The Lost City of Troy | Full Documentary | TRACKS

For centuries, archaeologists have tried to find the legendary

city

of Troy, but without success. Troy is famous for being the site of the Trojan War. The fight for Helena, the most beautiful woman in the world, and the trick that got her back. The Trojan horse. It is a story that has already been told. and told by poets and actors for thousands of years, but is it real? Did the

city

of Troy really exist a century ago? A pioneering archaeologist claimed that he had found the site of Troy, but while the public was satisfied, the experts were not, they said yes.

It is impossible to relate the underground clues to a story that may be just fantasy. Now, a team of archaeologists has returned to the same site in an excavation spanning the past 15 years. They have made discoveries that are both dramatic and controversial, but at the same time At the heart of their work one question persists: Have they found the

lost

world of Troy? At first glance it doesn't look like much nestled among remote farmland. A small hill baking under the Mediterranean sun, but this hill is in fact a gateway to the ancient past. It is Hisarlak in the northwest of Turkey, it is located near the Strait of Dardanelles, a few kilometers from the scene of the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War, every year thousands of tourists come to Hisalak with the belief that they are visiting one of the most famous sites of antiquity, the city. of Troy, but many experts have a different opinion, they say that no one knows if Troy ever existed and even if it did, there is no proof that it was here for 15 years.

An archaeological team has worked in Hisalek. Your findings can solve the problem once and for all by doing research. The site is not easy, it involves discovering multiple layers of human settlements dating from 3000 BC, the Early Bronze Age to the Late Roman era, around 600 AD. It is a delicate task to excavate layer after layer of remains in charge is the eminent German archaeologist Manfred Kaufman, it is a kind of operation what we are doing I would sometimes compare it to a heart operation or a brain operation Troy is a difficult place with all these layers and with all these expectations of all the scholars in the world and they all know better and want to advise Kaufman's work.

Hisalak attracts so much attention because it relates to one of the oldest and most famous stories in European literature. The story of Troy was first told more than two and a half thousand years ago in a work called the Iliad, part poem, part drama. , the iliad was originally performed by actors in the theaters of ancient greece the credit for writing the iliad belongs to the greek poet homer but no one is sure if it was a work of imagination or if it was based on real historical events history says that this Troy is ruled by King Priam Priam has a son named Paris.

Paris falls in love with the most beautiful woman in the world. A Greek princess named Helena. When the Trojan elders saw Helen for the first time, they said quietly to each other. No wonder the Trojans suffered hardship for such a woman. She is wonder

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y. like an immortal goddess in sight but Helen is already married Paris kidnaps her from Greece and takes her to her home in Troy the result is war the conflict lasts ten long years there is no possibility of victory in sight the Greeks pretend to retreat leaving a gift at the gates of trojan an oversized wooden statue of a horse inside the horse a group of warriors sit nervously waiting what follows is probably the most ingenious and improbable example of siege breaking ever recorded the unsuspecting trojans bring in the horse into the city the soldiers hidden inside sneak out and open the city gates, the greek army enters en masse hellen is rescued but the fate of

troy

is sealed the iliad offers a disturbing account of the destruction and massacre that immediately followed the greek heroes They felled the Trojans on all sides, their agonized moans rose horrible like a sword.

Smoking them, the river turned red with blood and it seemed as if all of Troy was completely burning in fire. Homer was writing in the 7th century BC, about 500 years after the events he described were supposed to have occurred, which meant that the Iliad could be a work. of complete fantasy if there was anything like the type of war that Homer described with a vast Greek army besieging the city for 10 years for particular reasons under particular leadership all of that must be very speculative the Homeric myths are a combination of many traditions built up over Throughout At that time there are many wars and there are other places like Troy in that part of the world, so whether the Iliad is really true as a series of events or not, I don't think it can ever be proven in the Iliad that Homer described in the city. some details its size its surroundings its wealth For centuries scholars and historians tried to find a place that matched Homer's description, but their efforts failed.

Then, in 1871, adventurer and self-proclaimed archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann claimed that he had found Troy here at Hisalak, in northwestern Turkey. Schliemann first got the idea from this man, amateur British archaeologist Frank Calvert, critics later claimed that Schliemann stole both Calvert's research and credit for the find. Archaeologist Donald Easton spent five seasons at the Hessalic excavation and made a special study of Schliemann's life and work. It is often said that Schliemann caused enormous damage to this site and in some ways it is true that his initial work was incredibly crude, that is, he was lowering large vertical chunks of earth using crowbars, winches and battering rams.

