Troy's Earliest Agora Unearthed

TROY, TURKEY—Hürriyet Daily News reports that excavations in Troy have uncovered the ancient city’s earliest agora. The new work was carried out through a collaboration between the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. The agora served as the settlement’s central marketplace and is located in front of the city walls associated with Troy VI, the settlement and epoch typically associated with the Trojan War. During the Late Bronze Age, the city, which was then known as Wilusa, collapsed, but the new evidence shows that the site was not vacant for very long. A little less than a century later, new immigrants moved to the city and began to build their houses atop the ruins and around the previous settlement’s central square. The new inhabitants named their city Ilios or Ilion. “We believe there was a marketplace, an agora, here in the Late Bronze Age,” said Reyhan Körpe, deputy head of the Troy excavations. “This agora was revived by settlers who came here about 80 to 90 years after Bronze Age Troy was abandoned, so we can say that the place we are excavating is Troy’s oldest agora.” To read more about excavations at Troy, go to "The Unexpected World of the Odyssey."