Priam’s Treasure

Real gold, wrongly named, wrongly taken; the city itself proved real

Priam's Treasure is a hoard of gold and other objects that Heinrich Schliemann took out of the mound of Hisarlık on Turkey's Aegean coast, 4.8 km from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles. The Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren had named the mound as Homer's Troy as early as 1822, and from the 1840s Frank Calvert, an English amateur archaeologist and consular official whose family farm took in part of it, dug there first. Schliemann, a wealthy businessman with a doctorate in classics from Rostock, had been searching at Pınarbaşı and was about to give up when Calvert steered him to Hisarlık. He excavated in 1871 to 1873 and again in 1878 and 1879.

On or about May 27, 1873 he found the hoard: gold diadems, among them the pair he called the Jewels of Helen, 8750 gold rings, buttons and small objects, bracelets, gold goblets and cups, an electrum cup, silver vases, and copper axes, daggers and lance heads. He named it after King Priam. The layer it came from is Troy II, hundreds of years older than the Troy VI or VII that Priam would have ruled, and the pieces are probably several finds from across the site rather than one hoard. His story of his wife Sophia carrying the gold away in her shawl was made up; he later admitted she was with her family in Athens at the time.

He smuggled the treasure out of the Ottoman Empire. The government revoked his permission to dig and sued him for its share, and later he traded part of it back for leave to dig at Troy again; that part is in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The Royal Museums of Berlin acquired the rest in 1881. When the Red Army captured the Zoo Tower in the Battle of Berlin, Professor Wilhelm Unverzagt handed it over to the Soviet Art Committee, and it was flown to Moscow. The Soviet government denied knowing where it was through the Cold War, until the Pushkin Museum admitted holding it in 1994. A 1998 Russian law treats art moved from Germany in the war as compensation and blocks its return.

Troy itself is real. UNESCO lists the Archaeological Site of Troy, with 4,000 years of history, and 24 excavation campaigns have uncovered 23 sections of the citadel walls, eleven gates and a lower city to the south.