The Trojan War

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It's August 1868.

A German by the name of Heinrich Schliemann hikes across a blustery plain in northwest Turkey.

The sun beats down, but he is a determined man.

A self-made millionaire, he is on a quest to find a lost city.

He holds a shovel in one hand and a sweat-stained book in the other.

The wind, ruffling its pages, reminds Schliemann of a quote from somewhere in the story.

It's called the Iliad, an account of a war waged by the armies of Greece against the city of Troy.

Pausing, he flicks through the pages.

Yes, here the poet Homer describes Troy as the windy city, just like it is on this plain.

But the Iliad also describes two springs of water rising from the ground, the huge walls of Troy's citadel, its wide streets and lofty towers.

So where are they?

In frustration, Schliemann slams the book shut.

The landscape has changed since ancient times.

Most scholars think the Trojan War is a myth, but Schliemann is a believer.

He pushes himself on, using the long-handled shovel like a walking stick.

Soon, he reaches a craggy hill that juts from the plain.

It is called Hisalek, which means the fortress.

On the hillside, Schliemann can make out the figure of a man chipping away at a small trench.

He is an Englishman named Frank Calvert, a fellow believer who is so convinced that Hisalik matches the geographical description of ancient Troy that he bought the land it sits on.

Schliemann calls out as he approaches, and Calvert throws down his trowel and greets him.

He invites the visitor to jump down into his trench, then shows off some finds from his excavation, broken pieces of pottery and fragments of carved stone.

But Schliemann wants hard evidence that this is Troy, something definitive, such as the mighty city walls, which must be buried deep inside the mound.

Calvert has made some progress in his study of His Salik, but the wealthy German has the funds to uncover its secrets more quickly.

The two men sit down to discuss a way forward.

As the sun sets, they reach an agreement to work together, together, and the amateur archaeologists pop the cork of a bottle of Raki to celebrate.

They raise a toast to Homer and Troy, its gods and heroes.

A little while later, the German returns to start the excavation, and he comes prepared.

Horses, carts, hundreds of men armed with pickaxes, winches, and explosives.

He sets his army to work on the hill.

Schliemann soon realizes that His Salik is what archaeologists call a tell,

a mound consisting of one settlement built on top of the previous one.

And there are more signs of civilization.

Burnt stones, pots, defensive ditches.

Excited, he orders his men to dig deeper and faster.

They set sticks of dynamite into gaps in the rock and take cover.

Soon, they have unearthed walls made of limestone blocks, polished smooth by the hands of workers now long dead.

Schliemann has his men drag these ruins out of the way because they're too close to the surface.

Troy is older, he's sure, so will be buried deeper.

He plunges further into the hill, desperate to reach the bedrock, the part that must surely contain the Troy of the Iliad.

His workforce clears a massive trench like a bomb crater.

Finally, in June 1873, Schliemann strikes gold.

Literally.

In the dirt, buried in the side wall of a trench, he spots a metal object.

He sends his workforce away so he can investigate.

Digging around with a knife, he unearths a large silver pot, dented and tarnished.

But when he cracks it open, sunlight glimmers on a cache of jewelry.

A golden hoard so magnificent that Schliemann assumes it must have belonged to the fabled king Priam, ruler of Troy.

After years of toil, thousands of dollars, and the scorn of academic scholars, Schliemann's odyssey is over.

He announces that he has found the site of Homer's Iliad.

But Heinrich Schliemann has made a terrible mistake.

Hisalik is much older than the Iliad, older even than the Trojan War itself.

With each swing of the axe and blast of dynamite, He sacks the very city he is seeking, tearing down the walls of Troy in a demolition job the ancient Greeks who besieged it could have only dreamt of.

The Trojan War was a time of heroes.

The swift-footed Greek warrior Achilles, invincible but for a single point of weakness in his heel.

The hot-headed Trojan prince Paris.

whose seduction of Queen Helen of Sparta ignites a war.

