My letter to the editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (to the report about a Troy exhibition), published in the issue of April 9, 2001:

The war described by Homer in the Trojan plain did not take place on earth but in the sky. Participants in the war were not the Greeks and the Trojans on Earth, but the stars and constellations of the sky above Troy and the Aegean Sea. The goal of the war was not the conquest of Troy, but the memorization of celestial geography.

The listeners of the performances were not cultural nobles, but seamen who needed the exact knowledge of the starry sky in order to reach their destinations safely and by the shortest route before the discovery of the compass and clock.

The actions of the “Star Wars” took place before Troy only because the largest maritime trading city at that time had to train many Anatolian landlubbers to become navigable seafarers.

Homer later combined the much narrated Trojan star sagas into the astronomical teaching poem Iliad, in order to convey the superior Trojan astronomy and navigation art to the Greeks of the colonization period of the eighth century BC, who were just learning how to navigate the high seas. The seafaring Greeks loved Homer above all else because knowledge of his poetry ensured their survival on the high seas.