Ancient Troy's Lost Marketplace Unearthed After Millennia

Archaeologists digging at ancient Troy, the fabled city in Türkiye's northwestern Çanakkale province, are uncovering the remains of a 2,800-year-old agora, a public marketplace that looks set to become the oldest known civic square at the legendary site. The find, reported in September 2026, sheds new light on a place whose urban history stretches back around 5,000 years, through wars, fires and earthquakes that kept destroying the city and rebuilding it again.

The excavation area lies in front of the southern gate of the city's sixth Bronze Age settlement layer, the fortified phase most closely tied to the legend of the Trojan War. The research is part of a program begun in 2014 to trace how Bronze Age Troy, then known as Wilusa, turned into the later Greek city of Ilion, according to Archaeology Magazine.

The dig runs with permission from Türkiye's Culture and Tourism Ministry, in coordination with Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. The excavation committee is headed by Rüstem Aslan, while his deputy Reyhan Körpe, a history professor at the university, briefed reporters on the team's latest conclusions in September 2026.

The Marketplace That Refused to Disappear

The team believes the square served as a marketplace during the Late Bronze Age. Newcomers arrived only eighty to ninety years after the earlier city was abandoned, and instead of starting from scratch they built houses on top of the ruins and the old walls while keeping the public square in use. Körpe described the spot as "Troy's oldest agora," according to the magazine's report.

The Turkish press reports also describe architectural remains of the square alongside amphorae and pottery fragments from the Early Iron Age, plus a paved road and an entrance leading from the lower city toward the southern gate. The picture is one of continuity, not collapse: the marketplace of the old Bronze Age city kept functioning as an agora for the people who settled there. Körpe also noted that much of Troy was damaged by the digs launched in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann, which is why the modern team works in a smaller, more careful area.

What the Discovery Means for ancient Troy

The find matters because an agora was the beating heart of a Greek city — part market, part town square, part civic stage. Tracing Troy's oldest one back to the age when the site was Wilusa fills a gap of less than a century in the story of ancient Troy, between the fall of its Bronze Age phase and the rise of Ilion, the city the new settlers named after the land they already knew.

The site has drawn visitors for centuries — Roman emperors are said to have treated it as a place of pilgrimage — and it joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998. Today thousands of visitors come each year, many of them from East Asia, to walk among walls that have stood in some form for five millennia. A newly understood civic square gives them one more reason to come: this was not just a fortress of legend, but a working city where ordinary people bought, sold and gathered.

Troy is not the only Anatolian site making headlines. In the same month, a newly studied cuneiform fragment at Hattusa, the old Hittite capital, turned out to be part of a surviving copy of the Kadesh Peace Treaty, according to Turkish Archaeological News. GenZ NewZ covered that Hattusa find in a separate report — together, the two discoveries show how much of Anatolia's deep past is still coming out of the ground.

Körpe said the team will keep digging in the area in the coming years to firm up the link between the Bronze Age city and Ilion. The result answers a long-standing puzzle about how the legendary city became Ilion, anchoring that transition in the city's oldest public square. For more stories from the ancient world, see The Old World.