The Trojan War sits somewhere between Homer's poetry and the physical remains at Hisarlik, and this opening episode of Michael Wood's six-part series lays out the case for treating it as history rather than myth. Wood walks the excavated mound in Turkey and traces the story back to Heinrich Schliemann, the amateur archaeologist who dug into the site in 1873 convinced Homer had recorded a real war, and who pulled out a hoard of gold jewelry and ornaments he claimed belonged to King Priam. The episode follows how that discovery, spectacular and controversial in equal measure, turned a literary question into an archaeological one, and set off a century of digging aimed at matching layers of burnt city walls to the siege described in the Iliad. Wood presents the evidence himself on location rather than through a panel of talking heads, weighing what Schliemann actually found against what he claimed, and setting up the rest of the series to test the Iliad's other details against the ground.