CHAPTER 14:  Turkey: Troy.

23 Nov, Tuesday

I leave my backpack at the pension with Arhman and take only my daypack with toilet articles, a change of underclothes, my black sweater and hiking jacket, mandarin oranges, and my camera. Catching the bus to Izmir is a breeze. 

A large statue of Artemis, which is at least three times my height, stands at the side of the highway. Large globular nodules cover Artemis’ midriff. The nodules have caused a controversy argued through the centuries. Some claim they are breasts, others, me among them, that they are bull’s testicles, a symbol of fertility. The shape is a dead giveaway. I stand at the edge of the road under this statue of Artemis until a bus comes by. I flag it down.

Halfway to Izmir, the rain starts. A dismal overcast day. Water stands in the streets and glistens on cars. Out my bus window, I see a herd of goats wandering a field of brown cotton stalks. Little tufts of cotton linger in the open bowls. The Turkish buses are even nicer than those in Greece, but they permit smoking. When someone next to me lights up, I suffocate.

The city of Izmir spreads along the shore of the deeply indented gulf, crisscrossed by freeways, more modern than any city I’ve seen on my journey. St. Paul and St. John were both in this city. It was called Smyrna then, and they started one of the seven Christian churches of Asia here. Not far inside the city, the bus exits the freeway, and we’re immediately caught in a traffic jam of major proportions at a roundabout outside the otogar.

I mill among the acres of buses trying to figure out which one goes to Canakkale, the small town north of Troy where I hope to spend the night. A young man walks up to me. I say “Canakkale,” and he motions for me to follow him, takes me to a shed covering rows of huge buses where another man makes a telephone call, and shortly a third man arrives to walk me through the hordes of people to the ticket counter. The ticket agent tells me 70,000 lira, and I try to negotiate with him as my guidebook says I should, but he won’t budge. Instead, he’s offended and will no longer talk to me. The man next to him takes pity on me, tells me my bus number and where to catch it, that it will leave at 12:30.

I stand with a crowd, loud-talking Turks, many in suits, some in leather jackets, women in head rags and long dresses. I’m still shaken from the ticket agent's reaction . When I try to get on the bus, the other passengers stop me.

A man checks my ticket and says, “Change bus.” “No,” I tell him, “I paid for a ride on this bus and I’m getting on.” After witnessing Bronwyn and Richard’s difficulties yesterday, I’m certain these people are simply trying to get me to use another bus line. I try to get on again, but a woman grabs my shirt and pulls me off. Finally a man shows me with arm motions that this bus will pull out and another will take its place. The new bus will go to Canakkale. They’re all trying to help, and of course I’m like Richard from Cincinnati yesterday, arrogant, antagonistic, and determined to have things my way.

When the new bus pulls into the space, it has a big sign on the front “Truva” (Troy) and below it “Canakkale.” No one tries to stop me from getting on the new bus, but I have difficulty finding my seat. A young Turkish woman notices my confusion and speaks to me in broken English. I thank her, and she smiles like I’ve never been smiled at before. It’s an exotic smile, beautiful, dark, mysterious. She sits a couple of seats from me. Romantic fantasies combust but drift gradually from dreams of love to confrontation with a Turkish man. I imagine him to be full of hatred over my love for the Turkish woman. I fantasize a physical struggle, violence. I kill him with a barrage of lefts and rights.

A woman paws at my arm, and my murderous fantasy evaporates. I don’t understand her question, so she speaks German. “Schreiben,” she says. She wants to borrow my pen. But my thoughts drift back to the girl and my imagined confrontation. Recently an undercurrent of anger has surfaced as fantasies of violence.

Back on the freeway, the bus turns north at the waterfront, and we’re one lane from the Aegean. At the dock, ghostlike cranes off-loading cargo gawk about in dense fog. We zip past dilapidated houses, yellow walls, red crumbling tile, more sea, more rain. The wet swish of cars. Another dock, more cranes, land, trees, light poles, power lines, apartment buildings, billboard after billboard, clotheslines, laundry. Inside the bus, the wail of Turkish music. More apartments, spiked spires standing tall and religious, old trucks, a garbage dump, a Shell service station, an intersection with stoplight.

The bus stops at the intersection, and I watch the pedestrians crossing the street, in and out of shops. The bus stars again, and I see a Kosem Kiraat Hanesi, more shops. We stop at another stoplight, rain. The bus windows fog, the quiet murmur of Turkish voices. Three lanes of clogged traffic. We start to move again. Trucks with tarps line the roadside. Sea again, eucalyptus trees, four lanes now separated by a median, a lumberyard, a mountain of used tires, a vacant field of wet brown grass, the Aegean through dilapidated buildings. All this on the way out of Izmir, Smyrna, where the giant of Greek literature, Homer, was born.

The steward walks through the bus with a bottle of cologne and dumps a large splash into each person’s hands. I don’t get my hands up in time and get a couple of drops on my clothes. The bus smells like a beauty parlor. He passes through the bus again, passes out small cellophane packets of raisin bread, ETi kek Uzumlu.

The rain has stopped and the windows are dry, but streaks of mud remain. I see blue sky to the west but an ominous cloud bank to the north, where we’re headed. The young woman, who smiled at me, gets up from her seat and closes two circular vents in the ceiling of the bus. She’s even more beautiful than I thought. It’s turned cold. I haven’t been cold since I left Patmos. A road to Kozak cuts through a green field to the right. Olive orchards line the road and cover the rolling hills as far as I can see.

