Day 13: Troy

Day 13:  Cannakale – Troy – Kusadasi

We are finding that so far, our decision to stay with this particular tour company is proving successful.  It seems to be that we have paid the tour company to act as an agent for us and to book us on all the public buses that we need to get around, to find local mini buses where necessary to get us from hotels to bus stations etc and to find local tour guides to show us around the various sites.  They have booked and paid for everything:  the hotels, all the entrances, most of the meals, all the bus fares and the air fare back to Istanbul.  So far it has all just fallen into place without a hitch.  Once we arrived at Selcuk, the last ciy before Kusadasi, which was to be our final destiation for today,  we had a few minutes in which we wondered if we were about to be picked up or not, but a phone call to the tour company and were on our way again. 

We are much more impressed with our Kusadasi hotel.  It is a  5 star and very nice indeed.  We are here for 2 nights, so are pleased it is so good.

Thismorning we visited Troy in the morning.  Again it was a local guide – in fact a guy who has a shop only a kilometre or two from Troy who showed us around.  His knowledge of Troy ,  the various stories behind the archeological digs and the eight different reconstructions of Troy was just about as impressive as Bill’s knowledge of Gallipoli.  Again, I felt that I learned so much more and so I was far more interested in it than I remember being in 2000.   Robyn, Damien and Roger were also impressed with Troy, so again that was pleasing.

Troy, the city of wooden horse fame, is one which was originally built around 3000BC.  From then until around 500AD, several times the city was destroyed by earthquakes, war, fire and the like.  Each time, it was rebuilt, basically on top of where the ruins of the last city were.  Archeological digs have found no fewer than 9 different cities – each on top of the last and more extensive than the last.  Of course, over 3,500 years, several civilizations have been the occupiers of Troy.  It started with people from the Bronze age, then there are ancient Greek buildings, then ancient Roman buildings and finally Byzantium buildings.  The Greek writer Homer, in writing the Iliad and the Odessy, wrote extensively about Troy.   It is in one of these books (the Iliad I think) that the story of the Trojan Horse is written.   However the city was assumed to be mythical until, in 1871, a German archeologist found what he believed to be the site of Troy, obtained permission from the then Ottoman Empire of Turkey, and proceeded to carve great excavation channels through the area, destroying much of it and plundering the gold that he found.   The great treasures of gold made their way to Greece then Germany but were taken by the Russians at the time of WW11.   They are currently in a museum in Moscow and the Turkish government is trying to have them brought back to Turkey.

I think that having a local guide, who maybe hasn’t Hakan’s  general knowledge about Turkey, but who has indepth knowledge of their own particular area, is a great way to go.  (Hakan is the Turkish travel guide who my dad was great friends with and who guided all the tours that Dad took to Turkey, including my tour in 2000.)  We found this on the cruise too.  At each town or city, we had local guides who could really “sell’ their particular part of Europe and then we had Csaba who was the tour director for the overall tour.  It worked very well.

A quick word about the weather.  We have well and truly left the snow behind.  Here in Turkey it is really quite warm.  It would be around 17-19 degrees and really quite muggy.

Having looked around Troy, we were deposited at the bus station where we caught the bus to Selcuk and then Kusadasi.  We were a total of 6 hours on the bus, so were obviously very glad to arrive in Kusadasi.