"These war-torn shores are strewn with blades, bullets, and bones."

TRUVA, OR, TROY, IS TODAY WIDELY REGARDED AS ONE OF the Mediterranean world's greatest disappointments; guidebook after guidebook insists that it's not worth the effort to visit. In fact, the ancient ruins are so notoriously abject that desperate locals have built a giant wooden model Trojan horse-just to give baf- fled tourists something to photograph.
Apparently even this wasn't working, but it was irresistible to me. After all, the mystique of Troy is as potent now as ever-thanks as much to cinematic versions as to Homer's thunderous verse. Today, Homer's screed is admired but rarely read; for modern tastes, its 15,600 lines of mythological digressions, genealogy, for- mulaic combat, and bombastic rhetoric comprise an all but im- penetrable quagmire. It's an effort for us to imagine how utterly revered the Iliad was in the Roman era, when it was considered the ultimate text, as profound as Scripture and as insightful as Shakespeare. I was carrying an extraordinary new translation by Stanley Lombardo, which was more approachable: His terse, clipped lines made the narrative crackle again, and the heroes' speeches fluid. But even for those who have never read a line of Homer, the stories of the siege remain brilliantly alive, embeddeddeep in the Western psyche. In the.nineteenth century, the quest to discover "lost Troy" became one of the great historical adven- ture stories of modern times. And the site can grab headlines: The war of words about the factual basis of Homer's account is as emo- tionally charged as when the redoubtable "father of field archaeol- ogy," Heinrich Schhemann, dug his first spade here in the 1870s. And then there are those endless reruns of Uysses and Helen of Troy, circa 1955...
How could you be in Turkey and not make the pilgrimage to Troy?
So noted the poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, who visited the site around A.D. 60, in the reign of Nero, and used his impressions to describe the tour ofjulius Caesar.
He walked around what had once been Troy, now only a name, and looked for traces of the great wall which the
god Apollo had built. But he found the hill clothed with thorny scrub and decaying trees, whose aged roots were embedded in the foundations.
The sightseeing Caesar in the poem doesn't pack up and leave in disappointment, or wish he hadn't bothered. To Romans, the disappearance of Troy's famous fortifications was logical and expected-after all, the city had been caught in a "whirlwind of doom," as Aeschylus said in one play, its glories "ground to dust." So the absence of major ruins actually added an extra poetic dimension to a visit, allowing visitors to poignantly muse on the fragility of human endeavor. Empires pass; fame and memory endure. "Every stone had a name," notes Lucanus, and Caesar's guide sardonically warns him not to tread on Hector's ghost.
This, I had a feeling, was something that modern visitors might need to keep in mind; standard tourist expectations might have to be left by the wayside.
The nearest town for visits to Troy today hes directly above the pebbly shore of the Dardanelles Strait. Canakkale-pronounced cha-knuckle-a)---is yet another of Turkey's mysteriously faceless cities. It exists to the tune of high-pitched drilling, with every street and building in a perpetual state of renovation from earth- quake damage. Its fractured hotel balconies provide ringside seats for the parade of supertankers on their way to the Black Sea; down below, car ferries break loose of the Asian shore and plow through the syrupy waters, describing a wide parabola as they defy the powerful current. On both sides of this two-mile wide pas- sage one of the great strategic bottlenecks of history-Ottoman fortresses squat like bloated gargoyles. Turkish air force jets regu- larly buzz overhead, naval recruits fill the streets, and worried neighbors still rattle sabers over Turkey's dominance of crucial oil shipping lanes.
On our own visit, the weather remained resolutely English. Day after day, walls of rain and fog advanced and retreated in subtle tac- tical maneuvers.
Les wasn't getting any healthier in this damp northern climate, but at least she seemed to be enjoying the view, staring in mes- merized prenatal bliss at the eddying currents. As for me, I wan- dered the sodden streets of the town, meeting up with provincial scholars at the museums, watching Turkish navy drills, returning with lamb kebab dinners and bottles of Troy Pilsner, the local brew with-of course!-the silhouette of the Trojan Horse on its label.
