How Heinrich Schliemann Rediscovered Troy—and Then Destroyed It

In 1876, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was excavating graves in Greece when he discovered something stunning: a mummy with a mask of gold. He peeled off the mask to confront the leathery visage beneath. After a solemn moment, he declared it the body of a legendary king from the Trojan War. As he soon announced to the world, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.”

The tale was classic Schliemann. Captivating. Picturesque. And almost certainly a lie. Schliemann did find a mummy and gold mask in those graves, but not together. Whoever the mummy was, he predated Agamemnon and the Trojan War by hundreds of years. And while that line is Schliemann’s most famous quote, there’s no evidence he ever actually said it. He and his admirers had a disquieting tendency to exaggerate, romanticize, and fudge facts in service of his legend. Whatever made the best story became the truth. As one biographer noted, he had “a canny sense of what the public wanted to hear” and gave them plenty of it: tales of plunder and woe, of lost tombs and epic battles with brave warriors. Sigmund Freud sometimes daydreamed about living Schliemann’s life, and he wasn’t alone. Indiana Jones himself was modeled in part on Heinrich Schliemann.

Nowadays, Schliemann is best remembered for one thing: proving that the most fabled city in history, Troy, was not a figment of the poet Homer’s imagination but actually existed. Despite that achievement, Schliemann remains radioactively controversial today, and not just for his exaggerations and untruths. As one scholar put it, “We may be grateful to Schliemann for plunging his spade into Troy … But he tore it to pieces in snatching it from the earth.” Indeed, if Troy itself was once lost to history, the destruction of its remains at Schliemann’s hands represents a second, deeper loss for archaeology—one all the more painful for being self-inflicted.

A Legend Fades to Myth

According to lore, the Trojan War began around 1200 B.C., when a prince named Paris absconded from Greece with a bride named Helen and brought her back to the magnificent walled city of his father, King Priam of Troy. The wronged Greek husband, Menelaus, rallied several other warrior-kings—Achilles, Odysseus, his brother Agamemnon—and sailed off to win her back. A decade-long war followed, until at last Troy fell. Most of us associate this story with Homer and his Iliad, an epic poem composed in the 700s B.C. (Other names for Troy include Ilium and Ilios.) But in truth, the Trojan War was simply the backdrop for the Iliad, which opens nine full years into the fighting and focuses more on the personal clashes between the characters. In fact, several of the most famous scenes from the war—the Judgment of Paris, the stratagem of the Trojan horse—never appear in Homer’s poem. Most of these details are found instead in lost poems by other bards, collectively called the Epic Cycle. We know these poems existed because literary scholars from classical Greece either quoted or summarized them in their works. Had those summaries not survived, our knowledge of the Trojan War would be greatly impoverished. Luckily they did, and we wove them into the tapestry of Homer to produce some of the most beloved tales of all time.

But something funny happened to Troy over the centuries. In Homer’s time, people considered the Trojan epics to be more or less straight history. They believed that Troy sat in what’s now western Turkey near the Dardanelles Strait, a narrow sliver of water linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea beyond it. People in Homer’s day had even identified the supposed ruins of the city, and the very name of Troy stirred up the same echoes of sacrifice and courage that battles like Gettysburg and Agincourt do today.

This reverence continued into classical Greece, which began around 500 B.C. (The playwright Aeschylus once said that his own works were mere “crumbs from the great banquet of Homer.”) During this era, temples sat where the war allegedly took place, and every heavyweight from Greek and Roman times stopped by to pay homage: Xerxes of Persia, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and several Roman emperors after him. As late as the 300s A.D., the emperor Constantine considered building a new capital on the supposed site of Troy.

But in later centuries, cynicism took root. Had the Trojan War really been so epic, so world-changing? Or had nostalgia and Homer’s elegance seduced people into making far more of it than was warranted? Little by little, the old reverence decayed. By the 1800s, most historians classified the Trojan War as fiction. And archaeologists knew of no suitable ruins. If Troy was so grand, so mighty, where were its temples, its palaces, its fearsome citadel? Given this dearth of hard evidence, the conclusion seemed clear: Homer and the bards of the Epic Cycle had invented the entire war.

