off, boat after boat, push off for a few yards, spring from the seats to dash into the water which was now less than waist deep. It was just on this point that the enemy fire was concentrated. Those who got into the water, rifle in hand and heavy pack on back, generally made a dive forward riddled through and through, if there was still life in them to drown in a few seconds. Many were being hit before they had time to spring from the boats, their hands thrown up in the air, or else they heaved helplessly over stone dead. All this I watched from the holes in the side of the ship, but when not otherwise occupied, from the deck where I could see on all sides."  George Davidson - The Incomparable 29th & the "River Clyde"

    Mustapha Kemal, the Turkish commander on the Gallipoli Peninsula, was awoken on the morning of the 25th by the naval bombardment. He set out to personally assess the situation. "Kemal saw at once what was happening. Here was no small enemy force; here was a major offensive. With his acute grasp of military essentials he knew that the Sari Bair ridge, and especially the Chunuk Bair crest, was now the key to the entire Turkish defence. Its capture would enable the enemy to dominate all sides of the peninsula. A single battalion would be totally insufficient to hold it. The whole of his division would be needed. Acting on his own responsibility and exceeding his authority as a divisional commander, he thus ordered his best regiment, the Fifty-Seventh, with a mountain battery, to advance up the ridge to the crest of Koja Chemen. As it happened the regiment was already drawn up for a field exercise planned for that day. Kemal reported what he had done to corps headquarters then rode with an ADC and his chief medical officer to its headquarters to hasten and lead the advance.                                                        Kemal’s decision was a bold one. He was committing the bulk of von Sanders reserve on the basis of not very clear information as to the strength of the enemy, but only on that of his own intuitive conviction that this was the crucial attack. Had his judgement been wrong, had the enemy planned another important landing elsewhere, there would have been only one Turkish regiment left to resist it. But he was right, and his abounding self-confidence knew it."

          Kemal rode towards the landing beaches at the head of a company. "Seeing that his men were tired from their arduous climb, he ordered their officers to give them a ten-minute break. Then he moved on himself, with a few of his staff, towards Chunuk Bair. They started to ride but, finding the terrain too rough, dismounted and proceeded on foot. Near the crest they came upon a company of men streaming down over the ridge in full retreat. They were a unit of the outpost screen, spread out to watch for the landings, which for more than three hours had been the only force to oppose the enemy.     

Kemal stopped them and asked, “What’s up? Why are you running away?”                                                                “They come, they come”. Was the reply.                             “Who comes?”                                                                     “Sir, the enemy. Ingiliz, Ingiliz.”                                        “Where?” he asked. They pointed down the slope to a patch of scrub, from which a line of Australians was freely advancing. They were closer to Kemal than his own troops, whom he had left behind to rest. ‘Whether by logic or instinct’ as he afterwards put it, he said to the retreating soldiers,                                                                                  "You cannot run away from the enemy,”                              They protested, “Our ammunition is finished.”                     “You have your bayonets,” he said. He commanded them to fixed bayonets and to lie down on the ground. He sent an officer back to instruct his own infantrymen to come up at the double, together with any available gunners from the mountain battery. Then, as he observed, “When our men lay down, the enemy lay down. This was the moment of time that we gained.”                                                                                                                      It was a moment of hesitation by the Anzacs which may well have decided the fate of the peninsula. While they hesitated the Fifty-Seventh Regiment began to come up, and Kemal sent it straight into action. He rode through the forward positions, driving the troops over the slope with unwavering energy. Placing his mountain battery on the ridge, he helped to wheel its guns into position. He directed operations from the skyline with a complete disregard for his own safety. In an order of the day he wrote: ‘I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.’  By the end of the battle almost the whole of the Fifty-Seventh Regiment had died, charging continuously through a curtain of enemy rifle-fire to win immortality in the annals of the Turkish army."                                       Lord Kinross - Ataturk: the Rebirth of a Nation

    By the end of the day, the invading forces had secured bridgeheads, tenuous strips of land overlooked by the Turkish defenders. The troops dug in and in the succeeding weeks the battle deteriorated into a bloody see-saw of attack and counter-attack - and the body-count mounted. Veteran journalist Alan Moorhead went ashore shortly after the landings and reported what he saw: "No stranger visiting the ANZAC bridgehead ever failed to be moved and stimulated by it. It was a thing so wildly out of life, so dangerous, so high-spirited, such a grotesque and theatrical setting and yet reduced to such a calm and almost matter-of-fact routine. The heart missed a beat when one approached the ramshackle jetty on the beach, for Turkish shells were constantly falling there, and it hardly seemed that anyone could survive.

