Was The Trojan War real is still being tested at Hisarlik in Türkiye, where the site believed to be Troy remains under excavation. Rüstem Aslan has spent 40 years digging there, and the hilltop keeps yielding evidence instead of a final answer.
Rüstem Aslan at Hisarlik
Aslan, a professor at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, said the site’s preservation is unusual: “Nowhere in the Mediterranean do you have such well-preserved Late Bronze Age ruins, except Santorini, which was covered with ash”. He added, “The aura is so strong, [that] when Caesar visited Troy he said, ‘Every stone has a name,’” a line that captures how strongly the place has been tied to Homer’s world.
The excavation record is long. Over the past 160 years, work at Troy has uncovered walls, passages, streets, an amphitheater, and a destruction layer with burned material, skeletons, arrowheads, and slingstones. Archaeologists have assigned numbers to the settlement layers, and the site holds the remains of nine different cities that rose and fell over time.
Troy 6 and 7
The layers most often linked to Homer are Troy 6 and 7, which are thought to correspond to Priam’s Ilium, the setting for The Iliad. The site’s later name, New Ilium, reflects how the Greeks and Romans understood it. That historical continuity is part of why the hilltop outside Çanakkale remains the main candidate.
Eric Cline put the problem bluntly: “Honestly, there’s nothing that actually says it’s Troy,” even as he noted that the identification remains persuasive because “Geographically it fits. Archaeologically it fits. There’s even destroyed layers that fit the [Trojan War] time period.” His point is the heart of the debate: the case is strong, but the evidence stops short of proof.
What Hisarlik Still Holds
About 90 percent of the main site has been excavated, yet the ruins have not been reconstructed the way some other ancient places have been. Aslan said that difference leaves the remains closer to how archaeologists found them, which is why the site continues to draw readers interested in The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as visitors who want to see what can still be read from the ground itself.
The practical answer for anyone following the Troy story is simple: the excavation is not finished, and the strongest case for Troy still rests on layers, geography, and destruction evidence rather than a single item of proof. Until something more decisive appears, Hisarlik remains the place where the legend is being measured against the dirt.
