[Digging up Turkey’s past] Troy and Heinrich Schliemann

Around five kilometers away to his west, across the serenely beautiful plain of the Troad, the Aegean glimmered glassily under a powerful sun. A similar distance north lay the entrance to the Dardanelles, the narrow strait spectacularly separating Asia from Europe and linking (via the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus) two great seas -- the Mediterranean and the Black. But the man on the hill was not here to admire the topography. He burned with the desire to prove that the ground beneath his feet was the site of the legendary city of Troy, immortalized in the seminal work of Western literature, Homer’s “Iliad.”

Troy today may not be Turkey’s most visited ancient site, but it is its most famous. Millions around the world have read at least parts of Homer’s “Iliad,” and the story of the Greek expedition to recover the beautiful but hapless Helen (“the face that launched a thousand ships”) from the mighty walled city of Troy is embedded in the Western consciousness. Brad Pitt played the part of one of the chief protagonists, the demigod Achilles, in Hollywood’s 2004 epic adaptation of this timeless tale, and more recently the vibrant Turkish dance-show “Troya,” based on the legend, has been wowing vast audiences both domestically and internationally. There is, it seems, something in this epic story of love, betrayal and revenge that strikes a universal chord. But had it not been for the pioneering archaeological excavations of Schliemann, the balding, bespectacled middle-aged son of a Lutheran pastor, Homer’s Troy may still lay hidden beneath the earth in a sleepy, rural corner of northwest Turkey.

1) Heinrich Schliemann, 2) Sophie Schliemann wearing gold jewelry from ‘Priam’s Treasure,’ 3) ‘The Lost Treasures of Troy,’ 4) ‘Schliemann of Troy’ The site Opening hours: daily May-September 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; October-April 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: TL 15 How to get there: Buses to Çanakkale from İstanbul (five hours) or Bursa (four hours). Regular dolmuşes run from Çanakkale to Tevfikiye (30 minutes). Where to stay and eat: There is plentiful accommodation in Çanakkale or the Hısarlık Hotel in Tevfikiye (Tel 0 286 283 0026). The Hısarlık has an attached restaurant. Background reading: On Schliemann, try “Schliemann of Troy” by David Trail or “The Lost Treasures of Troy” by Caroline Moorehead. For more general information, look at “In Search of the Trojan War” by Michael Wood. “Troia/Wilusa” by Manfred Korfman (available on site) is an essential purchase and will help you make sense of the remains.

Exploratory visits

Most ancient sources agreed that Hisarlık, the settlement mound (a “hill” which grows, layer by layer, over the ages as successive settlements are leveled and built on top of) astride a low spur running down onto the plain formed by the ancient Scamander and Simoeis rivers, was the site of Troy. Schliemann, however, was initially convinced that Pınarbaşı, well to the south, was the site of Homer’s fabled city. Although the vain and unscrupulous Schliemann later claimed otherwise, it was actually an Englishman, local landowner Frank Calvert, who persuaded Schliemann that Hisarlık was the site of Troy and that his excavations should begin there. Schliemann had already visited the mound of Hisarlık in 1868 and again in 1870. On his second visit he had even begun (without permission from the Ottoman authorities) exploratory excavations. But by the autumn of 1871, Schliemann had obtained the requisite fırman (an official permit issued by the Ottoman sultan) and could begin his long-awaited dig.

For decades, Europeans had been carting off antiquities from Ottoman lands to adorn museums in London, Paris and other capitals. The opening of the Ottoman Imperial Museum in İstanbul in 1868, however, signaled a change in attitude -- from now on at least some of these ancient treasures would be housed within the Ottoman Empire. Schliemann, who was stumping vast sums of his own hard-earned cash to conduct the dig at Troy, was none too happy about this, but in true wheeler-dealer fashion wrote to the sultan: “I do not expect to find any treasure, Excellency…and my entire task will be restricted to archaeological verifications based on the writings of the poet Homer. If, however, I am fortunate enough to find any ancient objects of value that could be of interest to the Imperial Museum, I would be very happy to divide them, half for the Museum and the other half for me.” A deal was eventually struck, but it wasn’t until Oct. 11, 1871 that the first shovel bit into Hısarlık.

The excavation commences

The autumn weather in this part of Turkey is notoriously unreliable and heavy rains on occasion turned the site into a quagmire. Dealing with the workmen, mainly employed from local villages, proved tricky as well. Perhaps because he already spoke Greek (ancient and modern -- along with a myriad of other languages), or the fact that his second wife, the young and beautiful Sophia, was Greek, or merely through Christian bias, he drew most of his workforce from surrounding Greek villages. Unfortunately for the German, as with most self-made men, he simply couldn’t understand that not everyone wanted to work 24/7, and when the Greeks refused to work on church-going Sundays, he turned to Muslim Turks from the nearby village of Çıplak. The Muslims, who had been providing accommodation for the Greek workers, grew resentful that they were only employed when the Greeks refused to work, and communal tensions rose.