Yet once ashore a curious sense of heightened living supervened. No matter how hideous the noise, the men moved about apparently oblivious of it all, and with a trained and steady air as though they had lived there all their lives, and this in itself was a reassurance to everyone who came ashore. The general aspect was of a vast mining camp in some savage desert valley. Close to the shore were the dug-outs of the generals, the wireless station, the telephone exchange, the searchlights, a factory for making bombs, a corral for Turkish prisoners, a smithy. Scores of placid mules sheltered in the gully until at nightfall they began their work of taking ammunition and supplies to the men in the trenches in the hills above – the water ration was a pannikin a day. There was a smoking incinerator near the jetty and it erupted loudily whenever an unexploded bullet fell into the flames. An empty shellcase served as a gong for the headquarters officers’ mess. They ate bully beef, biscuits, plum and apple jam and just occasionally, frozen meat; never vegetables, eggs, milk or fruit.

          Above the beach a maze of goat tracks spread upwards through the furze and the last surviving patches of prickly oak, and at every step of the way some soldier had made his shelter in the side of the ravine: a hole dug into the ground, the branches of trees or perhaps a piece of canvas for a roof, a blanket, a few tins and boxes and that was all. As one progressed upwards there were many crude notices of warning against enemy snipers: ‘Keep well to your left’, ‘Keep You Head Down’, ‘Double Across One at a Time’. Then finally the trenches themselves, where all day long the men stood to their arms, watching and watching through their periscopes for the slightest movement in the enemy lines. Cigarettes dangled from the mouths. They talked quietly."  Alan Moorehead - Gallipoli

      Passages selected by Neil S. Rawlins

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My paperback books on my Overland travels in Asia, Europe & Africa in the early 1970s and the experiences of a tour guide on the Asian Overland routes & leading Camel Safaris in Rajasthan in the 1980s are available from Amazon.

Special Places in the East

The ruined Kiz Bridge over the Qizil Üzen River in north-eastern Iran in 1970

     There are times when we travel when we tend to over look the small places, places that seem unimportant at the time, but perhaps we take a photo anyway. Some of these places stay deep in our memory and suddenly come back to life when we look at a photo. Often something is triggered in the memory-banks, perhaps, an incident, a little spot of tranquility or just a place of rustic beauty and the photo takes on a new meaning. On my first Overland trip in 1970, I took several photos in a area spanning the Eastern Azerbaijan province of Iran and Eastern Turkey to the Black Sea port of Trabzon. At the time, other than the aesthetic value of the photos, I thought nothing of them, but recently, probably with the impact of world events - Iran falling under the sway of an Islamic Revolution and the tumultuous political struggles in Turkey's Kurdistan region, these places have triggered a renewed interest.

    As we drove from Tehran to the city of Tabriz, we came upon an ancient ruined bridge over a small river. Although Hubert, our tour leader, would have told us briefly the story, I had forgot even the location.  In recent months, and with the help of Google, I now know that this is known as the Kiz Bridge over the Qizil Üzen River, dating from possibly the 8th century, although some archaeologists believe it may even be of Sassanian, or pre-Islamic, origin. Despite its ancient origins, the damage to the central arch of the bridge was recent; in 1946, in the aftermath of World War 2, Communist separatists of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, blew up the central arch in a futile attempt to stop the advance of the Iranian Army who were re-occupying this area of Iran which had been occupied by Soviet troops since 1941.  In the course of my research I also came upon a sketch of the bridge, dating from 1840, by the French traveller Eugène Flandin, which shows the intact bridge.

Eugène Flandrin's 1840 sketch of the Kiz Bridge

Continuing north, after passing through the city of Tabriz we came to the border town of Maku, which is situated in a spectacular gorge of the Zangmar River. What was remarkable about this town was its setting with many of the old mud-brick buildings resting beneath what seemed to be a massive overhang of rock. That there had been collapses from this overhang was quite evident, with large rocks being visible among the old mud-brick buildings. I passed through Maku a couple of times in later years, but it was only really on this journey in 1970 that I was able to clearly see the rather precarious situation of part of the town.

