Troy

The wind comes off the Dardanelles and crosses a low mound where nine cities are buried inside each other. It is quieter than you expect — no Homeric thunder, just the rustle of dry grass over walls that were already ancient when Alexander the Great visited. You stand where Schliemann dug his trench through three thousand years of occupation, and the layers are visible in the exposed earth like rings in a cut tree.

Troy occupies a modest hilltop near the western tip of Turkey, overlooking the strait that connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara. The site contains nine distinct settlement layers spanning from approximately 3000 BCE to 500 CE — a compressed record of Bronze Age citadels, Greek colonies, and Roman expansion. Troy VII is widely identified as the likeliest candidate for Homer's Iliad, destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE. Heinrich Schliemann's 1870s excavations made the site famous but also damaged it irreparably — his deep trench cut through the very layers he sought. The adjacent museum, opened in 2018 and winner of the European Museum of the Year Award, displays finds in chronological order and makes legible what the ruins alone cannot.