We pass a turnoff west to Ayvalik, where the warm-weather ferry goes to Lesbos, the isle where the great Greek poetess Sappho lived. The mountains of Lesbos are silhouettes in the distance, twenty kilometers away. I hope to be in Lesbos in less than a week.

We round the top of a hill and descend into the small town outside Bergama. The bus pulls into a roadside stop. In antiquity, this region of the coast was called Mysia. The Greek’s first attempt to siege Troy went awry here. They attacked Mysia by mistake and were driven back by Telephos, the grandson of Heracles.[1] Thersander, son of Polyneices and grandson of Oedipus who had recently destroyed Thebes, was the only one to stand his ground against Telephos, and even though he died as a result he was known as the bravest of the Greek warriors. Achilles wounded Telephos as the Greeks retreated, and the thigh wound would not heal. Telephos went to Delphi seeking a cure, and the oracle told him the wound could only be healed by rust from the wounding sword. Telephos sought out Achilles, and after being healed, agreed to guide the Greeks to Troy.

The bus leaves the roadside stop. Haze shrouds the horizon, but the copper-coin sun is still too bright to look at as it dives toward the blue-gray Aegean, where silver-edged waves rush the sandy shore. Olive trees come between us and the sea. Glistening olive orchards climb rolling hills. Wind has shaped the trees here, bowed them inland.

Mt. Ida looms to the right, where Zeus, father of gods, and men watched Paris duel Menelaus for Helen until Paris showed his cowardice and ran to the security of the walls of Troy. The rumble and shimmy of the bus, the wail of Turkish music, the murmur of obscure voices. We turn inland, the bus struggling with the grade, up a boulder-filled ravine covered with olive trees, a switchback, a momentary view of the white-capped sea far below, and suddenly, huge firs looming between us and the cliff. Bushes line the side of the road, yellow, orange, red. Heavy clouds sitting on the rocky peak just above us. A naked pine trunk topped with a bonnet of green needles. Maple trees dressed in bright orange. Window dirt set aglow by sunlight.

The bus turns left into the setting sun, past farms and into the middle of a forest and the small town of Ayvacik. The windows fog again. A short stop and we’re on our way back to the main road. The time on the big red LED clock above the driver’s head reads 16:47. A road sign points off to the left, Truva. We whiz on past toward Canakkale.

The dawn of the Bronze Age brought a demand for metals to the Aegean world. Asia and in particular the Black Sea region was a primary source for copper and iron. Ancient Troy, located at the mouth of the strait of the Dardanelles, prospered as a result of the traffic in metals.[2] Troy sat on a hill overlooking the mouth of the strait which flows with water from all over eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, coming by way of the Black Sea.[3]

The Don river[4] originates in the central Russian upland, cuts a lazy path through the Ukraine, the bread basket of the former Soviet Union where the famous Don Cossacks lived, eventually emptying into the Sea of Azov at the port town of Rostov. The Sea of Azov is shallow, fourteen meters deep at its maximum, and separated from the Black Sea by a large peninsula, the Crimea, known to the ancients as the Tauric Cheronese which was visited by Orestes. He came to the temple of Artemis where his older sister, Iphigenia was a priestess of Artemis following her narrow escape from being sacrificed by her father at Aulis. Water from the Sea of Azov flows through the Kerch strait into the Black Sea.

The Dniester river[5] drains the north slope of the Carpathian mountains and the southwestern Ukraine, meandering for 1,400 kilometers before dumping into the Black Sea. The Black Sea’s other primary source is the Danube,[6] the most important river in southeastern Europe. It originates in the Black Forest of Germany and flows for 3,000 kilometers through Austria, the Czech Republic, along the Slovakian boarder, through Hungary, across the northeastern edge of Serbia, and along the Romanian-Bulgarian boarder where it dumps into the Black Sea.

Many famous stories of Greek mythology are set on the far eastern coast of the Black Sea at the mouth of the Phasis river. Jason and the Argonauts retrieved the golden fleece from Colchis, a city on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. This, to the ancient Greeks, was the edge of the world. The fleece was nailed to a giant oak in the sacred grove of Ares, the Greek god of war, and guarded by an unsleeping dragon. Among Jason’s crew on the good ship Argo were Theseus who later became the king of Athens, Mopsus the son of Manto and grandson of Teiresias, and Orpheus, Homer’s direct ancestor,[7] who possessed superhuman gifts in music and song. In Colchis, Jason fell in league with the evil sorceress and murderess, Medea. Also in the Caucasus mountains on the untrodden Scythian tract north of the Black Sea, Prometheus was chained upon a “high-beetling crag” and suffered for thirty thousand years the torment of having his liver devoured by an eagle during the day and freezing temperatures at night.

All this water from the Black Sea either evaporates or dumps westward into the Sea of Marmara through the Basporus strait[8] at Istanbul, which the Greeks still call Constantinople. In turn, the Sea of Marmara dumps into the Aegean through the sixty kilometer strait of the Dardanelles. The strait was named for Dardanus, the first ancestor of the Trojans. His city, Dardania, was just south of Canakkale. His grandson, Tros, named the entire region after himself when he became king. Homer knew the Dardanelles as the fish-filled strong-stream of Hellespont.

Water through the Dardanelles, strangely enough, flows in both directions simultaneously. The top sixty-four meters of rapid surface current flows from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara, but below, the water is colder, heavier and more saline and flows into the Aegean. The narrows of the Dardanelles is one kilometer across at Canakkale. The name Canakkale comes from the Turkish word canak which means “pot,”  but pottery is no longer the central industry in the city. The Dardanelles is rich in fish because of migration from the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. The strait is full of red mullet, salmon, bream, sturgeon, herring. Canakkale is the center of the fish canning industry in northwestern Turkey.