Then there are gods like Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite who toy with the fate of mortals as though they are puppets.

In the early days of what we now call ancient Greece, the story of Troy was already a saga from a bygone age.

The poet Homer preserved his imagined version of events in two epic ballads, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

His tales of divine intervention, noble ambition, and rippling bodies fighting it out on the sun-baked plains enthralled audiences ever since.

From ancient Greeks and Romans, to Victorian schoolchildren, to Hollywood audiences.

But Homer's sagas weren't written down until long after his lifetime.

And indeed, he only composed his poetic account of the war centuries after it occurred, if it ever did.

So was any of it true?

Did those legendary heroes ever exist?

What about Helen, a woman whose beauty launched a thousand ships?

And could the Greeks really have breached the city walls by hiding inside a giant wooden horse?

Is the Trojan War myth, literary fiction, or history?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network.

This is a short history of the Trojan War.

The long period known as classical antiquity spans the overlapping civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, some 1300 years.

Antiquity starts roughly from the time of Homer, around 800 BC, and ends with the fall of the Roman Empire.

It is a period when people make little distinction between myth and history.

Far from being just a collection of entertaining stories, like all mythologies, the tales are a means of explaining natural phenomena, phenomena, guiding moral behavior, and shaping political ideologies.

It is only later that the historicity of events is called into doubt.

Professor Armand Danger is a classical scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, and presenter of the podcast, It's All Greek and Latin to Me.

What most people think about when they think about ancient Greece is the golden age of Athens, where the great tragedies were put on, where Socrates was executed, but Parthenon was built and so on.

That's 5th century BC

and that's when prose writing really began with the history of Herodotus.

And Herodotus tells us actually that the Trojan War took place, I think he says 400 years before Homer.

which would place it sometime in the 11th century BC.

We now think actually that's an underestimate.

But this was something the world of Homer and Troy was certainly understood by the Greeks of classical times as being in the far distant past.

Much of what we know about the Trojan War comes from a series of poems called the Epic Cycle.

Two of its stories, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are attributed to Homer.

The others are told by fellow poets.

The tales are passed down as songs rather than through writing, but most of the epic cycle cycle gets lost over the centuries.

Its stories only survive in fragments or mentions by later historians like Herodotus.

If we imagine the epic cycle as a modern television box set, then we have lost six of the eight episodes, including the pilot, which is called Cypria.

Only fifty lines of this introduction to the series remain, all quoted by later writers.

From those fragments, we know that the Cypria tells of the build-up to to the Trojan War.

It is set in Troy, a powerful city that becomes rich because it sits on the crossroads between vital trade routes, the junction between Asia and Europe.

In the story, Paris, a prince of Troy, is given an impossible task.

He is forced to decide which of three goddesses is the most beautiful.

A dangerous judgment because the Greek gods are notoriously vain and vengeful.

He chooses the goddess of love, Aphrodite,

who in return awards him a prize, the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, called Helen.

Unfortunately, Helen is already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta.

Undaunted, Paris sets sail to Sparta to claim his prize.

He either abducts or seduces Helen, depending on which version of the story you believe.

In response, Menelaus raises an army and sets off to rescue his wife.

But he is going to need backup.

His brother is King Agamemnon of Mycenae, an influential ruler who persuades neighboring kingdoms to join the fight.

Soon, a thousand ships descend on Troy.

After landing on the beach, they set up camp on a plain below the impenetrable city walls.

What follows is nine years of conflict that hardens into a stalemate,

the siege of Troy.

It's not hard to see how such a story becomes part of the heritage of the region.

So one of the features of it is that it is actually very what's called Pan-Hellenic.

All the Greeks are in there.

Menelaus, the king of Sparta, Agamemnon, king of Argos, loads of other Greeks from other cities in the mainland.

And so it felt as if it was almost a sort of foundation story for the Greeks as a whole.

