When I rode across the Troad from the Dardanelles to
Hissarlik and Mount Ida, I noticed that my dragoman and his men did all our outdoor cooking exactly in the Odyssean and Iliadic fashion.
Taken from Schliemann's excavation site at
Hissarlik (in modern-day Turkey), this resplendent cache of axes, pots, jewelry, and other such items was displayed in Berlin until Allied bombing campaigns forced its removal to underground bunkers, from which the Soviet Army seized the lot in 1945.
(49) The location of the campaign would also have recalled for many the relatively recent excavation of
Hissarlik on the other side of the straight where, in 1873, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann began unearthing the site now identified as Troy.
Driving the book is Heinrich Obermann, Ackroyd's stand-in for Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), discoverer of Mycenae, Tiryns, and the "Treasure of Priam" at
Hissarlik in eastern Turkey.
As the book casts its inexorable spell,
Hissarlik gradually becomes a place, like (Ackroyd's) London, where gods and men, supernatural and natural, meet, however briefly." DIANE SCHARPER
Excavating at
Hissarlik he discovered the legendary city of Paris and Hector as well as a huge trove of jewellery and gold which had lain hidden there for thousands of years.
Then in the 1870s, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schlie- mann discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities, dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period, while excavating a hill at
Hissarlik, in north-western Turkey.
Heinrich Schliemann discovered what he thought was Troy near current day Turkish
Hissarlik in 1870.
We should not emulate Heinrich Schliemann ploughing headlong through the mound of
Hissarlik in pursuit of Priam's Troy.
Meanwhile in Homeric Synchronium he described Schliemann's excavations at
Hissarlik: the burnt-out town in the fourth layer down and the remains of successive later towns in the three layers above.