🇹🇷 Turkey · Istanbul and Marmara
For centuries, Troy was considered pure legend: the imaginary setting of Homer's Iliad, where Greeks and Trojans fought for ten years over the beautiful Helen, where Achilles and Hector died and where the cunning Odysseus devised the trick of the wooden horse with which the Achaeans, hidden in its belly, finally took the city. Nobody knew whether that Troy had really existed, until in the 19th century an eccentric treasure hunter named Heinrich Schliemann, guided by Homer's verses, set about digging a hill in northwestern Anatolia and found the walls of a very real city.
What you visit at Troy today is not a single city but the astonishing stack of at least nine cities on top of one another, each built over the ruins of the last across more than three thousand years, from the Bronze Age to Roman times. Visitors arriving expecting a film set may at first feel puzzled by a mound of stones and excavation trenches: Troy is not Ephesus or Rome. But with a little imagination, a good guide and a visit to the modern Troy Museum, the place becomes fascinating, because here you touch myth and history at the same time.
This guide helps you get the most out of the visit: how to get there from Çanakkale or Istanbul, what the different layers of the city are, where the famous horse is (there is a replica at the site and another, the film one, at the port of Çanakkale), how much admission costs and how to combine Troy with Gallipoli or Assos. Coming all this way is a small literary pilgrimage: standing on the ground where, according to Homer, the fate of heroes and gods was decided.
Troy is the site of the city Homer immortalised in the Iliad as the setting of the Trojan War. For centuries its real existence was doubted, until in the 1870s the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, following the clues in the epic, excavated the hill of Hisarlık and brought to light the ruins of a very ancient walled city. His excavations (rather destructive by today's standards) revealed that there was not one city there but several stacked on top of one another: at least nine main levels are counted today, from Troy I to Troy IX, running from 3000 BC to Roman times. The Troy of the Homeric war is usually identified with levels VI or VII, from the late Bronze Age. Schliemann believed he had found the 'treasure of Priam', a set of gold jewellery that he smuggled out and that had an eventful history afterwards. Declared a World Heritage Site in 1998, Troy is still being excavated, and its full story, from myth to archaeology, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The hinge at the heart of two continents: Istanbul, capital of two empires on the Bosphorus, and the plain of Troy and the Dardanelles, where legend and great wars left their mark.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It all began, according to the myth, with an apple. At the wedding of the parents of the hero Achilles, the goddess of discord, Eris, who had not been invited, threw in a golden apple 'for the fairest'. Three goddesses — Hera, Athena and Aphrodite — fought over it, and Zeus put a Trojan shepherd, prince Paris, in charge of judging. Aphrodite bribed him by promising him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris carried Helen off to Troy, and so, the legend says, the most famous war of antiquity broke out.
To avenge the insult, the Greek kingdoms joined together under the command of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and brother of Menelaus, and crossed the Aegean with a thousand ships to besiege the walled city of Troy. The siege lasted ten years. The Iliad, the great epic poem attributed to the Greek poet Homer and composed around the 8th century BC, does not tell the whole war but a few weeks of the last year, centred on the wrath of the best Achaean warrior, Achilles, and his duel with the Trojan hero Hector, son of king Priam. It is a work about glory and death, honour and destiny, with gods intervening on both sides.
The end of the war, with the trick of the wooden horse — the enormous hollow horse in whose belly the Greek warriors hid to get inside the city, left behind as a false offering after feigning a retreat — does not appear in the Iliad but in the Odyssey and in other later poems. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two great Homeric epics, stand at the very origin of Western literature: for almost three thousand years, poets, playwrights, painters and filmmakers have returned again and again to Troy. But for almost all that time, nobody knew whether the city had really existed.
In antiquity, Greeks and Romans took it for granted that Troy had existed and even located it in northwestern Anatolia: Xerxes, Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors visited the place as tourists of the heroic past. But over the centuries the location was lost and many scholars came to think that Troy was pure poetic fantasy.
