Larisa

Larissa, was an ancient Greek city in the south-west of the Troad region of Anatolia. Its surrounding territory was known in Greek as the (Larissaia). It has been located on a small rise by the coast now known as Limantepe, about 3.5 km from the village of Kösedere to the north-east and 3 km from the village of Babadere to the east, in the Ayvacık district of Çanakkale province, Turkey. As with other Greek toponyms containing the consonantal string -ss-, spellings that drop one 's' exist alongside those that retain both in the ancient literary sources. Larisa in the Troad should not be confused with 'Aeolian' Larissa, near Menemen, or with 'Ionian' Larissa in İzmir province. History Bronze Age Ceramic finds of Early Bronze Age III (c. 2700 - c. 2200 BC) and Troy VI material suggest that Limantepe had been occupied since the mid-3rd millennium BC by a pre-Greek population. The Augustan geographer Strabo considered the toponym 'Laris(s)a' to be Pelasgian, and it was understood by lexicographers in Antiquity to mean 'citadel'. The specific attribution to the little understood Pelasgians should be treated with caution, as scholars now generally consider this a catch-all term used by Greeks to refer to the non-Greek peoples whom they knew had previously inhabited Asia Minor, but understood little about. Nevertheless, modern philologists do consider the consonantal string -ss- to be pre-Greek, and possibly Luwian, in origin, and so it is quite possible that the name Larisa represents a pre-Greek survival. Larisa in Troad was likely the Larisa mentioned by Homer in his catalogue of Troy's allies in the Iliad. Some early historians located it in Thrace, but Geoffrey Kirk has shown that they were confused by a mistake of Strabo, and that the site of Larisa in Troad fits well with the other mentions of the Pelasgians in the Iliad.