An Unlikely Excavator

That’s where things stood with Troy in 1822, when Heinrich Schliemann was born into a minister’s family in northern Germany. His father was a petty despot who beat his mother, even during pregnancies. Schliemann escaped this chaos at age 11, moving in with an uncle, then became an apprentice to a grocer in a faraway town at 14. A few years later, Schliemann settled on international trade as his line of work and pawned his watch for a ticket on a steamship to South America. A storm sunk the ship off Holland, where he scrambled ashore and faked an illness to malinger in a Dutch hospital and figure out his next move.

While in Holland, one of Schliemann’s first genuine talents emerged: a knack for languages. He picked up Dutch, French, and English in cosmopolitan Amsterdam, partly by going to church in those languages and repeating the preachers’ sermons under his breath. Over his lifetime, he added Arabic, Danish, Italian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Greek. Several times, he traveled to a country not knowing a word of the local tongue and learned enough within a few months to begin composing diary entries in the language. This is no tall tale, either. The diaries exist.

In 1846, the firm he was working for sent him to St. Petersburg to manage its Russian accounts. Soon after his arrival, he quit to spin off his own business, and made a killing, heading to America to pad his fortune during the California gold rush. But after 12 months, he hightailed it out of the country under a cloud of accusations, after supposedly skimming gold from shipments to the Rothschilds. No matter—he left America $2 million richer (around $80 million today).

Around this time, Schliemann decided to marry. Previously, he’d been engaged to a woman in St. Petersburg, but broke things off after he saw her flush with desire while dancing with a soldier at a ball. He decided to give her a second chance after California and penned a marriage proposal. Incredibly, to hedge his bets, he also wrote a letter proposing to one of her best friends. Obviously, the two women figured out what he’d done and grew furious. The second woman nevertheless accepted his proposal, and they entered a loveless, even hostile marriage, despite having three children together.

To add to Schliemann’s woes, he no longer derived much pleasure from business. To be sure, he remained successful, and even vaulted into the realm of the megarich by profiteering on gunpowder during the Crimean War and speculating on railroad stocks and cotton during the U.S. Civil War. Ultimately, though, such success left him empty. And with his home life in shambles, he began traveling throughout Europe and attending lectures on Greek archaeology. Schliemann initially embarked on this journey because European high society considered him a nouveau riche vulgarian, and he wanted to appear more refined. But he grew genuinely fond of the field—an affection that soon deepened into obsession. 

Above all, Schliemann adored the legends of ancient Greece, venerating Homer the way some people do the Bible. He took his first archaeological tour in 1868, visiting the swamp where Hercules slew the Hydra, then bouncing around to different places mentioned in the Odyssey. He even tried excavating in Odysseus’s homeland of Ithaca, and unearthed several funerary jars with ashes and human bones inside. He ended up breaking the pots while disinterring them, but was too overjoyed to worry about such details. He later gushed, based on zero evidence, that it was “very possible” he’d just uncovered the remains of Odysseus and Penelope. 

Buoyed by this work, Schliemann decided to go looking for Troy. Despite the general consensus that the Trojan War was fiction, some scholars held out hope that the city itself once existed—and most of these sited it in Anatolia, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire and now makes up the bulk of Asian Turkey. Specifically, they placed Troy at a mound in western Anatolia near the village of Pınarbaşı, a few miles from the sea. Still, many of those archaeologists never bothered visiting Pınarbaşı. They practiced a sort of theoretical archaeology, and weren’t about to get their fingernails dirty. Schliemann, in contrast, did travel there; for all his faults, he never shied away from hard work.

