Troy VI, the next major period of the citadel’s history, encompassed a significantly greater area than its predecessors: again a rough circle, but now with a diameter of nearly 200m. Much has been destroyed, but we can appreciate the improved quality of the construction in certain surviving sections. The walls are particularly striking. The east wall, tower, and baffle gateway are the first features that greet the modern visitor. The walls are tall, their stone foundations surviving to a height of some 9m in places, fortified with massive towers 8m square. The stones are somewhat larger than in the Troy II walls, and they are now well cut and placed without mortar in fairly regular courses. As in earlier walls, the exterior face slopes outward as it descends. In addition, the wall face frequently juts out slightly in vertical offsets that serve to alter the direction of the wall, perhaps simply a handsome elaboration of a continuously curving wall. As usual, the superstructure would have been made of mud brick, now disappeared.
The baffle entry on the north-east provides good defense. The wall reaches out to the east, overlapping the continuation of the wall to the south. The entryway runs between the parallel stretches of wall, creating a corridor which soldiers could patrol from above on both sides. In contrast, the badly ruined South Gate, the main entrance to the citadel, has a simple plan: just an open passage 3.30m wide within the wall, with a tower eventually added at one side. A paved street ran uphill from the gate.
The center of Troy VI was destroyed by later Classical builders and by early excavations. Had there been a palace, it must have stood there, on that commanding spot. Some houses or buildings have survived on the fringes; a striking example is the so-called Pillar House. As in Troy II, these buildings are generally freestanding, brick walls (now gone) on stone foundations. Wooden beams were occasionally used as reinforcements. Different and very interesting is the slight trapezoidal shape of many of these houses. Apparently oriented toward a central point in the citadel, the side walls of the houses are not parallel but converge slightly toward the center of the mound. The other two sides of a house, perpendicular to the converging sides, are parallel. The purpose of such planning is unclear. Perhaps, as Dorpfeld suggested, builders intended to maintain the even width of paths leading into the citadel. But the surviving ground plan of Troy VI, not particularly regular, does not substantiate Dorpfeld’s thesis.
World History
