By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 8, 2026 · Updated May 8, 2026
Last reviewed: May 8, 2026.
What the Mound at Hisarlık Actually Holds
Troy is not one city. It is nine, stacked like the pages of a book, and the question of which page Homer was reading has occupied archaeology for a hundred and fifty years. The mound at Hisarlık, on the western edge of the Biga Peninsula in northwestern Türkiye, has been dug, redug, mismeasured, and quietly re-stratified across five major excavation campaigns since 1870. Each generation has produced a different candidate for the Iliad’s Troy, and none of them is exactly Homer’s, as the UNESCO listing for the Archaeological Site of Troy records [1].
I have stood on the southern edge of the citadel in late afternoon, when the wind off the Dardanelles carries the dust of Mycenaean potsherds and modern wheat in the same handful, and watched a Turkish guide named Mehmet Yıldırım walk a school group along the lip of Schliemann’s enormous trench. The trench cuts the mound like a wound. From its rim you can see the entire stratigraphic argument laid open: limestone walls of one period sliced clean through to expose mudbrick of an earlier one, and below that the burnt fill of a settlement that ended in the second millennium before Homer was born. To stand there is to understand, in the body, that the Iliad and the archaeology are two different texts about the same hill.
This is a guide to how the search for Homer’s Troy has been conducted on the ground, what the layers actually contain, and what they cannot tell us. For the wider terrain of mystical places and lost worlds, Troy is the foundational case of a city pulled out of the literary imagination and into the dirt, and not always to the literature’s advantage.
The Direct Answer: Homer’s Troy in Forty-Six Words
Troy is a real archaeological site at Hisarlık in northwestern Türkiye, with nine main occupation layers spanning roughly 3000 BCE to 500 CE. The Late Bronze Age citadel of Troy VI and Troy VIIa, destroyed around 1180 BCE, is the candidate most plausibly remembered eight centuries later in Homer’s Iliad [2].
Schliemann, the Trench, and the Misdated Treasure
Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) did not discover Troy. The British consular officer Frank Calvert had identified Hisarlık as the probable site of Ilion in the 1860s and had begun small soundings on his own land. Schliemann arrived with money and conviction in 1870 and, between 1871 and 1873, drove his now-famous trench north-to-south across the mound, roughly forty meters wide and seventeen meters deep, in some places straight to bedrock. He cut through everything. The remains of the Late Bronze Age citadel he was actually looking for were thrown out as overburden [3].
On May 31, 1873, Schliemann announced his discovery of a cache of gold diadems, copper vessels, silver bowls, weapons, jewelry, and beads, which he attributed to King Priam and which he and his Greek wife Sophia smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire to Athens, then to Berlin. He called the find Priam’s Treasure. The cache was real; the attribution was wrong by roughly a thousand years. The objects came from the layer Wilhelm Dörpfeld would later assign to Troy II, dated to around 2400 BCE, well before any plausible Homeric king. After 1881 the treasure sat in the Royal Museums in Berlin until April 1945, when Soviet trophy brigades crated it for Moscow, where it remains today in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, declared property of the Russian state by Duma resolution in 1998 [4].
Schliemann’s contribution to Troy is double-edged. He is the reason we know the site exists, and he is the reason much of it is gone. The trench remains visible from the citadel parking lot, and a careful walk along its edge in raking light is, by itself, a graduate-level seminar in the cost of treasure-driven excavation.
Dörpfeld and the Walls of Troy VI
Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) was the German classical architect Schliemann hired in his last seasons, and after Schliemann’s death in 1890 he returned to Hisarlık on his own. Across the 1893 and 1894 seasons, working with the patience of an architect rather than the haste of a treasure hunter, Dörpfeld concentrated on the edges of the mound that Schliemann’s trench had spared. He uncovered the great curtain wall of the sixth city: limestone blocks five meters thick, sloping inward, broken by square towers, with a paved gateway on the south side that faced the route inland from the Dardanelles [5].
In Mycenaean potsherds within the same fill, Dörpfeld found the chronological link he needed. Troy VI was contemporary with the palace cultures of mainland Greece, the world the Iliad describes. He published Troja und Ilion in 1902, formulated a chronology that survives in modified form, and assigned Homer’s Troy to layer VI. He was off by one stratum, but his stratigraphic method, and his courteous insistence that the architecture was the document, set the standard the next four generations of archaeologists at the site have tried to meet.