At first, Schliemann dug to the bottom. part of the mound in the process, digging a huge trench right in the center of the site. It was a typically drastic approach. He drove this huge trench from north to south across the mound, excavating it with the goal of widening it and opening up the entire area so that he could expose the city of prayer, but Schliemann could never have imagined what he was about to find as he dug into several Occasionally over the next 20 years, he discovered not one city but nine different settlements, each built on top of the other.

From more than 5,000 years ago to 3,000 BC. There has been continuous human occupation here for longer than almost anywhere else in the world. Archaeologists still marvel at the prospect. Here we can get a really nice picture of the layer cake that is Troy, because at the bottom we have the remains of Troy One from around 3000 BC. You can see there the side of Schliemann's north-south trench that he cut in the early years and then up the side here is a gradual construction with a platform laid out in around 2500 BC. which Troy 2 was built on and there, if you look at those unexcavated pinnacles of earth up there, if you were to dig into them, you would find remains of Troy Three and Four, and that's what makes this place so wonderful.

Rich Site: This great accumulation of ruins for so long, but the site turned out to be rich in more ways than one when he finished digging his great trench. Schliemann literally found gold buried in the oldest layer, the layer he believed dated from that time. After the Trojan War, Schliemann discovered a fabulous treasure and claimed it belonged to the Trojan leader in Homer's story, King Priam. For Schliemann, the treasure proved beyond a doubt that the Troy of legend really existed and that the sight of his salak was the treasure. It was exhibited in the Berlin Museum and caused a sensation.

Schliemann even dressed his wife in some of the most spectacular pieces and published her photograph in the press, but stylistic analysis by Schliemann's colleagues revealed that the treasure belonged to a much older period. predating the early bronze age a thousand years before the time of homer's story the treasure could not have had anything to do with the

troy

of legend it was simply too old it really has nothing to offer us for the second millennium b.c. When the Trojan War should have taken place Has no connection to King Priam Whether King Priam ever lived Had no connection to the Trojan War Whether the Trojan War ever occurred At the time of his death in 1890 Schliemann had forced to admit the collapse of his claim to have found Troy after Schliemann's death.

After his death, the treasure had an adventurous career. In 1945, during the final days of World War II, invading Soviet troops invaded the city. where the treasure was stored. Berlin when the Third Reich collapsed, the Soviets took the treasure for protection, it quickly disappeared and remained missing for decades only 50 years later, when the Soviet Union itself was falling apart, the treasure reappeared hidden in the basements of the Pushkin Museum of moscow, once again the public was able to delight in a wonder of antiquity the schliemann hoard is undoubtedly a fantastic horde of jewels from the early bronze age, but it does not bring us closer to confirming the existence of troy, but the new Findings made by the last expedition to your salak can change everything.

Time is running out for archaeologist Manfred Kaufman. He has spent 15 years digging in his Sarlacc. in northwest turkey, the supposed site of ancient troy and this is his last season kaufman is one of the world's leading experts on the archeology of ancient turkey and has spent 30 years in the region he has come to believe in facing to academic skepticism that isalek and troy are one in the same kofman operation it is called the troyer project and is among the largest and most expensive archaeological excavations ever undertaken each day dozens of local workers work at the site artists meticulously record the exact position of thousands of found objects are care

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y pieced together by restorers as Kauffman faces the same challenge faced by his 19th-century predecessor, Heinrich Schliemann, how to resolve the riddle of Troy in the face of critical scrutiny, but Kaufman remains confident that we are in a position to put the schliemann excavation is underway in the right context because we are here and we see the schliemann walls, we understand them better, we think about them and we have this huge job with many workers better under control.

The Hisalex site consists of nine layers dating back five thousand years. the excavation was focused first. In layer number six, the three-thousand-year-old Late Bronze Age settlement, this was located at the time when the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place, but layer 6 looked nothing like the one. city ​​described in Homer's epic, the Iliad, which led skeptics to claim that it was simply not large enough to qualify as Troy; in fact, the entire site was slightly larger than the Tower of London, but Kaufman and Schliemann suspected there was more here than met the eye. The Late Bronze Age attracted us because there were many indications that Troy is much larger. than he thought before Schliemann wanted it to be bigger at ground level Kaufman's team could discern little more than what Schliemann had done, so they turned to a relatively new process of magnetic prospecting by measuring fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field.