A clear view of the rocky overhang that appears to threaten part of the old town of Maku, Iran

The border with Turkey is just a few kilometres down the road, at a small place called Bazargan which is dominated, on a clear day, by the twin peaks of Biblical Mt Ararat. Ararat is made up of two volcanic cones - Greater Ararat at 5137m and Little Ararat at 3896m.   According to Biblical tradition it is on one of these peaks that Noah's Ark ran aground after the Biblical flood: Genesis 8:4 ‘and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat.’  But if the passage is looked at closely it says the 'mountains of Ararat'. From the mid-9th century BC, all the area of Eastern Turkey, including the two volcanic peaks, was part of the Kingdom of Urartu which existed until the early 6th century BC. The name Ararat has its origins in Urartu. 

Great Ararat & Little Ararat, the two volcanic peaks from the Bazargan border, 1970

Eastern Turkey is part of Kurdistan, the traditional homelands of the Kurdish people. We stopped at a small Kurdish village named, if I remember rightly, Dikendere. In 1970 villages in this area were pretty basic, with flat-roofed houses constructed from the local broken grey stone that lay around the hills. Conical piles of dung, used for fuel, were positioned throughout the village. The area was peaceful and the villagers scratched their meagre, subsistence existence with their sheep in these sparse mountains.

The Kurdish village of Dikendere, with conical piles of dung used for fuel. Eastern Turkey 1970

Kurds in traditional costumes appeared in doorways with their children and dogs while lethargic fat-tailed sheep stood by solid wooden-wheeled carts. The Kurds had lived in the region of Turkey for centuries, and as yet, their lives had not been disrupted by modern International politics.

One of the largest towns in Eastern Turkey is the ancient town of Erzurum whose origins go back to the Urartuan Kingdom and , under the Romans,was known as Theodosiopolis. The city's present name dates from the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century. In 1970, as the town wakes up, there is an intermingling of horse-drawn carriages, dolmuş - the popular share-taxis found throughout Turkey, and more modern local and inter-town buses.

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Leaving Erzurum our route took us north over the snowbound Kopdaği Pass and into the small attractive town of Bayburt, dominated by a Byzantine Castle. 

The snowy landscape near the top of Topdaği Pass on the road to Bayburt

Marco Polo passed this way on his epic journey along the Silk Road to China in the 13th century, however he limited his observations of Bayburt to: "And on the route from Trebizond to Tabriz is a fortress called Bayburt, where there is a large silver mine.". The Trebizond that Marco Polo mentions is modern Trabzon , our destination on the Black Sea.  In 1970, Bayburt still had that ancient feel about it with horse-carts mixing with trucks and buses. As with most Turkish towns, a bust of Kemal Atatürk, Father of Modern Turkey, takes pride of place in the main street.

The small town of Bayburt is dominated by a Byzantine Fortress

As we continued towards Trabzon, late afternoon saw us enter a delightful little valley known as Ikisu. This means two waters in Turkish, and I watched two women industriously hoeing their fertile wall-enclosed garden. 

Women hoe their fields in the beautiful Ikisu Valley

Peach blossoms were just coming to their early spring best as I walked through the Valley to the little, tinkling Ikisu stream.

Peach blossoms in the Ikisu Valley, late afternoon

Near Trabzon, in the Altındere National Park, is the amazing abandoned Greek Orthodox Monastery of Sumela, nestled on a ledge high on a steep cliff. After a hair-raising truck ride from Trabzon, along the mountain roads and an exhausting few hundred metres climb up a steep footpath, we reached the monastery. 

The spectacular remains of the Sumela Monastery, near Trabzon

A number of very fine Byzantine wall murals of Biblical scene still remained in excellent condition, including on a Jonah and the whale and, the mural below. showing Christ's entrance into Jerusalem, although many of the more accessible had been defaced in accordance with Moslem iconoclastic beliefs. 

Byzantine murals in Sumela Monastery

Much of the monastery  buildings, including the former monks' cells, have fallen into disrepair  and in my diary at the time I noted that: "the toilets of the monks put a completely new meaning to the term 'long-drop'." 

Ruined cells within the Sumela Monastery

Text & photographs ©Neil Rawlins 

Instagram accounts  @dustonmyfeet     and    @antipodeanneil

My paperback books on my Overland travels in Asia, Europe & Africa in the early 1970s and the experiences of a tour guide on the Asian Overland routes & leading Camel Safaris in Rajasthan in the 1980s are available from Amazon.