Troy X: a meta city
Troy was believed to be a city that was located in ancient Anatolia, today’s west Turkey, southwest of the Dardanelles. To reveal this buried mystery - that still causes great debate between archaeologists and historians - extensive excavations took place on the hill of Hisarlik, as named by the Turks. Initiated by archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1870, the studies revealed 9 layers of civilisations dating from the Bronze age to the Roman period.
Archaeologists started digging with the hope that they will come across the location of the Trojan war and the mythical location of which Homer sang about in his Rhapsodies. They wanted to reveal the fortified citadel mentioned on the famous Homeric Epic.
However, reality is different from fantasy and myths. Only reality was built in stone and only reality can be revealed by archaeology. Clearly, excavations show that the citadel was not an enclosed isolated space on top of the hill as myth suggests. The nature of the city itself was not what archaeologists initially were looking to find. The lack of built is speaking to the landscape, making it the city’s extension. The openness and porosity reveals a way of living that was closely related to the landscape. Not shutting it from it.
Therefore the aim of Troy X: meta-city, is not to restore the dead city or to make a better one, since, to quote Ruskin, it is simply impossible to deal with anything that has ever been great in architecture.
But rather, to recognise the city as an amphitheatre and to re-inhabit the same site, using the knowledge and being aware of the buried history of this ancient city and its relationship to the unbuilt.
