In Search of the Trojan War (40 page)

The Greek colony was founded before the year 700 BC by colonists from Aeolian Lesbos. It is just possible that Homer himself visited the new colony, though what role it played in the formation of the epic we do not know. Did the citizens of the city in 700 BC have stories about the Trojan War, for instance, carried down by oral tradition? It is not impossible. From about 700 BC the strange custom of the Lokrian maidens (
see here
) began in Troy, which carried on until the Christian era: the altar and area of sacrificial burnings Blegen found on the west side of the city may have been their sanctuary. The place was never a great success, merely a small market town for the sale of the produce of the plain. But such was the fame of the tale, and so uniform was the belief that this was its true setting, that many famous pilgrims came to worship on the spot, and this rather unprepossessing little place enjoyed a brief heyday from the end of the fourth century BC which we might count the beginning of Hellenistic Ilion. Then it was adorned by wealthy patrons. Its chief landmark was a Doric temple of Athena on the old acropolis, site of Troy VI. At this time Alexander the Great’s general, Lysimachus, built fine walls around the site, enclosing a city 1200 yards by 800. In the lower town there were a few handsome buildings, an agora and basilica, and a theatre which could hold 6000 (though the city’s population can never have
reached such a figure). But without its great bay, now silted up, it was really a nowhere place: it soon declined again till it was ‘so decayed that there were not even tiles on the roofs’ (
c
.190 BC). Devastated in the fighting of the Mithridatic Wars in 83–82 BC, the city may have lain largely ruined for some time: the story of Caesar’s visit in 48 BC certainly implies it, and from then on the town existed as a poor country town with a few hundred people, superseded by the wealthy town of Alexandria Troas situated on the coast with its grand basilica, fine baths and its population of some 40,000. It cannot have helped when Ilium was sacked by the Goths in AD 259. By the Late Roman Empire it was, one imagines, a bit of a backwater, a hick town, not one that any self-respecting would-be rhetor or governor would like to be coupled with. By then, too, it had a Christian bishop and a little Byzantine church, probably a typical whitewashed redbrick affair of the kind you see all over the Greece of today. But it still had its pagan ghosts, as Julian discovered when he went round it with its bishop in 354 (
see here
). When did city life finally die out on Hisarlik? Clearly the old place was in decay in Julian’s day (one imagines geese in the streets, crumbling walls with pigsties in among them, and many abandoned houses). Schliemann thought the city was abandoned in the fifth century AD, basing his belief on coin finds – that is, when did coins cease to be used? It was a commendable try: in fact subsequent finds have generally corroborated him, suggesting, if anything, that it survived well into the sixth century. The last citizens of classical Ilion perhaps lived long enough on the hill to see the apotheosis of Justinian’s renewed Hellenic empire. But of the lives of those individual citizens in the last phase of Troy’s existence we know nothing. In fact the fifth and sixth centuries AD were a very flourishing period for the Troad, especially in the villages, for there was a kind of move to the countryside. This last breath of prosperity may have touched the town, if we can go by the finds of coins of Theodosius I and II at Ilium: people still had money to spend and things to buy. But from Justinian’s time such finds die out. We do not have to search far for a reason. In 542 the empire was ravaged
by a terrible plague, and whole villages and cities were wiped out in Anatolia. We cannot prove that Ilium was among them, but from then on the record is silent for centuries.

From the sixth century the history of the place is virtually a blank; presumably it was a deserted and overgrown ruin – but it may just be that some sort of village continued on the site which was not traceable in the archaeological record. Our evidence for this comes in the work of the Byzantine emperor and administrator Constantine Porphyrogenitus who says that there was a bishopric at Ilium in the 930s, at the time of the Anglo-Saxon empire in Britain. Was the bishopric actually on Hisarlik? If so it would indicate that the church of the fourth century (or its successor) had survived.

