Bundeskunsthalle - Ausstellungen - Troia - Traum und Wirklichkeit

The place and the countryside

Here the sea is so narrow that it is no wonder when a young lover (Leander) dares to swim to the other side, or an ambitious king (Xerxes) tries to take his army across. But it is so stormy that it is likewise no wonder that the lover drowned and the bridge collapsed. From here we can see Mount Ida, "Where Hera once kissed love-struck Zeus, / And love did conquer the Lord of all Worlds."
Lady Mary Montagu, English traveler to Troy, 1718

Troy [Truva], the best-known dig in Turkey. It's location on the straits of the Dardanelles (the Hellespont, more than 60 km in length, between 1.4 and 6 km wide) and the unique wind conditions made it an important bronze-age seaport and trading city, in control of the only sea route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, at the crossroads of Orient and Occident.

From words to images

Throughout antique Greece, the legends of the Trojan War were common knowledge, the core of the myth--the Trojan War itself--being an indubitable part of shared history. The victory of the Achaeans proved that great strength could be found in solidarity and that the gods were propitious. Children learned from the "Iliad" in school, people quoted its verses verbatim. The Trojan War was, however, also one of the great themes of Greek art. It was certainly no coincidence that the earliest pictorial representations date from the late eighth century B.C., the age of the Homeric epics. Thus Homer also obviously inspired artists to make use of his material. These artists put his works to their own ends, constantly discovering new images. Above all, they also depicted that which is not related in the "Iliad" directly, but only implied: scenes of what came before the Trojan War, the death of Achilles and the destruction of Troy.

In the middle of an empire

During the Hellenistic and Roman eras, Troy/Ilion was an important place both in poetry and in reality. Many rulers and peoples claimed to be descendants of the Trojans. The tangible link was the shrine of Athena Ilias.
The Romans, who completely destroyed Ilion around 85 B.C., turned the ruins into a place of pilgrimage which marked the genealogical center of the Roman Empire: Ilion/Ilium.
The historic period was seen to be a repetition of the mythic age, history as a way to redeem the myth. Rome was said to be Troy built a new.
Varro, the Roman historian, put the beginning of the Trojan War at 1193 B.C. Exactly 440 years later-753 B.C.-was his date for the founding of Rome.

What the Bible does not tell us

Following an earthquake in the fifth century A.D., the actual city of Troy was probably only a shadow of its former self. All the more important was Troy's place in the medieval view of the world. The stories of the Trojan War were drawn upon to derive what could not be found in the Bible: the status of knighthood, the concept of honor, the system of courtly love. The Trojan War was held to be the first substantiated event of world history before Christ's birth.
Virgil's "Aeneid", Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the Latin prose novels about Dares and Dicyts (alleged to be two eyewitnesses of the Trojan War) were the story's vehicles. Of Homer's "Iliad," only the title was known.

From Virgil to Homer

Accounts of the demise of Troy have not been kept alive in the world of literature alone. Trojan scenes have adorned all sorts of objects and were encountered in all conceivable situations of life in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries¾as pictorials on tapestries and chalices, as cantos and as moral aphorisms. A canon of a few isolated motifs taken out of narrative context came to prevail. Each of these motifs reads like a book, is capable of giving guidance for appropriate action and behavior, shedding the limelight on the moral of many a story. Troy proper was as far away from playing a role in these centuries as the Homeric.

Reading the Iliad

The 18th century witnesses paintings and books - and above all their creators and poets - become objects of cult-like reverence. People long to return to the origins, discover the first poet in Homer as well as the beginning and culmination of literature in the "Iliad." The sagas of Troy and its landscape, which one believes to re-discover in Greece, Italy and Turkey, become the epitome of an ideal, heroic era, in which the arts and humanity¾both still in infancy¾have reached perfection. One reads the original version of the "Iliad," attempts to create something of comparable status in one's own language and it is taken literally in graphic arts as well. One sentence after the next, artists discover new motifs that had remained hitherto undepcited and undepictable. And people start reading the "Iliad" "where Achilles fought, Ulysses traveled and Homer sang" (Robert Wood).

The search for Troy

Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at the end of the 19th century spark the beginning of an archaeological expedition in search of Troy. Its history is reflected by material documenting Schliemann's first archaeological findings all the way to the digs of Manfred Korfmann.

The settlement hill of Hisarl¢k in Troy

Schematic cross-section of the settlement hill of Hisarl¢k (Troy) including official designations of the settlement layers.
A "tell" or "Höyük" is a term used to describe populated hills as can be found in Anatolia, Southeast Asia and Southeastern Europe. Houses were built of unburned mud bricks. Over the centuries, hills would grow higher as the mud bricks decayed and new homes were built atop the rubble.
In this manner, the City of Troy's Hisarl¢k hill produced about 15 meters of settlement layers in 3,500 years.
I-X: The numbering scheme applied to the Hisarl¢k hill's settlement layers starting from the bottom up and counting from I through X is based on observations made by Dörpfeld (1893/94), who, in turn, leaned on Schliemann's work.
a, b, c...: The subdivision into over 50 construction phases labeled a, b, c, etc. finds its roots in work conducted by Blegen (1932-38). Additional sub-phases were identified as research progressed. Labeled 1, 2, 3, etc., these designations remain binding until this day¾albeit that the weighting of the construction phases may have shifted from a modern-day point of view.

Tour of Troy

Atop the ruins. A 40-meter-long wall featuring the stages of a typical, ideal tour, composed of exhibits, monitors (displaying a tour filmed by Korfmann), cards, photographs, models, etc., starting in front of the upper city wall of Troy (VI) to the ramp (FM) of Troy (II) and the walled-in gate of Troy (VII).

Troy eternal

A new Troy according to Heinrich Schliemann. Prior to Heinrich Schliemann, Troy was just a myth. He made clever use of the media during his excavations, turning archaeology into a popular adventure. The myth of Troy becomes entwined with the archaeological site to create a destination that has continued to attract masses of tourists to this very day.
Schliemann describes his finds with imaginative names such as the "Treasure of Priamos" or the "Chalice of Nestor." By drawing these references to the "Iliad," he is giving birth to a new myth, of which he himself is a part. This legacy is widely resonated in operas, the arts and modern media.

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