Is there still a large amount of debate as to if Troy was a real place?

by HarlockJC
rosemary85

No; but there never really has been. Any debate that you may have read about was largely manufactured by Heinrich Schliemann in a deliberate effort to make himself look like an iconoclast.

Schliemann was the first to excavate Troy on a large scale, but he didn't discover it; he was the fourth or fifth to treat the site as ancient Ilion. It used to be said that it was not Troy, but rather Wilhelm Dörpfeld, that was Schliemann's great discovery: Dörpfeld was the genius who salvaged some archaeology from Schliemann's dilettante treasure-hunting adventure.

There had never really been any significant doubt that the site now known as Troy was the city known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Ilion/Ilium. (There's probably more resistance to the idea today than there was in Schliemann's time; which is still practically nil.) Schliemann simply took every opportunity to conflate the physical site with the mythological setting. When he claimed to have discovered Troy, what he really meant was that he had discovered the historical reality of the mythical Trojan War as described by Homer. That obviously does not follow from the existence of the site -- if it did, then by the same logic the existence of Knossos would prove the reality of the Minotaur.

There's a fairly substantial section of our FAQ that may provide some further food for thought (I'm afraid I appear in most of the threads listed there). More answers are welcome, of course, and do call back for follow-up questions.