Blegen found another hint that a Byzantine building had stood on the site, in a large cutting inside the south gate. This could suggest a small village with a still working population, a church, and perhaps some sort of wall. But these were grim times. Byzantium by now was a beleaguered state, ‘waiting for the barbarians’: Saracens from the south, Slavs from the north and west, Turks from the east. Arab attacks deep into the Aegean had been severe since the seventh century AD, and in the early tenth century they had been able to devastate Lesbos and sack Salonica. At this time smallholders were settled in many villages in Asia Minor to provide local levies for the Byzantine defence forces; perhaps little Ilium felt these events too. Later in the tenth century the growing pressure of Slav incursions on the northern frontier (the Greek mainland had already been inundated) caused the government of Constantinople to transfer part of the population of Asia Minor to the Slav borders, dispossessing smallholders. Disasters during the Turkish occupation of the Troad in the eleventh century caused a further loss of population, but the decline had clearly been a long time coming. It can only have bean a tiny and impoverished community – perhaps just a small group of families with their priest – which defended itself on Hisarlik from the eleventh to the late thirteenth centuries AD. Then the rich life which had existed from the fourth millennium BC ceased.

The last phase of the history of the Troad is Turkish. In fact the area was overrun by the Seljuk Turks as early as the 1070s and occupied for a quarter of a century until the Byzantines took it back. Finds of coins and pottery on the site show that occupation continued on Ilium for the next 200 years on a small scale, perhaps sustained as ever by the alluvial soil of the plain and seasonal fish, though archaeology suggests that the villagers could no longer afford any luxuries. In 1306 the Troad fell to the Ottoman Turks, and has been Turkish ever since. Our first detailed accounts of the plain come in fiscal surveys of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: these show it dotted with villages, mainly tiny ones of only half a dozen families. Ilium is evidently finally abandoned.

What happened to all the Greeks who had lived in the Troad until the Turkish conquest? The history of the Greek element in the population has yet to be sifted – Greeks are surprisingly absent from the surveys – but it is likely that they remained with their churches, with which the Turks, unlike the Roman Catholics, did not interfere. Greeks were frequently met by sixteenth-and seventeenth-century western travellers in the Troad, such as Belon and Lithgow at Alexandria Troas. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were Greek speakers in the interior of the Trojan plain, usually isolated craftsmen, travelling dealers, or
han
keepers. Then surprisingly after Greek independence, as Alexander Kinglake noted, a big influx of Greeks came into Asia Minor, and in Schliemann’s day there was a handful of landowners, oil merchants and householders who were Greek. At that time the main Greek village was called Kallifatli, just over a mile to the south-west of Ilium; the modern village of this name in fact lies a few hundred yards away from the site of old Kallifatli towards the river Menderes. The old village was abandoned after the war of 1922, and the modern one founded by Turks from Bulgaria. Kallifatli was apparently a tiny place in 1574, with only six adult males named as taxable; Gell says it was large and prosperous in his day (1801), perhaps through immigration; but the plague of 1816 took away 200
people, leaving it in ruins but for a dozen houses. It had recovered a little in Schliemann’s day, and he hired workmen from its population of 100 or 200. As a result the villagers were able to carry off much marble from Ilium, and their old cemetery has numerous carved stones. Kallifatli in a sense is the last living link with Ilium, though perhaps there is a village somewhere back on the Greek mainland with a family who came from Kallifatli after 1922. Given the tenacity with which the ancient Trojans clung to life, it would be pleasing to think that somehow the descent of the people of Troy – in however small a drop – ran in someone’s veins somewhere, but that doubtless is taking the concept of the ‘collective memory’ too far!

Hisarlik is now of course an archaeological site, which is where we began. Most of its secrets have been given up, though there are small areas still unexcavated. The rest of the plateau of New Ilium, which remains to be explored, is now cultivated fields strewn with rubble, with groves of oaks inhabited only by squirrels – and perhaps, ghosts?

POSTSCRIPT: THE TROJAN WAR FOUND AGAIN?

THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BOOK
told the story of the three great excavations of Troy, by Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen. It concluded that there was now little hope of further information coming out of the site of Hisarlik itself, which had been so devastated by the archaeologists and by Schliemann in particular. What remained to be explored was the extensive lower town of the Roman city where excavation might prove whether Bronze Age Troy had a town too.

In 1988, less than five years after I wrote that conclusion, a new excavation of the site began under the direction of Manfred Korfmann, whose name will now take its place alongside the greats of the past. The site was cleared of undergrowth and made more intelligible to visitors; the eastern defences were freed from their tangle of fig trees: Schliemann’s great trench was cleaned out, crumbling walls were restored, and key features such as Schliemann’s ‘great ramp,’ the east gate, and Dörpfeld’s northeast bastion were dismantled, consolidated and rebuilt. In the lower town the Hellenistic and Roman theatres were explored and mapped, and the grid plan of the Roman streets was discovered. In addition a wide-ranging geophysical survey of the plateau and the Trojan plain was undertaken.

