Gallipoli / Çanakkale Centenary: 1915-2015. Approximately 500,000 casualties in this one campaign of the First World War: mostly Ottoman imperial troops, British and French imperial troops, Australian, New Zealander, Indian, Canadian and German troops. 100,000 dead in eight and one-half months.
Gallipoli / Çanakkale Centenary: 1915-2015. Pertinent books, movies, poems and cultural exchanges have bubbled up in the past 100 years.
Here in Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), Mel Gibson's character Frank Dunne looks across barbed wire at a Turkish POW on the beach at Gallipoli. Turkey is now part of NATO.
Gallipoli / Çanakkale Centenary: 1915-2015. Recent Turkish film from the Ottoman point of view. June Tabor's excellent 1976 version of Eric Bogle's powerful 1971 song, "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," which is all about Gallipoli from an ANZAC perspective. Perhaps fittingly, the French and Turks battled over the same area as the site of the Trojan War (circa 1250 B.C.). 'Nuff said. Today's Rune: Harvest.
1 comment:
Whoa--unbelievably tragic. And the song is very haunting--beautiful voice
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