The ancient city in the old Greek stories, the one the Greeks besieged for ten years and finally entered by hiding soldiers inside a huge wooden horse. Homer's Iliad is set there. For a long time educated people assumed Troy was pure legend, like a dragon. Then in the 1870s a German businessman turned archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, dug at a mound called Hisarlik in northwest Turkey and announced he had found it. The honest picture today is more mixed than the school version: archaeologists agree there was a real, rich, walled city there, destroyed and rebuilt many times, and most accept it as the Troy the stories remembered — but whether the war happened as Homer tells it, nobody can show. Schliemann himself dug so roughly that he damaged the very layers that mattered. So say 'a real city stood there' with confidence, and 'the war happened' with care. In everyday English the city gives us two live phrases: a Trojan horse, meaning a gift or program that hides an attack inside it (which is why computer viruses of that type are called trojans), and 'to work like a Trojan', meaning to work extremely hard. Troy is also a fairly common man's first name, and a place name in the United States.