Tomb of Festus

The Tomb of Festus is an ancient burial mound, or tumulus, near the village of Üvecik in the Ezine district of Çanakkale province, in the plain associated with ancient Troy. The name was attached to the mound by early European travelers and antiquarians who explored the Troad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associating it with a figure called Marcius Festus; it has also been recorded under the name Tumulus of Phaestus. One of the earliest visual records of the mound is a depiction made in 1809 by the French diplomat and artist Gabriel Florent Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier. Like other large earthen tumuli scattered across the Trojan plain, it drew the attention of travelers trying to match the landscape to places and heroes described in Homer's Iliad, long before systematic archaeological excavation began in the region in the later nineteenth century.