1915 Canakkale Bridge

The 1915 Canakkale Bridge holds a record that may stand for years: at 2,023 meters, its main span is the longest of any suspension bridge on earth. Opened in March 2022, the crossing leaps the Dardanelles strait between Lapseki and Gelibolu, linking the Asian and European sides of Turkiye at a point ships have funneled through since antiquity.

Project Scope

The headline number is the 2,023-meter central span, a figure chosen to echo the centenary of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. The full bridge runs 3,563 meters, and with its approach viaducts the structure reaches 4,608 meters. Two steel towers rise 318 meters to carry the main cables across the strait’s deep, fast-moving water.

Delivery fell to an international consortium of Turkiye’s Limak Holding and Yapi Merkezi alongside South Korea’s DL E&C and SK ecoplant. Denmark’s COWI handled detailed design, with Tekfen Engineering on the tender design. The work demanded marine foundations sunk into the seabed of one of the world’s busiest and most strategically sensitive waterways, all while commercial traffic kept moving below.

Why It Matters

Beyond the record, the bridge is the centerpiece of the Kinali-Canakkale motorway corridor, cutting a crossing that once meant a ferry queue down to a few minutes by car. That’s a meaningful shift for freight and regional development on both shores. It was built as a public-private partnership on a build-operate-transfer basis, with a consortium financing and operating the toll crossing before eventually handing it to the state, a model Turkiye has leaned on hard for its recent megaprojects.

The engineering also pushed long-span design forward. Holding a two-kilometer span steady against wind and seismic loads in the Dardanelles required aerodynamic refinement that feeds directly into the next generation of record-chasing crossings. It sits comfortably alongside Exchange’s other landmark spans, including the Gordie Howe International Bridge. For now, no bridge anywhere reaches farther between towers.

Reference: 1915 Canakkale Bridge.

Project Team & Details