Attempting to supervise more than 70 unskilled workmen, record their findings and write up reports in the evening was demanding work, especially since finds from the Bronze Age, the period the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place in, eluded him. Still, he recorded, “Many scholars even think, because of the miraculous elements in the events described by Homer, that Troy never existed … but if by perseverance and enormous expense I manage to prove that Troy never existed, I will be very happy if the scholarly world recognizes the merit in having resolved the question negatively.” Whether the publicity-seeking Schliemann actually believed what he wrote is questionable, but in spite of his doubts, Schliemann continued to work feverishly, knowing that winter was approaching. Then, toward mid-November, his workmen at last began to unearth bronze artifacts -- broaches, a spearhead, nails, an axe. Here were finds of the metal used by Homer’s heroes. Perhaps this was the site of Troy after all. Frustratingly, the weather grew so bad further excavations were untenable, and Schliemann was forced to cover the trenches and leave the site.

He spent the winter writing up his notes and trying to make sense of the objects he’d found at Hısarlık. On April 1, 1872, he was back, mob-handed this time, with two Greek foremen and a French engineer to advise him on trench-cutting and soil removal techniques. Today settlement mounds like Hisarlık are painstakingly excavated, with the archaeologists scraping their way down layer by layer to uncover evidence of successively older settlements. In Schliemann’s day, however, archaeology, still in its infancy, was cruder and the German a man with a mission -- to prove the existence of Homer’s Troy. So to save time he ordered the cutting of a huge trench, 14 meters deep, north-south across the mound. At last he found some gold objects amongst the 78,000 cubic meters of earth his 100-strong workforce had begun to unearth and then stretches of impressive fortification wall. Were these the walls of Homer’s Troy?

There’s gold in the hill

In January 1873 the persistent German returned for a final season at Hisarlık. The dig house he’d had built on site let in the “strong icy north wind … the water standing near the hearth froze in solid masses.” One of the foremen, “taking advantage of my absence, tried to rape Sophia” -- but still the obsessed Schliemann drove on. He found a gateway he claimed was the Scaean Gate, where many famous scenes in the “Iliad” took place, then uncovered a complex of buildings he said must have been the palace of the Trojan king, Priam. Finally, on May 31, near the gate, he found something that was to bring him the fame he craved -- a cache of precious objects including several gold vessels and 8,750 small gold ornaments. Anxious to “withdraw the treasure from the greed of my workmen and save it for archaeology,” he gave his workmen an early breakfast. Free of their prying eyes he “cut out the treasure with a large knife” and, according to his journal, Sophia helped him spirit it away hidden in her shawl.

The cache of precious objects was, according to Schliemann, “Priam’s Treasure,” hidden by the Trojans to prevent it falling into the hands of the besieging Greeks. In his own mind at least, this self-made man had proven that Homer’s “Iliad” was more than a fable and that Hisarlık was indeed the site of Troy. In a manner worthy of Homer’s Odysseus, a Greek leader famed more for cunning than military prowess (and whose wooden horse ploy led to the fall of the Troy), the wily Schliemann reneged on his agreement with the Ottoman authorities and smuggled the treasure out of Turkey. Photographs of Sophia, stunningly adorned in gold jewelry from the cache (which in a masterstroke of self-publicity Schliemann had dubbed the “jewels of Helen”), soon appeared on front pages of newspapers around the world. In 1881 Schliemann donated the treasure to the new Ethnographic Museum in Berlin, only for it to fall into the hands of the Russians at the end of World War II. For a few decades it was lost to the world, before miraculously being put on display at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum in 1996.

A father of archaeology

Schliemann had many faults and often distorted the truth for his own purposes in his journals. Sophia, for example, was not even in Turkey when Schliemann claimed she helped him remove the treasure from its location. Doubts have been cast on the treasure itself -- was it found in a single cache or had he assembled it slowly from scattered finds from the site. Or even worse, had he bought the precious items elsewhere and “planted” them on site to prove his theories? He certainly got his dating wrong, as later research has shown that “Priam’s Treasure” was from a much earlier period than that of the Trojan War (around 1250 B.C.) and that Homer’s Troy (if it existed) was actually in layer VI of Hisarlık, not the much earlier layer II as Schliemann believed.

Nonetheless, Schliemann’s contribution to archaeology cannot be doubted. The trench he drove through the mound is still clearly visible at the site to this day, and thousands of visitors look in awe at the spot he uncovered “Priam’s Treasure.” Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy secured not only his own fame, but also that of Hisarlık which, thanks to his pioneering work, is amongst the most important archaeological sites in the world -- and one where excavations continue to this very day.