Turkey Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Battle of Gallipoli

Today Turkey celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli (Canakkale), which took the lives of 120 thousand soldiers and officers of Turkey and the military coalition - Britain, France, New Zealand and Australia.

The battle for the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli in 1915 was one of the local battles of the First World War, but it was important for the Turkish state. As a result of the bloody battle developed by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the victory was won by the Turks commanded by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), the future first President of the Turkish Republic.

His cry to the soldiers: "I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die!" was the apotheosis of the heroic resistance of the Turks.

Allied troops failed to break the incredible resistance of the Turks and complete the goal to capture the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and Istanbul.

After the failure of the operation, foreign troops were forced to leave the territory of Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited to the centenary of the Battle of Gallipoli the Heads of State and Government from 102 countries, including the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who did not accept the invitation in connection with the celebration of 100 years of the date of mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

As stated in the report of Euronews TV, the unsuccessful operation was, however, one of the most famous battles of the First World War - primarily for Australia and New Zealand, whose soldiers formed a significant part of the landing.

"I brought my grandfather here in 1990, and we could not get him to shake hands with the Australian veteran. I saw it with my own eyes. Today I shake hands with the grandson of an Australian soldier. We arrived at the cemetery together and talked," says the grandson of a Turkish soldier.

"Fear, pain, severe trials of war divided countries. Here you realize that all of this is beyond the scope of individual nations. Today the Gallipoli campaign ends with reconciliation between former enemies," says the grandson of an Australian veteran.

Interesting facts about the Battle of Gallipoli are in the documentary Ataturk. Life Strategy filmed by television Top Secret in 2007 by the order of the 5th Petersburg channel. The author of the film is Nazim Rahimov, a graduate of the Faculty of Journalism at St. Petersburg University, a former employee of the newspaper Youth of Azerbaijan and the agency Turan. -0-