Blegen, Troy VIIa, and the Burnt Layer
Carl Blegen (1887-1971) of the University of Cincinnati directed the third major campaign, between 1932 and 1938, with a team that pioneered the systematic ceramic typology now standard in Aegean prehistory. Blegen agreed with Dörpfeld that Troy VI was the great Late Bronze Age city, but he reread its destruction differently. Troy VI ended around 1300 BCE in what looks, on the evidence of collapsed walls and tilted floors, like an earthquake. The city that followed it, Troy VIIa, was poorer, more crowded, and built defensively, with large pithoi for grain and oil sunk into house floors as if expecting a siege. It ended around 1180 BCE in fire and human violence, with skeletons left in the streets, as the Britannica entry for ancient Troy summarizes [6].
For Blegen this was the layer Homer’s audience could plausibly be remembering. Mycenaean palace society on the mainland collapsed in the same window. The destruction at Hisarlık aligns with the wider Late Bronze Age catastrophe that ended Hattusa, brought down the Hittite Empire, and reorganized the eastern Mediterranean. Homer was composing roughly four centuries later, in the late 8th century BCE, in a poetic tradition that had been carrying the story orally across the Greek Dark Ages [7]. The setting in the poem is Bronze Age; the language and the worldview are Iron Age. Blegen’s burnt layer at VIIa is the closest thing the dirt offers to Homer’s Troy.
Korfmann and the Lower City
By the time the German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann (1942-2005) of the University of Tübingen reopened the site in 1988, the citadel had been read and reread for over a century. Korfmann’s question was different. He suspected, against the prevailing minimalist view, that the small fortified hill on top of the mound was only the upper acropolis of a much larger Late Bronze Age city, and that the houses and workshops of ordinary Trojans lay buried under the wheat fields to the south. Using magnetometry, ground-penetrating radar, and trial trenches across roughly thirteen thousand square meters of excavation by the time he died, his team mapped what is now called the Lower City: a settlement of about two hundred thousand square meters extending some four hundred meters south of the citadel, ringed by a defensive ditch cut into the bedrock [8].
Korfmann’s Troy is no longer a fortress on a hill. It is a substantial Late Bronze Age trading center, perhaps ten thousand inhabitants, controlling the maritime bottleneck where the Aegean meets the Black Sea and the prevailing northerly winds force ships to wait, sometimes for weeks, before they can pass the Dardanelles under sail. Imported pottery from Cyprus, copper from Anatolia, and lapis lazuli traceable as far east as Central Asia turn up in the workshop levels. This is exactly the kind of city a Hittite great king would have cared about, and the Hittite archives confirm it.
The Wilusa Question
In Hittite cuneiform tablets recovered from the imperial archive at Hattusa, a vassal city in the northwest of Anatolia is named Wilusa, sometimes Wilusiya. Its king Alaksandu signed a treaty with the Hittite emperor Muwatalli II around 1280 BCE. The Swiss philologist Joachim Latacz, in Troia und Homer (German edition 2001; English translation Troy and Homer, Oxford 2004), assembled the linguistic case that Wilusa equates to Greek (W)Ilios, the alternative Homeric name for Troy, and that Alaksandu corresponds to Alexandros, the second name of Paris in the Iliad. The identification, first proposed by the German Hittitologist Emil Forrer in 1924, is now broadly accepted by Hittitologists, though some Aegeanists remain cautious [9]. The point is not that the Iliad is a documentary record. The point is that the city Homer is singing about appears, by another name, in the diplomatic correspondence of the Bronze Age superpower whose collapse coincides with Troy VIIa’s destruction.
The Iliad’s Layer-Cake, and the 2024 Campaign
The current excavations at Troy, since 2014, are directed not from Tübingen but from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University by the Turkish archaeologist Rüstem Aslan, with funding from the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s Heritage for the Future program. The 2024 and 2025 seasons have concentrated on a Late Bronze Age gateway and an interior square within the Lower City, exactly the layer where, if Homer’s siege has any historical seed, the seed would be found. Aslan’s team has reported destruction debris, sling stones, and arrow points consistent with a violent end around 1180 BCE [10].
What Homer offers, and what the dirt cannot, is a poem. The Iliad is not a chronicle. It is a Greek epic composed in dactylic hexameter, in a language that fuses Mycenaean memory, Dark Age oral formula, and Iron Age civic idiom into a single stratified diction. Reading it against the archaeology requires the same discipline a stratigrapher uses on the mound: separate the layers. The bronze armor and chariot tactics belong to one moment; the cremation funerals and ironwork analogies belong to another. The catalogue of ships in Book 2 preserves a geography that fits the thirteenth century BCE; the funeral games for Patroclus describe an eighth-century BCE festival culture. To insist that the poem is either entirely historical or entirely fictional is to misread the medium.
