Troy is in Türkiye. It stands at Tevfikiye, in the central district of Çanakkale province. To get there from the city you take the Çanakkale–İzmir road to kilometre 25, turn off towards Tevfikiye village and carry on for 5 km; Tevfikiye minibuses run from the city centre. The Troy Museum is in the same place, on the plain just below the mound. The whole region is the ancient Troas, the land that joins the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and Europe to Asia.
Why the site is where it is
That position is the key to Troy. It stood at the meeting point of Anatolia, the Aegean and the Balkans, and its successive rulers kept up trade and cultural ties with other regions because the place made those ties valuable. The Troy Culture Route describes the Troas as a passage that Anatolian peoples used on their way into Europe from around 7000 BC, and the same ground later saw the Hellenes, Lydians and Persians, Alexander the Great, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans. In the First World War the Dardanelles Campaign was fought in this region.
Nine cities, one on top of another
What you see at the site is a mound made of nine settlement layers, each built over the remains of the one before. Together they cover more than three thousand years without a break. The lowest layer belongs to the Early Bronze Age, between 3000 and 2500 BC; the top one is Roman, running from 85 BC to the eighth century AD. Because the sequence never stops, Troy is used as a reference point for dating other archaeological sites in Europe and the Aegean.
Heinrich Schliemann opened the excavation in 1871, and W. Dörpfeld and C. W. Blegen continued it after him. Schliemann is also the one who named the mound as the home of Priam's treasure.
The Troy of the Iliad
Most people know Troy from Homer's Iliad: the city where Paris ran off with Helen and the Trojan Wars were fought. The Troy Culture Route begins at the site for exactly that reason, and notes that Troy is on UNESCO's World Heritage List. The Iliad is not confined to the mound, though. At the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus in Gülpınar, in the Ayvacık district, the temple friezes take the Trojan War as told in the Iliad for their subject, which the Ministry says makes the building unique. And at Assos, Homer's account of the Leleges, a seafaring people of the southern Troad, is part of the story the site tells.
The Troy Museum
The museum is the place to start if you want the layers to make sense. Its plot covers about 90,000 square metres, and every display floor is reached by ramp, some 480 metres in all; the visit begins on the way down, past wall niches that set out the successive layers of Troy through grave stones, statues, reconstructions and photographs. The account is divided into seven chapters, and the provincial directorate names six of them: the archaeology of the Troad, Bronze Age Troy, the Iliad and the Trojan War, the Troad and Ilion in antiquity, the East Roman and Ottoman periods, and the history of archaeology and the traces of Troy.
An entrance band explains the basic tools first — how archaeological dating works, and what a mound, the Neolithic or the Bronze Age mean — before the galleries proper. The ground floor takes in the Troad as a whole, with Assos, Tenedos, Parion, Alexandria Troas, Smintheion, Lampsakos and Imbros. One piece to look for is a bronze amphora from Parion, 34 centimetres high, found in 2005 in the city's southern necropolis: satyrs and maenads dance around its body with thyrsoi and torches, and a finely made Eros sits beneath each handle. Village buses to Tevfikiye serve the museum.
Around Troy: the rest of the Troad
The countryside around the mound is protected as Troy Historical National Park, declared in 1996 and covering 13,627 hectares of Aegean maquis, pine and oak, with coastal dunes and wet ground where herons, black storks and black kites have been recorded. Alexandria Troas, in the Ezine district, was founded in 310 BC in the name of Alexander the Great; it served as the region's main harbour, and it was from here that Paul is known to have set out to carry Christianity into Europe. Village minibuses from Ezine serve it.
Assos, 87 kilometres south of Çanakkale at Behramkale in Ayvacık, rises on an old volcanic cone; on its acropolis stands the Temple of Athena, one of the oldest Doric temples in Anatolia, and people gather there to watch the sun set over the Gulf of Edremit. The Troy Culture Route links the two ends of this story on foot or by bicycle: it runs about 120 km from Troy to the ancient harbour of Assos, takes around five to seven days in full, and is divided into stages for shorter trips.
When to go
Across Çanakkale province the monthly mean temperature stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October, and peaks at 25.2 °C in August. An open mound with little shade is easiest in those months. The opening times and entry details for the site and the museum are on their own pages on this site.
