Troy - the place that launched 1000 trips

Was Truva the site of the legendary city of Troy? ADRIAN MOURBY inspects the chunks of stone that are the town's link to the past.

The Greeks took the easy route to Troy, crossing the Aegean in a thousand ships. I drove a hire car from Istanbul airport, bouncing along roads that hugged the coast and, as often as not, petered out entirely through lack of official interest.

It was growing dark when I puttered into Eceabat, one of two 15th-century fortress towns built by the Ottoman army on either side of the Dardanelles. On the opposite coast, just over a kilometre away, was Asia and Canakkale, Eceabat's twin, where I was to spend the night.

Canakkale was wrapped in darkness and rain, and the waters of the Hellespont looked pretty uninviting too. Lord Byron famously swam across this stretch of water.

"I attempted it a week ago and failed," he wrote, "owing to the north wind, and the wonderful rapidity of the tide, though I have been from my childhood a strong swimmer. But, this morning being calmer, I succeeded, and crossed the 'broad Hellespont' in an hour and 10 minutes."

Being less adventurous, I waited for the ferry, my car surrounded by stocky peasants in army-surplus anoraks.

The crossing took 25 minutes and, as I disembarked, the steep ramp ripped off a section of my car's undercarriage. That, and a plethora of wooden-horse signs, was my welcome to Canakkale.

I had booked to stay in the Truva Hotel. The only problem is that Truva is the Turkish word for Troy and everything in Canakkale is named after the town's sole attraction and sports a picture of a horse on it. Easing my clattering machine past signs for Truva Tours, Truva Car Hire and Truva Souvenirs, I ended up in a rather empty-looking building on the seafront where the only language we seemed to have in common was my three words of Turkish.

I was given a long, thin room, where members of the Canakkale Carcinogen Convention must meet, and a view of where the sea would be were it not so dark and windswept. It had been a long cold day but tomorrow, as Agamemnon might have said, I would be in Troy.

My guide for this momentous day was Barish. As a child he used to play on the mound known as Hisarlik.

Hisarlik means ruins, Barish warned me. I should not get my hopes up too high. At least I was not the first to come in futile search of legends.

Although archaeologists have no proof that Truva is Homer's Troy, visitors have been making the trek south of Canakkale for thousands of years in search of Priam, Hecuba and Achilles.

In the dim and sleepy archaeology museum in the nearby port town of Canakkale, you can see generations of coins and carvings and burial offerings depicting scenes from the Trojan War, with images of Achilles, scenes from battles, and the broken marble busts of horses. The inscriptions do not say "Greetings from Troy", but they might as well.

So when the stall-holders gathered by the bus depot start sketching charcoal portraits of Brad Pitt and Eric Bana from Troy, the latest movie about the legend, they're only part of an ancient tradition.

Persia's King Xerxes paid his respects in 481BC. You can still see the ancient temple where he sacrificed 1000 oxen, hoping the gods would favour his invasion of Greece. The square platform of the sacrificial pit still stands, as do the two wells - one for water, one for blood - although both are now filled with weeds.

There are also many elaborately carved chunks of stone from the Temple of Athena, which was built on the order of Alexander the Great. He dropped by in 334BC en route to conquering Persia, keen to visit Achilles' tomb, where he hinted rather broadly that it was a shame he didn't have a Homer of his own.

The Romans, who created a legend that their own city was founded by Trojans, made many pilgrimages to Troy to emphasise their ancient links. Julius Caesar, who liked to think he was a direct descendant of King Priam, visited the city and declared it a tax-free enclave, making it the Monaco of the much-levied province of Asia Minor.

The first emperor, his nephew Augustus, followed suit and spent a lot of money building a new Roman city on the site where Aeneas, one of the world's first asylum-seekers, supposedly grew to manhood before escaping the avenging Greeks and founding Rome.

On the southern edge of the ruins, you can still make out the Roman bath, the parliament house, and the theatre where archaeologists recently found a larger-than-life statue of another VIP visitor, Hadrian.

In total, nine settlements have been built on the hillock known as Truva, but before we explored any of them, Barish took me to the ramshackle shop run by his uncle, Mustafa.

An unconvincing wooden horse stood outside, but coffee and a warm welcome awaited us within. After buying a few Trojan Horse key-chains and a T-shirt, I followed Barish through some state-of-the-art turnstiles and found myself face to face with a giant version of the same thing.

Standing 10m high, the wooden horse designed by Izzet Senemoglu was erected in the 1970s. It is impressive but ought to have made any recipient immediately suspicious. Those wooden steps and handrail leading into its belly are something of a giveaway, as is the little hut, with shuttered windows, where the saddle should be. If the Trojans didn't suspect anything when Agamemnon left this booby-trap behind, then they deserved to be slaughtered. Still, it makes for a good photo, unlike the ruins themselves.

