In 1873 a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann announced he had found Troy. He had — sort of.

He had dug a seventeen-metre trench straight down through nine stacked cities, blasted past the Bronze Age levels that are Homer's likeliest setting, and stopped only when he hit a layer about a thousand years too early. The hoard of gold and copper he smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire as der Schatz des Priamos — the Treasure of Priam — is now thought to belong to a king who lived a millennium before any Trojan War. The Mask of Agamemnon, which he hammered out of a Mycenaean grave three years later, is also off by several centuries.

But he was right about the place. Troy was real, and the dirt under it has been telling its own story for forty centuries.

The hill nobody believed in

For most of European intellectual history, Troy was assumed to be a fiction. Aristotle had thought it was real; the post-classical world stopped thinking about it at all. By the early nineteenth century the educated consensus was that Homer was a poet, not a historian, and that whatever city he was describing — if any — was lost beyond recovery.

Then, in 1822, a Scottish journalist named Charles Maclaren — who had never been to Anatolia — published a quiet pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, suggesting that the hill of Hisarlık on the Turkish coast, a low mound about five kilometres inland from the Dardanelles, fit Homer's geography. The plain was the right size, the rivers were in the right places, the sea was the right distance away. Nobody listened. Maclaren was a journalist; the academy was elsewhere.

A man named Frank Calvert

The first person who did was an English diplomat. Frank Calvert was the British consular agent at the Dardanelles, the youngest son of a trading family that had settled there. He had grown up in the area. He owned the eastern half of the Hisarlık mound. From 1865 he had been digging in test pits — quietly, on his own land, with his own money — and finding pottery, walls, and ceramics that did not match the Roman period above them. He could not afford to dig the whole hill himself.

In 1868 a wealthy German businessman, in Anatolia for the first time in his life, knocked on his door. Calvert told the businessman everything. He showed him the test pits. He shared his theory. He pointed to the spot. He had found his patron.

The patron's name was Heinrich Schliemann.

Schliemann's trench

Schliemann was forty-six. He had grown up poor in Mecklenburg, apprenticed to a grocer at fourteen, and built a fortune over twenty years as a war contractor — first selling indigo and saltpetre to the Russian army during the Crimean War, then expanding into commodity speculation across Europe. By his mid-forties he had retired from business, divorced his Russian wife, married a seventeen-year-old Greek girl chosen by his old Greek teacher in Athens, and decided to spend the second half of his life proving the Iliad was history.

He had taught himself ancient Greek by reading Homer aloud in his garden. He had no archaeological training. There was barely such a thing as archaeological training; the field was being invented in real time. He hired Calvert as a consultant, then increasingly ignored him.

In 1871 Schliemann began digging. His method was a trench — a long open cut driven straight down through the mound from the north side. Modern archaeology proceeds by stripping a single layer at a time, recording each one in plan and section, and only descending when an entire stratum has been excavated. Schliemann did the opposite. He went straight down. He used dynamite. He had a hundred and fifty workers. Within two seasons his trench was seventeen metres deep and forty wide — a wound in the side of the hill that is still partly visible today.

He was looking for Homer's city, which he assumed was the oldest. He drove past the Late Bronze Age levels — the layers most likely to be Homer's Troy — without recognising them, and pressed on into the Early Bronze Age below. There he stopped. He had reached, in his words, die brandgeröteten Schichten, the fire-reddened layers, and decided this was Priam's.

It wasn't.

"Priam's Treasure"

The legal terms of Schliemann's dig were not vague. The firman — the imperial decree, dated 30 June 1871 — granted him permission to excavate Hisarlık on three conditions: he would pay for the dig himself, an Ottoman official would supervise on site at all times, and any antiquities he found would be divided equally between him and the new Imperial Museum (the Müze-i Hümayun) in Constantinople. Schliemann signed. He began work that autumn.

For two seasons he complied, more or less.

Then on 31 May 1873 — the date is contested; his diaries are unreliable in places — workmen turned up a cache of gold, silver, copper, and electrum objects in a single deposit near the citadel wall: diadems, bracelets, earrings, vessels, a copper helmet. Schliemann sent the labourers away on the pretext of his wife's birthday and removed the hoard himself. He hid it from the Ottoman supervisor assigned to watch him. The next day he photographed Sophia Schliemann wearing the largest gold diadem — a publicity image that travelled the European press within weeks. He then packed the entire find into her luggage and crossed the Aegean to Athens.

He named it Priam's Treasure and announced to the world that he had recovered the personal possessions of the king from the Iliad.

The hoard is real. It is also from Troy II, dated to roughly 2400 BC. The Trojan War, if there was one, took place in the late thirteenth or early twelfth century BC. The treasure is older than Homer's Troy by a thousand years. It belongs to a city that already lay buried twelve hundred years before any plausible Hector lit a funeral pyre.

