Heinrich Schliemann dug straight through the layer he was looking for. In 1871 the German merchant drove a trench across the mound at Hisarlık and destroyed much of Troy VI and VII — the very strata that Homer's poem, if it remembers anything, remembers. What remains is stranger than the legend. Archaeologists have counted nine principal settlements stacked at Hisarlık, spanning roughly 3000 BCE to 500 CE, each built on the rubble of the last. Troy I was a walled village of some 90 metres across. Troy II yielded the gold hoard Schliemann called Priam's Treasure, wrongly dated by a thousand years. Troy VI raised limestone ramparts nearly five metres thick, sloped and buttressed, with towers guarding the eastern approach. Troy VIII and IX belong to Greeks and Romans who arrived as tourists themselves, convinced they were treading Homeric ground. Alexander ran naked around the supposed tomb of Achilles here in 334 BCE. Xerxes sacrificed a thousand oxen. Pilgrimage to this hill is older than most of Europe's cathedrals. The site earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 1998, and the Troy Museum at Tevfikiye — a rust-coloured cube sunk partly below ground — opened in 2018 to house what excavation has recovered. Entry to both site and museum costs 27 EUR for foreign visitors, and a troy full day tour from istanbul is how most travellers reach it, since Hisarlık sits some 340 kilometres from the Bosphorus by road and ferry across the Dardanelles. Coach operators running troy full day tour from istanbul tours pair the ruins with Çanakkale's waterfront, and several combine them with the Gallipoli battlefields a short distance south. Why it matters is not the wooden horse in the car park, a modern replica of a thing that may never have existed. It is the geology of the mound itself: a vertical archive in which Bronze Age megaron halls, Hellenistic sanctuary walls and Roman odeon seating are visible within a few hundred paces. Erosion, tectonics and the silting of the Karamenderes plain have moved the ancient shoreline several kilometres north, so the harbour Homer describes is now farmland. The museum's galleries follow chronology downward through four floors, displaying Bronze Age ceramics, Hellenistic sarcophagi and the repatriated Polyxena reliefs. Any istanbul to troy day trip that skips the museum sees half the story. Guided troy full day tour from istanbul tickets typically include both.