Troia

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TROIA



Even I knew of the story of the Trojan horse.

And the people of turkey have built a nice new one at the entry to the Ancient city of Troy.

Somehow I expected Troy ( Troia) might be like lots of other “Old Towns”.

Normally the Old Town is in various stages of restoration and inhabitation and surrounded by some more modern buildings ( say 3 or 4 centuries old).

But Troy is much older

And so it is much more different.

Troy is a set of ruins. There is no town. Its like the Latin language. Dead

It’s an archaeological dig site.

There are no buildings.

Just some blocks of stone that would be the foundations of a long abandoned city. There are areas where the layout of a building or street is formed by some parts of walls. Always built of heavy stone. Then there are decorative pieces ( often on marble) with fairly intricate etching and carving which form maybe a frieze or set on top of a wall or into the wall. So as you walk through you see how archaeologists now demonstrate the layout of the town and of individual buildings.

Then on the perimeter of the site there are numbered pieces of building stone in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I think of this area as “Bunnings”.

It looks as though odd individual pieces ( big slabs of rock, sections of columns, decorative friezes and cornerstones etc) have been placed there to be retrieved when more is known about how that bit of building block fits into the jigsaw. So if the archaeologists find a gap that might need a particular piece, the look up the Bunnings catalogue and order the piece to be delivered and fitted.

Going back to the story of how troy got trumped, you would recall that Troia was a sea port. Well it isn’t a sea port any more. Not only have all the people long gone, but so has the sea.

Now Troy is several kilometres inland. From the higher northern points of the ruins you can see across to the southern side of the Gallipoli peninsula and even see the Helles Memorial.

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