Transcript of Tape-recorded Diary
PART 4 of 7
Earlier in the day we’d been by Metro to the Parc Guell. The Barcelona Metro is extensive and efficient, and the guide books describe it as second only to Paris. To our minds it was better - better because of the signage. Very easy to find your way around the system and to find your way around Barcelona and, with so many stations, an ideal way to travel - although as Judy Rowe pointed out, there’s much also to be said for the bus system, because travelling by bus you can see your way and see the wonderful Barcelona architecture. But, obviously, quite a bit slower.
The Parc Guell is one of the significant examples of that architecture. It was designed by Antoni Gaudi on the commission of Eusebi Guell who had the idea of a twenty-hectare park with decorative public buildings and landscaped gardens. This was in the 1890s and, in the event, the cluster of houses was not built; and when the park opened in 1922 there were half a dozen buildings only, Gaudi landscaping, and the awesome snaking park bench - the park bench 499 feet long, completely decorated with mosaics of broken pottery and ceramics.
The buildings that flank the gateway are of irregular shape with colourful Gaudi tiling - and the word that can aptly be used to describe Gaudi architecture: indescribable. Gaudi lived in one of the houses in the park from 1906 to 1926. UNESCO has designated Parc Guell as a world heritage site.
After the Parc Guell, again by Metro, to Sagrada Familia, the Temple of the Sacred Family, the masterwork of Gaudi - commenced in 1882, and incomplete at his death in 1926. It’s only in recent times that work has recommenced, with the intention that Gaudi’s vision should be realised. The crowds were large and we took in the exterior, deciding to leave the interior for another day.
Judy went off to the beach and Anne and Gary returned home.
Our Tuesday bus tour took us to another Gaudi building, the Casa Mila, otherwise known as La Pedrera. This house, five or six storeys high, has a wave-like façade and chimneys that look like abstract sculptures. La Pedrera means “stone quarry”, and the building’s nickname refers to the pale stone finish and the lumpiness of the structure. The building comprises apartments, with two courtyards and, in the basement, Barcelona’s first underground carpark. There is no straight wall anywhere in the building. The guided tour gave us a complete understanding of the building including apartments set up as they would have been when the building was built between 1906 and 1910.
A pleasant stroll from La Pedrera to Casa Terrades, nicknamed Casa de les Punxes, that is the house of the points (nicknamed for the turrets). On the way I’d stopped at a friendly photographic shop and the chap had salvaged a film for me. I’d finished the film and then foolishly rewound it the wrong way ripping the film out of the cassette. My friend was able to put the camera and his hands into the black bag and remove the film, and put it into a light-tight container for me.
Casa Terrades is not a Gaudi house, but was built contemporaneously between 1903 and 1905 and is a striking example of Barcelona Modernisme - described in the books as a variant of art nouveau born in Barcelona, an extravagant architectural style that became a means of expression for Catalan nationalism. Every great architect needs a great patron and the exponents of Modernisme, and Gaudi in particular, were fortunate to have wealthy patrons who were prepared to let their architects take complete control of the design and the project and to see the building through to completion without interference.
Before the bus had taken us to La Pedrera we’d seen a lot more sights on foot. We’d had lunch at the Port Vell area. This is an area also made over for the 1992 Olympics, very similar to Sydney’s Darling Harbour (although not nearly so exiting), but already needing a bit of a facelift. Then a walk through the Barri Gotic, the Gothic Quarter of the old town; an area occupied by the Romans during the reign of Augustus, although the only remains of Roman times are in museums. In the Gothic Quarter we saw the Barcelona Cathedral - not of great interest - the striking feature to us being the choir stalls located virtually in the centre of the nave, with wooden pinnacles rising above each of the choir seats.
Also in the Gothic Quarter is the Museu Picasso, and there we spent an hour or so feasting on the master’s works. The guide book says that the museum is housed in five adjoining Medieval palaces. Certainly, it’s a rabbit warren of rooms and levels. It was opened in 1963 with works donated by a friend of Picasso; and after that man’s death in 1968 Picasso himself donated the works that had been kept by his sister; and then upon his death more works were donated by his widow. Picasso was not a native of Barcelona but lived there from the age of thirteen for a number of years. In all, the museum has 3000 Picasso works. It’s particularly interesting to see early works, drawings by the fifteen-year-old, and to confirm the obvious fact that even though an artist’s later and principal works may be abstract and unlifelike, the artist can nevertheless draw like an angel.
One detour on the Tuesday had been to the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Barcelona Opera House. This is a must-see building, and we needed to enquire about times of access. Wednesday morning was ideal, and we obtained our tourist tickets for the next day.
