I didn't know that!

Tour guides in Greece and the historical Trojan War

I just flew back from Greece on our yearly school trip and (say it with me) boy, are my arms tired!

Actually, my entire body and soul is tired, but it was glorious. It always is. Greece sends out vibrations to me that cut through all the fatigue and folderol of shepherding a dozen and a half young people through 10 consecutive 16-hour days.

Mythology, history (3500 years of it), food, people. Incredible.

And one of the best things about going to Greece is listening to Greek museum and archeological site guides.

Our school trip was heavy on guided tours. It sort of had to be: the government of the Hellenic Republic (Greece) has determined that no one except certified guides can lead informational tours at national sites.

It makes sense. Greece is justly proud of its heritage, and justly interested in controlling what is said about its monuments, stories, and history on its sovereign soil.

But what gets said (and why) is sometimes just as interesting as the subjects discussed.

First thing you need to know: Explaining a monument, myth, or historical event in Greece is seldom a simple thing. This material has been studied, researched, analyzed, and fussed over for millennia. So many questions have multiple competing answers.

And Greek mythology? Well, if you haven’t noticed already, even in Greek times it was overrun with variant versions.

There is no Greek Bible or Quran with an authorized text, all due respect to the Iliad.

Then there is the question of audience. Is it a group of elementary students, a random set of tourists, or a gaggle of Latin teachers who all have their pet theories about what’s what and who’s who?

So when a Greek guide opens her mouth to explain, say, who was buried in the Bronze Age Tomb of Agamemnon, or what goddess is on the west pediment of the Parthenon between Hera and Apollo, there’s going to be some complexity and even controversy.

Image from a booking site for private tours in Greece. Note: in the hot Mediterranean sun, the guide has a protective hat, whereas the students (unwisely) are all bare-headed. Getting a student to wear a hat on a trip to Greece is a surprisingly difficult task!

So it’s mostly best to keep your opinions to yourself if you are with a school group. Guides have a tough enough time trying to keep a bunch of restless students engaged without some questionably knowledgeable chaperone butting in.

On this last trip, however, I did take the liberty of jotting down some of the newer and odder things that our guides had to say.

There is probably enough material in those notes for a dozen Substack posts.

It’s not that what the guides said was wrong every time. I’m not doing a “gotcha” here. What I noticed was that it was (most of the time) different from what I have heard in past years.

Some of this is due to advances in scholarship. Other parts? Anyone’s guess.

I’ll start with just one thing that one guide said this time. If readers like this sort of thing, I’ll do more in a future post or posts.

Footnote 1: Greek guides are still explaining that Persephone’s myth is an explanation of the seasons. That one dies hard. Go here if you don’t know why the seasons idea never made sense.

This observation has to do with ancient Troy, and the continuing controversy over whether the “Trojan War” was a “historical event.” I put these phrases in quotation marks because there’s no scholarly consensus over what those two things mean.

What we do know is that Troy is a real city in northwest Turkey and there is a man named Alaksandu (Alexander, another name for Paris, the man who in the myth stole Helen from Menelaus with Aphrodite’s help) who is associated with the city.

We also know that Troy was burned down more than once.

But was there a war with all (or some) of Greece to bring back the most beautiful woman in the world who had been stolen?

This time, our guide claimed that the Trojan War was absolutely a historical event, and that it was fought, not over a woman, but because of wheat from ancient Scythia (modern Ukraine).

She explained that Greece has always had a need to import grain, even in the Bronze Age when the Trojan War is supposed to have happened. She said that carbonized wheat grains found in the storage jars of Mycenae (the home of the leader of the Greek forces, Agamemnon) were grown in and exported from what is now Ukraine.

Since Troy is next to the only shipping route to and from the Black Sea area, the guide hypothesized that Troy was in control of the wheat supply, and that at a certain point they decided to choke off that route so that Mycenae (and other Greek cities) would have no access to grain from that area.

Ancient Troy would have been close to modern Çanakkale (image from Wikipedia)

It was a dire predicament, so said the guide. The people of Ancient Greece had no choice but to attack in order to reopen the flow of life-giving grain.

To bolster her argument, the guide reported that arrowheads manufactured in the Peloponnese (the area where Agamemnon and Menelaus lived) were found lodged in the walls of Bronze Age Troy.

I didn’t know that.

And I don’t know whether the guide learned this explanation as part of her certification for guiding in Greece, or whether she read that somewhere, or whether it was from watching the History Channel, or if It was her own particular way of putting two and two together from disparate facts.

But I will say that no one I know has ever claimed the wheat-from-Ukraine theory, although I will also say I don’t have a corner on the market on articles about the historicity of the Trojan War.

Here’s a (very long and pretty technical) blog post about the current state (in 2016) of the Bronze Age evidence we have for our subject. You’ll notice there’s no mention of grain, Ukraine, or arrowheads.

But here’s the thing: it did give our students a compelling story that made sense, instead of a load of umms, maybes, and what ifs. And that, on a two-hour tour of some very complex material on a 95 degree F afternoon in full sunshine, is probably the best thing you could do.