The Last Of The Trojans

Most of us born and raised in the Western traditions will have heard of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans .....

Achilles v Hector - Trojan War

It was written about by many Greek authors, most notably Homer in the Iliad (with its companion piece with the Odyssey), an epic poem (like Beowulf in the later Anglo-Saxon tradition) to be recited at Bronze and later Iron age Greek warlords and Kings courts.

Homer was an 8th Century BC poet, and the events he wrote about in the Iliad were thought to have occurred 13th or 12th century BC. By the 19th century they were believed to be entirely mythical (like King Arthur and his round table) until 1868, when the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered that Troy was at what is now Hisarlik in Turkey.

Since then, the events of the Iliad have been accepted as having some basis in truth, particularly as the evidence showed that the city had been burnt to the ground in a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, at around the correct time period (Eratosthenes, said the war was between 1194–1184 BC). 

However, there was an interesting bit of evidence supporting the view that Troy had indeed been sacked by a confederation of Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Because part of the stories surrounding the events was that after the city was sacked, some prisoners of war from Troy were settled in the Southern Peloponnese area of Greece in a city that ancient texts named Tenea. However the location of this city was unknown.

But in late 2018 it was reported that archaeologists, led by Elena Korka had uncovered the city's urban fabric including floors, walls, door openings along with pottery, coins and tombs all dating from the 4th Century BC right through to the late Roman period. The city appeared to have survived the Roman invasion of nearby Corinth when they were conquering Greece. 

Indeed the city seemed to have thrived as some coins were dated to the reign of Emperor Septimus Severus (AD 193 - 211) showing that the local economy was vibrant and the city was even a local mint for coins. There was some evidence that the Visigoths damaged the city in AD 396-397 in the war that nearly brought the collapse of the Eastern Roman empire. The Emperor Valens was killed in one of the most decisive battles in history, when his Roman army was annihilated at the Battle of Adrianople (AD 378) - now Edirne, just inside modern Turkey - by the Visigoths, leaving the Eastern Empire nearly defenceless, and established the supremacy of cavalry over infantry that would last for the next millennium.

Tenea was finally abandoned around 200 years later, when Slavic raiders made much of Northern Greece uninhabitable ..... and so the last of the Trojans, disappeared from history.