Day Three: At Troy, Imagining the Wooden Horse and the Fall of a City

When I awoke early on December 22, 2025, our cruise ship was already docked at Çanakkale. The sea journey of more than three hundred kilometres from Istanbul had passed quietly in our sleep. A morning chill still hung over the water, and the city onshore was only beginning to stir, its lights not yet completely faded. A red harbour boat turned slowly across the water as if guiding us towards the threshold of another chapter in history.

Before setting out for Troy, our tour bus made a brief stop in central Çanakkale. The clock tower was not tall, but it stood out, already adorned with a sign welcoming 2026. The city’s clock was moving forwards, while our journey was about to turn its hands back three thousand years.

At a small streetside coffee window, passers-by lingered over cups of something hot. Turkish coffee is brewed without filtering out the grounds; the finely ground coffee is boiled with the water and settles at the bottom of the cup. Its flavour is intense, yet it somehow makes you slow down.

Behind the little window, an elderly man raised a hand in greeting to our guide. By the look of it, he saw these familiar faces here every day. To him, we were merely passing through; to us, the warmth of the city lay precisely in such unguarded moments.

A short walk from the city centre brought us to the Dardanelles. Çanakkale stands at the strait’s narrowest point, where the Aegean Sea connects with the Sea of Marmara, forming a vital passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. For that very reason, these waters have long been bitterly contested. History has doubled back here time and again, leaving traces of battles large and small.

A prominent memorial inscription was visible on the hillside across the water. It commemorates the best-known conflict fought here: the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War.

In 1915, British and French forces sought to seize control of the Dardanelles, open a sea route to Istanbul, and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The campaign lasted nearly a year, seesawing across narrow shores and steep hills. Both sides suffered enormous losses, yet the strategic balance remained unchanged.

In the end, the Allied forces withdrew. The Ottoman Empire had won a victory here that came at a terrible cost but carried profound significance.

For Turkey, this was more than a military campaign; it became a cornerstone of modern national memory. Çanakkale is therefore regarded as the country’s spiritual capital. Ankara may be its official capital, but the origins of Turkish independence and collective resolve are often traced back here.

In the Western world, memories of the Gallipoli campaign have been preserved largely through the screen—in works such as the film Gallipoli (1981) and the seven-part miniseries Gallipoli (2015). The war has not been forgotten; it has simply been passed down through different forms of storytelling.

Beside the strait, gulls circled low while an elderly bread seller stood quietly with his cart. It was hard to imagine that countless fleets once massed upon these seemingly tranquil waters amid the roar of artillery. Wars eventually recede, leaving only wind, waves, birds, and the routines of life carrying on.

A bust of Piri Reis stands along the waterfront promenade. An Ottoman mariner, he was also among the earliest cartographers to map the Mediterranean and the wider world.

The world map he drew remains the subject of repeated study. Although completed in the sixteenth century, it depicts coastlines in detail far beyond what might be expected of the period, and the sources of some of its information have never been fully explained. Such maps were practical tools of the age of navigation, but they also resemble riddles sealed deep within history.

Also standing on the promenade is this wooden horse. It was not unearthed by archaeologists, but built as a prop for the film Troy and later installed on Çanakkale’s waterfront, where it gradually became one of the city’s symbols. After our brief stop downtown, we boarded the bus again and set off for the ruins of Troy, thirty kilometres away. It was there that the story would truly begin.

The city gradually receded behind us, and fields quickly spread across the view. The land was divided into horizontal bands of colour—green, brown, and pale yellow alternating like a canvas combed over again and again. Now and then, a flock of sheep moved slowly along a country lane.

We passed the Troy Museum without stopping. Around thirty minutes later, the bus reached the ruins of Troy on Hisarlık hill, near the village of Tevfikiye in Çanakkale Province—a place where myth and archaeology meet.

Just inside the site stood another wooden horse. Our guide reminded us that the one in central Çanakkale was a film prop. This one had not been excavated either, but was a symbolic reconstruction shaped by later generations’ imagination.

Then he posed the ultimate question: Do you believe myths are true?

No one had an immediate answer.

Taken as fact, the myth clearly does not withstand close scrutiny: a ten-year siege, the intervention of the gods, a wooden horse determining the course of a war. These sound more like metaphors than a historical record. But viewed another way, perhaps a myth does not need to be “entirely true.”

What it preserves is how people understood war, fate, deception, and sacrifice—a way for humanity to remember history before writing had become systematic.

Myth is not the answer to history, but a path leading towards it. Guided by that path, we came to this land and saw the traces that people truly left behind.

Once inside the ruins, we discovered that this was not a single, intact “ancient city,” but a succession of cities layered one upon another. Stone walls, foundations, and fallen columns lay scattered across the slope at different heights and angles. Pointing out the numbered strata, our guide explained that archaeologists have identified at least nine major cultural layers here—Troy I through Troy IX—spanning the period from around 3000 BC to Roman times. Each layer marks the rise and destruction of another city.

Whether or not the war described in the Iliad truly occurred, the broken walls and shattered masonry confirm the existence of a Troy that was destroyed and rebuilt time after time.

Yellow and green lichens had each claimed separate patches of the stone walls. Perhaps this contest for territory is not confined to human society, but belongs to nature’s own law of survival.

The ruins of Troy are divided into several areas. On higher ground lies the citadel, with its massive walls, tower foundations, and remains of important buildings—the heart of defence and power.

Below are the residential quarters and public spaces, including houses, workshops, and wells.

The remains of a theatre sit quietly within the hillside. Added during the Roman period, it shows that even in a much later age, this place was still commemorated and used as “Troy.”

Archaeology has found no proof that the wooden horse existed, but the ruins confirm that this site endured repeated large-scale conflicts during the Bronze Age. The myth may be impossible to verify, yet these tangible remains give the ancient legend a place to take root.

Beyond the stones and walls left by successive eras, what most often made me pause were the trees growing among the rubble and broken masonry. Rooted in ground destroyed time and again, they grew tenaciously, each trunk and branch reaching out in its own distinctive form.

Then there were the small birds hopping among the rubble and branches. To them, this was neither a ruin nor a battlefield, but simply a place to roost and forage.

Human beings have written war and legend over this land again and again, while nature has quietly gone on multiplying. War leaves ruins; in time, life returns to reclaim them.

On the return journey, fields slowly unfolded beyond the bus window. A solitary tree stood against the horizon in the wind, silent and still.

It was difficult to connect such a scene with the war, siege, and destruction we had discussed during the day. Yet Troy brought that contrast into sharp focus: myth tells of a city sacked once through the ruse of a wooden horse, while history reveals conflicts that were real, recurrent, and without number.

Standing among the ruins, we were not searching for the truth of the wooden horse. We were trying to understand how humanity uses myth to remember war—and how life carries on amid the ruins.

Troy had settled back into silence by the end of the day, but our journey continued. Tomorrow we would travel to Ephesus and enter another ancient world spanning myth, history, and the present.

Treasures of the Ancient Mediterranean Itinerary

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Day Three: At Troy, Imagining the Wooden Horse and the Fall of a City

Treasures of the Ancient Mediterranean Itinerary

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In This Series

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Day Seven: A Whirlwind Tour of Athens

Day Five: Rhodes, City of the Knights

Day Six: Christmas—Taking Gains and Losses as They Come

Day Four: Ephesus, After the Sea Receded