Tourists descend on the sleepy Turkish town of Canakkale at all hours to gawp at the Hollywood star — a 12-tonne fibreglass horse, held together with bolts, ropes and nails, which dominates the seafront.
It was a gift from Warner Brothers and a small consolation for the fact that Troy, the $200-million blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, was not made in Turkey.
Troy may have bombed at the box office but, in Turkey, the film has put Homer’s ”well-walled city” back on the tourist map.
”We’re very happy that Troy was made. It’s been great advertising,” said Ismail Kansiz, the Canakkale regional director of tourism and culture. ”Everybody now knows about our town and Truva [the Turkish name for the ancient site of Troy, about 30km to the south].”
Since the film’s release this year, tourists eager for a glimpse of Homer’s ”vast, untilled and mountain-shirted plain” have flocked to the site. Among them was Barbara Kapetanaki, an Athenian pensioner on a two-week pilgrimage to western Turkey’s classical and Hellenistic ruins.
”The film made the Greeks look like fools,” she fumed as a local guide pointed to the grassy knoll where the swift-footed Achilles ”in all probability” speared Hector to death.
”It was very disappointing; full of inaccuracies,” Kapetanaki added in disgust. ”That’s why I wanted to come and see Troy — the place where it all happened.”
Archaeologists may grumble that the film bears little resemblance to the craggy hill town now widely believed to be Homer’s ”windy Troy”. Even worse, say scholars, is the way the movie’s 157-page script has ransacked the Iliad, the 15,693-line poem that charted the Trojan war in 1250 BC.
But sales of the epic have surged. And locals in Canakkale, a seven-hour drive from Istanbul, are revelling in the new-found attention.
After years of being little more than a base for those visiting Gallipoli and other World War I landing sites on the Dardanelles strait, the town will soon get several new hotels because of the boom.
”We’ll certainly be using the film to promote tourism,” said Hasan Zongur, a senior official at Ankara’s ministry of culture and tourism.
”Turkey’s target is to have 25-million tourists by 2010. Sites such as these are part of a universal culture. They belong to the world.”
But while the film has boosted awareness of the ancient city, officials also admit to a neglect of Turkey’s rich array of classical Greek antiquities. Near the fig tree-lined ruins, a billboard proudly proclaims that Troy is where ”the first chapter of modern archaeology was written”.
Yet for decades, few Turkish officials displayed any interest in the site, where German and American archaeologists have unearthed nine distinct cities built over a period of 3 000 years. Turks have often appeared ill at ease dealing with a heritage deemed not to be their own.
As recently as the 1970s, visitors needed written permission to visit Troy, which was once used as a stone quarry by locals. Ephesus, Turkey’s best-preserved ancient city, down the coast, is so unprotected that visitors have carved graffiti across its marbles.
”A lot of Troy is like a fake tour,” said Hedi Mantel, a Romanian-born American from Michigan.
”It’s unbelievable that the centrepiece of the place is this,” she added, looking up at a wooden horse that the authorities erected on the site in 1975. ”It’s like a secondhand carpenter’s job.”
Even now, officials in Canakkale concede that ”every Turkish schoolboy” is raised hating Heinrich Schliemann, the German businessman who ended speculation that the city existed in myth alone by discovering Troy in 1871.
Most Turks have yet to forgive Schliemann for smuggling Trojan treasures out of the country. The Turkish government is still trying to retrieve the hoard from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
”Generations of Turks have no idea about the Iliad or Odyssey,” said Savas Uran, a guide at the site. ”They weren’t taught Greek history at school. All they know is that Troy was discovered by a man who was a merchant, not a real archaeologist, and who, as a result, destroyed a lot of precious things here.”
Despite this, schoolchildren from across Turkey are among the crowds who now visit the site.
”Only 5% of Troy has been excavated,” added Uran, pointing to the surrounding fields. ”There’s a lot more under them. There’s a lot more for everyone to discover.” — Guardian Unlimited Â