Troy

Troy is an archaeological site on the mound of Hisarlik, near the village of Tevfikiye in Çanakkale province, in the region of north-western Turkey known in antiquity as the Troad. It is widely identified as the city at the centre of the legend of the Trojan War told in the poems of Homer. Excavation has revealed at least nine successive cities spanning more than three thousand years, from the early Bronze Age to the Roman and Byzantine periods. How far, if at all, the legend reflects real events remains one of the great open questions of ancient history.

The oldest substantial settlement, Troy I, was a small fortified citadel founded around 3000 BCE and burned around 2550 BCE. Troy II, about twice as large and with a lower town, yielded hoards of precious objects and was destroyed around 2300 BCE. Troy VI, from about 1750 to 1300 BCE, was a major Late Bronze Age city with a lower town of perhaps 30 hectares. Its last phase was ruined around 1300 BCE, probably by an earthquake, though revolt or attack have also been proposed. The rebuilt city, Troy VIIa, was destroyed around 1180 BCE, and signs of burning suggest an enemy assault, close in time to the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces in Greece.

Hittite texts of the period mention a western Anatolian kingdom called Wilusa, and many scholars, following a proposal made in 1924, equate it with the Greek Wilios or Ilion, though not all accept the link. Wilusa appears as a member of an alliance against the Hittites around 1400 BCE, and later as a vassal under kings such as Alaksandu, bound by a treaty. Other letters hint at unrest and the overthrow of a Wilusan king, but none describes a Greek attack on the city. The historian Trevor Bryce has argued that the Hittite evidence does not show an actual Trojan War, and others note that no inscription confirms Homer's story.

After a period of reduced settlement, Greek immigrants began rebuilding the city around 700 BCE, and it became known as Ilion. Its sanctuary of Athena attracted famous visitors. According to Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes I sacrificed a thousand cattle there on his way to invade Greece. In May 334 BCE Alexander the Great visited, made offerings at the tombs said to belong to Achilles and Patroclus, and declared the city free and exempt from tax. Ilion passed under Persian, Athenian and Hellenistic overlords in turn and was sacked by Gauls in 278 BCE.

In 85 BCE the Roman general Fimbria destroyed the city after an eleven-day siege, but Rome then treated it generously. Julius Caesar, whose family claimed descent from the Trojan prince Aeneas, granted benefactions in 48 BCE, and Augustus visited in 20 BCE and paid for the restoration of its sanctuary, council house and theatre. Goths sacked Ilium around 267 CE, and from the fourth century the city was a Christian bishopric. Earthquakes devastated it around 500 CE, after which only small-scale settlement continued into late Byzantine times.

For centuries travellers placed Troy at various spots in the region. In 1822 Charles Maclaren was the first to identify Hisarlik with confidence. Frank Calvert, a farmer of English descent living in the area, surveyed the mound in 1865 and went into partnership with Heinrich Schliemann, who dug there in several campaigns between 1870 and 1890. Schliemann believed Troy II was Homer's city and cut a great trench through the mound, destroying much of the evidence for later layers without recording it. He removed a hoard of gold and jewellery that became known as Priam's Treasure. Part went to the Ottoman government and is now in Istanbul; the rest went to Berlin, was taken by Soviet forces in 1945, and is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Carl Blegen in the 1930s, and from 1988 Manfred Korfmann continued the work. Korfmann's team found traces of a large lower town with a defensive ditch, transforming the image of Troy VI from a small citadel into a sizeable city, though the historian Frank Kolb contested his interpretation. Since 2014 a Turkish team led by Rüstem Aslan has excavated the site. Turkey created a national park around Troy in 1996, UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 1998, and a museum opened nearby in 2018.