But unlike other ancient sites, Schliemann found no pottery fragments lying about Pınarbaşı, which made it doubtful anyone had ever lived there. Other details didn’t add up, either. In the Iliad, Homer states that Troy had two springs nearby, one hot and one cold. In a hike around Pınarbaşı, Schliemann counted 34 springs, far too many. In another passage of the Iliad, Achilles chases Hector around Troy, circling its walls three times. Schliemann gamely tried re-creating the scene himself by taking a lap around the Pınarbaşı mound, but found himself confronted with slopes of 65 degrees in spots. He nearly faceplanted descending one and ended up crawling on his knees. “Not even a goat,” he concluded, could run down a slope so precarious. Given how precise Homer was with his landscapes, Pınarbaşı could not be Troy.

Yet there was another possibility. A handful of scholars sited Troy at a mound five miles north of Pınarbaşı called Hisarlık, the “place of fortresses.” If belief in the Trojan War was marginal, then putting Troy in Hisarlık sat on the margin of the margin—not as crazy as believing in Atlantis, but not far off. These scholars had nevertheless converted a few enthusiastic amateurs to their cause, including Frank Calvert. Although English, Calvert grew up in an expat family in western Anatolia. His older brother traded goods internationally and supported the family financially, freeing the more romantic Frank to dabble in archaeology. Calvert decided that Troy had to lie beneath Hisarlık, and convinced his brother to buy some land that included half the mound. 

Then disaster struck. His ambitious older brother gambled on some financial deals and lost. Unable to pay his debts, he filed fraudulent insurance claims for lost cargo and got busted, disgracing the family name. After going on the lam for five years, he was eventually sentenced to prison. With the family’s finances in ruin, Frank could not hire workers to dig at Hisarlık. Instead, he applied to the British Museum in London for a pittance grant of £100 (around $10,000 today). In return, he offered the museum every single artifact he unearthed, as long as they named him director of the operation. Museum staff responded curtly. Perhaps they wanted to distance themselves from fringe ideas about Troy, or perhaps they didn’t want to associate with scoundrels like the Calverts. Regardless, the British Museum told Calvert no. It proved one of the most shortsighted decisions in the history of archaeology.

Nothing if not determined, the 35-year-old Calvert undertook some small-scale excavations at Hisarlık in the mid-1860s, unearthing parts of a theater and the Athena temple, as well as artifacts. Farther down, he found pottery from the 600s B.C.—well short of Homer’s Troy, but enough to kindle an interest to keep digging, if only he could find the funds.

Calvert often hosted European visitors traveling through Anatolia, and in 1868, Schliemann dropped by on his archaeological tour. Calvert showed him some vases and a bronze lion from his digs. Schliemann was impressed. Hisarlık impressed him even more. The mound was about 200 yards wide and was surrounded, he later said, by lush green plains “embroidered with millions of flowers.” More important, he found exactly the sort of gentle slopes on which Achilles might have chased Hector. The temple and theater that Calvert had excavated further stoked Schliemann’s imagination. As for Homer’s hot and cold springs, well, Hisarlık didn’t have any springs. But Schliemann never let inconsistencies dampen his enthusiasm. So when Calvert proposed a joint partnership to dig for Troy, Schliemann jumped at the chance.

But before Schliemann could start digging, he had a domestic matter to attend to. That Christmas, he made one last attempt to reconcile with his wife, telegraphing her that he was returning to St. Petersburg with armfuls of presents for their children. She responded by fleeing town. At wit’s end, Schliemann decided to end their marriage—and soon, he was making arrangements to wed another woman. He’d written to an archbishop he knew in Greece, asking the cleric to help procure a new wife. The archbishop had just the person, 17-year-old Sophia Engastromenos. Schliemann and Sophia wed in late 1869.

With his domestic life back on track, Schliemann turned his attention to finding Troy. Despite Calvert’s hopes to run the dig, Schliemann shoved him aside and took over the operation. Excavating in the Ottoman Empire at the time required a permit, but Schliemann’s crew broke ground at Hisarlık in April 1870 before he’d bothered securing one. The initial trench they dug disappointed him—“I only find trash,” he moaned—but a second trench produced several nifty coins, figurines, and urns, plus five brick walls. Schliemann immediately declared them part of a temple mentioned in the Iliad.

