Çanakkale Red Crescent Reenactment Area

During the Gallipoli campaign, the Red Crescent Society (Hilâl-i Ahmer) ran mobile hospitals in the region alongside those of the Ottoman Fifth Army's rear organisation. A wounded soldier would first treat himself with the kit sewn into his bag, then be carried by medics to a shelter for the wounded, then to a dressing station where simple operations could be done, and finally to a hospital behind the lines.

The reenactment area at Alçıtepe lets you follow that route in detail. It begins at a machine-gun trench that protected hospitals from aircraft and continues past a tea house, an operating tent, a store, registration and first-aid tents, a disinfection machine and a shaded area where the dead were laid. An infirmary tent, a water-carrier's post and a horse-drawn ambulance complete the scene. One of the stops recreates a dressing station bombed from the air in 1915, and sound installations take you to those moments.

The second part is a trench reenactment inspired by the fighting between Turkish and Anzac troops at Arıburnu. Trench lines sometimes lay only 8 to 10 metres apart. Sound effects of gunfire and aircraft, a trench periscope and a mine tunnel show what life at the front was like. Do not miss the original field stretcher with a sunshade.