Troy

One of the main entrances to Troy in one of the earlier
building stages

Well, today I visited the legendary Troy. To be honest I've only grudgingly accepted the fact that this site probably was the real site of Troy. At first I was skeptical - it was excavated by Schliemann after all, and I'm sure if he had unearthed a Burger King he would have called it Troy in his excitement. But after checking out the site and reading all the information I have to admit the argument sounds pretty convincing. Troy would have been the biggest, most important city in the area, and it's hard to imagine a bigger, more important one than this. The first city was built on this site about 3000 BC, and among other things it's one of the first places in the world known to have used bronze.

Different layers in Troy's history

Despite Schliemann overzealously destroying a lot of important things to get to the lowest strata, archaeologists have been able to piece together an astounding amount of detail of Troy's building history. The great thing for archaeologists is that for a lot of its history Troy was built with mudbricks, unlike in most of Europe. The good thing about mudbrick is that it can't be very well repurposed by successive builders, so it tends to be built over. That means the individual layers are buried and preserved rather than ripped up and reused.

Walls of Troy. I think these might have dated from the
Trojan War period, but don't quote me...

Of course as nice as this is for archaeologists, it makes the site bewildering for the likes of me - it's very difficult to picture what it looked like at any stage of its existence. And obviously the part that everyone's the most interested in is what it was like during the famous war chronicled in the Iliad by Homer (Troy's alternate name was Ilias by the way). Of course nobody's even sure that war even happened - the only evidence we have is from poets such as Homer who were reciting oral legends. The war with Troy may well have originally been with Thebes, and over hundreds of years the legend changed through the telling. There is evidence that one building phase ended with the city being sacked, but that was about 500 years after the war Homer talks about would have occurred.
Still, the place is fascinating.