Priam's Treasure

In late May 1873, near the end of his third season digging the mound of Hisarlık in north-western Turkey, Heinrich Schliemann found a large copper vessel against a stone wall, and gold behind it. His published account is vivid: he called a sudden break so his workmen would not see, cut the treasure out with a knife under a wall that threatened to collapse, and passed the pieces to his wife Sophia, who carried them away in her shawl. Schliemann later admitted she was not there; she was in Athens, mourning her father.

What he recovered was spectacular. Inside the largest silver vase lay two gold diadems, the larger made of 90 fine chains hung with leaf-shaped pendants, the smaller of 64. There were earrings, bracelets, dozens of hair rings, a long gold band and around 8,750 tiny gold beads and elements. Alongside were a gold bottle and cups, including a two-handled boat-shaped cup, silver vessels, and copper weapons and vessels. Schliemann, convinced he had found Homer's Troy, called it the treasure of King Priam, and a famous photograph shows Sophia wearing the great diadem as the jewels of Helen.

The name was wrong. Later work at Troy, especially by Carl Blegen and Manfred Korfmann, showed that the layer Schliemann was digging belongs to Troy II, a prosperous Early Bronze Age town of about 2550 to 2250 BC. The Troy of the Trojan War, if it existed, would be Troy VI or VIIa, more than a thousand years later. Many scholars also doubt the treasure was a single find: Schliemann probably grouped objects found in different places into one dramatic discovery.

Schliemann did not report the find to the Ottoman authorities as his permit required. He smuggled it to Athens. The Ottoman government sued him in a Greek court; he was ordered to pay 10,000 gold francs and in the end paid 50,000 to the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, with some lesser finds. The Ottoman official assigned to watch his excavation was jailed. After failing to sell the treasure to the Louvre or the Hermitage, and showing it in London from 1877 to 1880, Schliemann gave it in 1881 to the German people for display in Berlin.

It stayed there until the Second World War. Packed into three crates, it was stored in the flak tower at Berlin Zoo. When the Red Army took the city in 1945, the director of the prehistory museum, Wilhelm Unverzagt, stayed with the crates and handed them to Soviet officers. On 30 June 1945 the treasure was flown to Moscow and taken to the Pushkin Museum, where its presence was kept secret. For decades it was thought lost. Researchers found documents in Soviet archives in 1987, and in 1994 the Pushkin Museum confirmed it had the gold, putting it on show in 1996.

Russia regards the treasure, along with other art taken from Germany, as compensation for wartime losses, and a 1998 Russian law blocks its return. Germany considers it the property of the Berlin museums, and Turkey has also asked for it to come home to Troy. For now the gold remains in Moscow, the replicas in Berlin, and the site itself in Turkey.