The big problem with Truva, as Barish explained to me, is that its nine layers were excavated in a rush by one Heinrich Schliemann, a man who preferred dynamite over the archaeologist's trowel, in 1873. Schliemann was interested in finding only one Troy - Homer's - and in search of it he created a chaos that still hasn't been resolved.

Barish took me to where the trail begins on top of an outcrop that would have commanded a view of the Aegean and the Greek fleet were the weather not so foul. "Homer called Troy the Windy City!" Barish joked. "Now you can see why!"

What we came upon was a muddy circle of ramparts rather like those of the British Camp at Malvern. Schliemann paid 100 Turkish workmen to dig up this remnant of the citadel for three years, and today it still looks as if they will be back next week to finish off. It is impossible to visit Troy without being confused by the jumble of layers presented to you.

The eastern gate I entered through dated from Troy VII (1250-1040BC) , the incarnation generally ascribed to Homer; but this immediately let on to ramparts from Troy II (2600-2450BC) and a temple from Troy VIII, the period of Greek settlement (700-85BC). Excavation of the site in the 20th century was much more painstaking, but the presentation remains inadequate.

Only one attempt has been made at re-creation: a small section of outer wall from Homer's time where the lower levels are of local stone and the top built up out of red mud bricks. Everything else is disappointing and the site seems to know this. It has a weary air - it knows that an opportunity was missed - and yet...

I toted my battered translation of The Iliad around the site until I arrived at the South Gate, a grassy path bordered by two thick rings of heavy white stone, fronted by the pillars of long-fallen gods.

Schliemann believed these were "the cool stone ramparts" of the Scaean Gate, where Hector fought Achilles before the city walls. I flipped my copy open to Book 22, and the last words of the Trojan prince: "No chance to win you over. Iron in your breast your heart is. Think a bit, though: this may be a thing the gods in anger hold against you on that day when Paris and Apollo destroy you at the Gates, great as you are."

Like more than two millennium of tourists before me, I stared out at the wide Trojan plain - fields of yellow rapeseed, grasslands full of dairy cows, and the drab smudge of distant olive groves. From a platform at the edge of the ruins, clearly visible to the north, was a conical green hillock, the tomb mound of Achilles.

Barish and I stood a while getting soaked and chilled in equal measure. I had come a long way to see where Brad Pitt and Eric Bana slug it out for immortality.

Nevertheless, one benefit came from standing on the hillock known as Troy. I could see how, before the rivers Scamander and Simois silted up Troy's harbour, the city was once a perfect berth for ships battling their way up the windy Aegean or arriving from the Black Sea down through the Dardanelles. Traders from all points on the compass would have put in at Troy to wait out the weather, taking on fresh supplies and spending freely.

Clearly it was the maritime wealth of Troy which drove the Greeks to invade. Orlando Bloom doesn't have to abduct Diane Kruger to explain the war. We are talking commerce here.

My view also made perfect sense of the subsequent poverty of landlocked Troy, no longer able to trade. It's a Truva truism, but nothing beats standing on the spot where history happened.

Getting There

Many tours from Istanbul include a whistle-stop at Troy, which is a popular side-trip for Kiwis headed to nearby Gallipoli, just across the Dardanelles. But you can also catch a minibus, or dolmus, to the site from the regional city of Canakkale or the pretty Aegean town of Behramkale, which was once the ancient Greek city of Assos. Contact Canakkale tourist office, right on the harbour, on 90 217 1187. The dolmus station to Troy is on the main road out of town, Ataturk Caddesi, about 2km from the harbour.

Admission to the site costs approximately $11, $5 concession, and if you're not with a tour, it's worth buying the detailed $15 guide book prepared by the current archaeological team, available by the front gate. Go after midday, and the tour groups will be gone.

What else to do

Those keen on a Homer-themed holiday should also include a visit to Kaz Dagi National Park. This is Mount Ida, the mountain where Paris awarded the goddess Aphrodite the golden apple as the most beautiful goddess, and also Zeus' preferred vantage point for watching the Trojan War. It's still a beautiful spot, with forest glades, waterfalls and snowy peaks straight out of a neo-classical painting.

Further information

The New Zealand Government is advising people to delay all but essential travel to Turkey. Travel writer Tom Brosnahan's website gives distances and public transport costs between cities and sites across Turkey, including Troy. The excavation's official site is here.

- INDEPENDENT

- additional material Michelle Griffin