Apple tea and tales of Turkish ruins: Troy: A place for dreamers

We set off driving from Istanbul airport in our hired camper: not without incident.

From the first we had problems with the fuel cutting out as the gears were changed, and on the second day finally alerted our camper contact who organised repairmen, with computer diagnostics, to meet us at our next campsite. All done very painlessly.

A change to the fuel injector system and we were underway. Avoiding Gallipoli, a small ferry took us across the Straits of the Dardenelles, heading first to Troy where we camped in the grounds of a wee pension and walked to the site in the evening. Troy is a site of myth and legend, war and treasure.

Strait of the Dardenelles through ferry porthole

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At the age of seven a little boy called Heinrich Schliemann was given copies of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey telling tales of romance and disaster between the Greeks and the Trojans.

On reading Homer, Heinrich became entranced with what was to become his life’s passion: when he grew up he determined he would find the setting for the tale of Troy.

He, like many others, came to believe it might be an account of a true story of what actually happened carried down through the ages via oral history, until it was finally recorded by Homer in his epic poems.

At its heart was the tale of a Trojan prince, Paris, who abducted the beautiful Mycenean princess, Helen, and carried her off to Troy. The outraged Greeks were quick to follow, sending a flotilla of ships after the Trojans. They fought a ten year battle from the coast of Troy, culminating in using a trick to win, where they set up a giant wooden horse at the gates of the Trojan palace, then sailed away, pretending the war was over and that they were done. But the moment the wooden horse was dragged inside the palace gates, Greeks mercenaries dropped out, and stormed Troy from inside the protective walls. The Greek ships were then recalled, and the Troy of Paris and Helen came to be reduced to rubble.

A Troy wooden horse

Rubble that Shliemann became obsessed with excavating.

His mother was dead, his father a poor church minister, so to fulfill his dream he set about working, acquiring money to begin his dig. He became a grocery apprentice, then a cabin boy, then a bookkeeper. He would do anything to support himself. All the while he taught himself languages which helped him in business. He made a fortune selling arms in the Crimea and read everything to do with this newly forming field of archeology, even taking himself off to the Sorbonne for a short course, leaving his wife and new family, and finally obtaining a divorce as she was not at all interested in pursuing his passion.

He came to Turkey. He visited several sites looking for the one which might be Homer’s Troy, digging in places, exploring, writing his findings up in a thesis which was awarded a PhD on submission.

Partially restored ramp to Troia 11 Citadel

He came to Hisarlik when he was 47, and took over the dig from Frank Calvert. Needing an assistant knowledgeable in Greek and the culture he advertised for a wife in the Athens newspaper and found Sophia, thirty years younger than he, and together they set about uncovering the mound that was believed to be Troy.

Heinrich and his diggers quickly cut a deep trench right through the site, a swathe of rubble, soil and valuable material was piled at the sides of the trench: unclassified. For this Schliemann, for the rest of his life was criticised.

Archeaology, in the late 1870s, was a new and emerging field. Specialist diggers were beginning to present papers about how best to go about digging and preserving finds. It was all new: methods, procedures, and how best to protect the artefacts.

Schliemann’s methods were questioned. Along with his motives. People claimed he was after treasure more than he was interested in revealing the history of a site. But when he dug deep through nine different layers of life on the Hisarlik mound, to where he believed the princes of Troy had their settlement, and found an extraordinary hoard of gold and glory that became known as Priam’s treasure, the world watched in wonder as he bedecked his wife in head and neck jewellery that he had seen shooting out sparks from deep in the earth, glinting as the sunlight hit. They were called the Jewels of Helen — albeit mistakenly, as they were not Helen's.

Only at the end of his life did Schliemann acknowledge that the main focus of his digs at Troy was at too early a level to have been Homer’s Troy. Some 1200 years too early.

Illustration of the Citadel at Troy

Today, nine levels of the mound at Troy are exposed. Information boards all around this well kept site describe life at each level: a Citadel here, shored up with great restraining towers and high walls; a beautiful palace there; elegant temples at this height, and so on. A huge amount of money is being spent on Troy by the Turkish government and Tourist authorities; its importance underscored by its UNESCO status.