Schliemann never accepted this in print. By the time of his death in 1890 he was still calling it Priam's gold.

The Ottoman lawsuit

The Ottoman government did not let it go. In April 1874 it filed suit against Schliemann in a Greek court of first instance in Athens — the first time, in any forum, that the Empire had attempted to recover smuggled antiquities through international litigation. Greek jurisdiction was the practical choice: the treasure was in Athens, and Schliemann lived there. The case is now studied in Turkish law schools as the foundational document of Ottoman cultural-property litigation.

It took a year. In April 1875 the court ruled for the Ottoman state. Schliemann was ordered to return the treasure or pay £400 in compensation to the Imperial Museum — about 50,000 francs at the time, a figure pegged to the Ottoman government's estimate of the hoard's value. He paid £2,000 instead. The over-payment, five times the judgment, has never been fully explained. The most plausible reading, supported by his subsequent return to Hisarlık in 1878 and 1882 with renewed firmans, is that the extra money bought him both Ottoman acquiescence to keep the gold in private hands and the right to dig the site again. He had lost the suit and bought himself a partnership.

A small portion of the find — silver vessels, ceramic objects, items of secondary interest — was sent to the Imperial Museum as part of the settlement. Some of those pieces are still on display today in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, in the same building complex (the former Çinili Köşk) that the Ottoman government had founded in 1869 specifically to house finds like Schliemann's. The gold went with Schliemann.

Nine cities, stacked

What Schliemann had not understood is that Hisarlık is not one city. It is nine.

The Bronze and Iron Age occupants of the site rebuilt directly on top of their predecessors, laying fresh foundations on the rubble of the previous fire. By the time the Roman emperor Augustus visited the place around 20 BC — Ilion was a tourist destination by then, drawing pilgrims who wanted to walk where Achilles had walked — the mound was already nine settlements tall. Modern archaeologists number them Troy I through Troy IX:

• Troy I (~3000–2550 BC) — the earliest village on the spot.
• Troy II (~2550–2300 BC) — a wealthy citadel, the source of Priam's Treasure. Burned in a sudden fire.
• Troy III–V (~2300–1750 BC) — quieter centuries, modest architecture.
• Troy VI (~1750–1300 BC) — a large fortified city with massive walls of dressed limestone, Mycenaean pottery, evidence of trade across the Aegean. The size and wealth match Homer's description.
• Troy VIIa (~1300–1180 BC) — Troy VI rebuilt after an earthquake. Destroyed by fire around 1180 BC. The most likely candidate for Homer's Troy.
• Troy VIIb (~1180–950 BC) — a smaller, poorer settlement reusing the ruins.
• Troy VIII (~700–85 BC) — a Greek town, Ilion, founded by Aeolian colonists who knew the Iliad and chose the site for its associations.
• Troy IX (~85 BC–500 AD) — the Roman city, restored by Augustus and visited as a heritage site for half a millennium before the Christian shift made it irrelevant.

Schliemann's trench cut through all nine. He had passed Homer's city — the most likely candidates, Troy VI and VIIa — on the way down, mistaken them for late Greek or Roman intrusion, and stopped at Troy II.

What was actually there

The Late Bronze Age city he overlooked is now believed, with reasonable archaeological confidence, to have been a real political and trading centre of the eastern Mediterranean. Troy VI and VIIa had walls five metres thick and gates flanked by towers. The pottery shows trade with Mycenaean Greece, with the Hittite Empire to the east, with Cyprus and Egypt to the south. There are imported swords. There is a destruction layer of burnt brick and a number of human skeletons across the floors of Troy VIIa, dated by ceramics to roughly 1180 BC — consistent with a violent end and consistent, in date, with the traditional Greek dating of the Trojan War (1184 BC, by the calculation Eratosthenes worked out in the third century BC).

There is also Hittite evidence. Cuneiform tablets from Hattusa, the Hittite capital eight hundred kilometres east of Troy, refer to a vassal kingdom called Wiluša on the western coast of Anatolia — almost certainly the same name as Greek Ilios, with the older Greek form being Wilios, beginning with the digamma ϝ (the lost w). One thirteenth-century-BC letter, the so-called Tawagalawa letter from a Hittite king to a Greek (Akhiyawan) ruler, mentions a war fought over Wiluša between the two powers. The names are not the names in Homer. But the place is the place, and the politics are the politics.

A real city. A real war. A real text — composed four hundred years later, in Greek hexameter, by a poet or poets who had inherited the story without ever seeing the place — whose specifics turned out, in surprising number, to map.

From Athens to Berlin

All of that — the Hittite tablets, the lower city, the destruction layer — would only surface from later excavations. Schliemann's gold, meanwhile, was already on the move.

