Troy: The Most Anticipated, Most Disappointing Site on the Tour?

Ask our guests which site on the Treasures of Western Turkey tour they are most looking forward to, and the answer, more often than not, is Troy. It is the one name on the itinerary that everybody already half knows, learned in some school lesson or half remembered from a film, long before they ever book a tour. It is also, for a good many visitors, the site that disappoints them most. One archaeologist is said to have compared it to a medieval rubbish tip rather than an archaeological site, and on a first glance it is not hard to see why: a site that is small, awkwardly labelled, and walkable in twenty minutes flat, set against the golden, wall-girdled city of Homer’s imagination. There is a full-scale wooden horse to climb up into near the entrance, which guests always enjoy (last year’s version was wrapped in scaffolding for restoration, so with any luck this year’s guests will get to climb it properly). But set the physical site aside for a moment, because the story behind it is arguably the most interesting of anything on the whole tour: a tangle of myth, mistaken identity, buried treasure and one deeply unreliable narrator, worth unravelling properly before you ever set foot on the mound.

What does Homer actually say Troy looked like?

The most famous account of the Trojan War is Homer’s Iliad, a poem that in fact covers only the final year of a ten-year siege, not the whole war. In it, Troy is the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom, a major regional power capable of summoning allies from across Anatolia to defend it. Homer describes a city set on top of a steep hill, ringed by enormous sloping walls, rectangular towers and massive gates, their wooden doors built to be bolted shut against attack. It is a description that, as you will discover, bears almost no relation to what greets visitors on the ground today.

Troy also appears throughout the Odyssey, Homer’s other great epic, which picks up the story after the war: it follows Odysseus’s own ten-year journey home, and along the way various other Trojan War veterans tell their own versions of what happened at Troy, filling in pieces the Iliad itself never covers.

How does Troy’s story reach all the way to Rome?

Troy’s story does not end with the Greeks. Centuries later, the Roman poet Virgil wrote the Aeneid, which recounts the travels of Aeneas, a Trojan refugee who escapes the fall of the city with his followers, journeys through Tunisia and Sicily, and eventually reaches Italy to found the line that becomes Rome. For the Romans, this made Troy something close to their own point of origin: one of Rome’s own foundation legends leads directly back to these ruins on the Turkish coast.

What actually started the Trojan War?

The traditional date for the war itself sits somewhere in the twelfth or thirteenth century BC, though the exact dating has long been disputed among scholars, some placing it earlier, others later. It was fought between the Achaeans, as Homer calls the Greeks, and the Trojans, who were not themselves Greek.

The spark, according to myth, was a quarrel among three goddesses: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Eris, the goddess of discord, had not been invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, so she turned up anyway and left behind a golden apple inscribed “for the fairest.” All three goddesses claimed it, and the judgement was handed to a young shepherd they encountered tending his flock on Mount Ida. That shepherd was in fact Paris, a Trojan prince, son of King Priam, who had been raised out in the countryside away from the court. Each goddess offered him a reward in exchange for his verdict: Hera offered power, Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, and Aphrodite offered the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite, and as his reward she caused Helen, queen of Sparta and by reputation the most beautiful woman alive, to fall in love with him. Whether what followed counts as an abduction or an elopement depends rather on which ancient source you trust, but either way, Helen left her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and went with Paris to Troy. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, raised an army of Greeks in response and laid siege to the city for more than ten years.

How did the ten-year siege finally end?

After the deaths of many of the war’s great heroes, Achilles and Ajax among the Achaeans, Hector and eventually Paris among the Trojans, the city fell at last to the ruse of the wooden horse. The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans, sparing only some of the women and children to be kept or sold as slaves, and in the process desecrated the city’s temples, earning themselves the wrath of the gods for it. Few of the victorious Achaeans made it home safely afterwards; many ended up founding colonies in distant lands instead. The most famous of those who did eventually make it home was Odysseus, whose own long, delayed return is the subject of the Odyssey.

If Homer wrote about it, why did nobody know where it was?

For centuries, nobody was entirely sure Troy had ever existed as a real place, let alone where it might have stood. Part of the confusion lay in the names. In classical Greece the city was known both as Troia and as Ilios, or Ilion, the second of which gives the Iliad its title. According to myth, both names trace back to the kingdom’s legendary founders: Tros, ancestor of the Trojans, and his son Ilus, who founded Ilion itself.

Here the story gets a little more technical, and rather more interesting. Metrical evidence within the Iliad and the Odyssey suggests that Ilios originally began with a sound that had dropped out of later Greek entirely: an old letter called the digamma, pronounced like an English “w.” In other words, the city’s name was likely once something closer to “Wilios.” That detail matters because Hittite records from the Bronze Age, found in what is now central Turkey, refer to a city in northwest Anatolia called Wilusa, a name many scholars believe is one and the same place. Long before archaeologists had a spade in the ground, philologists and historians were already fairly convinced a real city lay behind Homer’s story. What nobody could do yet was point to it on a map.

Who first thought to go looking?

