ASIANOVERLAND.NET SYDNEY TO LONDON  DAY 278/148/60: TROY,  TURKIYE

 16 November, 1980

A visit to Troy is a little disappointing visually, a bit like a visit to the Temple of Artemis. There are nine ancient cities of Troy, but visually, they look a little like a pile of rocks. The most appealing and memorable items for non-archeologists like us, are probably the replica of the famous Trojan horse (pictured), and the replica of Hector’s chariot.

On the eastbound, one punter was continually late, and was even late for departure from Troy, where the nine cities look like piles of rubble and don’t take long to take a photo and tick it off. So we decided to teach him a lesson rather than continually waiting for him all the way to Kathmandu, and drove off without him. He finally caught us at Pergamon, and wasn’t late again - nor were the other punters, who now knew that we really meant it when we told them the bus departure time and not to be late.

Ancient Troy was on the seaside, southwest of the Çanakkale Strait and south of the mouth of the Dardanelles. The location of Troy in the present day, is the hill of Hisarlik and its immediate vicinity.

Troy was the setting of the Trojan War described in the Iliad and the Odyssey , two epic poems attributed to Homer.  Troy's location near the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, made it a hub for military activities and trade, and the chief site of Maritime Trojan Culture, which extended over the region between these seas.

Troy was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age – the end of the Trojan War – and was abandoned or near-abandoned during the subsequent Dark Age. After this, the site acquired a new, Greek-speaking population, and the city became, along with the rest of Anatolia, a part of the Persian Empire.

Troy was conquered by Alexander the Great, an admirer of Achilles, who he believed had the same type of glorious destiny. After the Roman conquest of this now Hellenistic Greek-speaking area, a new capital called Ilium  was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, after which it was abandoned.

Troy was repopulated for a few centuries in the Byzantine era, before being abandoned again (although it has remained a part of the Catholic Church).

Troy's physical location, on Hisarlik, was forgotten in antiquity and, by the early modern era, even its existence as a Bronze Age city was questioned and held to be mythical or quasi-mythical. In 1822 the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren identified Hisarlik as the likely location of Troy, and it was rediscovered in 1868.

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