Everything changed with an extraordinary character: Heinrich Schliemann, a self-taught German businessman who made a fortune in trade and who, obsessed with Homer since childhood, decided to devote his wealth to finding Troy. Convinced that the Iliad described real places, and also following the indications of a British diplomat, Frank Calvert, who had already pointed to the site, Schliemann began digging the hill of Hisarlık, in Turkey, in 1871. And there, under the earth, he found walls, houses, pottery: a very ancient city, or rather several, one on top of another.
In 1873, Schliemann announced to the world the discovery of a fabulous set of gold objects and jewellery that he named the 'Treasure of Priam', the Trojan king of the Iliad. He photographed his young Greek wife, Sophia, wearing the 'jewels of Helen'. The discovery caused a worldwide sensation. Schliemann, however, was as much a pioneer as he was controversial: his methods were brutal by today's standards — he dug a great trench that destroyed extremely valuable layers — he exaggerated and falsified part of his accounts, and he smuggled the treasure out of Turkey, which started a dispute that lasts to this day (much of that material ended up in Berlin and, after the Second World War, in Moscow). He also got the layer wrong: the 'treasure of Priam' actually belonged to a Troy a thousand years earlier than that of the Homeric war. But with all his mistakes, Schliemann had proved something enormous: Troy was real.
The excavations that followed Schliemann — led by his collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld, then by the American Carl Blegen in the 1930s and, in recent decades, by the German Manfred Korfmann and other teams — revealed that the hill of Hisarlık did not contain one city but the overlay of at least nine large settlements, each built on the ruins of the last across more than three thousand years. Archaeologists number them Troy I to Troy IX.
Troy I is the oldest, a small Bronze Age settlement around 3000 BC. Troy II, the one with the walls and the ramp that Schliemann took for the Homeric city and where he found his 'treasure', flourished around 2500 BC. But the city most specialists identify today with the Troy of the Iliad is Troy VI and its final phase, VIIa, from the late Bronze Age (13th-12th centuries BC): a large, prosperous and well-fortified city, with cyclopean walls and towers, which controlled the strategic Dardanelles strait. In its levels traces have been found of destruction by fire and war around 1180 BC, more or less the period in which Greek tradition placed the fall of Troy.
Texts from the Hittite Empire, the great Anatolian power of that time, mention a city called Wilusa, which many historians identify with Wilios/Ilion, another Greek name for Troy, and speak of tensions in the region with the Achaeans (the Mycenaeans of Greece). All of this suggests that behind the myth there may have been real conflicts over control of this strategic corner of the world. After the fall of Bronze Age Troy, the place remained inhabited: there was a Greek Troy and a Roman Troy (Ilium), which the ancients visited as the revered setting of the epic. The city gradually lost importance in Byzantine times until it was forgotten, buried under the hill, waiting for Schliemann.
In 1998, UNESCO inscribed the archaeological site of Troy on the World Heritage list, recognising its exceptional value both for its archaeological importance — as one of the most famous sites in the world and evidence of contact between the civilisations of Anatolia and the Mediterranean over millennia — and for its deep cultural influence: the Iliad and the Odyssey, inspired by Troy, have fed the art and literature of the West from antiquity to the present.
Excavations continue, and each season adds nuance to what we know about the city and its surroundings. In 2018, coinciding with the 'Year of Troy', the Troy Museum opened a short distance from the site, a striking piece of contemporary architecture, a large rust-coloured steel cube that has won international awards. The museum brings together the finds from Troy and the Troad region, tells the story of the excavations and of the disputed 'treasure of Priam', and finally provides the context that visitors puzzled by the ruins lacked for decades.
The 'treasure of Priam' is still the subject of an international dispute: Turkey demands the return of the pieces Schliemann took out of the country, which today are divided mostly between Russia and Germany. Meanwhile, in 2022 archaeologists announced new finds that reinforce the idea that late Bronze Age Troy went through an episode of violent destruction consistent with the story of a war.
For today's traveller, Troy does not offer the visual grandeur of Ephesus or the Roman ruins, but something subtler and perhaps deeper: the thrill of standing on the ground where myth and history touch, of looking at three-thousand-year-old walls while imagining Hector and Achilles, and of confirming that one of the founding stories of our culture did, after all, have a real place in the world. As the poet wrote, the glory of Troy lies not only in its stones but in the verses that made it immortal.