Just south of Canakkale are the ruins of Troy, strategically located on the southern coast of the Dardanelles on a hill called Hisarlik (Turkish for “place of fortress”[9] but known by some as “Hill of Doom”[10]) overlooking its Aegean entrance. Historians have speculated that the Trojan War was not actually fought over a woman but for control of the Dardanelles.

Even though Hellespont was of considerable commercial and strategic importance, according to Homer the Greeks laid siege to Troy for a woman, Helen. And even though Hellespont was teeming with fish, it was the feminine commodity that occupied the Greeks, for they not only seiged Troy but many of her allies as well, slowly destroying all Troy’s support over a ten year period. Perhaps the most telling lines of the Greek’s motivations according to Homer are spoke by Achilles:

Many a sleepless night I’ve spent afield  
and many a day in bloodshed, hand to hand
in battle for the wives of other men.
In sea raids I plundered a dozen towns,
eleven in expeditions overland
through Trojan country ...[11]

It was a harvest of women, the Greeks warriors casting nets of war and retrieving the wives of other men.

Canakkale is dark and cold. I break open Let’s Go before exiting the packed bus to get directions to a hotel. Darkness hangs on this place like a disease. Canakkale is a bustling metropolis, lit only by shop windows, neon signs, car lights. People scurry in all directions and cars streak off to everywhere. I walk through the doors into the otogar, through the waiting room and out the front door into the wet street. A few blocks later I’m staring across the dark, rapidly-moving current of the Dardanells at the sprinkle of lights of Kilitbahir on the opposite bank.

I walk a few meters down the street, past a restaurant with the smells of dinner escaping through the door. I’m so hungry, it’s difficult to walk past. I spot the Hotel Amzek only a few meters further. The man behind the desk says the rooms are heated, so I take one with a private bath. My room has a heater on the far wall and is almost warm.

I flop my daypack on the bed, go back outside and walk the few meters to the restaurant in the bitter cold. Everything on their menu is displayed in the restaurant window. A young formally-dressed couple are the only ones in the place. They look to be about fifteen, possibly brother and sister, but professional and strikingly handsome. The young, thin dark-haired man sets the table for me. I have spicy-hot meatballs, beef stew, rice, bread and bottled water. Price 53,000 lira ($3.75). A green pepper in the beef stew scalds my insides.

I wake in the middle of the night from a long nightmarish dream about work. My coworkers laugh at me quitting my job over something trivial. After thinking it over, I go back to the program manager and asked for my job back.

The first word in Homer’s Iliad, is Mhnin, anger, wrath, and it’s the wrath of Achilles of which the muse sings. If the ten year siege of Troy and her allies is the tale of Helen, The Iliad, which concerns only fifty days[12] in the ninth year, is the tale of two women, Chryseis and Briseis. Chryseis was from the tiny island of Chryse, just off the Trojan coast. This island no longer exists and, according to Pausanias, sank into the sea sometime in the 1st Century BC.[13] Briseis was from Lyrnessus, an inland city in Mysia. Achilles plundered both cities and took all the women. Agamemnon had taken Chryseis as his concubine, and he valued her above his own wife, Klytemnestra. But her father, who was himself a priest of Apollo, wanted his daughter returned. Apollo sent a hail of arrows, which had their worldly manifestation as plague, to decimate the Greek forces, but Agamemnon refused to release the girl. Achilles chided him until finally Agamemnon relented, but he demanded recompense and took Achilles concubine, Briseis, to replace her. Thus the wrath of Achilles, who then returned to his ship and refused to fight. The Iliad opens, not with murderous demonstrations by the greatest warrior of all time on the battlefield, but with him retiring to his boat to sulk like a spoiled child. His sulk would cost many Greek lives. Only when his best friend was killed on the battlefield did Achilles return to the fighting. Agamemnon finally returned Briseis and sweetened the pot for Achilles by throwing in seven of the world’s most beautiful women from Lesbos. Such was the commerce determining the flow of events in the Trojan War.

But Achilles' sulk was destructive to both him and his fellow warriors. Although in my case it wasn’t over a woman, I too recently ruined my career to sulk. I was working on the Earth resources experiment that will fly on the Space Shuttle this next April. I had been promised a position, to become Technical Manager over our entire project, second in command to the Program Manager, but instead I was called in one morning and told the position had been given to another man. I didn’t fly into a rage as I had that evening in Munich two years earlier. I simply announced I would leave the project, much as Achilles left the war. I had them in a bind. The project was pushed to the wall with technical, budgetary and schedule problems. My experience working NASA programs was critical, and when I left to sulk, NASA took what we had completed, pulled the rest of the program in-house and canceled our contract.

The earth resources radar will still fly aboard the Space Shuttle this coming April and much of the hardware will be ours. Some would say I over estimate my value to the project, but my quitting was a big factor in NASA’s decision to cancel our contract. I did it because of Mhnin, anger, wrath. I went to work on a Star Wars contract that was later canceled when we got a new president in Washington. I was laid off.

24 Nov, Wednesday

Up very early. It’s still dark out, but the sound of rain floods my room here in Canakkale, water gushing from the eves of the hotel, lights from shops glistening in puddles. The wind comes in great swells, rattling shutters and slinging great waves of rain.