That task fell, in large part, to Frank Calvert, a British consular official based at Çanakkale during the years of the Ottoman Empire, whose family had deep trading and diplomatic roots in the region. Calvert owned part of the land at Hisarlik, the mound on the Turkish coast that he became convinced was the true site of ancient Troy, and he is generally credited as the first person to put a spade into it, beginning his own careful excavations there some years before Heinrich Schliemann ever arrived. What Calvert lacked was the money and the public platform to pursue the idea properly. What he did next was invite in a man with plenty of both.

Was Heinrich Schliemann the hero of this story?

That man was Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman who had made his own fortune independently and, by his own account, was determined to make his mark on the world, settling eventually on archaeology as his chosen route to it. Calvert persuaded Schliemann to take on excavations at Hisarlik, but what began as an agreement for modest digging turned, in Schliemann’s hands, into something far more drastic: a vast excavation trench, still known today as Schliemann’s Trench, that tore straight through the layers of the site without much regard for what it destroyed along the way, and by most accounts went well beyond anything Calvert had agreed to.

Schliemann himself was a genuinely complicated figure. He married a much younger Greek wife, Sophia Engastromenos, and lived for a time in Athens. He was a gifted linguist who kept diaries in several languages. He was also, by the verdict of later historians, someone whose own written accounts cannot always be trusted: parts of his diaries and memoirs have been shown to contain claims that were simply untrue. That unreliability hangs over the most famous moment of his career. Schliemann claimed to have discovered a hoard of gold and jewellery, since known as Priam’s Treasure, after sending his workmen home for the day and finding it while alone at the site. He later admitted that this too was embellished: his wife Sophia was not present at all, having gone to Athens following her father’s death, and the famous story of her helping to smuggle the jewels away in her shawl was Schliemann’s own invention. There was no independent witness to the find, and the surrounding circumstances have been treated with suspicion ever since. The treasure itself became famous chiefly through a later photograph of Sophia dressed in its jewellery, staged well after the actual discovery, which is why it is sometimes still spoken of, a little romantically, as the Jewels of Helen, even though the hoard’s proper name honours Priam, Troy’s legendary king.

What happened to Priam’s Treasure?

Schliemann donated the treasure to a museum in Berlin, where it remained on display for decades. It disappeared amid the chaos of the Second World War and was long assumed lost for good. It has since resurfaced, understood today to be held in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, taken as a war trophy by Soviet forces in 1945. It has never returned to Berlin. What survives in the popular imagination, far more than the objects themselves, is that photograph of Sophia Schliemann glittering in another woman’s legendary jewellery.

Did later archaeologists get it right?

Schliemann, for all his talents, made a considerable mess of the site, and it fell to others to sort out what he had actually found. Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a German architect who had worked under Schliemann, took over the excavation and carried out the careful, patient work of untangling the site’s many superimposed layers, work that also corrected one of Schliemann’s biggest errors: Schliemann had believed the treasure, and the city he took for Homer’s Troy, belonged to a layer far too early to match the Iliad’s description. Dörpfeld’s stratigraphy pointed instead to a much later layer as the more plausible candidate.

The American archaeologist Carl Blegen refined that picture further with his own excavations in the 1930s, narrowing the likeliest candidate for a historical Trojan War down to a specific layer destroyed around 1180 BC. Decades later, in 1988, the German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann reopened excavations at Troy and transformed the picture again, uncovering a substantial lower city stretching well beyond the citadel walls that Schliemann and Dörpfeld had explored, evidence that whatever stood here was a far larger settlement than earlier generations of archaeologists had assumed. Korfmann died in 2005, and excavation at the site has continued since under Turkish archaeologists.

So which Troy are you actually standing in?

Part of what makes the site so hard to read on the ground is that there is not one Troy but several, stacked one on top of the other across roughly four thousand years of continuous occupation. Archaeologists divide the mound into layers, numbered with Roman numerals, each representing a city built on the ruins of the one before. Troy 0 is the earliest, a pre-Bronze Age settlement dating from around 3500 BC. Troy I through V cover the early Bronze Age. Troy VI belongs to the middle Bronze Age. Troy VII, split into VIIa and VIIb, dates to roughly 1300 to 1180 BC and is generally considered the layer most likely to correspond to Homer’s war. Troy VIII was a Greek city of the classical and Hellenistic periods, and Troy IX was the Roman settlement built on top of everything that came before it.

Nine or ten cities, then, standing on the same low mound, each one dismantled or destroyed to make way for the next, which goes some way towards explaining why the site can feel so confusing to actually walk around. You are not looking at one ruin. You are looking at the last, faint outlines of several, laid one over another, most of them barely distinguishable from the next without a guide standing beside you to point out where one ends and the next begins.

Which is really the point of the whole visit. Troy was never going to look like Homer’s city, whichever layer you are standing in, and it was never going to look like a battlefield either. What it offers instead is the layered evidence of four thousand years of people rebuilding on the same spot, generation after generation, certain enough of the place’s importance to keep coming back to it, long after whatever happened here in the Bronze Age had already passed into legend. Troy is the day after Gallipoli on Esplora Travel’s Treasures of Western Turkey tour, the two sites facing each other across the very water this whole story keeps crossing and re-crossing, from Homer’s Achaeans to Schliemann’s trench to the guests who climb into that wooden horse every year, hoping, as everyone always has, to find something grander than what is actually there.