That next day: back on the bus first thing. Not using the bus as a tourist bus but rather as a way of getting to the Opera House; and then our ten o’clock tour. Not a great grand ostentatious building like the Paris Opera, but a sublimely beautiful theatre interior.
“Gran” it certainly is; and fascinating to know that it’s been restored twice after fires, in 1861 and in 1994. The Opera theatre is on La Rambla, and on Wednesday La Rambla had a street market, so we were able to browse through the market on our way to the next high point, the Palau de la Musica Catalana
..... only to suffer the bitter disappointment of finding the place closed for renovations. According to the guide book “this is a real palace of music, a Modernista celebration of tilework, sculpture and glorious stained glass. It is the only concert hall in Europe lit by natural light.” It was completed in 1908 and is in a narrow street, and it’s hard to tell how our photos of the facade will turn out; but the interior, for us, will have to wait for another day.
Now to the tourist bus and out to the Sagrada Familia. Huge crowds but definitely worth the visit. I chose to climb the spiral staircase in one of the towers rather than to take the lift, but it was an awfully congested process with dozens of people in a sense trapped, moving a few steps at a time until we were able to emerge on to an area of the rooftop.
The return tourist bus trip home to Placa d’Espanya passed many more of the tourist sites. There are just so many, and in the time available we could simply not see them all.
On our last day in Barcelona, Friday the 29th of August, Anne and Gary, the sightseeing-aholics, (first) took a tour of the Guell Palace. Guell, the rich businessman who commissioned Gaudi to design the namesake park, had earlier commissioned Gaudi to build him a city home. Guell’s family had lived on La Rambla, and Guell wanted a house in a side street connected by corridors to the family home. The house, built on a small piece of land in a narrow street, is relatively unimpressive from the outside, although undoubtedly Modernista in style, but the inside is indeed a palace. The guided tour through the building took us from the stables in the basement, to the ground floor where Guell conducted his business, to the first and upper floors containing the rooms for entertaining, and even a private chapel. And thence to the roof, where each of the chimney pots is individually shaped like a tall toadstool, each covered with ceramic tiles. It was said that Gaudi had complete freedom in the basement and on the roof because the family never visited those parts of the building.
From Palau Guell along La Rambla, the full length of La Rambla past its upper end at the Placa de Catalunya, to Casa Batllo another Gaudi masterpiece. This is the one with the curved window frames and windows; and, again, we were able to do a tour of the building.
From here we took the funicular railway to Montjuic hill again, and across the road from the Olympic Stadium we took in the gallery devoted totally to the works of Joan Miro, the Fundacio Joan Miro. Miro was a surrealist painter, lived from 1893 to 1983, and his works are not to everyone’s taste. But when you see a complete collection like this it’s informative to learn the way in which the artist’s style changes through his working life. A very worthwhile visit.
We continued our walk down Maria Cristina Avenue to the Placa d’Espanya - this time no fountains working - and home.
But that night, irrepressible, our last night in Barcelona, the three of us went to town and again walked the full length of La Rambla from the Placa de Catalunya to the Columbus column.
Impressions of Barcelona: well I’ve already said what a magical place it is - magical architecture, magical culture, magical Metro, and magical people. The worst feature is the dog droppings, although to some extent this is under control - every street seems to be tree-lined and so many of the trees have a square of dirt around them, unpaved, and it’s in these squares where the locals seem to have trained their dogs to do their business. So, so long as you stick to the pavement and don’t step in the dirt you’ll have a reasonably odour free visit. Actually, I lie, because there is a pervasive odour and I was not able to identify it. I think it was the smell of cooking fish, which is a significant part of the local diet, but it also at times smelt like a dirty drain. So, who knows?
There are wonderful wide avenues, and a number of them are sufficiently wide for there to be thirty or forty feet of pavement along one side with room for bicycle traffic and maybe three or four separate avenues of trees. The guide book says that Barcelona has more street trees than any other city in Europe, and I can believe it. The tree plantings are of uniform species and every so far along there’s a tablet in the pavement indicating the type of tree. The most prevalent species looked to be ones described as Brazilian acacias, very like what I would at home call a cassia. I say prevalent, but prevalent only in terms of recent plantings. Far and away the most popular tree is the plane tree; and in the older parts of the city these are massive. They don’t let them spread, so they’ve been cut to grow tall, but the girths of some of them could be five feet through. I was also interested to notice several streets with Australian kurrajongs. They are of a slightly different variety from the ones we’re used to seeing.
