Troy: Not the Movie

The gates were there, and so were the walls, hills and just beyond, the fields tangled by rows of corn and wheat, sat the ocean all indigo and just little forlorn-blue. Perhaps she is weary and just a little bored of the white-washed cliffs?

Just like the movie, but not really.  Truva of 2006 Turkey took a lot of imagination to look like the Illium of 1800 BC, the Troia of 800 BC Homer, or even the Troy of 2005 – the city that reflected the sweat of Brad Pitt and the golden locks of whatshername, that decent but not great looking actress in the so-so film/epic/Gladiator-wannabe.

Really, it took a lot of imagination.

There were at least 7 layers to the city, since the Bronze Age.  The mythical Troy, the one that captured the most beautiful woman in the world, was presumably on layer 4.  None of the treasures remain – although they were here once (King Priam's treasure, or maybe just a hoard from one of the earlier peoples) – but they were taken away by Heinrich. Heinrich the German businessman turned archeologist who turned out to really be just another European treasure hunter bent on looting shiny things buried in dirt.

The treasure is now somewhere in Russia. Necklaces and bracelets and earrings and chalices and so on. Now shiny things behind glass cages.

The thing that struck me: all over Turkey, the pattern of archeological-robbery repeated itself, as it did and does in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and all the other places where Europeans and Western scholars have gone.  Where would the British Museum, or the Metropolitan Museum, of the Louvre be, without their precious friezes and sphinxes and obelisks taken from the birthplaces of those artifacts?

Should they be returned to their rightful owners?  Who gives the English the right to cart off an entire wall of an Assyrian temple? Or Italians to uproot obelisks thousands of years old and place them in Roma?  How many of the ancient world have been plundered (or at least nibbled away a little) to amplify the historical richness of the Old Country – and even some of the New?

I digress.

Most of Troy – its circumference can be walked in an hour – reached to my waist.  The foundations were intact, but the walls, the ramparts, the golden roofs and towering pillars had vanished with time.  At its peak, the city commanded ships to stop – it's a prime position at the turning point for trade winds.  It also commanded merchants to sell and buy and slaves to build grand temples.. But, Time marches on, and like most great cities, other cities supplanted it, empires overran it, and ultimately, it sank into irrelevance (around 600 BC).

Now – now it was a patch of dirt where the most impressive monument was a wooden horse three stories tall built by a Turk in the 1980s for tourists to climb up and take pictures of themselves acting like baboons.

But man!

The powers of language and myth – how they can affect emotions!

Even now, 3,000 years after the events which may-or-may-not have occurred, 2,000 years after a blind poet waxed about them -- the aura remained.  The debates of Priam and the brooding of Achilles and the shouts of Hector rustled among the fig trees, archers cocked bows and arrows over hills that still stood, and horses snorted and stamped behind stones that are now tucked under cracked earth... Real or not, grand or simple, Troy exerted it influence.  Through words and rhyme, deeds and stories, the present-day Troy melded with the archeological Troy and lo! beget the romantic Troy. 

The myth is so strong that Romans, Britons and modern day Turks have all claimed to be descendants of the survivors! Fancy that.

Expensive and underwhelming? Perhaps.  But with just some imagination, heroes and gods, villains and wooden horses can be just that real.