A fatal shore: Gallipoli
After several days of grey, bitterly cold weather, with ice skimming the puddles, snow blanketing the hills and a biting wind whipping in from the north, the first day of 2009 bodes well for the new year.
The sun is shining, the sky a flawless canopy of blue. There’s not so much as a whisper of wind and, in the unexpected but welcome warmth, the blackbirds and chaffinches chattering happily away in the undergrowth sense that spring is just around the corner. I’m standing a little below the crest of a long ridge, on the lip of a green, scrub-choked valley that twists steeply down to a shingle shore lapped gently by an almost blindingly blue ocean. In the far distance, the snow-capped form of the distant Greek island of Samothrace seems to float, ethereally, somewhere between the sea and sky. Read the rest of this entry »