UC building digital gallery of ancient Troy

The Blegen Library’s classics archive contains field journals, artist renderings and documentation from UC’s projects across the Mediterranean. Kramer said they began digitizing the Troy excavations because those records are among the department’s oldest and most extensive.

“The gem of our collections are the Troy archives from Blegen’s excavations in the 1930s. We have all the records that survived: correspondence, notebooks, financial documents,” Kramer said.

“This was a pioneering excavation. And it has the magic name: Troy,” Kramer said.

Troy, sometimes called Troia or Troja, was the backdrop for one of Greek mythology’s most dramatic stories: the Trojan War between the Greeks and Trojans. The stories feature the heroes Odysseus, Hector, Ajax and Achilles, who was cut down by an arrow to his heel. And its legends persist today, particularly that of the Trojan horse sculpture within which the Greeks hid to gain entry to the fortified city.

The ancient cities of Troy were first unearthed in the 1860s and studied again in expeditions over the next 20 years before UC’s Blegen arrived on the site in the early 1930s. Today, it’s a world heritage site “of outstanding universal value,” according to UNESCO.

Blegen’s team kept meticulous notes on everything from employee hours to grocery bills, Kramer said.

“The records are so extensive you can find out how much they spent on eggs each week,” he said. “You could reconstruct the economy of a very young Turkey, which had existed for less than 10 years when they started excavating.”

Archaeologist Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who excavated Troy in the 1880s, returned to help UC plan its 1930s excavations. Here he leads a tour of the site. Video/UC Classics

UC’s ambitious Troy expedition was launched at the behest of former UC Classics Head William Semple and his wife, Louise Taft Semple, niece to U.S. President William Howard Taft who served as dean of UC’s College of Law.

“In 1931, William Semple and Louise Taft Semple decided that UC was ready for an ambitious archaeological project. [The University of] Chicago was digging at Israel’s Tel Megiddo. The University of Pennsylvania was digging at Ur in Mesopotamia,” Kramer said. “So a confluence of events led to working at Troy.”

Blegen embarked on his expedition during the Great Depression, the debilitating effects of which were felt across the Mediterranean.

“The Depression spread worldwide to the point where people were lining up at the excavation because there was no other work,” Kramer said. “Even a small wage was better than nothing.”

Despite the economic turmoil, UC’s Classics Department supported the excavation because of its importance to archaeology, Kramer said.

Troy represented the most audacious archaeological project at the time for UC’s Classics Department, which met with government officials in Ankara, Turkey, to arrange a permit consisting of two typewritten sentences on a single sheet of paper. Roughly translated, they read: The American professor from Cincinnati, Semple, will make excavations at Hisarlik. I extend him legal authority.

“These days, archaeological permits are not just a few lines on a paper,” Kramer said. “But in 1932, that’s all that was needed.”

Blegen was a natural photographer. In 19 photo albums, Blegen and Rawson, his longtime research partner, captured the excavations along with daily life in rural Turkey. 

Since the site was far from the nearest large town, they brought their home with them – a prefabricated house shipped over the Atlantic Ocean in pieces and carried inland by oxen and camel. The team dug a well and septic system and built a water tower that provided indoor plumbing, a luxury for rural Turkey in the 1930s.

The photos also put a human face on the archaeologists, who adored the baby camels they saw and took an interest in curious visitors who would stop by the site.

UC's Classics Department has shared some of these images on its Instagram feed called #FridaysintheArchives.