A surprising feature of the supermarket that was fairly close to our apartment was its lack of stock. Perhaps this was just an example of poor management. (On the other hand, the smaller supermarket had well-stocked shelves - but had a shortage of shelves!) It had absurdly few lines and lots of space between the racks, and in Australia the same business could have been crammed into an area half the size.
Barcelona is not a honking city, drivers don’t press their horns at the slightest pretext, and we found the drivers to be invariably courteous and competent. It’s a great city for pedestrians, and even the guide books point out that the traffic lights for pedestrians stay green for an exceptionally long time. Anne and Gary are agreed: we have no hesitation in recommending Barcelona as a great, a first class, tourist destination, and we’d love to return one day.
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I hadn’t intended on this trip to do any actuality recording because it’s not usually successful. I’ve recorded the sounds in the Paris Metro, I’ve recorded a thunderstorm in Perugia, I’ve recorded impromptu amateur opera singers in the streets of Paris - but the tapes never get replayed and these things don’t transcribe into text. But today it seems again to be the right thing to do, because we’re visiting Gallipoli. We’ve alighted from our tour bus at a cove, just beyond Anzac Cove, where there’s a long memorial wall with information panels. We’re going to walk our way back to Anzac Cove itself. The sea is calm, beautiful, blue; gentle waves of the Aegean rolling into a narrow beach, very light touches of white tops. And a big expanse of lawn; and the marker wall with the word “ANZAC”.
The cove is the site of the first landing on North Beach on the 25th of April 1915. North Beach is just to the north of Sulva Bay where the Briish landing was meant to be. The steep hills behind are mostly covered in vegetation but there’s a very tall outcrop of clayey formation - very forbidding, and no doubt used as an observation post by the Turkish forces.
At the water’s edge North Beach is a mixture of smooth stones and greyish sand and lots of seaweed and flotsam; and just under the commemorative wall there’s been some restoration done - obviously a storm at some stage has gouged away part of the sand dunes. It’s now a row of large stones held together by heavy wire mesh; and the beach could be any beach, any cove, anywhere. I’m not jingoistic and not very patriotic in the official sense, but the Anzac thing has always seemed to me to have great significance, not because it was the making of a nation - any of that - but just because of the bravery on both sides, the great drama of the story, and most of all the axiomatic fact that Australia as a nation celebrates a decisive military defeat. I guess my views have been reinforced by years of attending Anzac Day parades in Melbourne as a kid, and the great Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, and the annual myth-making that goes on around Anzac Day. But it’s become a more powerful force of recent years. Two reasons, I think. First the growing interest of the younger generations in visiting Gallipoli and Anzac Cove; and second, something that to me was quite significant, and that was the bringing back to Australia of a corpse, and the burial in the Canberra War Memorial, of the unknown soldier; a thing initiated in the days of Paul Keating, and which was commentated upon so eloquently by Bob Ellis. Ellis, the world-weary writer who, so averse to these public displays, attended the unknown soldier ceremony, and was greatly moved and said so. In a way the force strengthens as the years go by. And if you need further proof of the Anzac “legend” consider this extract from Alan Moorhead’s Gallipoli: "On May 24, with death in all its shapes around them, Turkish and Anzac troops worked together in digging great communal graves. At the end of that dreadful day, stamped forever in the participants’ minds, some 4000 bodies had been buried. For both sides, working together in this common act, the enemy ceased to be a propaganda figure. He was no longer a monster, a fanatic, or a figure of fun: he was a normal man, and feelings of rancour died."
Around the corner of North Beach there’s a new cemetery being installed. I guess all the dead were Australian troops, certainly the ones that I can see from where I stand were. All the headstones are bearing their number, their name, their regiment, their date of death - together with a cross. No provision, I’m afraid, for an atheist’s faith to shine through .... yes, there is! One stone has no cross on it. “In memory of our dearly loved son. Mr. and Mrs. W. Blakeney of Yarck (Yarck in Victoria). Died aged 22 on the 7th of August 1915.” One can only presume that some descendants have indicated the wish not to have included the symbolism of the Christian faith.
There are about twenty Turkish workmen, and the ground has been bevelled back from the seafront. Little stumps of headstones are being inserted, somewhat in random order. Where they’re placed they’re placed in rows. There are little truncated rows over an area of half an acre; and at the back there’s a large structure which I presume will have the name of the cemetery and its particular position in the scheme of the numerous small cemeteries that are dotted over the peninsula. My limited research has left me confused. North Beach was indeed the site of the landing that was intended for Sulva Bay - but it was the British landing. How come, therefore, we saw existing and proposed cemeteries for Australian troops? I suspect that we weren't at North Beach at all!
