Day 25 - Çanakkele -> Troy -> Pergamom -> Kusadasi

As I sat down to write about the day in my hotel room in Kusadasi, a coastal town about 8 hours from Istanbul by car, I heard about the terror attack in Istanbul Airport on TV. Turkey tourism has been severly hurt from the terror attacks in the past few years. The tour that I'm on, at it's peak, would be a group of 40 people on a large bus. But now it's been whittled down to 9 people in a smaller van. Our guide said his tour company has sold off all of their large buses, because they don't really see it picking up any time soon. In some cities, more than 60% of the hotels have closed down. With this latest attack, Turkey has been dealt a huge blow to their tourism economy.

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This morning, we started off the day visiting the ancient city of Troy, famous for Homer's Illiad and Oddessey. I learned that there has been 9 cities of Troy, all built on top of one another. The Trojan War was fought on the 6th Troy. The 7th and 8th Troys were of Greek, and the 9th Troy was Roman.

The signposts identify the layers of Troy (I - IX).

Diagram showing the 9 layers of Troy.

Carefully excavated sections of Troy

The actual horse used to enter Troy, disguised as a gift from the Athenians. 

There's a whole story about this Austrian "archaeologist" who merely wanted the treasure, and essentially wrecked the whole excavation site to find the treasure. Once he found it, he quickly packed up the treasure, left the site in ruins, and made it a lot more difficult for the real archaeologists to do a proper excavation. He sent most of the treasure to Germany. When Russians sacked Berlin in WWI, half of the Trojan treasures "disappeared" and the other half are now displayed in St. Petersburg. When Turkey asked for these treasures back, the Russians' response is, "We didn't take anything from Turkey."

Next site was Pergamon, one of the great Greek cities on Anatolia, but under Roman rule. It held the second largest library in antiquity (the first being the one in Alexandria), and they also started the book format that we still use today (as opposed to the scroll format of Egypt), mainly because they developed parchment for writing.

The acropolis is a Greek word: acro  meaning high, and polis meaning city. It just means a settlement in high ground, and isn't exclusive to the Acropolis of Athens that we all know about. Pergamon had an acropolis, and we visited that as the second part of our tour.

:wave:

The temples where the priests hung out

Temple of Trajan at the Acropolis of Pergamon.

I didn't know I'd be getting so much ancient Greek and Roman history with this tour, but so far the wealth of information has been amazing. To finish the day, the guide told us the story about the Turks: where they came from (the steppes in central asia), where they moved to (Anatolia) as the Seljuks, how they were forced to accept Islam as the arabs continually attacked them, and eventually rising back as the Ottoman Empire. It's a real complicated history, and I'm barely starting to grasp the main ideas.