At seven-thirty I go downstairs to have breakfast, but the dinning room is dark and empty, the help still setting tables. I go back to my room and sit on the bed looking out into the drenched darkness. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I wanted to be back in Seljuk, so I could celebrate with another American or two but now wonder if I might have to stay here another day for my visit to Troy. Sarah was suppose to return to Seljuk late yesterday from Istanbul. The possibility of seeing her again weighs heavy.

I bundle up in every piece of warm clothing I brought in my daypack, long-sleeved undershirt, long-sleeved button shirt, thick black sweater, all under my hiking jacket, the hood pulled over my head. The rain has let up, but wind still comes in great waves. I walk away from the coast to the main street we came in on last night, spot a small square with several minibuses and look for one to Truva. None in sight. A taxi driver comes up to me, “Truva?” he asks. “No thanks,” I say. I certainly don’t want a taxi when I can get a bus for a fraction of the fair. “Truva bus, two blocks,” he says, pointing on down the street. I’ve misread another person who is only trying to help.

The shabby otogar sits on a street corner in a field of mud. I enter uneasily because it’s besieged with dark, severe-looking Turks, and not a tourist in sight. I’ve never felt so conspicuous. My dark-purple hiking jacket stands out like a neon sign. Why they’re all huddled in the otogar is a mystery. No one leaves on a bus. They’re all crowded about the tables as if with friends, but no one smiles. I feel out of place, vulnerable, and finally can’t take it anymore. I go back outside to huddle against the building, beaten by wind and a fine rain, watch the line of minibuses parked along side the street. Finally a driver shows, and I board a minibus with the sign “Truva” on the front. Other Turks board with me, but it won’t start, so they pile out to push.

A few kilometers back toward Izmir, the minibus turns west, off the main road. After a ride through desolate, grass-covered fields with the windshield wipers flapping and the Turks chattering comfortably, the driver stops at a closed tourist shop. 

A long paved driveway with conspicuous, unnecessary sidewalks leads into the distance, seemingly to nowhere. No other human beings in sight. I step outside and stand, reluctant to close the sliding door. “Truva?” I ask pointing down the lane. “Truva,” he confirms. “Next bus?”  I ask. He answers, “Three hours, return Canakkale.” Resistantly, I close the door and start my one kilometer walk through light rain. I see the outline of a dark horse standing above the trees at the site.

After the Greeks first attempt to find Troy and the aborted, disastrous landing in Mysia, their ships were scattered by bad weather, and they returned to Argos. They reassembled at Aulis, off the eastern coast of Attica, and this time Telephos, who had been healed of his thigh wound by Achilles, led them to Troy. Homer provides a list of those participating in the war. From just the areas of Greece I’ve visited, here is the number of ships and the names of the commanders who fought under Agamemnon.  Athens, Athena’s city, fifty ships, Menestheus commanding. The Boiotians, including Lower Thebes (the Kadmia had just been burned to the ground by the “Sons of the Seven”) and Haliartos, one hundred twenty ships, Peneleos, Leitos, Arkesilaos, Prothoenor, and Klonios captains. The Phokians, including Delphi, Apollo’s oracle, forty black ships, led by Skhedios and Epistrophos. Ithaka and Samos, twelve good ships, led by Odysseus. Argos, including Epidauros, eighty black ships, commanded by Diomedes. Mycenae and Corinth, one hundred ships, commanded by Agamemnon. Sparta, home of Helen, sixty ships, led by Menelaus. Crete, including Knossos and Phaestos, eighty black ships, commanded by Idomeneus. Rhodes, nine ships, commanded by Tlepolemos. The total of ships from all over Greece was said to be a thousand.[14]

Just inside the entrance, beside the museum, stands the gigantic Trojan horse, made of dark wood and standing ten meters into the dreary sky. The reconstruction of the horse followed the inscriptions on ancient Greek vases and descriptions found in ancient writings.[15]

It still seems overdone, Hollywoodish with it’s house with windows sitting astride it like a saddle. I leave the horse and walk up a slight incline, up a set of shallow steps. Before me stands the hill called Hisarlik and the ruins of Troy, besieged by a driving wind. It’s cold, but not bitter cold or I’d have to turn back. Only two other people are here at the site, a young woman with long brown hair dressed in black jeans and purple sweater. With her is a young man with bushy-brown hair and full beard, Paul Bunyan-like, hunkered under a large backpack.

Instead of descending the steps into the ruins, I walk to the right where archaeologist have piled their dirt forming a mound above the ruins. Off to the left and below me stand the stone walls of Troy.

A flat plane lies before me, quilted with brown plowed fields and deep-green squares roamed by cattle. Beyond this plane, a small patch of water glistens blue, the mouth of the Dardanelles.

In antiquity, just inside the southern lip of the strait, the Greeks grounded their boats in a small, quiet harbor. But in the 3200 years since the Trojan War, the sea has receded five kilometers from where the Greeks beached.

Similar to Ephesus, the harbor has filled with alluvial deposits from the Scammander river, which runs to the west of Hisarlik, and the Simoin river, which runs to the east, the two now meeting in the plane before dumping into the Dardanelles. Their traces are barely visible. The sea’s retreat has reduced the bay to a fertile, cultivated plane, some fields covered with brown cotton stalks, a rather startling reminder of the farm on which I was raised, where my father, brothers and I labored daily in the cotton fields.