The treasure did not stay in Athens. In 1881 — six years after the Ottoman judgment, eight years after the discovery — Schliemann donated his entire Trojan collection to the Royal Museums of Berlin. The terms were not pure philanthropy. In exchange for the gift he received honorary citizenship of the city, the Order of the Crown from Kaiser Wilhelm I, and a written assurance that the collection would be exhibited "in its entirety" under his name in perpetuity. He had been turned down by the British Museum and ignored by the Louvre; Berlin was the third European capital he had approached.

The hoard went on display at the Völkerkundemuseum, the Royal Ethnological Museum, on Königgrätzer Strasse. It moved twice. In 1921 the collection was carried across the road to the Kunstgewerbemuseum — the building that still stands today as the Martin-Gropius-Bau. In 1931 the holdings were given their own institution, the Staatliches Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (the State Museum of Pre- and Early History), with Schliemann's gold as its centrepiece.

It stayed there until the war.

Three crates in a flak tower

In late 1939, with German bombing of Polish cities already begun and the Allied response anticipated, Berlin's museums were ordered to evacuate their collections to bombproof storage. The Trojan gold went first to the Vor- und Frühgeschichte basement. As the air war over Berlin intensified through 1941, Hitler personally ordered the most valuable objects in the Reich's collections — Priam's gold among them — moved into the Zooflakturm, the enormous concrete anti-aircraft tower at the western edge of the Berlin Zoo.

The Zooflakturm was, on paper, the most heavily defended building in Berlin: forty metres tall, walls of reinforced concrete two and a half metres thick, four 128-millimetre twin guns on its roof, and inside it a 95-bed Luftwaffe hospital, a radio station, and a museum store running across two of its upper floors. Three sealed crates marked Trojanische Altertümer — Trojan Antiquities — sat in those storage rooms for three years, alongside the bust of Nefertiti, the Pergamon Altar friezes, and most of the Berlin Egyptian collection.

On 27 April 1945 the Red Army entered the western districts of Berlin. The Zooflakturm surrendered without significant fighting on 2 May. Soviet trophy brigades — units of officers and museum specialists, attached to the army for the express purpose of locating and removing cultural property from the territory of the Reich — entered the tower within hours. They had been looking for the crates. The location had been confirmed in advance by interrogations of museum staff captured during the previous fortnight, and by a German museum official, Wilhelm Unverzagt, who chose to surrender both himself and the inventory rather than risk the collection being looted by ordinary soldiers.

On 30 June 1945 a single transport flight took off from Tempelhof airfield bound for Vnukovo airport in Moscow. On board were three crates marked with the seal of the Staatliches Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte. They were unloaded at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. They were placed in a basement vault. They did not come out for forty-eight years.

Forty-eight years in a basement

The Soviet Union denied possessing the treasure for the entirety of its existence. East German archaeologists asked. West German diplomats asked. The Federal Republic asked, formally, in 1955, in 1957, in 1979, and on a number of unofficial occasions in between. The answer was always the same: the Soviet Union has no information about these objects.

It was a lie, and it was a successful one. The crates sat unopened in the Pushkin's basement for nearly four decades. A small number of senior Soviet officials and one or two Pushkin curators knew. No one else did. Even the staff of the Pushkin's antiquities department — the people who would have been expected to study a Bronze Age hoard if one existed in their building — were kept out of that vault.

In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved. In August 1993, two Russian art historians at the Pushkin, Vladimir Tolstikov and Mikhail Treister, published a journal article quietly confirming what German researchers had been arguing for several years on circumstantial evidence: the treasure was in the museum's basement, intact. In September 1993 the Russian government formally admitted it. In April 1996, after extensive conservation by the Pushkin's own staff, the museum opened a public exhibition titled The Treasures of Troy from the Excavations of Heinrich Schliemann. It was the first time the hoard had been seen in public anywhere since Berlin closed its galleries in 1939.

Germany asked for it back. Turkey asked for it back. Greece — on the theory that some of the objects had been part of an Aegean Bronze Age trade network and might more properly belong to the Mycenaean cultural sphere — also asked. Russia did not engage substantively with any of them.

In 1998 the Russian State Duma passed Federal Law No. 64-FZ, the Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation. The law declared that all art and antiquities removed from German territory in 1945–46 by the Soviet army were now, retroactively, the legal property of the Russian state — compensation, in the law's formulation, for the cultural losses suffered by Soviet museums during the German invasion. President Yeltsin vetoed the bill twice. The Duma overrode him both times. He signed it under protest in April 1998. It is still in force today.