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The second episode in the epic cycle, the one that does survive, is Homer's Iliad.

He jumps straight into the 10th year of the war, assuming that listeners are familiar with previous events and can skip the recap.

The Iliad focuses on the wrath of the warrior Achilles.

The hero is raging against King Agamemnon, who has confiscated an enslaved woman whom Achilles was keeping as his bride.

In his anger, Achilles refuses to fight.

His absence from the battlefield causes the deaths of many Greeks, until his best friend and possibly lover, Patroclus, secretly leads Achilles' army into battle.

But the young man is killed by the son of the Trojan king Priam, Hector, who is famed for his ability to tame horses.

Furious, guilt-stricken, and grieving for his friend, Achilles returns to the fray, slays Hector, and desecrates his body by dragging it behind his chariot back and forth beneath the city walls.

The Iliad ends with the king of Troy, Priam, bravely venturing into the Greek camp to beg Achilles to return his son's body.

Achilles softens because the old man reminds him of his own father.

The next four episodes of the epic cycle are lost.

These tell of Achilles' battle against female Amazonian warriors, his death at the hands of Prince Paris, and the famous trick that ends the stalemate, the Trojan horse.

The Trojan horse is the bright idea of a Greek called Odysseus, who is famed for his cunning.

His plan is for the Greeks to pretend to give up, abandon Queen Helen, and go home.

They sail away in their ships, but leave behind a gift, a huge wooden horse.

Legend says it is either a tribute to the god of the sea, Poseidon, who often appears in the form of a horse, or a nod to Hector's renowned prowess with the animals.

The Trojans fall for the trick.

and pull the wooden structure inside the walls of Troy.

What they don't know is that Greek soldiers are hiding inside.

At night, they jump out and open the city gates.

Under cover of darkness, the rest of the allies sail back and ransack the city.

After 10 long years, Troy finally falls.

The last episodes also cover the terrible violence inflicted by the victors on the Trojans who are either slaughtered or forced to flee as refugees, especially its women, many of whom are taken into slavery.

Another story describes the Nostoi or homecoming of the Greeks returning to their various kingdoms.

But the penultimate and most famous episode is Homer's Odyssey.

It is the story of King Odysseus who wanders the Aegean Sea after the war for another 10 years, constantly blown off course by a petulant Poseidon and forced to endure many trials in his quest to get home.

The finale of this epic cycle, another lost episode, is about the son born to Odysseus and a witch called Circe when he was trapped on her island for a year during his Odyssey.

Once again, cursed by the gods, the boy ends up on his father's home island and mistakenly kills Odysseus with a poisonous stingray spike.

This tragedy ends the saga that started with Prince Paris of Troy all those years ago.

If you want to just enjoy the story and learn about literature and so on, then Homer has it all there.

You can read the Iliad and the Odyssey and you can just think this is extraordinary.

But I think most people who've read those epics want to know: did this actually happen?

Or what happened?

What is behind it?

And that's where the archaeology has come to our rescue, because because it does suggest that there was indeed this citadel, and indeed a citadel which governed a town below it.

And this is all relatively recent.

Some scholars will be cautious.

I'm quite prepared to believe there was a Trojan war, more or less as Homer remembers it, but of course, he tells it as a fantastic tale of love,

betrayal, happiness, sadness, and life and death.

With a story as old and complex as the Trojan War, where do we begin to look for reliable sources of information?

How can scholars separate the facts of history from the fiction of mythology?

The Greeks themselves certainly don't talk about anything that comes before Homer.

It's as if he springs fully armed.

16,000 verses of Iliad, 12,000 verses of Odyssey come from the mouth, or they might even have thought from the pen of this great bard.

It seems to converge to around 700 BC,

and at that point, you have this great epic, which

is often considered to have come from nowhere, which obviously cannot be the case.

Throughout antiquity, though, people take the stories of Homer as gospel.

The heroes of Troy are revered far and wide.

