NOTE: This is the second of two articles inspired by seeing Christopher Nolan’s remarkable film of The Odyssey. The story is true. I’ve simply never written it down before.
It’s been more than half a century, but I can still feel my face pressed against the cold stone of the ancient stage, hearing a young woman applaud my killing at the hands of her boyfriend. That was the day I decided that 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann really had discovered the ruins of ancient Troy.
I don’t recall the young couple’s names – they were what I called “friends of the road.” We’d met at some bus station in western Turkey, learned we were heading in the same direction and decided to go together, mostly to save money by sharing rustic hotel rooms. I can remember many young faces sharing rooms that way over more than a year exploring Europe. I can’t remember any but one name – belonging to a very cute girl with whom I celebrated my 21st birthday atop Istanbul’s Galata Tower. Her name was the same as the rock star’s, Alice Cooper.
Our Trojan War trio had found a cheap room in the noplace town of Cannakale overlooking the Dardanelles waterway. It wasn’t far from the 1870s excavation site Schliemann announced as the ruins of Troy, location of the so-called Trojan War described in Homer’s Iliad and, at least as backstory, The Odyssey. Many scholars then disputed Schliemann’s claim, and some insisted the Trojan War, Troy and even Homer himself never existed in history. To travel this far off any beaten path, we must have given at least some credence to the German archaeologist’s claims. Curiosity, at least.
In the course of our visit to the site that late-spring day – I’m not even sure the place was fenced or required us to buy a ticket – we’d stumbled on the ancient Greek theater. Even Greeks living away from Greece in prehistoric times had to have some kind of theater. And apparently so did we. The young woman took her seat in the first row to watch, while her boyfriend and I morphed, without any real decision, into Archilles and Hector, fighting to the death with thick, very heavy swords. We had no props whatsoever, naturally, so it was all one big, sometimes gruesome pantomime of grunting, shouting, slashing and stabbing.
Finally, my opponent did something convincing enough, gaining the advantage, that I decided I had to be killed. I dropped to the stage with much theatrical flailing and drew my loud final breath for our audience of one. She clapped wildly. She may have shouted “Bravo!” Even though I wasn’t sure about Schliemann or his Troy yet, I decided it was pretty cool to get slaughtered by a sword in the Trojan War.
To say Heinrich Schiemann was controversial in his day is an understatement. I’d already learned something about him and his often-questioned methods while visiting Knossos, the ancient Minoan city on the Greek island of Crete. Schliemann had not only excavated the ruins there but reassembled and even repainted them to, in his way of thinking, help future generations understand. Many of his fellow archaeologists damned him for “reinventing” the past, while others debated his many choices of shape and color. In other words, they hated what he’d done with the place.
Over many years, Schliemann returned to dig at his Troy – his original discovery driven, as so much of archaeology is, by local folk traditions and legends of something big, something important happening in an area that was now the middle of nowhere. In the process, he tore through layer after layer of ancient dirt, some now say carelessly, finding just enough gold and other evidence to keep pushing him forward. He sent most of the treasures out of Turkey, to museums and private collectors all around Europe and pre-revolutionary Russia.
According to some, probably even now, Schliemann did almost nothing right. But we have some ruins of Troy to visit today, solely because of him. And based on what happened that day more than fifty years ago, I for one believe he was digging in the right place.
We eventually moved away from the theater where I’d been killed, poking our heads into caves and starting up trails that might or might not have led us to anything of value, anything interesting or exciting. This wasn’t at all Knossos on Crete. Nobody had put buildings back together or given them a fresh paint job. All I remember then was suddenly pulling away from my friends and heading, more and more quickly, along a trail we hadn’t explored yet. Before I knew it, I was jogging, then sprinting. Maybe I heard them shouting my name. But the trail kept carrying me upward.
As I neared the highest point, something dawned on me. This wasn’t just a hill – it was a rampart, a defensive military construction. At the top of the stone steps, the sun was shining. The wind was blowing, whipping the tall grasses left and right across my path. And then I stopped, panting from my run.
The rampart opened onto a vast plain leading across a wide sandy beach to the blindingly bright sea. Without an ounce of effort, I pictured the Greek ships beached on that sand – many for the Trojan War’s entire ten years. There were huge wooden war machines, tents, chariots, cooking fires and thousands of exhausted, dirty men fighting a war centuries before wars were written down as history. This wasn’t only a battle. This was a seemingly endless siege, until the Greeks pretended to give up and sail away, leaving a gargantuan wooden horse as tribute to their enemies.
This was the legendary Trojan horse, filled with Greek soldiers who crawled out once the horse had been dragged inside the walls. I’m no Heinrich Schliemann, but standing atop that rampart with the sun blinding my eyes and the wind roaring in my ears, I knew this was the place where it all happened.
