Gallipoli Battlefields Full-Day Tour from Istanbul with Lunch

The drive to the Dardanelles and lunch in Eceabat

The Gallipoli Peninsula lies about 320 kilometres west of Istanbul, so the day begins with a 06:00 pickup and a five-hour drive along the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, through Silivri and Tekirdağ and across the flat farmland of Thrace. There is a stop on the way for breakfast at a roadside restaurant at your own expense. The road reaches the Dardanelles at Eceabat, the small ferry port facing Çanakkale across the strait, where the 1915 campaign's purpose becomes obvious: whoever controlled this narrow passage controlled the sea route to Istanbul and the Black Sea.

Lunch is served at a restaurant in Eceabat before the battlefield visits; it is a set Turkish meal, halal as everywhere in Turkey, with drinks at your own expense. The port is also where many guests first see the hills of the peninsula that the Ottoman defenders held for eight months.

Anzac Cove and Arı Burnu

The afternoon starts at Anzac Cove, the small curved beach beneath steep scrub-covered cliffs where the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed before dawn on 25 April 1915, about a mile north of the intended beach. The difficult terrain that met them is still obvious from the shore: ravines, ridges and the knoll of Arı Burnu at the northern end of the cove, where the Arı Burnu Cemetery holds some of the first men killed on landing day. Your guide walks you along the beach and explains how the eight-month stalemate began here within hours, and how the whole force was finally evacuated from this same shore in December 1915 without loss.

Anzac Cove is also the site of the dawn service held every year on 25 April, Anzac Day, when the area is closed to normal tours; on all other days it is quiet, and a Gallipoli tour from Istanbul gives you about half an hour here.

Beach Cemetery

A short distance south of Anzac Cove, on the low point called Hell Spit, lies Beach Cemetery, one of the first cemeteries made during the campaign and one of the most beautiful, sloping gently down to the sea with the Aegean a few steps from the headstones. It was used from the landing until the evacuation and holds the graves of soldiers from Australia, New Zealand and Britain, among them a medical orderly famous in Australia for carrying wounded men down the gullies with a donkey. The headstones carry the inscriptions chosen by families a century ago, and the guide reads some of them so that the statistics become people.

The cemeteries of the peninsula are maintained to the same standard as those in France and Belgium, with cut lawns and roses, and visitors are asked to keep voices low, stay on the paths and avoid stepping on the plots; the stop here takes about twenty minutes.

Lone Pine and Johnston's Jolly

On the plateau above the cove the vehicle climbs to Lone Pine, the site of the ferocious fighting of August 1915 and today the main Australian memorial on Gallipoli. The tall stone memorial carries the names of close to five thousand Australian and New Zealand soldiers who died in the Anzac sector and have no known grave, and the cemetery in front of it, with its single pine tree grown from a cone taken from the original, is where the Australian commemorative service is held every Anzac Day. A few hundred metres along the ridge road is Johnston's Jolly, a cemetery laid out on what was the front line, with the Ottoman and Anzac trenches, now shallow grass-covered ditches, running on either side of the road only a few metres apart.

Standing on the road here is the clearest way to understand how close the two sides lived and fought for months, and the guide points out tunnels, mine craters and the old trench lines beneath the pines.

The Nek and Chunuk Bair

Further along the ridge is The Nek, a narrow saddle of land where, on 7 August 1915, waves of Australian light horsemen charged a Turkish trench line a few dozen metres away and were cut down within minutes; the small cemetery covers almost exactly the ground they crossed. The road then climbs to Chunuk Bair, at over 260 metres the highest point reached by the Allied forces during the campaign, held briefly by New Zealand troops on 8 August before the Ottoman counter-attack drove them back. The summit holds the New Zealand memorial and cemetery side by side with the great Turkish memorial, and the view takes in the whole Anzac battlefield, the Aegean, the islands and, on clear days, the Dardanelles.

Chunuk Bair is the last stop and the emotional summary of the day: the guide ties together the landings, the August offensive and the evacuation from this one ridge before the drive back to Istanbul begins.

The Mehmetçik Monument

Between the shore and the ridge the tour stops at the Mehmetçik Monument, dedicated to the ordinary Ottoman soldier, affectionately called Mehmetçik, who defended the peninsula. The statue shows a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded enemy officer back to his own lines, based on an incident recorded by an Allied officer, and it has become the symbol of the respect between the two sides that marks every Gallipoli visit today. The Ottoman victory at the Dardanelles cost both sides enormous losses, with more than a hundred thousand dead in total, and the Turkish memorials and cemeteries along the same roads are an equal part of the story.

Our Istanbul team includes this stop because it shows visitors why Gallipoli matters so much in Turkey, where the campaign is remembered as the Çanakkale victory, and gives a balanced picture of the battlefields rather than a single nation's view.