For now, the city remains inhabited and becomes a tourist attraction for for those who want to walk in the footsteps of legendary heroes.

In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes leaves his homeland in modern-day Iran and sets off to conquer Greece.

First, he makes a pilgrimage to Troy.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing only 50 years after the visit by Xerxes, reports that the Persian sacrifices a thousand head of cattle at Troy's sanctuary to the goddess Athena.

The king asks for her support in battle, then leads his army across the Hellespont, the narrow strait of water between Asia and Europe, ready to fight the Greeks.

Athena does not favor Xerxes, despite his generous offering.

Later that year, the entire Persian army is held off by 300 plucky Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.

This famous last stand would go down in history and place the Spartans, not the Persians, as the most formidable warriors of antiquity.

A century later, Troy receives another pilgrim.

It is the year 334 BC.

A column of horses gallops along a dirt path that flanks the coastline of the Troad.

This region surrounds the old city of Troy, with the wine dark sea to one side and olive green farmland on the other.

The lead rider is a man named Alexander.

He wears a gleaming golden breastplate and a red cloak that snaps in the wind.

There's no time to waste, and his entourage rides hard to keep up.

An entire army has paused on its march and is waiting for them to return.

Once this detour is over, they will continue on their way to invade Persia.

Alexander is looking for a tumulus somewhere along the coast, once guarded by the citadel at Troy, which has fallen to rack and ruin.

Now he spots something and brings his horse skidding to a halt.

One particular mound is conspicuous on the mostly flat landscape.

According to the Odyssey, the legendary warrior warrior Achilles was buried in a tomb overlooking the Hellespont.

Could this be the grave site?

Flicking the reins, Alexander gallops closer.

One day this man will be known as Alexander the Great.

But now he has been king for two years and is ready to conquer the world.

Young Alexander grew up on the stories of Homer, recited by his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle.

The exploits of Achilles fed his childhood dreams and spurred his ambition.

He vowed that one day he would come to Troy and pay his respects.

Today is that day.

As Alexander approaches the mound, he recognizes the remains of a tomb.

This must be the place where Achilles is said to be buried.

Leaping from his horse, he lands nimbly on the sacred ground and orders his men to wait.

He goes on alone.

There's not much to see, just tumble-down stones and hard-packed earth.

But then the tomb is unimaginably old.

Slowly, Alexander strips himself of armor, dropping it piece by piece in the dust.

His undergarments follow until he stands naked in the hot wind.

From the pack he has brought with him, he withdraws a bottle of oil and pours a libation around the base of the tomb, then anoints his body until his skin is gleaming.

Now Alexander sends for the garlands he's brought with him to honor the dead.

He drapes the flowers over the ruins while reciting prayers to the gods and blessings to the long-dead kings of Greece and Troy.

Finally, Alexander calls his finest soldiers to strip.

While they remove their armor, he plants the heel of one foot in the dirt and scores a long mark.

His men line up behind it.

Alexander joins them on the starting line, ready for a sprint around the mound.

He whistles,

and they take their marks.

On his second command, they set off,

dust rising as they race in a closely fought contest.

There, in the shadow of the tomb of Achilles, their show of strength honors the heroes of Troy.

When Alexander the Great visits the tomb of his hero Achilles, it is not just a pilgrimage, but a political move too.

The new king wants to show that his mission to conquer neighboring lands is a continuation of an ancient struggle for power in the region.

One that has played out for millennia.

The Greeks versus the Trojans, the armies of Xerxes versus the Greeks, and now Alexander taking the fight back to the Persians.

Almost 300 years later, in 48 BC, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar also comes to Troy.

He claims that his clan, the Julians, descend from an ancient line of Trojans.

This noble family line, he says, springs from a son of the goddess Aphrodite, the warrior Aeneas, who fled during the fall of Troy and settled in Italy where he founded the new city of Rome.

But Caesar is disappointed to find the ruins of Troy all but gone.

