The monument: A part of Turkey set aside as sacred ground to honor an army that invaded it in 1915. This monument is the result of a sublime act of magnanimity on the part of a victorious power and the fierce dedication to memory of the defeated power.

Why to go: Some nations look back to a glorious victory or conquest to mark their beginning. Others look to a some decisive disaster as the birth of their collective consciousness as a people. The Australians are in that second group. They look back upon a disaster that occurred 88 years ago on the shores of Turkey. There, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, the British and their Australian and New Zealand allies attempted to land an army that would later sweep north through Turkey and the Balkans to defeat Germany from the rear.

The daring plan was the brainchild of the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. But Churchill had not reckoned with the hostile geography of Gallipoli – the allied troops that landed there seized a narrow strip of beach that was bounded by high cliffs. From the tops of those heights, Turkish troops rained down deadly artillery and machine gun fire, pinning the invaders to their narrow strip and decimating them. Unable to seize the cliff tops above them, and losing huge numbers of men from the Turkish assaults, the invaders finally withdrew eight months later.

The ignominious retreat pushed Churchill into a 25-year political eclipse. But the Australians were left to contemplate a far greater catastrophe. Their casualties at Gallipoli numbered 8,700, a figure all out of proportion to the losses sustained by Great Britain. In terms of the current U.S. population, those 8,700 men would have been equivalent to the loss of 520,000 American soldiers in a single campaign. Though Gallipoli was an unmitigated defeat, the Australians chose it as the marker by which they would measure their emergence as a nation onto the world stage.

As a global backwater and a mostly un-honored adjunct to the British Empire, the Australians’ terrible loss received little sympathy or notice. They were left to note their sacrifice and honor their dead on their own. After the war, many Australians began pilgrimages to Gallipoli, marking as best they could the sacrifices that their husbands, brothers, sons, and friends had made there. Little did they know that recognition of what they had lost would come from a most unlikely source.

The general who led the Turkish resistance at Gallipoli was Mustafa Kemal, later called Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”). Ataturk was the great political organizer who led the Young Turk movement that took over Turkey and created the first and only secular state where Islam is the predominant religion. Ataturk, in a stunning show of magnanimity, wrote the words cited above, directing them at the Australians as he told them that they were welcome to come to Turkey to grieve their lost soldiers. Later generations of Turkish leaders expanded on Ataturk’s generosity. In 1985, Turkey officially declared the cove where the Australians had landed at Gallipoli “Anzac Cove.” To emphasize the solemnity of the declaration, Turkey gave the area national park status.

Today the cove is the center of memorial activities each April and May as Australians journey there. As the years unfold, the battleground is coming to be marked by more formal monuments. Echoing Maya Lin’s wall, a monument now under construction at the site will have as its primary feature an interpretive wall detailing the terrible events of 1915.

What to add to the journey: The Gallipoli Peninsula is on the Dardanelles, near the place where Xerxes crossed from Asia to Europe to begin his invasion of Greece. The site of ancient Troy is directly across the strait from the peninsula’s southernmost point (although it takes a keen and trained eye to truly appreciate the stony remains there). Istanbul is 120 miles over fairly good roads from Gelibolu, Gallipoli’s main town.