Qualla: Troy

Troy: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Winstonza, CC BY-SA 3.0. The mound is not impressive. Hisarlik rises only thirty-one metres above the surrounding plain in the Turkish province of Canakkale, near the mouth of the Dardanelles where the strait opens into the Aegean. From a distance it looks like a slightly raised piece of farmland. What makes it significant is what is underneath: nine successive cities stacked on top of one another, the earliest going back to around 3000 BC, the latest abandoned in the Byzantine era. One of those layers - probably Troy VI, possibly Troy VIIa - is the city the Hittites called Wilusa, the Greeks called Ilios, and Homer made immortal as Troy. Identifying which layer was which, and what really happened on this small hill in the Late Bronze Age, has occupied archaeologists for a century and a half.

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Image: Winstonza | CC BY-SA 3.0

Troy: The Man Who Was Right

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Frank Calvert was a Turkish-born Levantine of English descent who owned a farm near Hisarlik. He was not a famous man. In 1865, on his own land and at his own expense, he began trial excavations on a mound he had become convinced was Troy - convinced enough to persuade Heinrich S...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Troy: The Trench

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elelicht, CC BY-SA 3.0. Schliemann arrived in 1870 with permission to dig and a hurry that has shaped the archaeology of the site ever since. His first move was to drive a massive trench straight down through the centre of the mound to expose every layer at once - a gash today known as Schliemann's Tren...

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Image: Elelicht | CC BY-SA 3.0

Troy: Nine Cities Stacked

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit QuartierLatin1968, CC BY-SA 2.0. Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati came back to Hisarlik in the 1930s with a more careful method. He worked through the trench Schliemann had left and confirmed that the mound contained at least nine major cities - and within those, forty-six distinct sublayers - represe...

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Image: QuartierLatin1968 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Troy: Wilusa

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marsupium, CC BY 4.0. What complicates the picture beautifully is that we know the city existed in non-Homeric records too. Hittite tablets from the Late Bronze Age refer to a place called Wilusa, ruled by kings with names like Kukkunni and Alaksandu, that lay on the western edge of Anatolia and was p...

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Image: Marsupium | CC BY 4.0