Trojan Imagery on USC Campus: "Trojan" Column

     This ancient column fragment is displayed in a garden on the east side of Taper Hall.[1] It was gifted to USC by the Republic of Türkiye in October 1952. The plaque at the base of the column states that the column was “from the legendary Troy,” quarried before 1200 B.C. and believed to have stood in a temple of Apollo. In the Daily Trojan, it was hailed as a symbolic gesture: “It represents a gift from ancient Troy to modern Troy.”[2]
     However, research by Dr. John Pollini, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at USC, casts doubt over the Trojan origins of this column fragment. There is no known site of a temple of Apollo at Troy. Dr. Pollini believes that the small diameter of USC’s column fragment indicates that it was more likely part of a colonnade or sanctuary, rather than of a temple.[3] The column is made of quartz monzonite porphyry, otherwise called marmor troadense or “marble of the Troad” (the large geographical area around Troy). However, the earliest evidence of marmor troadense being used in construction is in the Archaic-Hellenistic period, beginning ca. 800 B.C. This is long after the Trojan War, which has been estimated to date to ca. 1200 B.C.[4] Though the rock originates from the correct geographical area, the timeline of when it was quarried is inconsistent with the Trojan legend. It is highly unlikely, as the Daily Trojan described it in 1952, that “the relic was taken from a large column in the temple of Apollo in that ancient city.”[5]
     Pollini theorizes the date of the column’s origin was the Roman imperial period (ca. 30 B.C.- A.D. 400). He wrote, “The Greco-Roman cities of the Roman province of Asia (largely western Turkey) reached the height of prosperity in the second century A.D., when marmor troadense was widely exported throughout the Roman Empire.”[6]

References:

[1] The Turkish information office in New York and the American embassy in Istanbul collaborated with USC’s Acacia fraternity to ship the artifact to campus.

[2] “Troy Dedicates Ancient Column,” The Southern California Daily Trojan 44, no. 34, October 30, 1952, 1.

[3] John Pollini, “Friends, Trojans, Alumni, Lend Me Your Ears!,” USC Trojan Family Magazine, Spring 1994, 31.

[4] Enver Vural Yavuz, “Antique quarries of marmor troadense (NW Turkey): Insights from Field Mapping and Absolute Dating,” Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences 23, no. 5 (2014): 496-497.; “Quarry landscape of the month February 2007: Marmor Troadense in the province of Ezine, Western Turkey,” QuarryScapes, February 2007, http://www.quarryscapes.no/QLM_february_07.php.

[5] “Ancient Troy Stone to be Dedicated Today,” The Southern California Daily Trojan 44, no. 33, October 29, 1952.

[6] John Pollini, “Friends, Trojans, Alumni, Lend Me Your Ears!,” USC Trojan Family Magazine, Spring 1994, 31.