Ancient Troy is the archaeological mound of Hisarlık, beside the village of Tevfikiye in Çanakkale Province, north-western Turkey, on the Biga Peninsula (the ancient Troad) close to the Aegean mouth of the Dardanelles. People lived on the hill for roughly 4,000 years, from about 3600 BC until earthquakes around AD 500, rebuilding so many times that archaeologists count nine main cities stacked one on another, Troy I to Troy IX. The site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998, two years after Turkey created a 136 km² Historical National Park around it.
The Iliad’s Troy: what Homer’s poems claim
The Iliad, an Archaic-era Greek epic, tells the story of the final year of a war between the Achaeans and Troy, and the Odyssey follows one of the Greek heroes home. Homer’s Troy is the capital of a rich kingdom that can call on many allies. It stands on a steep hill, ringed by enormous sloping stone walls with rectangular towers and massive gates whose wooden doors can be bolted shut.
The poems also give a landscape. The Achaeans beach their ships and pitch camp near the mouth of the river Scamander, and most of the fighting happens on the plain between that camp and the city. The Scamander, said to rise on Mount Ida, crosses that plain below the city and reaches the Hellespont, the ancient name for the Dardanelles. That geography is the reason Hisarlık was eventually taken seriously: it is a low hill at the edge of exactly such a plain.
The names come from the same poems. In Classical Greek the city was both Troia (Τροία) and Ilion (Ἴλιον), which is why the poem is called the Iliad. The metre of the Iliad and Odyssey suggests that Ilion was once pronounced Wilios, with a lost initial w. The Turkish names today are Troya or Truva.
What the poems cannot do is prove that a Greek war against the city happened; they mix inherited memory with later invention.
Wilusa and Taruisa in the Hittite tablets
The second set of texts is far older and more sober. Clay tablets from the Hittite capital Hattusa, in central Anatolia, mention a city in the north-west called Wilusa and a place called Taruisa. In 1924 the scholar Emil Forrer proposed that these were the Bronze Age forms of Wilios and Troia, and later work on Hittite geography has made the identification firmer, though not every specialist accepts it as settled.
If the match is right, the tablets give Troy a political history. Wilusa first appears around 1400 BC as one of 22 states in the Assuwa Confederation, which rose against the Hittites and failed. By the late 1300s BC it had become a loyal Hittite ally. A treaty of about 1280 BC between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and a ruler of Wilusa named Alaksandu survives; the name is probably a rendering of the Greek Alexandros, which is also the other name of Homer’s Paris.
Later letters show trouble. The Manapa-Tarhunta and Tawagalawa letters suggest that a Wilusan king was deposed or rebelled, possibly during the raids of the warlord Piyamaradu, who acted for the Ahhiyawa, the Hittite name for Mycenaean Greeks, though the texts never name him as the culprit. The last mention of Wilusa is in the Milawata letter, where the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV says he means to restore a deposed king called Walmu. None of these documents describes a Greek attack on Wilusa itself, and the Hittitologist Trevor Bryce has warned that thin evidence is easily bent to fit any conclusion. Readers who want the other end of that correspondence can visit the ruins of the Hittite capital in our guide to Hattusa.
Troy itself has produced only one piece of pre-classical writing: a small bronze seal from the Troy VIIb1 layer, inscribed in Anatolian hieroglyphs with a woman’s name on one side and a male scribe’s on the other. It hints that some Trojans wrote Luwian, though the language of the Bronze Age city is still unknown.
Xerxes, Alexander and Augustus: ancient visitors to Ilion
For the Greeks and Romans there was no doubt where Troy was. A Greek city called Ilion stood on Hisarlık from about 700 BC, and it lived off its legend. Herodotus records that the Persian king Xerxes sacrificed 1,000 cattle to Athena Ilias there on his march into Greece in 480 BC. In May 334 BC Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont, visited the temple of Athena Ilias, made sacrifices at tombs linked to Achilles and Patroclus, and declared Ilion free and exempt from taxes.
These visits do not show that Ilion was Homer’s Troy, but they show that the identification was unbroken in antiquity, which is why modern searchers began from the ruins of a classical city.
Rome adopted the legend as family history. The Roman general Fimbria sacked the city in 85 BC after an eleven-day siege; Sulla then helped rebuild it, and Ilion started a new civic calendar counting from that year. Augustus visited in 20 BC and paid for the restoration of the sanctuary of Athena Ilias, the council house and the theatre.
Coins like this one are useful witnesses. Struck by the city of Ilion and carrying its name, they show the goddess whose sanctuary drew Xerxes and Alexander, and they confirm that the city on the hill presented itself to the world as the heir of Homer’s Troy.
