Turkey caps off Year of Troy with new museum

A treacherous wooden horse, a blind Greek poet from Smyrna, a thrilling archaeological rediscovery — Troy is an essential component of Europe's cultural memory and imagery, both as history and as literary myth. It is where the West fought the East for the first time three millennia ago, starting a rivalry not yet extinguished and giving inspiration to artists from Homer's epic Iliad to Hollywood's 2004 blockbuster.

It is in Turkey, in the Biga Peninsula — the Troad of ancient times — on the eastern shore of the Dardanelles, at a strategic crossing point linking two continents across the Aegean Sea. The brand-new Troya Muzesi (Troy Museum), which is open to the visitors but still awaiting an official inauguration, is a long-needed complement and lively introduction to the excavation site just a kilometer away, part of the Unesco World Heritage List since 1998.

The museum is housed in a huge and isolated cube emerging from the flat landscape and covered in steel plate the color of rust and terracotta. It is purposely the same height, about 30 meters (98 feet), as the Hisarlik mound where Troy lays in layers, ten settlements built on top of another over 4,000 years.

Omer Selcuk Baz, the Turkish architect who designed the museum in 2011, told Al-Monitor that the new structure “is suggestive of a huge infopoint, or of a spaceship.”