The prospector detects objects buried at great depth. His deployment led to groundbreaking evidence that Isalak was indeed larger than previously thought. Like a magnetic radar. The prospector generated images of the city's streets from both the Bronze Age and Roman times, but the study also revealed an important structure running around it. Part of the excavation of the Bronze Age city uncovered the structure, a huge trench dug into the bedrock. It was very exciting because everyone thought it could be the fortifications of the lower city from the late Bronze Age, so you have to imagine a ditch here that would have been about four meters wide and four meters deep, there is a gap here where The Late Bronze Age occupants had left a causeway across the ditch, but the ditch continues from there onwards and has now been traced around the south side of the lower town in which they have been.

There is now evidence that it runs down the west side of the lower town and it is also likely that it runs down the east side. The ditch turned out to enclose an area many times larger than the original site. Was this the great city that Schliemann had missed? Ditchville includes building rubble, pieces of brick, pieces of building stone, pieces of pottery as well, indicating that here we did not simply have a defensive system and then an open area, but it was very close to the ditch, probably buildings, so i think it's pretty clear that between here and the citadel it was a fully urbanized area it wasn't just a small citadel the size of the tower of london it was a big city the excavation had revealed a city that now matched homer's description in An important aspect at the time in question this place was the right size,So what might this Bronze Age city have been like?

Troy is approximately 13 times larger than previously known, so we have a rough idea of ​​how many people lived in this city, say between five and ten thousand compared between the excavation here and other sites from the Age of the Middle Ages. Bronze reveals what the layer six settlement might have been like, the stone crenellated towers and multi-story buildings convey the impression of a remarkably sophisticated city three thousand years ago, one of the wonders of the world if these ruins only from the fortification would be in bulgaria or romania or yugoslavia poland germany you would always say oh, it's the center of the balkans, it's the center of europe, so people who come to this place would be very surprised to see some high culture that they had never seen.

Before such a city, the inhabitants would have needed a sophisticated technological base for their culture, which in itself is a sign of an advanced society. In fact, the stonemasons here were skilled enough to make the city's towers earthquake-proof. Look at this beautifully made one. masonry all fitting very closely cut without the use of iron tools look how this stone is wider on the outside and tapers towards the center of the tower the same is done the other way around behind me and the overall effect is that the weight of The stones are pushed towards the center of the tower so that if it were shaken by an earth tremor or an earthquake it would not tend to crumble, it would tend to collapse on itself and if anything becomes stronger, the ruins in Hisalak indicate a city sufficiently large and sophisticated to have been troy, but one thing is that its salak did not fit homer's description the location of the site in houma's two thousand five hundred year old account of the trojan war the iliad the city is described of Troy as a rich port, but the modern excavation site at Hisalak, in northwestern Turkey, is more than four miles inland from the sea in an effort to resolve this contradiction.

The archaeologist Manfred Kaufmann brought a man with a machine. This is a deep drilling drill. It belongs to a Turkish geophysicist. Ilhan Kiyan has extracted hundreds of soil samples in an effort to analyze the geological history of the area. This is like a book. Each layer, each sheet, each sheet of sediment tells you what the place was in that period, for example, when we went down about 20 meters. if we see marine sediments, this means that this place was marine surprisingly below the farmlands surrounding ishalak kyan has found marine sediments proof that these fields were once underwater kyan has concluded that three thousand ago years, during the supposed time of the Trojan War, the coast here would have looked very different isalak was much closer to the sea about half a kilometer, say from the citadel, the area was covered by sand and silt and was land but it was a swampy land, this means they were closer to the sea. at that time, if kion is right, the sea reached inland to a giant lagoon around the lagoon, a belt of swampy land, hisalak was on the edge of this swamp, access to the sea would have given the site access to the commerce and wealth and their reason for being.

