Visitors arriving by train in Stuttgart in the next few months are in for a surprise. The city most famous for producing the Mercedes and the Porsche has a new four-wheeled arrival that's impossible to miss. Beside the city's main train station, standing 15 metres high and 13 metres long, is a huge wooden horse, drawing hundreds of curious visitors to the newly-opened exhibition Troy: Dream and Reality.

The exhibition is the most extensive ever presented on the ancient city of Troy and gathers together over 800 objects from the collections of 12 different museums.

"We want to explain not just the history but also the context of the 3,000-yearold city right up to the present day," says Prof Dieter Planck, director of the Stuttgart exhibition.

Spread over 1,500 metres and two floors, the exhibition documents the fascination with the reality and legends of Troy through the ages. The most enduring legend of Troy - depicted in books and paintings on display and recounted in part in Homer's Iliad - is the story of the siege of Troy and of Helen, who left her husband, Menelaus, king of Sparta, to elope with Paris, son of Priam, the king of Troy.

When the Trojans refused to return Helen to her husband, the Greeks launched a great expedition and put the city of Troy under siege.

After 10 years, the Greeks pretended to abandon their siege and sailed away, leaving behind as a peace offering a huge wooden horse, filled with Greek warriors.

Once inside the walled city, the Greeks left the horse under cover of darkness and opened the city gates to the Greek army, who overran the city and slaughtered the royal family.

It was a picture of Troy in flames that sparked the life-long interest of the 19thcentury Homer-devotee, Heinrich Schliemann, when he was seven years old. He sold his successful shipping business in his 30s to become an archaeologist. Years of diligent research and hundreds of hours of digging and sifting finally brought to light as historical reality what until then was only a legend.

The approximate location of Troy was easy to identify from references in works by ancient Greek and Latin authors, principally Homer. But it was only in 1822 that the scholar Charles McLaren pinpointed a mound, referred to as Hisarlik in Turkey, as the site of Troy. In 1873, Schliemann showed the world that McLaren's hypothesis was correct, and uncovered the remains of Troy, realising a life-long dream.

He excavated the 32 metre-high Hisarlik mound in nine separate archaeological digs from 1870 until his death in 1890. In the mound he uncovered nine layers, representing nine separate cities, with the oldest settlement dating back to the early Bronze Age of 3,000 to 1,000 BC. Each successive settlement was built on the ruins of the last, usually destroyed by fire, earthquake or both.

The excavation work begun by Schliemann continues to this day, and the ruins of the city, just four miles from the Aegean Sea in north-west Turkey, attract over half a million visitors each year.

Schliemann's most famous find was a collection of gold objects, including earrings, necklaces and diadems, that he called "Priam's Treasure", after the Trojan King Priam. He smuggled the find to Greece before making it public, and it became the archaeological find of the century.

But at the end of the second World War, Russian looters took "Priam's Treasure" and other art works to Moscow, where the treasure is still located today. Last year, Germany's cultural minister went to Moscow to ask for the return of the treasure, but returned empty-handed.

On display in Stuttgart, however, is a relatively unknown collection of other gold earrings, bracelets and necklaces discovered by Schliemann in 1873. Until now the jewellery, in two collections known only as "treasure find A" and "treasure find C", lay in a safe in an Istanbul museum; this is the first time the gold jewellery has been seen by the public.

The exhibition opened two weeks ago in Stuttgart, but only after a little Trojan war of its own. Greek museums refused to co-operate with the exhibition after they learned that museums in Turkey would be contributing.

Then, at the opening ceremony, the Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer and his German counterpart, Johannes Rau, were heckled by Kurdish demonstrators.

"As a bridge between Asia and Europe, Turkey has served as the foundation for many civilisations and different cultures," said Sezer at the opening.

"The exhibition shows, in manuscripts, paintings and sculpture and, by using virtual reality and multimedia installations, how at the beginning of European history stands Homer, and before him the city of Troy," he added.

The exhibition also has a very inventive website (www.troia.de, in German), allowing visitors to take a interactive tour of the city's 3000-year history as well as "walk" around the first settlement at Troy.

Troy remains in the public consciousness right up to the present day, and the final item in the exhibit presents a cheeky example: a small glass case containing the best-selling brand of condom in the United States - Trojan condoms. In spite of the name, the manufacturers make no claim that their brand will last 10 years.

Troy: Dream and Reality, runs until June 17th at the Forum der Landesbank BadenWurttemberg, adjacent to the main train station in Stuttgart. The exhibition moves later in the year to Bonn. Website: www.troia.de