The 1870 dig lasted just 12 days, after which Schliemann returned home to Sophia. He nevertheless bragged about his exploits in the newspapers—and Ottoman officials punished his impudence by purposely delaying his application to dig in 1871. Schliemann couldn’t return to the field until October, and winter rains soon turned the site into a morass. Encouragingly, though, his team did find some bronze axes and spearheads in the mud, plus jars with human bones. Unfortunately, it never occurred to Schliemann to record the strata or often even the depth at which artifacts appeared. As a result, everything he hauled away proved useless for historical analysis.

For whatever reason, the discoveries in 1871 convinced Schliemann that Homer’s Troy lay at the very bottom of the Hisarlık mound. This was a regrettable assumption. As we now know, Hisarlık is a complex site, with 11 distinct layers of occupation running from 3500 B.C. to 1350 A.D. Homer’s Troy, circa 1200 B.C., probably corresponds to layer VIIa, nowhere near the bottom. But the bottom was where Schliemann was headed, ignorance be damned.

Gold-Digger

For the 1872 season, Schliemann hired 120 workers and gave them one order: Dig fast. A bulldozer could hardly have been less precise. One trench they opened stretched 87 yards wide, most of a football field. They removed 120,000 cubic yards of dirt overall, equal to 36 Olympic-size swimming pools. At that speed, the workers couldn’t have documented their findings properly even if Schliemann had trained them to (which he didn’t). Topics of fundamental concern to archaeology—how buildings are constructed, how bodies are interred, how occupation layers change from generation to generation—were thrown by the wayside. Schliemann even purposely destroyed some discoveries. He’d seemingly channeled the gold rush mentality of scouring entire hillsides down to bare rock. All that mattered was reaching bottom.

Schliemann’s shenanigans continued in 1873. His crew dug less aggressively that year (they could hardly have dug more aggressively), but the quality of finds was spectacular—at least in Schliemann’s mind. A crumbling mudbrick structure jumped rank to become Priam’s Palace, and an ambiguous gate in the city wall was brevetted into the famous Scaean Gate, where Paris killed Achilles and where Priam’s people found the Trojan horse. Yet metal goods were scarce overall—worryingly so for Schliemann, given how much Homer prattled on about bronze this and gold that. But all those worries dissolved during the final two weeks of the dig, with the discovery that would make Schliemann world-famous.

Work on-site commenced each day at 5 a.m., with breakfast four hours later and lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon; they quit digging at sunset. Early on May 31, Schliemann was clearing the dirt around a copper vessel beneath “Priam’s Palace” when he spotted a glint of gold buried with it. Not wanting to alert any workers, Schliemann called for breakfast, even though it was far too early. Meanwhile, he began hacking away at the ground near the vessel with a knife. What happened next, he later recounted in a book, was like a magic trick: piece after piece materialized from the dirt—vases, plates, goblets, and more. A stunned Schliemann summoned his wife, Sophia, and had her stuff the items beneath her shawl to ferry them away. He eventually unearthed around 9,000 items, all of which Sophia smuggled past the workers beneath her shawl. It was one of the greatest hauls in archaeological history. Schliemann dubbed it Priam’s Treasure.

Yet most of this story was another one of Schliemann’s tall tales. He did discover those 9,000 items, but not in one place and not at one time. Sophia hadn’t been smuggling cauldrons beneath her shawl, either; she wasn’t even in the country that day. 

Calvert penned a more honest account of the excavations, based on what he’d observed on the days he could get over to his mound. Most of the time, however, he served as Schliemann’s factotum—mending wheelbarrows, sorting mail, tracking down officials to sign permits that Schliemann wouldn’t abide by anyway. Schliemann repaid Calvert’s loyalty by violating the gentleman’s agreement they had to split the proceeds on any artifacts that turned up, either concealing goods from him entirely or buying out the younger man’s share of items at criminal prices, then turning around and selling them for 10 times more on the international market. Calvert was especially vexed to read Schliemann’s exaggerations and self-glorifying accounts in the press.