After the decline of Rome, at the end of the period known as antiquity, belief in the stories of Homer withers and dies.

It doesn't help that over the centuries, the landscape described in the Iliad has changed beyond recognition.

The sea silts up and the coastline shifts.

Sacred tombs no longer look out over the water.

Troy is considered as mythical as the lost city of Atlantis.

That is until the 18th century, when the new field of archaeology is born.

Suddenly, scholars start looking for hard evidence to back up centuries of myth.

Even then, serious historians consider the Iliad to be fiction, so most don't go looking for a real Troy.

It is left to enthusiastic amateur archaeologists to dig up the past.

But first, they have to find a place to dig.

In 1801, two mineralogists from Cambridge University make a tentative connection between Troy and the hill in the Turkish region of Anatolia called Hisalik.

Then, in 1822, a Scotsman, Charles McLaren, expands their work, using his skills as a geologist to cross-match the landscape of Hisalik with ancient literary references.

Up on the northwestern end of the Anatolian plateau is this area called the Troad,

where Troy was located, and it's on the bit of waterway that connects the Aegean Sea to the so-called Sea of Marmara, the Propontis as it was in the ancient world, which then goes on into the Black Sea.

So, the Dardanelles, as it's come to be known,

Troy, as an ancient city, would have stood high on a large bay,

which, by the way, has been silted up.

So, Troy itself would have been a lot closer to the sea than it is today.

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Charles McLaren is a a journalist who founds the Scotsman newspaper and is an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Confident in his investigative skills, McLaren goes public with the news that Hisalik is the probable location of Troy.

The article is picked up by an Englishman called Frank Calvert.

He's an expat diplomat living in Turkey with his family, who own a tranche of land that includes part of Hisalik.

Calvert goes to work on the site, digging up artifacts, but lacks the funds to carry out an extensive survey.

Soon, though, a solution will arrive in the form of German millionaire Heinrich Schliemann.

Born to a poor family, Schliemann went to sea as a young man to seek his fortune, but his ship was wrecked, leaving him stranded in Amsterdam.

Here, he landed a job that took him on to Russia, where he devised a system that, he claimed, helped him learn a new language in six weeks.

And maybe it works because he's eventually conversant in 15 languages, or so he says.

But he was in no rush to settle down.

After hearing about the gold rush in California, Schliemann arrived in Sacramento in 1851, where he traded in gold dust.

He made a million dollars in six months, but made a quick exit when he was accused of defrauding customers.

More evidence of the knack he had for fiction, it seems.

He also made fanciful claims about attending a banquet with the American president in Washington and witnessing the San Francisco fire of 1851, despite being far from these events at the time.

Entrepreneur, con man, fantasist.

Nevertheless, by the age of 36, Schliemann is wealthy enough to sell his business and retire.

Now it is time to indulge his real passion.

an obsession with the stories of Homer and the location of Troy.

Like other history sleuths before him, Schliemann sets off to Turkey with a copy of the Iliad in his hand.

People have been reading the Iliad for centuries and starting to do these grand journeys into Greece and discovering what we now think of as archaeological sites.

Archaeology was hardly a discipline in the 17th century, but the idea that it was to be located

really happens in the 19th century when you have British archaeologists and enthusiasts called Frank Calvert, who actually reckons it must be that particular mound.

And he passes this on eventually to Heinrich Schliemann, who is an amateur but an enthusiast and he spends a lot of money and energy.

I mean, they're literally holding the textophone in one hand and marching over the plain of the Troad looking for faces which might be this great citadel.

Schliemann throws his enthusiasm and funding into excavating the site first shown to him by Frank Calvert.

But he soon falls foul of the local authorities by digging without the necessary permits.

Calvert also starts to find his partner's methods worryingly brutal.

With an army of men using pickaxes and dynamite, Schliemann digs through meters of earth, rock, and ruins.

He finds that the hill at Hisalik is layered like a wedding cake, one settlement on top of another.

