Ataturk Memorial

On a windswept ridge above Tarakena Bay, overlooking the harbour entrance, there is a memorial to the man who killed the ANZACs.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the Turkish commander at Gallipoli. He led the defence that pinned down the Australian and New Zealand forces on the beaches and ridgelines, and ultimately drove them back into the sea. Thousands of ANZACs died under his command. And yet here, in the city that sent many of those soldiers to war, Wellington built him a memorial.

The site was chosen because the landscape resembles the Gallipoli peninsula. It was designed by Ian Bowman and unveiled on the twenty-sixth of April, nineteen ninety, by the Turkish Minister of Agriculture. An ANZAC Day service is held here annually.

Inscribed on the memorial is one of the most famous wartime quotes in New Zealand and Australian history: Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.

The words are attributed to Ataturk. They've been quoted by prime ministers, printed on memorials, taught in schools. They are beautiful and they are almost certainly fabricated.

Significant research — particularly from the Honest History project in Australia — has concluded that Ataturk never said or wrote these words. The quote appears to have been cobbled together in nineteen seventy-seven when an ANZAC veteran met a retired Turkish schoolteacher at Gallipoli, who showed him words from a guidebook. The attribution stuck. It became canon. Nobody checked.

So here is a memorial to the enemy commander, inscribed with a quote he never said, on a hill chosen because it looks like the place where the killing happened. And every year, people gather here and find it genuinely moving. Whether that makes it more meaningful or less is something you'll have to decide for yourself.