The treasure is now in the Pushkin's permanent collection, in a single dedicated room. The silver and ceramic portion of the hoard — items Schliemann had sent ahead in earlier shipments and which were stored in different parts of Berlin during the war — survived in the German capital and is held today by the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte. The fragments returned to the Ottoman Empire under the 1875 settlement are, as noted, in Istanbul. The objects most associated with the founding myth of European archaeology are now divided across three cities and three governments whose claims have not been reconciled in fifty years.

The corrections, slowly

Modern excavation at Troy resumed in 1932 under the American archaeologist Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, who established the basic stratigraphy and identified the destruction of Troy VIIa as the historical event most plausibly behind the Homeric story. Work paused for the war and resumed in 1988 under Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen, whose international team worked at the site until his death in 2005.

Korfmann showed that Troy was much larger than Schliemann had ever imagined. The citadel Schliemann excavated was only the acropolis. A lower city of perhaps ten thousand inhabitants surrounded it, defended by a ditch cut into bedrock — a discovery made through ground-penetrating radar surveys in the 1990s. Troy was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998. It is now a Turkish national park, and the visible remains include both the genuine Bronze Age walls and Schliemann's trench, which is preserved as a historical scar.

The lesson taught in every undergraduate methods course is that Schliemann was right about the place and wrong about almost everything else. He proved Troy existed. He destroyed about half of what he was trying to find. He misdated his most famous discovery by a millennium. He did all this while writing self-mythologising memoirs in which he claimed to have dreamt of finding Troy as a child — a story most modern biographers consider fabricated. He was a businessman who wanted to be a hero, and he became, in the end, both: a man who proved Homer right by methods that would now get him struck off.

What you read in Homer

Reading the Iliad is, even now, an unusual experience. It is fast. It is brutal. The Greek is older than classical Attic by four centuries — closer to the language of Mycenaean palaces than to the prose of Plato — and the metre (dactylic hexameter, six feet to the line) was designed to be performed aloud over many evenings to a non-literate audience. The poem assumes you already know who everyone is. There is no establishing exposition. Achilles is angry from line one, Agamemnon is the cause, and the rest is twenty-four books of consequences.

What surprises a modern reader is the specificity. Homer names dozens of warriors with their fathers, their hometowns, their wounds, their last words. He describes armour that has since been recovered from Mycenaean graves: boar's-tusk helmets with curved cheek-pieces, body-shields tall enough to cover a kneeling man, the tower-shield of Ajax. He describes a chariot tactic — the warrior dismounts to fight on foot, the driver waits at the rear — that is documented in Hittite military manuals and would have made no sense to a Greek listener of Homer's own century. He preserves a memory of the place. Whether he preserves a memory of the war is a question without a definitive answer, but the place, at least, was real.

Why we put it in the library

Storica's library now includes the Iliad as a B1-level reading. We chose it because the Iliad is the foundational text of European literature, because reading even a simplified version of Homer is one of the cleanest ways into the rhythm of Greek narrative, and because the dirt under the story has its own story — the one above. A book that drove a man to dig up a hill in Turkey is a book worth reading. A book that turned out to be partly right is a book worth reading more than once.

The Iliad is on the shelf. The dirt is in Çanakkale Province. The gold is in Moscow. The story is, somehow, still going.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Priam's Treasure — overview, donation history, post-war seizure.
• Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte — Re-examination of Schliemann's "Collection of Trojan Antiquities" — the German museum's official account of the 1881 donation, the 1921 move, the 1939 evacuation, and what remains in Berlin today.
• Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — 150 years since Schliemann uncovered the Treasure of Priamos — anniversary documentation of the discovery and dispersal.
• Russia Beyond — How the Gold of Troy became the USSR's war booty — the Soviet seizure timeline (Zooflakturm, 27 April / 2 May / 30 June 1945, Tempelhof to Vnukovo).
• The Art Newspaper — Lost Art: Homer's Troy and Priam's Treasure — the 1993 admission, the 1996 Pushkin exhibition, and the legal dispute since.
• The Washington Post (1993) — Trojan Treasure Unlocks Art War — contemporary reporting on the moment Russia confirmed the hoard's location.
• Ali Sönmez — A Legal Struggle in pursuit of the Treasures of Troy: The Ottoman Empire and the Schliemann Trial — the lawsuit in the Athens court of first instance, the £400 judgment, the £2,000 paid.
• "The Turks and Troy: The Treasure of Priam according to Ottoman documents" — the 1871 firman and the Ottoman side of the dispute.
• Deutschlandmuseum — 31 May 1873: The Treasure of Priam — discovery details and the smuggling itself.

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I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. Our adapted Iliad sits at B1 — twenty-four chapters cut down to the spine of the story (the wrath of Achilles, the death of Patroclus, the duel with Hector, the ransom of his body) in plain sentences with the Mycenaean specifics intact. If you want to start lighter, the Odyssey is on the shelf at A2.