The landscape around Troy does not immediately suggest a single ancient city preserved in isolation. The ground rises gradually at Hisarlık, a mound shaped less by nature than by repeated human occupation. Stone walls appear beside broken foundations from entirely different eras. Sections of the Earth contain traces of settlements separated by centuries. What survives there today is the result of continuous rebuilding across a long stretch of history rather than the remains of one civilisation frozen in time.
The archaeological site represents more than 4,000 years of occupation. The mound preserves evidence of several major settlement phases layered above one another, forming an unusually dense historical record in north-western Türkiye near the Dardanelles.
