Schliemann's Trench

The 17-metre-deep gash through the mound — and through all nine cities — that Schliemann cut in the 1870s.

The deepest scar on the site is also its most informative — the colossal north-south trench cut by Heinrich Schliemann between 1871 and 1890 in his quest to reach what he believed was Homer's Troy. At 17 metres deep and several metres wide, the trench cuts cleanly through every layer of the mound's occupation, giving you the rare experience of standing inside a complete archaeological stratigraphy.

The walls of the trench have been stabilised and labelled in recent restoration work — you can see the bedrock at the bottom, Troy I above it, then each successive city stacked up to the Roman period at ground level. Schliemann's methods are now widely condemned as destructive (he ignored the Bronze Age city he was actually walking through in his rush to reach what he thought was Priam's Troy at the bottom), but the trench itself remains the most powerful single feature on the site. Walk down into it for a sense of the depth of human time in one place.

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A story
Heinrich Schliemann began excavating Troy in 1870, convinced from his reading of Homer that the city was real and that he could find it. Driven more by enthusiasm than method, he dug a colossal trench straight down through the centre of the mound, passing through and partly destroying all nine layers of occupation. The damage was immense — much of Troy VI, the city most likely to be Homer's, was destroyed by his digging — but the trench did prove conclusively that Troy was a real place with thousands of years of continuous occupation.

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