Çanakkale [GP:Canakkale], mid 30s, sunny with scattered clouds

No more politics today – we’re back on the subject of people being annoying for the most part, but I’m not particularly annoyed at anyone today. Today our brief excursion was to Troy – don’t blink, folks, ‘cuz there’s not much left, and what little there is now resembles Diznee-land. This is Excavation Land over there; Mister Schliemann’s Wild Ride is this way, and in the middle of it all is this big, fake looking Trojan Horse that was put there in the 70s when the Turkish government figured they could make money off of the site. (Please do not ask how long it took for someone in the group to ask if this was the original Trojan Horse, it’s just too embarrassing….)

Troy was originally built 9 times over itself – part of the Diznee-land feel comes from the fact that most of the ruins are labeled with little roman numerals to let you know which of the Troys you’re looking at (for the record, Homeric Troy is Troy VI). We have, rather slowly but surely, come to the realization that the Turks take credit for everything (which is interesting, because I was certain the Greeks invented that, although I remember Kamran at work telling me that it actually came from Iran…) – among them: Western civilization as we know it; the first man to fly and safely land was a Turk (in the 17th century; unusual for these stories seem to go is the fact that they admit he used Da Vinci’s design for a flying machine, although from the way I’ve heard the story it sounds like he strapped on wings and launched himself out of a slingshot – the real miracle of the story is that he made it across the Bosphorus in one piece); also, apparently, some general who was the origins of the Greek and Roman military system was also from Anatolia (never mind that the Turks themselves didn’t come to Anatolia until the 10th century AD).

At any rate. Troy. The reason for my side note into the idea of Turkey taking credit for everything (a fine Greek tradition, or is it Iranian?) is that never, once, during today’s lecture was it suggested that the currently exploited site at Hasirlik might not be the actual site of the Troy of lore. A lot of archaeologists (maybe about half) don’t think it is. And this has something to do with a lovely, lovely gentleman named Heinrich Schliemann, a German who fancied himself an archaeologist in the 19th century. He heard the stories about treasure to be found in the Aegean, and looking to make himself a quick buck, er, mark, went off to Greece. He married a local woman and together they went and found the supposed Death Mask of Agammemnon (which is actually too early to have been his), excavated at Crete, and then came to Hacirlik where he did his real damage.

As I mentioned earlier, the alleged Troy is in 9 layers – think of it as a finally made layer cake. Now think of Schliemann as a 6 year old boy who comes and puts his hand in the cake and roots around until he finds something he likes, licks his fingers, and walks away. The gold he found – which he called Priam’s Treasure and put on his wife in a photograph that’s sold in every postcard shop in this part of the Aegean – is a thousand years too old for Priam to have seen it. Where’d it come from? Who knows – he claims to have found it in a bag lodged into the wall, which is almost certainly a lie. Equally intriguing is how much he got fined for smuggling it out of the country – 10,000 gold francs by the Sultan, and then he had to pay another 40,000 to the antiquities department who used it to start the archaeological museum in Istanbul. He got to keep the gold, which got lost during the second world war and resurfaced after Perestroika in Russia. It’s now in the Pushkin Museum, and the tug of war between Ankara and Moscow is rivaled only by Athens’ efforts to get the Elgin Marbles back from the British Museum, and it’s meeting with the same amount of success.

Following the visit to Troy, we stopped outside the site at one of the inevitable bookshop/restaurant/tourist shlock stores where we stumbled across a party for a boy who was about to be circumcised (you could tell that it was pre-circumcision because he was still capable of dancing…) It’s a bit rite of passage in Turkey, still, and he was proudly wearing his costume and when it was time to go, he climbed up into the seat of honor on the truck. Poor kid – clearly no one told him what was coming next. No man with any idea of what was about to happen would appear that enthusiastic, I don’t care how many people are showing up with money…

Then we went into Çanakkale because some of the folks wanted to shop, but we all forgot what day of the week it is, so there wasn’t much open. Laura, Rob, and I wandered around the city – it’s cute, even with all the shops closed – before group lunch and back to the hotel. Tomorrow we’re going over to Gallipoli, which ought to be sobering, and then on to Istanbul. It will be nice to be back in a big city again…