Turkish-Korean consortium invited to ink contract to build Dardanelles bridge: Transport minister

KARS - Doğan News Agency

A Turkish-Korean consortium has been invited to sign a contract after winning the tender of the planned 1915 Çanakkale Bridge to be built over the Dardanelles Strait, a top Turkish official said Feb. 11. 

The consortium, made up of South Korea’s Daelim and SK and Turkey’s Limak and Yapı Merkezi, won the tender on Jan. 26 by offering the shortest construction time, Transport Minister Ahmet Arslan said. 

Turkey’s highways authority received bids from four international consortiums, made up of eight foreign and seven Turkish companies in total, to build, operate and maintain the new 10 billion-Turkish Lira ($2.61 billion) suspension bridge over the Dardanelles Strait, the authority said Jan. 26.

“We took quite ambitious bids. A total of 13 international financial institutions offered letters of good faith, saying they were willing to provide financing for the project,” Arslan said. 

“We opened the bid on Jan. 26. We then declared their construction offers… After all technical examinations and other examinations were made by our teams, it was seen that all four of the offers met all technical requirements. In this vein, the Turkish-Korean consortium won the bid with their shortest construction time of 16 years, two months and 12 days. I approved the tender last night and we have invited the consortium members to sign the contract,” he added. 

The construction of the bridge, spanning over 2,000 meters between Lapseki and Gelibolu in the northwestern province of Çanakkale, is set to start by March 18 and open in 2023 when the country marks the centennial of the Republic of Turkey, according to the country’s Transport Ministry.  

Turkey marks what it calls the Çanakkale War – known in English as the Battle of Gallipoli – on March 18, when Ottoman forces repelled an Allied World War I assault on the Dardanelles.