A large wooden horse stands at the entrance to the archaeological site at Troy, located in north-western Turkey, as a reminder of the legend that surrounds this ancient city.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors pass by the horse which is popular with children who never fail to climb the ladder into the belly of the 20-metre-high figure.

According to legend, ancient Greek soldiers besieging the city of Troy pretended to withdraw and left a wooden horse behind them. The citizens of Troy brought the horse into the city, and the rest is history.

Troy’s downfall was first described in Homer’s Odyssey: "For the city was doomed when it took in that horse, within which were all the bravest of the Greeks waiting to bring death and destruction on the Trojans."

The myth of Troy continues to attract visitors to the site. Many arrive in Troy after spending a night in the provincial capital of Canakkale, 30km away.

Hotels of varying standards can be found around Canakkale’s harbour.

Others arrive in Troy with package tours from Istanbul or the other main tourist centres along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

"The story of the Trojan Horse as a military ruse is simple and memorable.

"Almost everyone has heard it at least once," says the leader of Troy’s archaeological team, Prof Ernst Pernicka.

It is nearly impossible to get away from the legend of Troy here. In early summer, the site is surrounded by a sea of aromatic herbal plants from which red poppy plants emerge.

The topography of the surrounding countryside spurs the imagination and it is easy to imagine the chaos of the Trojan Wars even though there is no firm archaeological evidence they ever happened.

Archaeologists have laid out a walking tour that explains Troy’s development as a city. Each destruction was followed by reconstruction and expansion.

Located at the centre of the city was a hill with palaces. Ordinary Trojans lived around the hill.

For 3,500 years, Troy was a living, functioning city. It was abandoned in the 5th century AD and then reoccupied in the 12th but its final demise came in the 14th century.

The archaeologists say Troy’s history can be read in the excavation like a layered cake.

Troy’s special wealth was due to its location on the Dardanelles, a narrow strait connecting the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and then eventually the Black Sea.

In ancient times, ships waited off Troy for the right wind and current conditions. Today, the coastline is about 6km from the site of Troy but in the Bronze Age the bay came as far as the city.

Briton Frank Calvert was the first to search there for Troy’s remains. The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann began excavating in 1871 and found the first ancient ruins.

Much has been learned about Troy since another German archaeologist, Manfred Korfmann, began working there in 1988.

Pernicka followed in Korfmann’s footsteps after his death four years ago.

When touring the site, visitors will see a ramp paved with flagstones that leads to the entrance of a house from the period of "Troy II."

To the left of the entrance, Schliemann found a cache of ancient artefacts in May 1873 that became known as Priam’s Treasure.

Schliemann decided the cache must date back to the time of the Trojan King Priam mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and he smuggled it out of the country. Later, studies established the treasure dated back to an even earlier period.

Since the discovery of Troy’s ruins in the 19th century on a hill called in Turkish, Hisarlik, scientists have been trying to reveal its secrets. At the moment, archaeologists are excavating a defensive ditch that could eventually reveal Troy’s size.

"The archaeological evidence points to a regional centre with an unusually large, double defensive wall," says Pernicka.

"The city may have been 2ha, or perhaps 35ha, in size. There is growing evidence to show it was relatively densely populated so perhaps several thousand or even as many as 10,000 people lived there." – dpa