The History Blog

Recent reports of massive security failures in Turkish museums don’t tell the whole story. A museum with some Troy artifacts, for instance, has a security system sensitive to insects.

The Canakkale Archaeology Museum, known throughout the world for its collection from the ancient city of Troy, houses nearly 30,000 artifacts excavated from 200 sites in and around Canakkale.

The museum has been protected for 15 years by a closed-circuit camera system as well as an alarm system that is sensitive even to insects.

The first sentence seems a bit of an overstatement. According to Istanbul Portal, the Troy collection is a new, small addition to the far larger and more diverse main museum.

At the entrance to the Troy ruins is a small museum, which has recently been set up. The museum contains pottery, figurines, statues, glass objects and building stones found in the excavations at Troy and the surrounding region.

I think we might here have an instance of press (and PR) from other countries tailoring a story for US tastes. Need to make a museum in Turkey look cool? Ottoman wonders aren’t going to do the trick. Not even Hellenistic gold makes the name-recognition grade. Unless it’s from Troy. We know Troy. Brad Pitt was in that.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 12:17 AM and is filed under Museums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.