Standing on the South Gate
Mehmet, the guide, will eventually walk you to the south gateway of Troy VI, where Dörpfeld’s wall meets a paved approach ramp, and stop talking. The wind comes up the Scamander Plain, the Aegean sits flat and pale to the west, and Mount Ida lifts its dark wooded shoulders on the horizon to the south. The plain itself is no longer the marshy beach of Homer’s poem; the river has silted forward over three thousand years and pushed the coast some five kilometers west of the gate. But the orientation of the citadel toward Mount Ida, and the great south wall built thick against the north wind that funnels down the Dardanelles, is the same orientation a thirteenth-century BCE king would have chosen for the same reasons. The standing-there is the argument. Whatever Homer remembered, he remembered the right hill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Troy located today?
The site of ancient Troy is the mound of Hisarlık in Çanakkale Province in northwestern Türkiye, about thirty kilometers southwest of the modern city of Çanakkale and roughly six kilometers inland from the Aegean coast. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998 and is administered today as the Troy Historical National Park, with an on-site museum opened in 2018.
Who was Heinrich Schliemann?
Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was a German businessman who, after retiring from the indigo and gold trades, devoted his fortune to proving the historical reality of Homer’s Troy. He excavated at Hisarlık between 1870 and 1890, often crudely, and announced the discovery of “Priam’s Treasure” in 1873. He is rightly credited with putting the site on the archaeological map and rightly faulted for the damage his methods caused.
Was Priam’s Treasure really from Homer’s Troy?
No. The cache Schliemann published as Priam’s Treasure in 1873 came from the Troy II layer, dated to roughly 2400 BCE, more than a thousand years before any plausible historical setting for the Iliad. The objects are genuine Early Bronze Age elite goods, but the attribution to the Homeric king Priam was Schliemann’s romantic guess, corrected by the stratigraphy Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Carl Blegen later established.
Which layer of Troy is Homer’s Troy?
Most scholars now favor Troy VIIa, which Carl Blegen excavated between 1932 and 1938, as the layer most plausibly remembered in the Iliad. Troy VIIa was destroyed by fire and human violence around 1180 BCE, in the same window as the wider Late Bronze Age collapse that brought down the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaean palaces. Some researchers prefer Troy VIh, the late phase of Troy VI, which ended around 1300 BCE.
What is Wilusa, and why does it matter?
Wilusa is the name of a city in the Hittite cuneiform records, located in the northwest of Anatolia, whose king Alaksandu signed a treaty with the Hittite emperor Muwatalli II around 1280 BCE. The Swiss philologist Joachim Latacz argued in Troia und Homer (2001) that Wilusa is the same city Homer calls (W)Ilios, an alternative name for Troy. Most Hittitologists now accept the equation, which gives Troy a documented Bronze Age existence outside the Greek tradition.
What is Schliemann’s Trench?
Schliemann’s Trench, also called the Great Trench, is the north-south cut Schliemann drove through the Hisarlık mound between 1871 and 1873. It is roughly forty meters wide and seventeen meters deep, in places excavated to bedrock. Although destructive of intermediate strata, the trench did expose the deep stratigraphy of the site for the first time and remains visible at the modern park.
Where is Priam’s Treasure today?
The majority of the cache is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where it has been on permanent display since 1996. Soviet trophy brigades removed the treasure from a flak tower in Berlin in May 1945. The Russian Duma declared the objects state property in 1998, despite continuing claims for restitution from Germany and Türkiye.
Who is excavating Troy now?
Since 2014 the excavations have been directed by Rüstem Aslan of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, with funding from the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Earlier campaigns ran under Schliemann (1870-1890), Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1893-1894), Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati (1932-1938), and Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen (1988-2005). The 2024 and 2025 seasons have focused on Late Bronze Age contexts in the Lower City.
How does the Iliad’s date relate to Troy’s destruction?
Modern scholarly consensus places Homer’s composition of the Iliad in the late 8th century BCE, around 750 to 700 BCE, while the destruction of Troy VIIa is dated to about 1180 BCE. Roughly four centuries of oral tradition lie between event and poem, the period known as the Greek Dark Ages, during which the story would have been preserved and reshaped through generations of singers.
Are there still findings being made at Troy?
Yes. The 2024 and 2025 seasons reported sling stones, arrowheads, and destruction debris in Late Bronze Age contexts of the Lower City, exactly the kind of evidence consistent with a violent end to Troy VIIa around 1180 BCE. The current focus is the gateway and central square south of the citadel, where Korfmann’s geophysical surveys had predicted dense occupation.