But rather than carefully examining each of the finds in turn, he blasts through the strata, convinced that the legendary Troy lies in the oldest and therefore deepest layer.

He destroys anything in his path.

The only problem is, Schliemann has got his dates wrong.

Hisalik is much older than he or anyone of his time could imagine.

We now know from more careful archaeological work at the site that Troy is first occupied around 3500 BC.

That's over two millennia before the possible date of the Trojan War.

Back when it is first settled, it's a small town with a basic city wall.

But Troy really takes off a thousand years later.

when it expands into a citadel protected by stone defenses.

Scroll forward another thousand years, and a new phase of building sees Troy start to resemble the city described in the Iliad.

Home to some 10,000 people, it has wide streets, towers, impenetrable walls.

The timing fits, too.

We are now around 1200 BC, the latter part of the Bronze Age, during the time of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Their empire dominates the region for some 400 years, but suddenly collapses.

No one knows why.

It was a civilization so advanced that it boasted palaces and a form of writing known as Linear B, which has been found on clay tablets.

But the Mycenaean society goes into rapid decline.

Its fall plunges the Greeks into a kind of dark ages, during which writing disappears for 400 years.

That's why Homer's works are recorded orally rather than in written form.

He appears right at the end of this Greek Dark Age, just before writing is rediscovered.

And even then, centuries pass before his songs are committed to paper.

By then, the ballads are likely to have been added to and changed by fellow poets throughout the Dark Ages.

But there is little doubt that they draw on memories handed down from generation to generation of that splendid Mycenaean civilization.

Indeed, in the Iliad, the Greeks are led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae.

What this means for Heinrich Schliemann is that the Troy of the Iliad is not the start of Hisarlik's story, but comes somewhere in the middle.

Similarly, it is not located right at the bottom of the mound at Hisarlik, but somewhere in the middle, a section he digs right through in his zeal.

Although Schliemann proves to be a destructive field archaeologist, he is nonetheless the man who puts Troy on the map.

He pours his own money into the excavation, starting an ongoing investigation that will span decades and prove many details described in Homer's Iliad.

What we know about it was that it had wide streets, it had an imposing city wall, and that it was a place where there were people who seemed to have a lot to do with horses.

And it could be that it was indeed famous for horse rearing.

The archaeologists who excavated Troy, starting in the 19th century, found layers on layers, something like 40 different layers of habitation.

So they've given these different layers names: there's Troy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

When you get to Troy 6, you have a layer which shows every sign of terrible destruction.

The fact that you find some skulls and so on in the ruins suggests that actually it seems possible that the city was put to the flames.

And if that is the case, and that layer can be dated to around 1280 BC,

then that fits in very nicely with a lot of other evidence that suggests that various kinds of hostile incursions were being made at the time.

And this would have been a time when the Mycenaean Greeks were at their height.

And the Mycenaean Greeks, of course, are the very Greeks who are supposed to have launched the Trojan War in order to bring back Helen of Sparta.

So Homer is right to set the Trojan War war amid that time of great conflict.

His description of a strategically important city that needs high walls to protect its citadel matches up with the remains found by archaeologists, and also with evidence found by scholars in ancient texts.

This was a very warlike world in which different groups, and you had of course the Egyptians to the south, you had the Hittites to the east, you had all kinds of different Greek chieftains on the mainland, and you had Near Eastern empires and so on.

So they were all jostling with each other.

And the Hittite Empire was a very important one and has left some documentary evidence of association, diplomatic and other, with the Greeks.

They weren't called Greeks in those days, they called themselves Achaeans.

So in Homer, we don't have the word Greek.

We have words like Achaeans and Danaeans.

And both of these names are found in Egyptian and Hittite sources

and what they suggest is that there was a problem with an independent area which is called Welusa and Welusa is almost certainly the origin of the name Ilium which was another name for Troy.