And worse was coming, because Schliemann soon engineered his biggest publicity coup yet. After excavating Priam’s Treasure, he smuggled the items from Anatolia to his estate in Athens. There, he dressed Sophia up in the necklaces, earrings, and diadems—claiming they were Helen of Troy’s own—and snapped a stunning photograph. The picture appeared in newspapers across the globe, beneath rapturous headlines about the once lost, now found riches of Troy. 

The treasures seized the public’s attention like nothing ever had before in archaeology, and like few things ever have since—perhaps only King Tut’s tomb and the discovery of the Titanic. To be sure, scholars scoffed at Schliemann’s boasts and harrumphed over the picture, pointing out that there was zero evidence linking the jewelry to Priam. Do you think anyone cared? As far as the public was concerned, Schliemann had found the lost city of Homer.

Scholars were right to be suspicious. Given that Schliemann found the hoard near the bottom of the mound, “Priam’s” Treasure predated Homer’s Troy by a thousand years. More damningly, archaeologists have never found anything even remotely as spectacular at any other site from that era. While Schliemann probably did find all those artifacts in the mound, he likely found them in multiple locations and layers, then “salted” the spot under the wall to ratchet up the drama. But because he never admitted this, or kept any records that could untangle his lies, the treasures cannot shed much light on the civilizations that occupied the mound. Schliemann was reckless at the best of times. His stunt with Priam’s Treasure is an archaeological crime.

And yet. Despite his lies, despite his despicable behavior, Schliemann really had located Troy. Some of the artifacts he found, however jumbled, were exactly the kinds of goods Homer describes. The buildings inside the mound, however battered in spots by Schliemann, were exactly the kinds of places where Priam and Paris and Hector would have lived and fought and died. Whatever his (many) failings, the amateur Schliemann had taken on thousands of better-heeled, better-read, and frankly smarter scholars—scholars who thought him a boorish, lying scoundrel—and proved every single one of them wrong. He never tired in pointing this out. It was the best story he ever told, and it was completely true.

Seeking the Real Troy

In 1881, Schliemann gave Priam’s Treasure to the German government, even though he had no legal right to do so. The publicity surrounding this gift ratcheted his fame to even higher levels. Before long, Schliemann’s mansion in Athens became a tourist site in and of itself. Learned societies across Europe invited him to give speeches, and the reception was always rapturous. “I am received in London,” he once boasted, “as if I had managed to climb up to the Moon and there resuscitated the Library of Alexandria from its cinders.” Cities sometimes shot off fireworks to greet him.

Schliemann died in 1890, after an ear infection spread to his brain. He got a tomb worthy of Priam or Achilles: a towering, multistory mausoleum decorated with marble pillars and friezes of scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey. One frieze also portrays Schliemann himself, standing alongside Sophia at Troy and reciting from a copy of Homer. An inscription reads, humbly, “To Schliemann the Hero.” But a colleague named Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who took over excavating at Hisarlık in the 1890s, supplied a truer epithet shortly after Schliemann’s death, in the form of a double-edge comment: “Rest in peace. You have done enough.”

Archaeologists now have a much clearer picture of the real Troy. Bronze Age Troy contained the biggest, stoutest fortress in the entire Mediterranean region, and its massive stone walls—12 feet thick, 27 feet high—show signs of repeated assaults. Moreover, in the 1990s, excavators began digging beyond the citadel and found a long defense ditch carved into the bedrock. It stretched a dozen feet wide and six feet deep, and enclosed a town of perhaps 75 acres and 10,000 people. 