A very dramatic find had already taken place in preliminary excavations at Besik Tepe, five miles southwest of Hisarlik. This cone-shaped tumulus is one of the oldest and most prominent on the plain; it stands nearly 50 feet high on a natural platform above the sea in sight of Tenedos at the northern edge of the wide sweep of Besika Bay. It was investigated by Schliemann in 1879 and again by Dörpfeld in 1924, who demonstrated that an earlier prehistoric mound had been transformed into the striking shape we see today at some time in the Late Bronze Age. In other
words the tumulus had been raised into its present monumental cone before Greek settlers arrived in the Troad in Homer’s day, the eighth century BC; perhaps indeed it is the great tumulus by the seashore mentioned by Homer.

Modern scholarship has shown that Besik Tepe is almost certainly the mound which the classical Greeks regarded as the tomb of Achilles, scene of the famous visits by Xerxes and Alexander. Close to it Korfmann was able to locate the original seashore at the time of the Trojan War, when the bay was deeper, and the tumulus stood on a promontory which went nearly a mile into the sea. Only yards from the line of the ancient seashore a potentially critical discovery was made: over fifty cremations and burials with Mycenaean Greek grave goods and pottery datable to the early thirteenth century BC (late Troy VI). One stone-lined chamber tomb contained funeral offerings, including a fine pedestalled vase, and the dead man had been cremated with his sword. Most significant, five seal stones were found in the burials, two of which were certainly of mainland Greek provenance. Such stones are thought likely to have been personal seals of Mycenaean aristocrats. Had Korfmann then found the long-sought-for evidence of the Greek camp, and even some of the Greek dead? Or was this the cemetery of a Mycenaean merchant colony (perhaps the likeliest solution, as the remains included women and children)? It was not a question on which Korfmann would be drawn. ‘I can only express an intuitive impression,’ he wrote, ‘a feeling I have, that the cemetery we have just laid bare at the harbour of Troy should belong to the very time when the Trojan War ought to have occurred.’

The presence on the Trojan coast of cremations from the Heroic Age, close to the mound the ancients believed to be the tomb of Achilles, raises fascinating questions about the survival of traditions of a Mycenaean presence in the Troad. (Does this find, for example, have some connection with Homer’s story of a cemetery by the seashore near the Greek camp?) As we shall see, the very latest discoveries at Hisarlik now suggest continuity of population on Hisarlik from the thirteenth to the eighth century
BC, from the time of the Trojan War to the time of Homer; the tale could after all have been handed down orally on the site itself.

The finds at Besik Tepe have also given substantial support to the idea that the Greek fleet would have anchored in Besika Bay, and not in the bay of Troy as Schliemann and most modern scholars had supposed. Situated on the coast known in classical times as Achaiion (‘the Achaean shore’), Besika Bay is wide and shallow, with a good protected anchorage; it lies right opposite the island of Tenedos, which is only six miles away. Could it have been the harbour of Troy? In the late eighties Korfmann’s team made an attempt to determine the bay’s topography in the late Bronze Age, taking over seventy drill cores from the land behind the beach.

They were able to prove that at the time of the Trojan War the bay was much more deeply indented than now, with the sea coming 600 yards further into the bay (the old line of the dunes is marked today by a slight tree-lined ridge curving round the shore). Analysis of the core samples showed that behind the beach there had been a large freshwater lagoon half a mile long and 400 yards across; though long silted up, the area still gathers some water in wet winters. This may perhaps explain an enigmatic feature of Homer’s story (
Iliad
, VI, 4;
see here
) which has never been satisfactorily elucidated: the
stomalimne
. This was a lagoon which apparently lay between the Greek ships and the Scamander river; according to scholars’ marginalia recorded in the great Venice manuscript of the
Iliad
, this reading was in some older manuscripts of the epic, but was excised by the critic Aristarchos because it contradicted his theories about the topography of the plain and the location of the Greek camp. Once again archaeology seems to have shown that the Homeric text contains detailed local knowledge.