Çanakkale

The narrows here have been strategic for as long as ships have used them. The strait, the Hellespont of Greek writers, was crossed by Xerxes' army on a bridge of boats in 480 BC and by Alexander the Great going the other way, and Troy stood a day's walk to the south, guarding the same passage. The town itself is much younger: it grew around the fortress that Mehmed II built at the narrowest point in 1462, paired with another on the European bank, and took its Turkish name, meaning roughly the castle of pots, from the glazed ceramics made here.

Under the Ottomans it was a customs post and a mixed port of Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews. Its defining moment came in 1915, when an Allied fleet tried to force the Dardanelles and was stopped on 18 March by mines and shore batteries, a day still commemorated across Turkey. The land campaign that followed on the Gallipoli peninsula opposite lasted until January 1916 and cost enormous casualties on both sides. A divisional commander, Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, made his reputation on the ridges above Anzac Cove.

The 20th century brought the population exchange with Greece, which emptied much of the local Greek community, and a slow rebuilding of the town around its port. A university opened in 1992 and changed its character, and the Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park and the excavations at Troy made visitors a mainstay. The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, opened in 2022, ended the town's role as a compulsory ferry crossing on the road between Europe and the Aegean.

For Turkish visitors this is a place of pilgrimage. School groups, veterans' families and coach parties come year-round to the memorials, and the 18 March anniversary is marked with ceremonies, flags on every street and recitations of poems written about the defence of the strait. Australians and New Zealanders arrive for Anzac Day in April, and the town has grown used to hosting two different national memories of the same battle side by side.

Away from the monuments, Çanakkale is a relaxed Aegean university town. Term time fills the cafés and bars around the campus and the seafront, and the promenade at sunset — families walking, tea glasses on the benches, fishermen on the wall — is the fixed social ritual. Sea and wind shape the calendar: fishing, sailing and windsurfing on the coast, and ferry crossings that everyone plans around.

The province keeps older traditions in its villages: the olive harvest in the Troad, the vineyards of Bozcaada, and the mixed Greek, Turkish and Balkan heritage of the islands and the coast, visible in stone houses and church buildings on Gökçeada and Bozcaada. Ceramics, the craft that gave the town its name, are still made and sold locally. Manners are more coastal than conservative, though modest dress is usual away from the beaches.

About 145,000 people live in the city, a small population for a place with this much traffic passing through it. The university adds tens of thousands of students in term time and empties the bars and cheaper restaurants in the summer holidays, when their place is taken by Turkish holidaymakers heading for the Aegean coast and the islands.

The economy rests on the port and shipping trade through the strait, on agriculture and food processing — olives, tomatoes, wheat and the dairies around Ezine — on fishing, and on the visitors who come for the battlefields and Troy. Ceramics and small manufacturing add to it, and a share of the province's workforce commutes to mines, quarries and wind farms in the hinterland.

Days are ordered by the ferries and the wind. The market streets are busy in the morning, the seafront in the evening, and weekends mean the beaches south of the town or a boat to an island. Local debates turn on coastal development, mining and quarrying in the Troad, wildfire risk in the pine forests, and how the bridge has changed a town that for centuries made its living from people waiting to cross.

The strait supplies the table. Sardines, sardalya, are the local speciality, grilled or wrapped in vine leaves, alongside bonito, sea bass and calamari at the seafront restaurants, usually eaten with meze of beans, aubergine and wild greens and with rakı or a bottle from the islands. The wind-blown Aegean coast nearby produces olives and olive oil, and vegetables cooked in oil and served cool are a standard part of any meal.

Cheese is the province's best-known product. Ezine peyniri, a white brined cheese from the district south of the town, made with sheep, goat or cow's milk, is sold across Turkey. It turns up at breakfast with olives, tomatoes and bread, and in peynir helvası, the local sweet of fresh unsalted cheese cooked with semolina and syrup and eaten warm, often with ice cream.

Bozcaada has grown wine grapes since antiquity, and its small wineries are the usual accompaniment to a fish dinner. Other local names are worth knowing: kavun, the melons of the plains, tomatoes that the province exports in quantity, and the honey and chestnuts of the mountain villages. In the bazaar, lokantas serve the ordinary Turkish repertoire of bean stew, stuffed vegetables and grilled köfte at prices well below the waterfront.