Ancient City of Troy (Hisarlik, Çanakkale)
The ancient city of Troy is located on Hisarlik Hill near the village of Tevfikiye, about 25–30 km south of the modern city of Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey. It is best known as the setting of the Trojan War described in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998. With its legendary status and long archaeological history, Troy is one of the most famous ancient sites in the world.
Excavations at the site have revealed a multi-layered settlement sequence extending from the early 3rd millennium BC to the Roman period. The remains of the city, rebuilt many times on the same hill, are grouped into nine main phases (Troy I–IX) that together document over 3,000 years of interaction between the cultures of Anatolia and the Aegean–Mediterranean world.
Systematic excavations began in the 19th century with Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and continued with Carl Blegen in the 1930s and the long-term project directed by Manfred Korfmann from 1988 onwards. These investigations have made Troy one of the key reference sites for Bronze Age and early Iron Age archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Today visitors can see impressive fortification walls and towers from the Late Bronze Age city, residential buildings and megaron-type houses, as well as a Hellenistic–Roman theatre, bouleuterion, temples and streets terraced down the slope. At the entrance to the site, the award-winning Troy Museum presents artifacts from Troy and the wider Troad region in a modern exhibition that tells the story of the city and its cultural impact from prehistory to the Byzantine and Ottoman periods.