Troy, Troia, or Ilium, is a world-class site to visit that should be on your bucket list.
For a good reason — Troy is a unique archeological site with a story (a 16,000 line epic, actually), a tale every child learns at school in the West: the story of Iliad by Homer.
The Story in a Nutshell
Helen (wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta) is an irresistible Greek beauty kidnapped by Paris (son of Troy King Priam). A Greek (Achaean) fleet under the coalition command of Agamemnon sets sail and attacks Kind Priam’s Troy to get Helen back. They fight for ten years. Trojans (led by Hector) lose the war when Greek warriors steal their way into Troy hidden inside a wooden horse designed by Odysseus (whose harrowing ten-year struggle to go back home to Ithaca, Greece is the subject of Homer’s second volume — Odyssey).
All this happened around 1200 BC according to Iliad which was written in the 8th century BC.
For thousands of years, the story of Troy was taken as a myth, a fable with no counterpart in reality.
Enter Schliemann, the Bull in History’s China Shop
About 3,200 years later, a German businessman and adventurer named Heinrich Schliemann decided that the story is more than a tale and is true.
He started the Hisarlik excavations in 1870. He ravaged the current site (the village of Hisarlik in Turkey’s Balikesir province) by using dynamite in his haste but by 1873 he uncovered all nine cities of Troy.
Just before the day he was going to stop the excavations in 1873, Schliemann found “Priam’s Treasure” of golden necklaces and diadems.
He gave the treasure to his wife Sophia as a present, with total disregard for the historic significance of the find.
Since then a total of nine different city layers were found, all from different eras going all the way back to 3500 BC.
Troy is the kind of place that forces you to question your assumptions about what’s real and what’s not. If Homer’s Troy was not pure fiction, what about other “tales” like “Atlantis” or “Shangri-La”? Can they also be true but waiting for their own Schliemann?
My Visit
I visited Troy in May 2022 on a hot day with insects buzzing in the lush ground cover surrounding the new Troy Museum.
The museum rises from an orchard of olive trees with its rust-brown massive bulk without any stylistic apologies, driving home a silent declaration: “I’m Priam, the King of Troy, I’m here still in my power and glory!”
The actual ruins themselves just a few miles ahead are another spectacle altogether.
The four-story museum building has an elevator of course but no stairs.
You enter the mega cube from a walkway sloping down to the basement level as if entering a subterranean burial chamber.
Then you walk from one floor to the other by walking along a sloping ramp that winds its way through all three sides of the building.
Such layers mimic the multiple layers of Troy which is a “layered cake” of nine cities built on top of each other.
Wonders of Troy Museum
The quiet ruins of windy Troy sing to us today through a rich collection of artifacts displayed tastefully in the Troy Museum which opened its doors in October 2018.
There is the magnificent statue of Emperor Hadrianus in the museum, for example, who is known as a fair and good ruler who took pleasure in strolling the streets to meet his subjects personally. (But he is also known to have suppressed the revolt in Judea with unmistakable force. So the verdict is still out about his overall legacy.)
The sarcophagus of Polyxena, daughter of Priam the King of Troy, is another treasure of this museum. It is said to be the earliest stone sarcophagus of its kind ever found in Turkey (Asia Minor) depicting on its four sides different reliefs about the sacrifice of Polyxena for Achilles.
The meaning and significance of the sacrifice are not clear to me 2,500 years later but the artistic value of this work is obvious and beyond question. Just look at this lovely detail:
There are all the cups, amphoras, glass perfume bottles, and numerous household items that Trojans just like you and me have used in their daily lives.
Shiny arrowheads in different shapes, conical and triangular, are on display at the museum which reminds us of the fight Achilles had with Paris.
Did Paris hit Achilles in the heel and killed him with an arrow just like the ones above?
In museums like this, history suddenly becomes very real and personal.
The collection of lovely golden diadems and fashion accessories is a must-see section of the museum even though even a larger collection is today kept at Pushkin Museum in Russia despite the protests of the Turkish government.
Perplexing Affair
Walking around the ruins of Troy is a wonderful but perplexing affair for two reasons.
The remains are so layered on top of one another that it’s hard to keep track of which wall belongs to what era, etc.
Secondly, due to our daily experience, we are used to viewing objects at the “street level,” that is, at the height of our eyes.
But in Troy, you need to remember that you are looking top-down at many walls and buildings. You are actually walking on TOP of city walls most of the time, looking not AT the walls but DOWN on them. You have to get used to that orientation to make sense of the layout of the buildings and passages. That helps to visualize what this once-mighty city of antiquity looked like.
Once a Port, Believe It or Not…
Another thing that helps to remember is that, just like the city of Ephesus a few hundred miles south, Troy was also an important port city controlling all naval passages sailing north from the Aegean towards the Marmara and the Black Sea.
Today the city sits a couple of miles away from the shore, which is a testament to the speed at which our physical world evolves. Nothing remains the same. Harbors are filled with silt before we know it and become fertile plains within just short 3,000 years.
The Walls
Most of Troy consists of walls — but what walls! After 3,000 years some of these walls are still in perfect shape, even though no mortar was used in their construction.
Here is one, a section of a city wall, that is suspected to have survived a fire:
Here is another one (below). This one formed the foundation walls of a series of houses built on top. Look at the precision with which stone blocks of various sizes are put together thousands of years ago.
The three vertical bands in the right-half of the photo are a characteristic of the construction style of the era, representing a few-inches wide change in the thickness of the wall:
The above is the famous Ramp leading to one of the entrance gates of Troy. Look how well it maintained itself despite thousands of years of exposure to the elements and human activity (that still continues today). Can you hear the wheels of the carts going up this ramp, carrying people and food items to the city?
The Worship Center of Troy (above) dates back to the 8th century BC. What looks like a circular well in the bottom center is actually a sacrificial altar where animals were sacrificed to the Greek gods during religious ceremonies. There were stairs leading to the stand where the nobility and rulers of the day watched the ceremonies from their privileged positions.
Like most Greek cities, Troy also had an Odeon (above), a small circular amphitheater, where the performers of the day entertained the citizens of the city.
The Troy city officials gathered at (what I call) “The Parliament” (above) to raise, discuss, and vote on the issues of the day.
Visit While It’s Still There
If history excites you, if you love classics, Homer and Iliad, you should see this world heritage site while it’s there.
You’ll go back home with renewed respect for what previous generations have achieved while they shared the same passions, dreams, and follies that still energize us today.