After Achilles left the battlefield to sulk, Agamemnon had to rally the demoralized troops to fight the Trojans without their most fearsome warrior. Agamemnon cut a striking presence:

          Agamemnon’s lordly mien  
was like the mien of Zeus whose joy is lightning;
oaken-waisted as Ares, god of war,
he seemed, and deep-chested as Lord Poseidon;
and, as a great bull in his majesty
towers supreme amid a grazing herd ...[16]

Although Agamemnon may have resembled Ares on the battlefield, his help from above did not come from the god of war. Ares was on the side of the Trojans. Besides, Ares was no good at war even when accompanied by his two offspring by his mistress Aphrodite, Phobos and Deimos, “Fear” and “Panic,” who drove their father’s chariot. Athena kicked Ares' butt at every encounter. Even his father, Zeus, didn’t care for him. After Athena hit him in the belly and a mortal wounded him, Ares ran from the battlefield to Zeus who had this response:  

Do not come whining here, you two-faced brute,
most hateful to me of all the Olympians.
Combat and brawling are your element.[17]

Like the vision of the Virgin Mary leading the troops, Athena was Agamemnon’s ally, and as he mustered the warriors for another assault on the walls of Troy, she provided the inspiration:  

                                 And Agamemnon,  
marshal of the army, turned at once,
telling his criers to send out shrill and clear
to all Akhaian troops the call to battle.
The cry went out, the men came crowding, officers
from their commander’s side went swiftly down
to form each unit--and the gray-eyed goddess
Athena kept the pace behind them, bearing
her shield of storm, immortal and august,
whose hundred golden-plaited tassels, worth
a hekatomb each one, floated in air.
So down the ranks that dazzling goddess went
to stir the attack, and each man in his heart
grew strong to fight and never quit the melee,
for at her passage war itself became
lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing
in the decked ships to their own native land.[18]

Here Athena is the very essence of the Virgin Mary as seen socially, the leader of a mighty army of spiritual warriors ready to do battle with the forces of evil.

I crowd to the edge of the hill, look down the uneven slope and try to imagine Achilles chasing Hektor three times round the walls of Troy before he finally stopped to fight. Hektor, eldest son of King Priam and the Trojan’s fearless leader in battle, knew he had no chance against Achilles. The most touching scene in Homer’s narrative of the war occurs when Hektor left the battlefield and entered the city walls to get his cowardly brother Paris to rejoin the fighting. Paris, who caused the war in the first place, was in bed entwined in the arms and legs of Helen. After Paris agreed to return to the foray, Hektor returned himself but was stopped by his warmhearted wife, Andromache, and a nurse carrying his baby boy. Andromache called to him just before he left the fortress to the south through the Skaian Gate. The interaction between Hektor, his infant son, and his wife is what I find so touching:  

... Hektor held out his arms
to take his baby. But the child squirmed round
on the nurse’s bosom and began to wail,
terrified of his father’s great war helm--
the flashing bronze, the crest with horsehair plume
tossed like a living thing at every nod.
His father began laughing, and his mother
laughed as well. Then from his handsome head
Hektor lifted off his helm and bent
to place it, bright with sunlight, on the ground.  

When he had kissed his child and swung him high
to dandle him ...
into his dear wife’s arms he gave his baby,
whom on her fragrant breast
she held and cherished, laughing through her tears.

Hektor pitied her now. Caressing her,
he said: “Unquiet soul, do not be too distressed
by thoughts of me. You know no man dispatches me
into the undergloom against my fate ...”
He stooped now to recover his plumed helm
as she, his dear wife, drew away, her head
turned and her eyes upon him, brimming tears.[19]

Hektor rejoined the battle, and the confrontation with Achilles. Three times round the walls Achilles chased him, Hektor thinking of his wife and child, before he stopped and Achilles killed him.

When I was a child, a violent event occurred, which almost deprived me of my father. It occurred in our front yard. When I was eight, just before we moved into the old home that burned to the ground, my aunt’s husband came over one dark evening to kill my father. He was the uncle who beat his kids and the man my father had gone to see to stop the abuse. The evening he came to our home, my father must have anticipated something because he told my mother to stay inside when my uncle stood in the driveway and called my father out. My father didn’t run three times around the house to avoid him.

As my father approached, my uncle told him, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this.” The story was, my uncle had once whipped four sailors at once. My father grabbed him by the tie with his left hand and with his right fist beat him senseless. When they tried to put him in the backseat of his car to drive him home, piss ran out his boots, and as my father stooped to pull them off to empty them, he noticed a wetness around his own midsection and discovered my uncle had stabbed him in the abdomen. He really had come to kill my father. What followed was a frantic chase to the hospital, emergency surgery and a long wait. The doctor came to my mother and told her the knife had penetrated to my father’s stomach. “To but not through,” he said. And thus my father lived.

But Achilles didn’t live to see the siege of Troy either. He was killed by an Apollo-assisted arrow from the bow of cowardly Paris, who let loose his evil-plumed missile from within the safety of Troy's walls. Achilles, son of the mortal Peleus, was born to the goddess Thetis, a Neread. Achilles was mortal, so Thetis took him to the Underworld and dipped him in the river Styx to make him invulnerable to injury. But she held him by the heal which left him weak in that single spot, thus the infamous “Achilles Heal.” Paris’ arrow hit him in the heal, and he died from the unhealing wound. Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was then enlisted to take his place. Neoptolemus was among the forces when they succeeded in siegeing Troy.

After ten years, the Greeks routed the Trojans on the battlefield but still couldn’t penetrate the walls of the fortress. In one last desperate enterprise, Odysseus, the man of many wiles, inspired by Athena, came up with the Trojan-horse scheme. They built a gigantic horse of pine from trees taken from Mt. Ida. They left the horse outside the city walls with a inscription dedicating it to Athena in hopes she would provide a safe trip home. Then they burned their tents and vacated the coast, sailing to the nearby island of Tenedos. They left a single warrior, Sinon, behind with the story that the Greeks had been intent on using him as a human sacrifice. He told the Trojans he escaped and lingered by the horse to join them. They tortured him to learn the truth but could not break him, though they cut off his ears and nose and burned him with fire. The Trojans came to believe him, and even though Priam’s daughter, Cassandra, prophesied their doom, they brought the horse inside the city walls. Cassandra was a seer also, one who titillated Apollo but refused his advances and was thus given the fate feared most by a seer, to never be believed.