Then, as now, the Dardanelles Strait was a busy waterway, the main trade route to the Black Sea and beyond to Central Asia. Three thousand years ago, Hisalek was a rich port and that brings it one step closer to equaling that of Homer. trade networks from the aegean sea and maybe the black sea that allow troy to import and export import maybe copper tin maybe gold maybe silver export maybe things we can't see in the archaeological record like textiles maybe slaves we don't know this It is what Bronze Age Troy might have looked like: a dynamic city, a busy port filled with visitors and merchants from the four corners of the known world, not so different from the modern Turkish city of Istanbul, if you came from Europe, It must have been enormously impressive and getting here by sea must have been very similar to arriving as an immigrant in the 1930s and getting that first fantastic view of Manhattan, so the Bronze Age remains at Hisalak seemed to indicate a great city ​​that was near the sea, the coincidence with Homer improves, but still does not prove that his salak is Troy, the excavation continued, crucial to the archaeological search for Troy, of course, it was evidence of war in his great work, the Iliad, the ancient poet Homer had described a war before. the walls of trojan that lasted ten years only using the trojan horse to trick the greeks finally won now among the ruins of their harlock the troia project team began to show signs of a major war first the team discovered a coal layer evidence perhaps of a city-wide fire.

Does this match Homer's description of the burning of Troy? Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal places the fire at approximately 1250 BC, the moment believed to mark the end of Homer's Trojan War, when the team began to find housed in the city walls, the well-preserved remains of bronze spears and arrowheads in the ground discovered more: did these spearheads reflect Homer's descriptions of large-scale battles before the walls of Troy could be and the team found further evidence of war even more? dramatic bones of both horses and humans were these the skeletons of stallions and the graves of their riders the charcoal the spearheads the bodies kaufman has no doubt about what he found we have a

lost

war signs of a lost war we have people murdered we have weapons and a conflagration throughout this area were signs of a war that occurred around 1250 BC.

C. The correct date for the Trojan War combined with the newly established size of the city and its strategic position near the coast this evidence brought Kaufman closer and closer to a conclusion that three thousand years ago, during the Bronze Age Late, the city of Troy had actually existed as Homer had described, but did this mean that the Trojan horse king, Priam and Helen of Troy, had also really existed, as an archaeologist Kaufman had always said he had not established? We are not trying to find the setting of the Trojan War or prove that Homer's Troy really existed.

There was no chance of finding the wooden horse or the remains of Helen or King Priam. We, as archaeologists, can never say that there was a Trojan War. Helen was in Troy was main in Troy because we don't have evidence of that, we have evidence of the wars, but we don't have evidence of the Trojan War, but years of painstaking archeology combined with high-tech scientific research had turned up a combination of clues. That both the city and the war were real. This meant that Troy was a real place and was here in Isalak. It seemed like an innocent enough statement, but it caused a storm.

Critics began to accuse Kaufman of exaggerating his fines. Their doubts were fueled by the fact. that the troyer project had strong commercial backing the temptation to please sponsors with dramatic discoveries he said some must be irresistible perhaps kaufman had succumbed and given too much weight to too little evidence the problem at troy is particularly serious because the ruins as they are they have been damaged even in ancient times to the point where precisely the parts of the site that we would like to be able to see are no longer there. The side of Troy that Homer seems to be referring to when he described the Greeks attacking Troy.

It was already destroyed. in ancient times Kaufman responded that his critics could not accept his interpretation, he stated that due to their own vested interests, the people who have learned and taught their students in ancient history and so on, that this is all an invention, are in a difficult situation or perhaps in a difficult situation and now they are looking for counterarguments to stick to their old established views, but the criticism did not stop if it was about troy, where were the royal tombs, the burial chambers of the main king and the others, where the remains of the ten year old Greek army camp were I would like to see the Greek camp excavated and distributed we know from Homer that the Greeks were there for 10 years we know they had temporary camps more detailed excavations of that type of site would convince me that the vision of his salic and the trojan legends of the homeless are the same, the discussion rumbled it seemed as if kaufman was destined to travel the same controversial path as his predecessor, always trying to convince his colleagues that he Finding that Troy linked his salak to Homer only provoked criticism after all.

The Iliad was a work of fiction. It was written 500 years after the events he described were supposed to have occurred. What was needed was some kind of contemporary Bronze Age reference writing that could be proven with physical evidence at the current site. For decades, scholars had searched for references to Troy in archaic Greek writings, but found nothing at Isalak. The archaeologists had left even more blank, there was no writing, no tablets, no inscriptions, so Kaufman's team made a surprising discovery among the ruins not of layer 6 but of the settlement that followed layer 7 built around it. from 1100 BC.

