Excavations at Troy have uncovered the ancient city's earliest agora, the central marketplace that served the settlement in the Late Bronze Age. The discovery was made through a collaboration between the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, according to Hürriyet Daily News.
The agora is located in front of the city walls associated with Troy VI, the settlement and epoch typically linked to the Trojan War. Reyhan Körpe, deputy head of the Troy excavations, said the team believes a marketplace stood at the site during the Late Bronze Age. «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,» Körpe said.
During the Late Bronze Age, the city was known as Wilusa. It eventually collapsed, but the new evidence shows the site was not vacant for long. A little less than a century later, new immigrants moved to the city and began building their houses atop the ruins and around the previous settlement's central square. The new inhabitants named their city Ilios or Ilion.
The finding adds a new layer to the long history of Troy, a site whose ruins have been excavated for more than a century and whose cultural layers span thousands of years. The identification of an agora in front of the Troy VI walls places a hub of commerce and public life at the heart of the settlement during a period of regional trade and interaction in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia.
The revival of the marketplace by later settlers also points to continuity of use at the site after the collapse of Bronze Age Troy. Rather than remaining abandoned, the location was reoccupied within roughly a century, and the new residents rebuilt their homes around the old central square. That pattern suggests the newcomers recognized the value of the earlier settlement's layout and chose to preserve its central public space.
The name Ilios, or Ilion, is the name by which the city was known in later Greek tradition, including in the Homeric epics. The new evidence connects the physical remains of the site with the names and stories that have been attached to Troy for millennia, though the excavations themselves are focused on the material record of the settlement.
Work at Troy continues under the joint effort of Turkish authorities and university researchers. The agora is the latest in a series of discoveries that have refined understanding of the site's chronology and its role as a regional center. Further excavation and analysis are expected to clarify how the marketplace functioned and how it related to the surrounding settlement.