During the night, Helen suspected what was afoot and lingered by the horse disguising her voice in the manner of the wives of the Greeks to chided those inside. But she didn’t give them away, and at midnight the Greek warriors came out of the horse, killed the guards and opened the gate, signaling their fellow warriors with torches to help them take the city.

I look beyond the battlefield, searching for a pale mountain in the distance. Poseidon watched the War from Fengari, a granite peak which is the highest in the Aegean, 1611 meters above sea level and seventy-eight kilometers away, on the island of Samothrace. Homer described Poseidon as  

                   Enthralled, watching the battle,
he sat on woody Samos’ highest ridge
off Thrace, whence Ida could be seen entire
and Priam’s town and the Akhaian ships.
He had climbed up from the salt sea ...[20]

The cloud cover prevents me from making out anything that far in the distance.

I leave the archeological mound, walk down the stone steps to the site, the crumbled foundation of the east tower and the sloping stone wall of the ancient city to my left, and the Dardanian gate in front of me.

This is the main gate to the ancient city. I'd imagined a magnificent entry, huge doors swinging on great hinges, but this is hardly more than the span of a man's arms wide. And obviously doorless. Still such a narrow entryway must have been easily defensible.

The stone walls which stand only four and one half meters high today stood thirteen in antiquity.[21] Now they still serve a purpose, shielding me from the wind. Sure enough, the walls are sloped just as depicted by Homer. The two young people, the guy with the Paul Bunyan beard and the girl with dark-brown hair, are loading their cameras with film while leaning against the sloping stone wall.

I stop to inspect a crack in the wall which was caused by an earthquake around the time Troy fell, and talk to them for a minute, thankful that the rain is no longer falling. We talk across a large puddle spanning the width of the dirt path. He’s an American and she’s from Australia. They met a few days ago and are hitchhiking through Turkey together. I caution them, saying all guidebooks talk against hitching, but he scoffs at me. “It’s as safe as being in a bus,” he says while sighting through his camera at me like he’s pointing a gun. She says they’re on their way to Ephesus after Troy, so I tell her I met several of her countrymen at the New Zealand pension in Seljuk. He shuts me up, saying they already know where they’re staying in Seljuk. He keeps standing in front of her like he’s trying to protect her from me. I wish them good day and move on.

I tiptoe through the mud at the edge of the puddle in front of the Dardanian Gate. The stone ruins to my left are old gray stones, moss-covered portions of walls sparsely populated with wind-swept oak trees. The hillside is covered with loose earth and brown  grass with new green grass showing through. The primary entrance to the city was formed by the overlap of a leaning rock wall to the left and the lip of a second wall to the right. The gap between the two is the Dardanian Gate, now undoored.

Through it and a turn to the left, up a set of steps and the ruins of the entire city of Troy lie before me. Gravel grits and crunches under my hiking boots. I look along a dead shrub-covered ravine cut into the slope of the hill to the plane of Simois, now a water-logged field.

I walk a second flight of steps and off to the left see the stone remains of houses, which in antiquity had wood columns supporting roof beams covered with mud, covered with branches. I imagine all this burning in a ferocious fire.

A horse skeleton was found here, a verification of Homer’s epithet, “horse-taming Trojans.”

Troy today is a partially reconstructed mountain of rubble 200 meters by 150 meters. Troy (or Ilium as it was also called, Iliad means poem of Ilium) was founded by Ilus who participated in the games of Phrygia,[22] winning at wrestling.

He was given fifty boys, fifty girls, a spotted cow and told by the oracle at Delphi to found a city where the cow laid down, similar to the story of Kadmos founding Thebes. Ilus followed the cow to a hill where she laid down and Ilus founded a city and named it for himself.[23] Troy prospered because of metallurgy practiced here and the transport of metals between the lower Danube through the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles into the Aegean.[24]

The siege of Troy by Agamemnon and his forces was not the first. Schliemann’s excavations uncovered nine cities dating back to the first bronze age city, which prospered from 3000-2500 BC.

It was built on bedrock thirty-two meters above the plane. Debris from the nine successive cities, some destroyed by earthquake others by fire, raised the tumulus another sixteen meters by the time Schliemann excavated it.[25] Homer’s Troy is believed to be either Troy VI (1800-1275 BC) or VII (1275-1100 BC). He excavated this site in 1870 during his mad search for King Priam’s treasure.

As I saw in Mycenae, Schliemann’s approach was to cut large trenches through the earth. He had caught gold fever in the hills of California during the gold rush, not far from my own hometown.

And here he found treasure in abundance. He assumed he had found Homer’s Troy, but in fact he had destroyed the remains of that city and found another even more ancient city, Troy II, which had been destroyed in 2200 BC. Schliemann destroyed much of Priam’s Troy in his frantic search for gold.

Alexander the Great came here in 334 BC to ruminate over Achilles, his ancestor.[26] Aeneas was a descendent of Dardanous, Tros and the brother of Ilus of whom Virgil would write in the Aeneid.

