Nine stacked Troys hide under the tourist hill of Hisarlık
Troy—Ilion—at Hisarlık in Çanakkale, Turkey, is the legendary Trojan War setting and a UNESCO site open to visitors. Settled about 3600 BCE, fortified by 3000 BCE (Troy I), it was rebuilt so often that archaeologists count nine main layers, including wealthy Troy II and Late Bronze Age Wilusa under Hittite vassalage.
Classical Greeks called the city both Troia and Ilion or Ilios, the source of the title Iliad, and the metre of Homer’s epics suggests the second name was once pronounced Wilios. Both forms appear to go back to the Bronze Age: Hittite records mention a north-west Anatolian city called Wilusa or Truwisa, now generally identified with Hisarlık near Tevfikiye. Myth derived them from the kingdom’s founders, Tros and his son Ilus. Latin used Troia or Ilium, and Turkish says Troya or Truva.
People settled the mound around 3600 BC and fortified it by 3000 BC, the phase called Troy I. Destroyed and rebuilt again and again over some four thousand years, it now shows nine main layers, among them the prosperous Troy II and the Late Bronze Age city that was a Hittite vassal. Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann began excavating in 1871, uncovering many older settlements beneath the classical town.
The Iliad, an Archaic epic about the last year of the war, pictures Troy as the capital of a rich kingdom able to call on many allies. Its city sits on a steep hill behind sloping stone walls, square towers and gates with bolted wooden doors, with broad streets and, at the summit, a temple of Athena and Priam’s many-roomed palace around a courtyard. The Greeks beach their ships and camp near the mouth of the Scamander, and much of the fighting happens on the plain between.
The legend also runs through the Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Virgil expanded it in the Aeneid, and Quintus of Smyrna later told of the Trojan Horse and the sacrifice of Priam’s youngest daughter, Polyxena.
Source: Troy
