Roman Troy is what historians call the least-known chapter of a site the world knows almost entirely for the war Homer immortalized.
A team from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, led by Professor Rüstem Aslan, is excavating a Roman-era street in Troy’s lower city that was in use from the late first century B.C. until roughly the sixth century A.D.
The discovery is part of the 2026 excavation season of the Turkish project Heritage for the Future, and it offers direct evidence of a phase of the city that lasted nearly as long as its legendary fame.
Ilion, the City That Rose From Troy’s Ruins
Long before Rome took an interest in the site, the settlement had already been reborn once.
After the collapse of the Bronze Age and the fading of the Troy of Homeric legend, Greek colonists reoccupied the site around 700 B.C. and founded a new city there: Ilion, with temples to Athena honoring the heroes of the epic.
For centuries this Greek Ilion served as a place of pilgrimage rooted in myth, until it was absorbed into the Roman world in the first century B.C. under the name Ilium.
The urban layout uncovered in recent excavation seasons confirms a planned city. Streets oriented east-west and north-south organized the settlement into rectangular city blocks, or insulae, each occupied by residences and commercial spaces.
That regular grid, typical of Roman town planning, stands in sharp contrast to the more irregular layout usually associated with pre-Roman Troy.
A Century and a Half of Overlapping Excavations
The archaeological site of Hisarlik, where Troy stands, has one of the longest and most intermittent excavation histories in Mediterranean archaeology.
Frank Calvert conducted the first test excavations in the 19th century, before German businessman Heinrich Schliemann launched the 1871 excavations that brought the site to worldwide attention.
Two decades later, in 1893, architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld documented the Roman-era odeon for the first time.
The University of Cincinnati resumed work between 1932 and 1938 under Carl Blegen. Then, in the final years of the 20th century, between 1988 and 2005, an international project led by Manfred Korfmann applied magnetic survey technology that revealed a lower city of roughly 74 acres — far larger than anyone had previously assumed.
Korfmann’s discovery was decisive. It established that the Troy of archaeological significance extended well beyond the fortified mound Schliemann had excavated, across a much larger urban area. That is precisely where Aslan’s team is now tracing the Roman street.
The site, located near the Turkish village of Tevfikiye in Çanakkale province, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.
Why Rome Claimed Troy as Its Own Origin
The turning point in the city’s Roman history came with Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, who visited the site around 20 B.C., ordered a series of reforms, and renamed the city Ilium Novum.
Under his patronage, structures of Greek origin were restored — including the ancient bouleuterion, or council house — and new buildings were constructed, among them an odeon built for musical performances.
This imperial interest was no accident. Roman literary tradition, given its definitive form in Virgil’s Aeneid, held that Aeneas had escaped the destruction of Troy together with his father Anchises and his son Ascanius. Their descendants, centuries later, founded the city of Rome under Romulus.
The Julio-Claudian dynasty, to which Augustus belonged, explicitly claimed that Trojan lineage as the basis of its political legitimacy. That connection turned Ilium into a kind of ancestral shrine at the heart of Roman power.
This symbolic bond endured for generations. Emperor Hadrian visited the city in A.D. 124 and commissioned new construction, including thermal baths, an aqueduct, and a monumental fountain whose remains can still be seen near Kemerdere.
A statue of Hadrian, discovered in the odeon in 1993, stands as physical confirmation of the emperor’s presence in the city.
What the Excavation May Reveal in the Years Ahead
Aslan’s team plans to continue tracing the Roman street toward the site’s main archaeological area.
The long-term goal is to open a section of the Roman route to visitors, letting them walk among the remains of a period that is still far less accessible to the public than the Bronze Age walls.
Urban life at Ilium continued well into late antiquity, until a series of earthquakes in the sixth century A.D. severely damaged the city and brought large-scale settlement to an end.
With each season, Aslan’s team adds another layer to a sequence that already documents almost 4,000 years of near-continuous habitation, from the earliest Bronze Age settlements to the last streets laid under Roman rule.
That continuity — more than any single find — is what keeps archaeologists fascinated by a place most of the world knows only through a poem, much like the eerie submerged ruins of Epecuén.