From Pınarbaşı to Hisarlık: travellers and the lost location
After the Byzantine centuries the exact spot was forgotten, and early modern travellers guessed wrongly. In the 16th and 17th centuries Pierre Belon and Pietro Della Valle took the ruins of Alexandria Troas, a Hellenistic town about 20 km south of Hisarlık, to be Troy. In the late 18th century the French scholar Jean-Baptiste Le Chevalier argued in his Voyage de la Troade for a hill near the village of Pınarbaşı, near Ezine, about 5 km south of the true site. For almost a century his choice was the favourite.
The turn came from a non-specialist. In 1822 the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren became the first to identify Hisarlık with confidence. In 1865 Frank Calvert, a consular official of English descent whose family farm included part of the mound, surveyed it and correctly matched it with classical Ilion. Calvert’s conclusion was the key step: if classical Ilion lay on top, then the Bronze Age city had to lie underneath.
Schliemann’s Trench, 1870–1890
Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), a German businessman who had first looked for Troy at Pınarbaşı, visited Calvert in 1868 and obtained permission to dig. At that point the mound was about 200 m long, a little under 150 m wide, and rose 31.2 m above the plain. In April 1870 he drove a trench straight across it, now known as Schliemann’s Trench, and he returned in 1871–1873, 1878–1879, 1882 and 1890, the last two seasons with Wilhelm Dörpfeld.
The trench proved that the hill held a deep sequence of cities, but it also destroyed much of what it passed through. Schliemann removed structures he judged unimportant without recording them, and most of Troy III–V was lost this way. He believed Troy II was Homer’s city and in 1873 unearthed a hoard of gold and silver, diadems, rings, earrings and vessels, which he called Priam’s Treasure. His story that his wife Sophie carried it away in her shawl was invented; he later admitted she was in Athens at the time. The hoard came from Troy II, around a thousand years too early for any Trojan War. Some pieces went to the Ottoman government and are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum; most went to Berlin in 1881, were taken by the Soviet Union in 1945, and are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Dörpfeld, who continued in 1893–1894, turned attention to Troy VI and VII, which Schliemann had overlooked. Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati excavated from 1932 to 1938 and divided the nine main cities into 46 sub-layers, the framework still in use.
Nine cities in one hill: what the layers reveal
Read together, the layers give the city’s life story. Troy I, founded around 3000 BC on the shore of a shallow lagoon, was a citadel of under 1 hectare with heavy limestone walls. Troy II, from about 2550 BC, was twice the size, with a lower town, megaron halls and a well-preserved entrance ramp; its treasures included Baltic amber, carnelian from India and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Troy VI, from about 1750 BC, had sloping ashlar walls up to 5 m thick, watchtowers, five gates and multistorey houses. Collapsed masonry suggests an earthquake brought it down around 1300 BC.
Troy VIIa, built by survivors of Troy VI, filled the citadel with small houses and storage jars sunk into the floors, and was destroyed around 1180 BC with signs of enemy attack, including scorch marks. Along with the end of Troy VIh, it is among the leading candidates for the war of the legend. Greek settlers rebuilt the hill as Ilion from around 700 BC, and their building projects destroyed the summit where the Bronze Age palace probably stood.
Korfmann’s lower town and the sources still missing
The biggest modern change came from a team from the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati led by Manfred Korfmann from 1988 to 2005. Excavation south of the citadel revealed a lower town of roughly 30 hectares, bounded by a defensive ditch cut into the bedrock. With the citadel, Late Bronze Age Troy covered around 200,000 m², over 16 times what earlier excavators had assumed. Korfmann’s team also found bronze arrowheads and fire-damaged human remains in layers of the early 12th century BC.
Geology adds another check. In 2001 the University of Delaware geologist John C. Kraft reported on work begun in 1977 comparing the region’s geology and ancient coastline with the Iliad and with Strabo’s Geography, and concluded that Hisarlık and the likely Greek camp fit the landscape the sources describe.
Work continues. Ernst Pernicka led excavations from 2006 to 2012, and since 2014 a team from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University under Rüstem Aslan has dug, reporting a “Level 0” near the Troy II entrance; the pre-Bronze Age Troy 0 layer is tentatively dated to about 3600–3500 BC. The one source everyone would like, Troy’s own archive, is still missing: the Hittite letters imply wooden tablets, but the citadel’s inner precinct was pushed over the hill’s north side by later builders and nothing written has been recovered. The hill also overlooks the entrance to the narrow sea lane that may have made it a regional capital, described in our Dardanelles Strait guide, and visitors who continue south along the Aegean coast can compare it with the Roman city in our guide to Ephesus.