Schliemann and his immediate successors tended to view the city as essentially Greek, and drew strong lines of continuity between Trojan and Greek culture. They weren’t wrong in this: Troy did share affinities with Greece. But scholars back then had only spotty knowledge of the lands east of Troy, in wider Anatolia, where a powerful group called the Hittites reigned. And in light of modern knowledge, most features of Trojan society—the pottery, the mudbrick homes, the burial practices—far more closely resemble Hittite culture.

Further cementing this link, scholars have now deciphered clay tablets from Hittite sites that make suggestive references to kings, battles, and political strife in a city in western Anatolia called Wilusa—an echo of the alternative name for Troy, Ilios. One king mentioned in them is Alaksandu, or Alexander, an alternative name for the Trojan hero Paris, and there are references to battles between the Hittites and a group that most scholars think are Mycenaean Greeks. In all, while certainly a major city, Troy is probably more accurately thought of as a frontier outpost of the wider Hittite kingdom.

Archaeologists have also revised their views about Troy’s downfall. The grandest iteration of Troy appears in layer VI at Hisarlık, the Troy of the massive citadel. But Troy VI seems to have been destroyed circa 1275 B.C. by an earthquake; it’s a layer of crooked walls and half-toppled towers. Meanwhile, that city’s successor, the diminished Troy VII, shows evidence of war: piles of burned wood, stores of arrowheads and sling stones, hacked-off bits of bodies. The best guess is that Homer, who lived centuries after Troys VI and VII, decided to conflate the two cities and set the battle that doomed Troy VII in the more distinguished Troy VI. 

Regardless of the exact amount of truth in Homer, most scholars today believe that the Iliad and its Epic Cycle brethren point to at least some real, historical events and perhaps real individuals. That’s a stunning turnaround from the days when everyone in the smart set viewed Troy as fictional. Usually, historians debunk things: They find some widespread, cherished belief and, killjoys that they are, pick it apart. Here, the opposite happened—and it all started with Schliemann. He always believed in Homer, and unlike those who merely bandied about theories from their armchairs, he got off his duff and started digging. He also had the personality and literary chops to make others believe, even if they had to correct his excesses. “If my memoirs … contain contradictions,” he once declared, “I hope that these may be pardoned when it is considered that I have revealed a new world of archaeology.” (He was modest, too.) But no matter what, Schliemann found Troy, and even today it remains the most cited archaeological site in history.

Treasure Lost ... and Found

So … whatever happened to Priam’s Treasure, the hoard of diadems, earrings, daggers, vases, gravy boats, and cauldrons that Schliemann smuggled out of Troy in 1873 and donated to Germany? Fast-forward to World War II. Given that these were the most valuable archaeological goods in the Reich, the Germans had packed Priam’s Treasure into crates even before the first bombs fell on Berlin in August 1940. At that point, some of the crates were moved to a bank vault for several months, others to the cellar of the mint, before everything was reunited and transferred to the stoutest keep in the Reich: a giant antiaircraft tower of concrete and steel near the Berlin zoo. Unfortunately, the tower got pummeled in 1945, and while the Russian trophy brigades hurried over as soon as they could, they announced finding no trace of Priam’s Treasure.

Then, most dramatically, in the glasnost period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government revealed that it had been lying all along about Schliemann’s artifacts. Priam’s Treasure had not been destroyed in the Battle for Berlin but looted by trophy brigades, brought to Moscow, and stuffed into the basement of the Pushkin Museum.

In 1996, the museum flexed its muscles and put 260 Trojan artifacts on display. Naturally, Germany cried foul and demanded them back. They weren’t alone in doing so. Given that Schliemann had illegally smuggled them out of Troy in the first place, Turkey also claimed the goods—a claim complicated by the fact that the government Schliemann was dealing with, the Ottoman Empire, no longer exists. Additional claims were filed by the descendants of Frank Calvert, the wannabe archaeologist who owned half the Troy-Hisarlık mound. But all talks about repatriating Priam’s Treasure have broken down—and to this day, the golden goods remain in Russia.