Above Anzac Cove on a grassy knoll is the large plinth bearing the wonderful words of Mustafa Kemal [In some places you see the spelling Kemel. But Google has 893 entries for Mustafa Kemel and 143000 entries for Mustafa Kemal - so I guess the “a’s” have it.], the local commander during the conflict, later to become the leader of the Turkish Republic. “Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears: your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.” Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal) 1934"
More important than the beach is the vista of the cliffs above. When I say cliffs: they’re not overhanging crags, but it’s an eighty to eighty-five degree incline of gravelly shaley clay - nowadays cut by a bitumen road about fifty feet up from the beach level - and beyond that again another hundred-and-fifty, two hundred, feet for the first ascent.
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We’ve now moved on to Chunuk Bair, the highest point on the peninsula and, accordingly, very windy - so this is no doubt recording badly. It is the point where Mustafa Kemal set up his command post and from which he said the battle would be won or lost. And its notable that during the battle the New Zealanders captured this hill and held it for some time. And it’s on this very point that stands the memorial to the New Zealand soldiers.
And close by an imposing statue of Mustafa Kemal mounted on an enormous plinth, surrounded by native pine trees. There’s one vendor of wares. Down the slope are a number of trenches that have been reconstructed. The view is superb. Down below, the western side is an extensive plain, many trees down the slopes. Further on, steep escarpments, tree covered.
Further beyond, the blue sea in a lovely shallow curved bay. From the distance white sands and, further away to the northwest, Sulva Bay the site of the second British landing, in August 1915.
From this high point at Chunuk Bair it’s possible not only to see the Aegean where the landings took place but also the Dardanelles, the objective. This is the only spot from which the Allied forces ever saw the Dardanelles.
Further down the hill we are now at the memorial to the 57th regiment of the Turkish army, the one commanded by Mustafa Kemal and the regiment responsible for the Turkish victory on the peninsula. Unlike the Allied memorials which are massive stone monoliths, this one is open, with arches on four sides and three levels, rising to a conical point like a bell tower. And down the slopes in front of it there are gravestones, memorial plaques to some hundreds of the members of the regiment who perished. The one piece of information on the headstones that’s readily clear to all observers is the age of each soldier at the time of death - mostly 19, 20, 21; the oldest I’ve seen is 27,
Tape 2, side 2
but all young men. We just stopped at a small New Zealand cemetery called Quinn’s Post, specifically to look for a great uncle of Hamish on our tour. And among the hundred or so graves we found it very quickly, and Hamish has been able to take some photos, and others have been taken of him standing beside the marker.
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Now, I think this is our final stop. We’re at Lone Pine.
This is the point of the most significant Australian attack, and the site of serious fighting - 2200 Australian dead and 4000 Turkish dead on this hill - now the site of an enormous memorial cairn, and a memorial wall engraved with names; and there is indeed a lone pine, quite a handsome tree. I’d always had this mind’s eye picture of a gnarled and aged specimen, but it stands about thirty feet, the first branch about twelve feet up, and the crown mostly quite uniform and round, rather like a mushroom. Better still, rather like a broccoli stalk.
We’re very fortunate today in that there are so few people, just our bus-load and one other bus-load of about the same number.
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My illusions have just been shattered. This is not the original tree, it’s a seed from the original just as in Australia there are other offspring; and I’ve no idea how old this one is. It certainly carries the same significance as if it had been the original.
From here we can see the Aegean Sea, but I don’t think we can see Anzac Cove - it’s hidden by the hill itself. And reading the lists of names on the large wall, David has just by chance noticed two soldiers’ deaths recorded with the name of Weeks, and wonders whether there were some remote ancestors, previously unknown to him, who died at Gallipoli.
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We have now stopped, our last stop before we go to the boat ferry to cross to Asia, to the Anatolian - eastern - part of Turkey. This stop is at a - what’s described as - small museum with a number of artefacts taken from the battlefields. In front of it is a large paved forecourt with further Turkish memorials, I think to the Turkish naval forces. There’s nothing translated into English here so I can’t be sure.
Just when I wanted the wind to be active it seems to have died down. The reason for my change of heart is that this spot is surrounded by pine trees of the lone pine variety, and the wind whistling through them gives an eerie effect - not that there’s much eerie on a beautifully sunny day like today.
As I wander I see more reconstructed trenches, and the thing that’s surprising me - in contrast to the trenches traversed by Mel Gibson and Mark Lee - is that they’re only between three and four feet deep.
To be continued..........
Gary Andrews
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