The Walls of Troy. Evokes images of fabulous palaces and majestic bronze age walls doesn’t it? The reality is less awe inspiring but still a fantastic visit although the city has been rebuilt and destroyed so many times what you see is really a montage rather than a single point in time.
Visiting The Walls of Troy
It is possible to visit the walls of Troy as a day trip from Istanbul although that is quite a trek. It is also on the opposite shore to Gallipoli, famous for its First World War battlefield so the two could be combined. The actual site is very well organised to take advantage of the legends and milk those tourist dollars/pounds/euros.
My Experience
Our visit was as part of a tour the classical sites of western Turkey, detailed on my travel blog here. There really are some incredible places to visit in Turkey, literally the stuff of legends, but it is striking how few of the classical sites actually had any defences, or at least ones that are now visible.
The walls of Troy are really an amalgam of five thousand years of history with nine distinct cities replacing earlier settlements destroyed by fire or earthquakes. It is another site that probably needs more time than the bucket list tour we did as it was literally a one hour photo stop so we missed a lot of the peripheral sites.
The Walls of Troy Photo Gallery
History
Troy or Ilion, was an ancient city, known as the setting for the Greek myth of the Trojan War. Troy was located in present-day Turkey, at Hisarlik 30 kilometres (19 mi) south-west of Çanakkale. The site was first settled in the Early Bronze Age, around 3000 BC. It was destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly over the next four millennia before its ultimate abandonment during the Byzantine era. The mythic city is typically identified with one of the archaeological layers from the Late Bronze Age, such as Troy VI, Troy VIIa, or Troy VIIb.
During the Classical Greek and Roman periods, the city was a tourist attraction, and visible remains of the Bronze Age ruins were sites of worship. However, the city was abandoned during the Byzantine period and its location was forgotten. By the early modern era, scholars doubted whether it had even existed. In the late 19th century, the site was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert. Though Schliemann is credited with the successful identification of the site, his legacy remains controversial due to his excavation methods, which included dynamiting layers he considered insignificant. Subsequent excavations by others have added to an understanding of the site.
Since the rediscovery of Troy, a village near the ruins named Tevfikiye has supported the archaeological site and the associated tourist trade. Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
References
There is a nice guide to the different levels of Troy and what is still visible now on the Planetware site here.
Turkey travel planner has a good guide to visiting Troy here.
The best guide to visiting the walls of Troy I’ve found is here on Passport & Pixels site.
The history above is summarised from the far more comprehensive information on the Wikipedia page here.