He was one of the Trojans who escaped death during the Trojan War. Aeneas resettled in Italy. His descendants founded Rome. Caesar came to Troy in 48 BC, walked the ground I’m now walking, and claimed to be a descendent of Aeneas. Perhaps blood from those fighting on both sides of this great war flows in all our veins.

For years, Menelaus had promised to kill his wife when he finally got his hands on her, but when he finally found her, his tune changed. Somewhere within all this rubble is where he finally found Helen:

Menelaus mid the inner chambers found
At last his wife, there cowering from the wrath
Of her bold-hearted lord. He glared on her,
Hungering to slay her in his jealous rage.
But ... powerless all
Was he to lift the sword against her neck,
Seeing her splendour of beauty. ...
All his great strength
Was broken, as he looked upon his wife.[27]

To save face, Menelaus promised to kill Helen when they returned home to Sparta.

With the city of Troy at last firmly in hand, the Greeks burned it:

The fire-glow upward mounted to the sky,
The red glare o’re the firmament spread its wings,
And all the tribes of folk that dwelt around
Beheld it, far as Ida’s mountain-crests,
And sea-girt Tenedos, and Thracian Samos.
And men that voyaged on the deep sea cried:
“The Argives have achieved their mighty task
After long toil for star-eyed Helen’s sake.
All Troy, the once queen-city, burns in fire...[28]

The Greeks slaughtered the men and took the women and children as slaves, but one great injustice was righted. Demophoon and Acamas, the sons of Theseus who had joined the forces against Troy, retrieved Aethra, Theseus’ mother. She had been kidnapped by Helen’s brothers years before when they retrieved Helen who had been kidnapped and raped by Theseus. Aethra had been enslaved by Helen and brought to Troy when she ran off with Paris. Aethra’s grandsons narrowly avoiding killing this aged and enslaved noble woman because they mistook her for Priam’s queen, Hekuba.

Andromache, Hektor’s comely wife, was allotted to dead Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus. Her small son, Astyanax, who Hektor loved so much was jerked from his screaming-mother’s arms and thrown to his death from a high rampart.

At the crown of the hill are the scattered remains of the temple of Athena, where, in the bedlam of the siege of Troy, Aias of Locris raped Cassandra, the virgin daughter of King Priam. Athena could not bare to look upon the act:

                        Yea, she would not look
Upon the infamy, but clad herself
With shame and wrath as with a cloak: she turned
Her stern eyes to the temple-roof, and groaned
The holy image, and the hallowed floor
Quaked mightily.[29]

But archaeologists have found no remains of Athena’s Mycenaean temple. The few marble blocks of ceiling coffers and fluted column bases and capitals are from Troy VIII and IX.[30]

On this high promontory, the wind is so strong I turn my back to it, lean into the gale-force wind, tighten my hood about my head.

Athena, enraged at the desecration of her temple by Aias’ rape of Cassandra and the failure of the Greek generals to do anything about it, elicited the help of Poseidon, who was aligned at the end with the Trojans, and her father Zeus in scattering the Greek ships as they tried to return home. They destroyed the treasure-laden Greek fleet:              Thousands perished; corpses thronged The great sea-highways: all the beaches were Too strait for them: the surf belched multitudes Forth on the land. The heavy-blooming sea With weltering beams of ships was wholly paced ...[31]

Those who didn’t die were sent wandering about the Mediterranean. Menelaus and Helen took seven years to return home, Odysseus ten. Athena let Agamemnon reach home, but his wife, Klytemnestra murdered him immediately for his sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis.

I wander back out of the ruins toward the entrance, stop at the museum to take a look around. They have a model of the ancient city as it must have appeared at the time of the Trojan War.

A much less formidable-looking construction than I'd imagined. The power of myth is incredible. The Trojan horse looms and darkly over me as I exit the site.

---

Early afternoon. I sit in the minibus at the end of the long driveway to the ruins of Troy waiting for the driver to come back, so I can get to Canakkale and catch a bus south. Out the minibus window I see the sun, pale as a moon, trying to break through a crack in the clouds. Shortly, the driver comes back with five other Turks, but the minibus won’t start so they try to jump it. Something is wrong with the ignition system. They have to push it again.   I sit here after seeing the most famous battlefield of all time, and I remember the one chance I had to go to war. The year was 1971. I had been in the Air Force for eight years and, at the time, was performing a stateside assignment supporting B-52’s that were being used to bomb the North Vietnamese. One morning, I came to work and on my desk found a postcard with orders stating that I was being sent to Vietnam.

The orders came at a bad time. My wife was sick, had been for several months with a life-threatening illness, and I asked for a six-month deferment. We had two small kids. I could have just gone on to Vietnam, in true military tradition, but my family meant a great deal to me, and I didn’t feel I could leave just then. I was shocked when word came back that I should apply for an “early-out.” I still had a six-year commitment and was planning to retire in the Air Force.

Since making the decision to leave the military, I have had a lot of guilt over not going to Vietnam. Particularly when I talk to those veterans who fought there. I’ve never been to war, but dreams of war have plagued my sleep. I’ve wondered how much of my motivation came from my family situation and how much from cowardice. It was my chance to see war first hand. I would have been stationed in Da Nang, which at the time was a safe place. But during my projected tour, the city would have come under heavy fire from the Vietcong.

---

The minibus travels a narrow dirt road through grass-covered rolling hills lined with fences made of piled brush. We come to a small village, honking to let people know the minibus is here. By mid afternoon, I’m back in Canakkale waiting at the otogar for the bus south. I have a long split-pita sandwich filled with goat meat from a turning spit, lettuce, red sauce and spices. I board the bus and shortly hear the chatter of a man behind the bus shouting directions to the bus driver as he backs up. The Turks are not too shabby when it comes to buses. This one is a Mercedes.

