![]() ![]() Since those ancient times, the city has crept four miles inland from the Aegean shore and overlooks the Dardanelles (now Canakkale) Straits. We know Troy doesn’t stand exactly where it did when Homer was writing. The Unesco World Heritage site is still being excavated to add, if not ancient bones then at least shards of pottery, to the archaeological evidence and make the myth real. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and the Emperor Constantine were all here before me, footstepping Hector and hoping to tread where Helen wept. Homer’s epic poem, one of the oldest works of western literature, has attracted tourists to this unassuming spot for millennia. This unpromising site claims to be the real Troy - the very spot where Zeus’s daughter Helen fled to make love to Paris where the mighty Hector, the Trojan general, fell at the hands of Greek warrior Achilles and where the giant Trojan Horse entered the city concealing Greek warriors in its wooden belly. ![]() ![]() Over 3,000 years after Homer wrote in The Iliad of the 10-year siege of King Priam’s mighty citadel, I’m standing on an unremarkable patch of scrubland in northwestern Turkey. Few places can conjure up such stories of love and loss, homesickness and heroism, gallantry and grief as Troy. These three things transformed a hillock in Asia Minor into a legendary city. A wooden horse, a fallen hero and Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |