After 50 Years, Quest for Troy Resumes

The spirits of Homer’s heroes may hover over the wind-swept mound of Troy, but experts on the first excavation here in 50 years are still searching for any concrete trace of his epic war story.

Visitors since King Xerxes and Alexander the Great have believed the small mound on Turkey’s Aegean coast holds the ruins of the city that fell to a 10-year siege recounted in the Greek poet’s “ The Iliad.”

In the absence of dramatic Greco-Roman ruins found elsewhere in Turkey, tourists seem happiest climbing into and photographing a large wooden replica of the Trojan Horse.

Homer said the Greeks hid in the hollow wooden horse to enter and capture the city, all for the sake of the beautiful runaway Queen Helen.

“This is no Roman Disneyland. It’s all dull, gray stone,” said Prof. Manfred Korfmann of West Germany’s University of Tubingen, who is leading the first excavation since 1938.

“But you can feel more than you see. It is unique, a site where the spiritual history of Europe and Asia meet,” he said, gesturing to the nearby Dardanelles strait, onc e known as the Hellespont, between the two continents.

The first seasons in 1988 and 1989 in what may be a 15-year excavation have unearthed no dramatic finds at one of the most hallowed sites in archeology.

Core drilling in the fertile plain between the mound and the Dardanelles revealed that the sea once lapped the walls of Troy, but well before the Bronze Age Trojan War.

Some 600 buckets of pottery shards have been individually computer listed. Every stone that is dug out will also have its details entered by two computer specialists.

The 30-person, mainly West German team eventually hopes to have direct satellite links from Troy to computers in Tubingen and the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

An electromagnometer survey of the mound and surrounding area has found the street plan of the Roman Era city, when Troy enjoyed a pilgrimage status similar to Jerusalem today.

“These machines are only just beginning to be used in archeology. The plan will save us a great deal of time in future,” said Brian Rose, a professor from Cincinnati.

Underneath the Roman layer lie 40 cities, one atop another, the earliest dating back to 2,400 BC. A visitor can jump millennia in a single step.

Experts say Homer’s Troy is possibly a level destroyed by fire about 1,200 BC, whose stone houses and finely dressed walls were a fitting backdrop for the epic tale.

Rose said the hope of finding actual proof of Homer’s Troy is always strong in archeologists’ minds.

Even if there is no miracle discovery like written Trojan records, archeologists say properly excavated layers of stones and broken pottery will help date excavations of other sites in Asia Minor.

Korfmann said modern archeology was virtually invented at Troy with the 1870 excavation by German businessman-scholar Heinrich Schliemann.

Schliemann found gold treasure, lost in Germany during World War II, but experts now believe that it predated the era most likely to have encompassed the reign of Homer’s Trojan King Priam.

Schliemann’s great north-south trench removed much of the mound and did great damage by today’s standards. But he did leave two two-yard wide central pillars of earth standing for future generations.

Now archeologists are working on them with painstaking care, scraping off a yard each season and recording each tiny piece of pottery on the computer.

“We want our work to be just as accessible in 50 years time as now,” Korfmann said.

The technology may be advanced, but Rose said some of the old realities of Near Eastern archeology had not changed.

“We are washing all the pottery shards at the work station near where we live,” he added. “It uses up all the water in the village. There is none left for people to wash themselves.”