C. A small bronze seal inscribed with two names This was an exciting find so far the only writing discovered at the site and it was to help Kaufman's cause from an unexpected place The hieroglyphs on the seal belonged to a now obscure language used in western Turkey during the 2nd millennium BC Luvians The Luvians had lived under a people who dominated central Turkey the Hittites and appear to have shared a language Lewin is closely related to Hittite, as close as, for example, Italian and French, and both are Indo-European languages, meaning they are related to Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit.

The Hittites were diligent record-keepers, they eagerly wrote diaries on stone tablets. routine government tax accounts, lists of military equipment, etc., as an expert in ancient languages, David Hawkins had noted that one of the Hittite kingdoms, a place called Willusa, was in northwestern Turkey, the same region that Hisaleck Hawkins further noted that the name Willusa sounded similar. to the greek word for troy, the word used by homer ilios hawkins had come to suspect that both willusa and ilios were describing the same place homer's troy his intuition paid off he found a hittite treaty dating back to 1280 b.c.

Just before the time of the Trojan War in the treaty found a clue that could be proven both with Homer and with characteristics of the archaeological site that clue was contained in a list of Willowson's gods, typically from the Hittite treaties, they end with a list of gods who are invoked as witnesses to the treaty. and among the gods of willoughsa we have a reference to something called the divine earth path, that is, it is a path to the earth, a path to the underworld and we know what these things are geographically, they are where the rivers enter and flow . into the underground and flows into the potholes etc.

In the bronze age, according to the Hittites, willusa was built over an underground stream, one special enough to merit divine status beneath the mound at Hisalak, archaeologists also found an underground stream, a large one fed by rainwater. Seeping through the region's native limestone rock, this in itself was not surprising as most ancient cities were built near sources of fresh water, but the excavation found somewhat more canals and tunnels in the cave than They had signs of construction, the ancient engineers had clearly extended the stream. In a huge drainage system here was an underground water source worthy of worship.

This is the entrance to a network of artificial caves that extend at least 100 meters below the lower city and the purpose of all this was to collect water as it seeped. permeable limestone and provide a source of water for the inhabitants of the lower city, significantly in the Iliad Homer also refers to sacred springs that gushed from the side of the hill where Troy stood, but was this cave old enough as to have existed during the second? millennium BC Supposedly the time of the Trojan War dating the lime deposits on the walls of the cave gave the answer.

The first deposits on the face of the cave date back to the beginning of the third millennium BC. that means the trojan period one two or three these caves at least in origin are as old as trojan itself, but what it means is that this water production system existed here both in the time of the homeless and in the time of the blows. For the first time, a physical feature at the site linked an independent contemporary Hittite inscription to a reference. InHomer, the water system offers the strongest evidence yet that his salak could actually be the Troy of legend.

For Kaufman it was a triumph of methodical detective work, but Kaufman's team faced one more question, and it was perhaps the most obvious of all: whether Isalak was in fact Troy and was destroyed in the Trojan War. What happened next. The excavation had one more secret to discover the final destination of the great city of Troy. It seems a world away from the history of ancient Troy, but this place offers a taste. What Troy became during the later stages of its long history, this is the Anzac monument that stands atop the cliffs of Gallipoli, where a quarter of a million soldiers died during the First World War, but this region It was a place of remembrance once more than two thousand years ago.

Six miles from Gallipoli, archaeologists are working on another large site of homage in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era, people came here to pay homage to the heroes of the legendary Trojan War, this is Hisalek, in the northwest of Turkey, this has long been considered to be the site of the great city of Troy, recent research by the Troyer project team has revealed the extent of the homage site overlapping earlier Trojan settlements, but five centuries after the war of troy we have layer eight, a great new city, so why did troy revive? The answer lies in the incredible power of the legend of the Trojan War and Homer's writings, the Iliad and the Odyssey, once written in the late 8th century, had an enormous impact on the Mediterranean world.