We'd been trapped in industrial outposts before, caught by bad weather, and accepted our lot; gloomy Canakkale was almost a wel- come punctuation in the regime of constant travel. But then, on the fourth morning, the skies cleared up without warning. It was like the opening credits of ne Simpsons. By noon, not a cloud was left in the pearly blue sky. Down below, Turks were blinking at the bril- liance with the expressions of coal miners emerged from the pit.
I left Les wrapped in a blanket, pondering the same dark waters that Lord Byron had once swum (tour companies now help swim- mers emulate the feat at. a mere $550 a pop), and headed out into that "whirlwind of doom," birthplace ofWestern civilization's most cherished tales.
From the Canakkale bus station, a crowded dolmus was carrying cotton farmers into the fields. It already felt like a serious step back in time. The men sat silently -in peaked caps and woolen suit jackets; the women's gold teeth sparkled in the sun as they belly-laughed.
I sat with my knees against my chest, watching the driver work his way, cigarette by cigarette, through the pack. He passed me some Turkish delight ("Turkish Viagra-with cashew flavor"). Outside, it might have been French wine country; the pastures were filled with canary yellow wildflowers. But inside the bus, this was definitely Asia. Manic music clawed its way out of the radio. Piled boxes full of fish and cheese swayed in the aisles. Now I knew why one of the infatuated British expats I'd spoken to down south had compared rural Turkey to Spain fifty years ago. It felt a million miles away from the coast with its English pubs and ATMs.
The driver stopped outside the Helen Restaurant, which was nearly obliterated by plaster sculptures, and directed me down an empty agricultural road. A glossy black snake slithered in the thickets nearby. Overhead, a pair of Turkish F-111s shot past like Apollo's silver arrows; they tore the sky open as they broke the sound barrier. Then it was back to millennial silence, broken only by the scuttling of beetles on the stones.
So this was it-the high road to Troy. I couldn't quite believe it. The approach to the most famous city in history --- symbol, in a way, of all man's cities-the place where the ancients felt the his- torical enmity between East and West had begun.
The entrance to the site was announced by a ranch house, where the guards were sipping tea from tall glasses, too pleased with the weather to bother charging me the entrance fee. I gath- ered I was the only visitor that afternoon. A shady path wound on- wards directly to the main attraction-a wooden horse standing above a trimmed rose garden.
Today's Trojan horse isn't quite the "steed of monstrous height" sung by the poets; in fact, it's a bit of a dwarf. It had been lacquered with a staunch dark gloss; the mane was trimmed into a brittle mohawk. You could climb inside its belly and play Ulysses; win- dows were inserted for a better view of the flowers. The recon- struction wasn't an entirely risible effort, though. After all, even the guidebook writers who cruelly mocked it had included pictures. It filled a need, obviously, as much as ancient Ilium's guides had needed imaginative props like Paris'lyre. Naturally, I took several photographs. A rocky path led out to the hill now called Hisarhk-a spear- head of land jutting above an apple-green plain, which runs five miles out to the indigo sea. Only after drinking in the space ;ind light did I realize that there were some archaeological trenches around my feet. A few haphazard mounds of excavated earth rose like refuse heaps. Id passed through the legendary Scaean Gates of Troy-or at least their foundations-and hadn't actually noticed.
Yes, it was undeniably a far stretch from the standardized visions of the city's grandeur-not only Homer's grandiose epithets, but all those chintzy film versions. In the execrable Helen of Troy, for example, the ancient towers look taller than Babylon's, giant gates swing back and forth, while 30,000 extras and war chariots charge in and out. Kirk Douglas himself had been needed to get past them in Ulysses. But the walls of Troy today look like they've been pul- verized by a giant hammer. A sailor passing through the Dardanelles would barely glance at this mutilated hillock-an in- dustrial slag-heap, perhaps, or an abandoned Turkish mine?
