Guide
The centre stands at Kabatepe in the Eceabat district of Çanakkale, built so that the Çanakkale battles would be remembered and so that what is called the spirit of Çanakkale would be carried to later generations. It opened on 7 June 2012.
It is a war museum that tells the battles both in order and by theme, and the building itself was designed to be read. It is left entirely underground, to give the sense of a burial ground. Two memorial walls face one another at the entrance, standing for the Asian and European shores of the Dardanelles, and their light and dark colouring for the themes of war and peace. Three columns at the head of the dark wall are explained as the faith, the courage and the love of country of the Turkish soldier, and the bareness of the wall surfaces as the silence and solitude of death.
Inside, eleven separate reconstruction rooms, some of them with moving platforms, carry the visitor through the important passages of the fighting in a 65-minute audiovisual sequence. Narration through headphones is available in seven languages: English, German, French, Russian, Japanese, Italian and Arabic. Over the two floors of the museum halls, every side of the war is shown with wax figures supported by dioramas and models.
The objects come from the battlefield itself. Uniforms, equipment and war material, each piece with its own history, are displayed inside, while real trenches and military vehicles stand in the open landscaped areas. The exhibit that draws the most attention is the bloodstained uniform of Captain Eşref Efendi, killed in the fighting.