---

The scattering of my family has been devastating. First my wife left me for a doctor, and I left for San Diego. My son went off to college, and my daughter went to live with her mother. Actually, I’ve not been willing to tell the full story of the break between me and my daughter. I mentioned when I was in Rhodes that a young lady had moved in with me and my kids after my ex-wife moved out on her own. My ex-wife called one day, a screaming and crying telephone call, telling me to get that bitch out of the house. Well, the “bitch” didn’t leave. She stayed and we got married.

When I was interviewing for the job with General Dynamics, a problem arose between me and my second wife concerning my daughter going with us to San Diego to see if she would like to go to high school there. My daughter liked her stepmother, but my new wife was jealous of her and talked about her behind her back. The day before we were to leave for my interview, my new wife and I had a screaming and shouting argument about my daughter going with us. I’ve always felt that the argument was the big reason my daughter stayed in Phoenix. I never forgave my new wife for this outburst. I sold my home in Phoenix, and just before leaving, I walked into my daughter’s deserted bedroom and cried it full of tears. Then I drove to San Diego, alone.

The events leading up to my daughter’s disappearance occurred over the next two years. Though my daughter said she was staying in Phoenix with her mother to be with her friends, her mother moved to another area of Phoenix and my daughter had to change schools anyway. She became lonely and withdrawn. My calls to her revealed a growing sadness and isolation only relieved when her mother moved again, and my daughter was able to return to her old high school. But it wasn’t long before ominous stories of my daughter’s activities came from Phoenix, and I became more and more concerned about her.

The most telling of these incidents occurred when her best friend tried to burn down her parent’s apartment. Her father was beating her, and one night she poured a stripe of gasoline down the hall and set fire to it. The smoke woke her parents, thus the building and the lives of many people were saved. My daughter had been with her friend during the plotting stage of this act and would have helped her kill her parents if she had asked. My daughter told me so, rather heatedly. The police took her girlfriend into custody and my daughter was also taken to the police station but released later that evening. My ex-wife called from Phoenix the next day to relay the bizarre events, and I talked to my defiant daughter. I should have gone to Phoenix to assess the situation myself, but my job on the Shuttle Centaur program demanded every second of my attention, and my ex-wife said everything was under control. I used her confidence as my excuse for not going.

A couple of months later, my daughter’s girlfriend, who had been put in a juvenile detention center, ran away. My daughter seemingly accepted her friend’s disappearance with a certain philosophic resignation, but another event occurred a few months later when my daughter came to San Diego for Christmas that should have told me all was not well.

---

We’re nearing a wide spot in the road marking the junction east to Bergama, the ancient city of Pergamon. It’s turned dark, the night settling on the gentle Turkish coast like a soft carpet pricked by the bright jewels of car lights. I’m about to take a chance. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I left Canakkale. I would like to get back to Seljuk tonight, Sarah has been in my thoughts a lot the last couple of hours, but I have several reason’s for wanting to stop in Bergama. This coastal area, is where the Greeks first attempt to siege Troy went awry, mistaking Mysia and the town of Teuthrania for Troy. Telephos, the king of Teuthrania, repulsed the attack, killing Thersander in the process, but being wounded in the thigh by Achilles. Telephos then sought out Achilles at the advice of the Delphic oracle. After Achilles healed him with rust scraped from his sword, Telephos led the Greeks to Troy. A most unneighborly act.

Hektor’s wife also spent the end of her life here. Following the Siege of Troy, she was enslaved to Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. She became his concubine and bore him three son’s, one of whom she name Pergamus. When Agamemnon’s son Orestes, killed Neoptolemus at Delphi over Menelaus’ and Helen’s daughter Hermione, Andromache returned to the coast of Asia Minor and her son Pergamus captured Teuthrania and renamed it Pergamon. Pergamon is now named Bergama.

The bus parks face first into the roadside stop. I step tentatively off the bus into the dark wondering if I’m putting my life into the hands of some mad Turk. I’m eight kilometers from Bergama, and as the bus belches exhaust off south to Izmir, I feel lost and alone. I don’t see a ride in sight. The only car is a ‘60 Desoto parked with its tail to me, window light reflecting from the chrome bumper. An old man comes out of the building, waddles toward me, thick gray mustache, wrinkled black shirt open down the front, shirttail flapping the breeze. His baggy pants could have used a washing two months ago.

“Bergama,” I say, and he motions toward the Desoto shaking his head that he already knew where I’m going. As I get in, I see the big black word “DOLMUS” written in black letters across the top of the car. Ordinarily I would get to share this ride and fare with several other travelers, but tonight it’s just me.

[1]Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Vol. 1, tr. with an intro. by Peter Levi, New York: The Penguin Group, 1971, page 231.

[2]Finley M. I., Early Greece, The Bronze and Archaic Ages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981 (1970), page 8/9.

[3]The Black Sea was called the Euxine in antiquity.

[4]The Don river was called Tanais in antiquity.

[5]The Dniester river was called Borysthenes in antiquity.

[6]The Danube river was called Ister in antiquity.

[7]Guthrie, W. K. C., Orpheus and Greek Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952 (1993), page 26.

[8]Basporus means "Cow’s Ford" and was named for Io, ancestress of Argos, Thebes and Crete, and obsession of Zeus. She rejected him and, as protection, was turned into a cow by Hera. She was forced to wander throughout Greece. She crossed into Asia at the Basporus and visited Prometheus at the far edge of