Troy Ancient City

Listen for the wind first. It comes off the Dardanelles strait, steady and salted, bending the dry grass between the stones around you. Crickets rasp in the heat. Underfoot, the path is packed earth mixed with crumbled pottery, ground fine by more than a century of digging. The ruins here do not rise high. They sit low, tawny, and warm in the sun, wall stacked against wall. You are not standing on one city. You are standing on at least nine of them, pressed together in a single mound.

Archaeologists call this mound Hisarlik. Beneath your feet, nine major settlement layers sit one on top of another, from a small walled town founded around 3000 BC to a Roman city that lasted into late antiquity. Each city rose, thrived, and fell. Its ruins were leveled, and the next city was built on the rubble. Over roughly 4,000 years, the mound grew upward, metre by metre. The numbered signs around the site, Troy One through Troy Nine, tell you which layer you are looking at.

Troy is famous because of a poem. Homer's Iliad, composed in Greek around the eighth century BC, describes a ten-year war fought over this citadel. For centuries, many scholars treated that war as pure myth. Then excavators found a real Bronze Age fortress here, with massive walls, watchtowers, and layers of burning. No inscription has ever proven that Homer's war happened. But the layers known as Troy Six and Troy Seven fit the poem's era, and both show signs of violence and fire. The question is still open, which is part of the pull of this place.

The man who first dug here on a grand scale was Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman obsessed with Homer. He began major excavations in 1871, guided by Frank Calvert, an English resident who owned part of the mound and had long suspected what lay inside it. Schliemann dug fast and hard. His workers cut a huge trench straight through the middle of the mound, destroying layers he did not recognize as important. You can still see that great trench today. Archaeologists have worked more carefully ever since.

In 1873, Schliemann found a hoard of gold jewellery, vessels, and weapons. He named it Priam's Treasure, after the Trojan king in the Iliad, and smuggled it out of the Ottoman Empire. He was wrong about the name. The gold came from Troy Two, a city more than a thousand years older than any Homeric war. The treasure later passed to Berlin, disappeared in 1945, and resurfaced decades later in Moscow, where much of it remains. The ground where it was found is part of the circuit you are walking.

Walk toward the eastern side of the site and you reach the walls of Troy Six. These are the most impressive stones at Troy. They lean inward at a slight angle, cut limestone fitted in smooth faces, with the base of a great watchtower still standing. In the late Bronze Age these walls stood several metres higher, topped with mudbrick. Run your eyes along the vertical seams that divide the wall into sections. Builders may have used them to manage earthquake damage, a constant threat on this coast.

And the horse? The wooden horse never appears in the Iliad itself. It comes from later Greek poems and from Homer's Odyssey, where the trick is remembered. Whether any real horse existed, nobody knows. It may be a memory of a siege machine, or a ship, or pure invention. A modern wooden horse stands near the site entrance, built for visitors, and children climb inside it most days. Legend or not, the story has carried this small hill into languages spoken all over the world.

Near the centre of the mound, look for a wide stone ramp climbing at a gentle angle. It led into the citadel of Troy Two, almost 5,000 years ago, and Schliemann found his treasure close to it. The ramp is paved with flat stones and edged neatly. Carts and people entered the fortress this way when the pyramids of Egypt were still new. It is one of the oldest things you can see at Troy, and one of the easiest to imagine in use.

The last cities on this mound were Greek and Roman. They called the town Ilion, and they treated it as a place of memory. Ancient writers say Alexander the Great visited in 334 BC, honoured the tomb of Achilles nearby, and left offerings. Roman emperors favoured the town because Rome traced its ancestry to the Trojan hero Aeneas. On the southern edge of the site, you can sit in a small Roman odeon, a covered theatre for music, whose curved stone seats survive.

Troy joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998. Twenty years later, in 2018, the Troy Museum opened in the village of Tevfikiye, a short drive from where you stand. Its rust-coloured cube holds thousands of finds from the mound, including some pieces returned from museums abroad. If the ruins feel hard to read, the museum gives them faces, tools, and voices. Many visitors say the site makes more sense the second time around, once the objects have filled in the gaps.

Before you leave, stop somewhere quiet and face north-west, toward the strait. The plain below you was once a wide bay, silted up slowly by rivers over thousands of years. Ships may once have anchored where tractors now cross the fields. Stand still and let the wind do what it has always done here. Nine cities heard it before you. Whatever the truth behind the poem, people kept choosing this hill, again and again, and this afternoon, so did you.