The frustration is that there has never been just one Troy. Archaeologists have actually found nine Troys, each built on the ruins of the last (and just to make things even more confusing, there are forty-seven subdivisions, too). The hill is best thought of as a giant chocolate wafer with layer upon layer of Troys inside. The oldest version of the city, called prosaically enough "Troy I," dates back 5,000 years. The Troy everyone is actually interested in-Heroic Troy, of Homer's heroes fame, which fell around 1260 B.c.-has been identified as Troy VI. The Roman city of Novum Ilium, or New Troy, is the last exposed layer, called Troy IX.
And while there is a -glut of Troys on the site, there's not really very much left of any of them. The city suffered a second devasta- tion at the end of antiquity. Sacked by Goths from beyond the Black Sea, its port silted, the site was abandoned in the sixth century A.D. Tremors and floods did the rest, burying the remains for 1,500 years. Modern excavations have exposed slivers of one Troy, frag- ments of another, the rubble of the next.
I wandered about the kaleidoscope of centuries, trying to pry the Troys apart. As it happens, the remains of Troy IX-the lucky, wealthy outpost of Rome's "New Troy"-make the most sense. There are the clear outlines of its two amphitheaters and the def- inite foundations of the temple of Athena. Of course,just like any ancient tourists, I was compelled to seek out the shreds of Homer's version-Troy VI. Ever-sensitive to foreign interest, Turkish au- thorities have put up signs pointing out any relic. And there it was-a single exposed corner of the world's most famous fortress wall, angled and steep,just as the poet promised. I stopped, stared, and-pathetic as the fragment was--couldn't help shuddering with amazement.
It was no effort at all to imagine that these stones once echoed with the howls of soldiers.
I could finally taste the sheer anticipation that ancient sightseers felt when standing on this blood-soaked spot. All along their Grand Tour, Romans had been fed a tantalizing diet of Trojan War bric- a-brac. Rhodes had had Helen's personal silver cup, fashioned in the shape of one of her perfect breasts; Sparta, the egg from which she emerged (she was the daughter of Leda, who had been violated by Zeus in the form of a swan; the giant egg was probably an African ostrich's). A temple in southern Italy displayed the carpentry tools that the Greeks had supposedly used to build the Trojan horse; cities in Asia proudly displayed the papyrus letters of war veterans to their loved ones. But nothing could compare to standing on the hallowed turf of Troy itself--or drinking in the famous view of the seashore. By the time of their visits, fourteen centuries of silt had already begun to distort the coastline's shape. But miraculously, everything else about the topography fit the precise descriptions of Homer: the landing cove with its "gaping mouth, enclosed by the jaws of two jutting headlands" (now called Besika Bay); the course of the two rivers, the Simois and the Scamander; the locations of the burbling freshwater springs. On clear days, ancient tourists could make out the distant island mountain peak from which the god Poseidon, swathed in pale sea mist, had watched the battles.
After dinner on their first evening, the visiting tourists would leave their inns and gaze down upon the moonlit scene, perhaps reciting one of the most beloved passages from Homer, when the Trojan soldiers camped before the foray they hoped would shatter the siege:
The Trojans had great notions that night,
Sitting on the bridge of war by their watchfires.
Stars: crowds of them in the sky, sharp In the moonglow when the wind falls And all the cliffs and hills and peaks Stand out and the air shears down From heaven, and all the stars are visible And the watching shepherd smiles.
So the bonfires between the Greek ships And the banks of the Xanthus, burning On the plain before Ilion.
And I, finally gazing out at the same storied scene, could almost smell the smoke of those fires; once again, the past was lurching to life.
. The next morning at dawn, tourists prepared for a sightseeing routine that was by now almost second nature to them. After a perfunctory breakfast of bread dipped in wine, they sallied forth to meet the Ihan guides, accompanied by servants carrying some sim- ple food for lunch-cheese, olives, fruit-a spare cloak in case of rain, and the papyrus guidebook. Many would also have copies of Homer and Virgil-eved though educated Romans knew the lines of both by heart. Some had no doubt picked up the pulpy "eye- witness accounts" of Trojan heroes; like war comics, un-poetic, but full of the clash of swordplay and dust of the plains.
And then they set off down the hill to the world's most fa- mous battlefield.