We can see this by looking. on pottery with scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey appearing almost immediately and throughout the eastern Mediterranean and one of the reasons these two epics had such prominence is that so many areas trace their ancestry to these heroes who had fought in The Trojan War, the home of the Trojan heroes, became a sacred place, a place imbued with enormous mythological and religious meaning, a place that everyone wanted to have a connection with. In turn, the Persian emperor Xerxes and the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great made the trip. to the city, but the most enthusiastic pilgrims came from Rome, the first Roman emperors traced their ancestry from Troy and of course it was also considered the mother city of Rome, so they pumped a lot of money into the site, many of the buildings you see. in the market, the omens are as great as they are because of the imperial benefits, but the emperors were not alone, just like modern tourists, thousands of ordinary Greeks and Romans would have ventured here seeking contact with the warriors and gods of a glorious past, in fact, the Greeks. and the romans developed troy as a historical sanctuary dedicated to the trojan war, they called it illium, in fact, among the ruins of william evidence of the tourist presence in greek and roman times is still visible, this is the northeast corner of the citadel, the protruding mound of troy.

From it you can see this large triangular block which is the remains of the ancient citadel from the late Bronze Age that would have existed at the time of the Trojan War if there had been a Trojan War and the Hellenistic Greeks built this staircase against it and I think you can imagine the tour guides here taking people up these steps and you can imagine them saying that now this is the only remaining fragment of Troy, where our ancestors fought, just touch that because here you are touching history, not much survives of illium now to get an idea of ​​what it might have been like, we have to go further south along the turkish coast to another city built around the same time as ephesus.

Ephesus is distinguished by magnificent multi-story public buildings, paved streets and impressive amphitheatres. Its grandiose architecture still delights visitors and its scale and appearance allow us to create an image of what Ilium would have looked like, behind us here would have been the acropolis with the Temple of Athens on top, you have to imagine this stretching out to 10 or 15 rows of seats here to the top of the temple platform so that people could enter and exit the odeon here at the top, but there was a darker side. to the Roman obsession with Troy's legendary past, as excavations in the southwest corner of the citadel mound have revealed this area to be a pagan sanctuary.

Its large size shows that the city witnessed many cult practices, one of them was a branch of the popular one. cult of Athena and, in turn, was directly related to the story of the Trojan War the custom of the Locrian maidens the custom of the Locrian maidens this goes back to an episode in the Iliad where Ajax, a Greek hero, dragged the Trojan woman Cassandra of the cult The statue of Athena thus violated Athena in a certain sense because it was a place of sanctuary. Ajax was, by tradition, a native of the Greek city of Lochras, so each year, in penance, the Locrian rulers sent two young women to fulfill their job of maintaining the temple of Athena. clean and if they were found outside the sanctuary of Athens, according to ancient descriptions of custom, they could be killed after a year; women were replaced if they had survived.

This probably continued until the early 1st century BC, so at least the aliens had a clean sanctuary for almost a thousand years and were free for 500 years. Ilium enjoyed a golden age enhanced by both trade and its strategic location. The city continued to grow in size and wealth until it rivaled Ephesus itself, but then Ilium began to face a new threat: a slow and ruthless sedimentation of the port that drove away trade and with it the wealth that kept this archaic fairyland alive and well. Just as the sea's retreat reached a critical point, illium fell out of favor with the rich and powerful because Rome had become Christian, the new devout Caesars had no interest in preserving a city so closely linked to a recently discredited pagan past that emperors generally stopped coming in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. and the main reason for this is Christianity, money goes to others.

Sites that have some type of Christian heritage, as this site does not, their main associations were pagan and the benefits that had always characterized the city during the Roman empire also tend to stop earthquakes and diseases that also accelerated the end in the year 650 AD. ilium, the excavation has begun. to calm the archaeologist who has perhaps done more than any other to reveal the lost worlds that lie beneath this soil manfred kaufman will soon face a crossroads in his life's work i will not stray from troy but i am 60 there will always be a dig in Toroia and my students, my students, who have put so much work and effort into this site, will continue this work.

I would be very happy to see him from there, not in an armchair, but to have helped and supported him in the next one. The generation can continue Kaufman's team has been the closest to understanding the real history of Troy. For the first time we can say that three thousand years ago there was a great city here, a strategic center of maritime trade, a city that suffered war and destruction, a city that was reborn as a pagan sanctuary dedicated to the memory of that epic past tourists still come to his salak his confidence that here was the trojan of legend can now be justified history can never confirm if Homer's heroes ever lived nor if the legendary Trojan horse ever existed but thanks to modern archeology the city in the one where Homer placed his heroes the lost city of Troy is no longer lost