1915 Çanakkale Bridge

Listen first. Wind comes off the water in steady pushes, and it carries salt and the low hum of engines. Far out on the strait, a cargo ship slides past, so slowly that it seems to stand still. Then you lift your eyes, and two red towers rise into the sky. Between them hangs a single road deck, light and level, held up by cables that look as thin as thread from here.

This is the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge. It crosses the Dardanelles, the narrow strait that separates Europe from Asia. On this side lies the Gallipoli peninsula, near the town of Gelibolu. On the far shore, near Lapseki, lies Anatolia, the Asian part of Türkiye. For thousands of years, people crossed this water by boat. Today a driver can cross it in a few minutes, without ever touching the sea.

Here is the first surprise. The distance between those two towers is 2,023 metres. When the bridge opened in 2022, that made it the longest main span of any suspension bridge in the world. It took the record from the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge in Japan. And the number is no accident. The engineers chose 2,023 metres on purpose, to mark 2023, the hundredth anniversary of the Turkish Republic.

The bridge carries other dates too. The name itself, 1915, points to the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. In that year, Allied fleets and armies tried to force their way through these waters toward Istanbul. On 18 March 1915, Ottoman defenders stopped a major naval attack in the strait. The bridge opened on 18 March 2022, the anniversary of that day. So the calendar, the measurements and the name all point back to the same history.

Now look closely at the towers. They rise more than three hundred metres above the water, taller than most skyscrapers in Europe. Their colour is a deep red, with white details, and those colours match the Turkish flag. From a distance, the towers look solid and simple. Up close, they are hollow steel structures, built to bend slightly in the wind. A suspension bridge is not rigid. It moves a little, all the time, and that movement keeps it safe.

The main cables do most of the work. Each one runs from an anchor on land, over the top of both towers, and down to an anchor on the far shore. Thousands of steel wires are bundled inside each cable. Vertical hangers drop from the cables and hold the road deck. The deck itself has an aerodynamic shape, a bit like an aircraft wing turned on its side. That shape lets strong winds flow past instead of pushing against a flat wall.

Building all this in the Dardanelles was not easy. The strait is deep, and its currents are strong. Water from the Black Sea flows toward the Aegean on the surface, while saltier water moves the other way below. The tower foundations had to sit firmly on the seabed in these conditions. The region also has a history of earthquakes, so the structure was designed to handle ground shaking. A consortium of Turkish and South Korean construction companies built the bridge.

Let us go back much further in time. This strait had another name in the ancient world: the Hellespont. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Persian king Xerxes crossed it with a huge army in the fifth century before Christ. According to his account, the Persians tied boats together to form floating bridges. When a storm broke them apart, Herodotus says, the angry king ordered the water itself to be whipped. Whether that happened or not, it shows how much this crossing mattered.

There is a love story here as well, and it is a legend, not history. According to the Greek myth, a young man named Leander lived on the Asian shore. Every night he swam across the Hellespont to meet Hero, a priestess on the European side. She lit a lamp in her tower to guide him. One stormy night, the wind put out the lamp, and Leander drowned. When Hero found his body, the story says, she followed him into the sea.

The legend inspired a real swim. In 1810, the English poet Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont, partly to prove that Leander's crossing was possible. He wrote about it with pride for the rest of his life. People still swim the strait today in organised events. So when you look at the water under the bridge, you are looking at a place where stories, armies and swimmers have all tried to reach the other side.

For people who live here, the bridge changed daily life. Before it opened, crossing usually meant waiting for a ferry. In summer and on holidays, queues of cars could stretch along the coast. The bridge is part of a new motorway that links Thrace, in European Türkiye, with the Aegean regions of Anatolia. Ferries still run in the strait, and many visitors like to take one to see the bridge from the water.

When you look at the bridge, notice the strait as well. This is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. Tankers, container ships and fishing boats all pass under the deck. The bridge had to leave a very high clearance so that the largest ships could pass. Watch for a while, and you will probably see a ship move through the gap between the towers. That moment shows the scale of the structure better than any number.

The light changes the bridge through the day. In the morning, the towers can look almost dark against a pale sky. In late afternoon, the sun from the west turns the red paint warm and bright. After dark, lights outline the towers and cables, and their reflections lie on the moving water. Each version is a little different, so a second look at another hour is worth it.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment. Feel the wind on your face, the same wind that sailors here have fought for thousands of years. Look at the two shores, Europe at your feet and Asia across the water. Then follow the long line of the deck from tower to tower. As you walk away, you may notice that it seems smaller each time you turn around... and the strait beneath it seems as wide as ever.