Troy in Turkey or Troy in Britain? False Leads vs Hard Evidence

Nobody reading Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid has ever failed to wonder ‘was this real?’ and ‘where was Troy?’. Homer’s Troy lay across the Aegean from Greece, whence the angry Greeks sailed to avenge the abduction of Helen. Since Homer’s time, Troy was known to have been near, if not below, the Roman city of Ilium, in the north-western tip of Anatolia (now Turkey), immediately south of the mouth of the Dardanelles. In his poem Civil War, Lucan describes Julius Caesar visiting Ilium, fascinated by the myths of Aeneas, who he believed to be his ancestor. Every rock had some myth attached to it. Once, says Lucan, Caesar walked into some tall grass and a peasant warned him to be careful, lest he trample on the ghost of Hector. Yet once the Roman Empire collapsed, Ilium fell into ruin and by the time the area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, the city had vanished.  

Educated travelers remained curious and, as their ships stopped off the coast, either deliberately or to wait for the wind to change, they explored in hope of finding Homer’s fabled city. Many people, unaware that the walls and archways of Alexander Troas, on the Trojan coast, were built by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, allowed themselves to believe that they were in Troy. In the 1790s, Jean Baptiste Lechevalier, claimed he had found Troy on the Balli Dağ, a dramatic hill on the southern edge of the Trojan plain, seven miles from the sea. His arguments were as unconvincing as those for Alexandria Troas and, from his lofty viewpoint in Cambridge, Jacob Bryant published two dissertations arguing that Homer was pure fiction, and Troy with all its heroes, including Aeneas, were mere fables. 

Yet the power of myths continued to draw the curious. When Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse were travelling along the Anatolian coast in 1810, their ship anchored off the Trojan shore to wait for the weather to change. In the fourth canto of Don Juan, Byron recalled, ‘where I sought for Ilion’s walls/The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls’. ‘We do care for the authenticity of the tale of Troy’, Byron wrote in 1821: ‘I have stood upon that plain daily for more than a month, in 1810, and if anything diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity’.  

Gaps in knowledge provide rich ground for new theories to take root, and in 1806, Karel Jozef de Graeve exploited the doubts about the exact location of Troy in Turkey in an extraordinary way. His Republic of the Champs Elysées claimed that Homer was Belgian, the real Trojan War was set around the Rhine delta, and the story was only later transposed to Turkey.  

Part of the faux-logic behind this was the fact that, by the Middle Ages, many Western European countries had adopted myths that their founders came from Troy. These myths were worked up slowly over many centuries, without reference to historical evidence, but inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, with its inspiring story of Aeneas’s journey west to found a new Troy in Italy. That story in turn had been worked up in ancient Rome, out of nothing more than Homer’s hints in the Iliad, that Aeneas was destined to survive the fall of Troy. Indeed, Rome’s greatness was caused partly by the Romans’ implacable belief that they were, originally, Trojans. Britain’s version of this was the myth of Brutus of Troy, whose genesis (via ‘Britto’) from the name ‘Britain’ can be seen unfolding plainly in the pages of Nennius’s Historia Brittonum and then expanded in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The myth was so popular in the Middle Ages that students from Cambridge named their nearby hills the Gogmagog hills, after the giant whom Brutus’s Trojans had to fight, according to Geoffrey, before gaining possession of Britain. Thus, by de Graeve’s time, the West was full of Trojan stories and all he needed to do was flip them on their head, and argue that, rather than having arisen in response to myths from the eastern Mediterranean, they were in fact the inspiration for stories that were later relocated to the Aegean and Turkey.  

Fortunately, few gave much credence to de Graeve, and in 1822, Charles Maclaren (1782-1866) carefully extracted the topographical details about Troy and its surroundings in Homer’s Iliad and published a dissertation concluding that Roman Ilium and Homer’s Troy must have been in the same place after all. Maclaren visited the Troad in 1847 and explored the area immediately west of the tiny Turkish settlement of Hişarlik, and in 1863 he published his belief that it matched Homer’s descriptions: it was at the end of a ridge, and at the confluence of two rivers (Skamander and Simois, see Iliad book 5), and it was, as Aeneas himself says in Iliad 20, ‘on the plain’ (and not in the hills, like the Balli Dağ). The same year, Frank Calvert, the local British and American consul, was so convinced by Maclaren’s ideas that he bought some land at Hişarlik, and an experimental dig revealed enough to confirm that the site next to Hişarlik was Roman Ilium. He could not afford a major excavation but in 1870-2 Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) led a major investigation and discovered Bronze Age palace walls, a magnificent stone ramp, and a hoard of gold. 

The ramp at Troy, excavated by Schliemann. Author’s photograph. 

They were astonishing finds – but was the tiny, hill-top citadel they discovered really Homer’s great city of Troy? In 1879, Théophile Cailleux hurried to press with his Atlantic lands described by Homer: the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Britain, the Atlantic islands, the Americas. Playing on uncertainties over Schliemann’s discoveries and inspired by de Graeve and the name of the Gogmagog Hills, Cailleux claimed that the real Troy was to be found near the Wash, the bay between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, 45 miles north of Cambridge. 

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