We know that this place, Welusa,

eventually called in the Hittites for help when the Achaeans decided that they would plunder it or would make war against it.

So there's all that kind of evidence from the Hittite documents.

So the Hittites call the city Wilusa.

Homer then calls it Ilium, from which he gets the Iliad.

Today, the local name for the site is Hisalik.

So why do we call it Troy?

The name Troy may come from Greek mythology.

Legend has it that the city is a capital of a whole kingdom called Troy, named after its founder, King Tros.

Certainly, many centuries later, Troy is accepted as the standard name in Western literature.

These classical texts form the basis of education for generations of children in Europe, including the young Heinrich Schliemann, who grows up obsessed with the age of heroes.

Perhaps the German archaeologist is a little too taken with mythology.

So much so, he applies poetic license to the accounts of his own work.

According to his memoir, one day during the dig at Hisalik, he spots a metal object in the wall of a trench.

He knows it is something significant and sends his workforce away for the afternoon.

With only his wife, Sophie, to help, Schliemann digs the container out of the bedrock with a knife.

Inside, he finds treasure.

jewelry made of gold, silver and copper.

The hoard contains two golden diadems or headdresses, over 8,000 gold rings, precious earrings and cups.

He declares the cash to be the treasure of Priam and says the diadems are Helen's jewels.

No one disputes or dates the finds.

In fact, a waiting world laps up the story.

Schliemann is fated, while Frank Calvert and the others whose work pointed him to the site are written out of the story.

The German never credits them for their work.

What no one knows is that Schliemann, the showman, is up to his old tricks.

The story about discovering the treasures with his wife Sophie is a tall tale.

She was far from Hisalik at a family funeral.

In later years, some will even question if Schliemann found the horde at all.

or if it was another one of his cons.

He was such a charlatan in so many ways and so brilliant brilliant in others.

But yeah, he did fabricate a lot of his story in order to make it more exciting.

And we don't really know what's true and what isn't.

And people thought,

even at the time, that he actually brought in a lot of the gold that he claimed to have discovered at the site.

It's not clear that is the case, but you know, he wasn't above doing that kind of thing.

What is certain is that Schliemann smuggles the treasures out of the country without permission.

He arranges a photo shoot featuring Sophie dressed up in the diadems and earrings.

It is only when the local authorities see these pictures that they realize the foreigner has plundered their site.

They try to sue Schliemann and do manage to ban him from Hisalik.

Schliemann later gives some of the treasures back to the Ottoman government, who legally own any fines in their jurisdiction.

but only in return for renewed access to the dig.

In Europe, Schliemann tries and fails to sell the jewelry, but the collection finally goes on display at Berlin's Museum of Pre- and Early History.

Later historians have shown that the so-called treasure of Priam in fact dates to a period almost a thousand years earlier than Schliemann claimed.

It could not have graced the head of Queen Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, but another unknown woman, lost to history.

Half a century after Schliemann's adventures come to an end, World War II is ravaging Europe.

Berlin is under the kind of bombardment that would have shocked even the beleaguered people of Troy.

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It's May the 1st, 1945.

The dying days of World War II.

Berlin is under attack from the Soviet army who are advancing into the city.

Dr.

Wilhelm Unversacht, a German archaeologist, cows inside a bunker while the battle rages outside.

This is room number 11 inside the so-called Zoo Tower, a concrete building that resembles a windowless skyscraper.

It stands beside Berlin's famous zoo, hence its name.

The Flak Tower is a tall, defensive structure with anti-aircraft guns mounted on top.

Now, it is being being bombarded by Soviet artillery.

The zoo tower may be impenetrable in theory, but Dr.

Unversacht knows that he cannot hold out under siege forever.

He glances around at the wooden crates with which he shares the room.

The Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, ordered them to be delivered to the tower earlier in the war.

They contain the finest treasures of Berlin's museum.

It's Unversacht's job to ensure the priceless artifacts survive the conflict.

But now the Soviets are at the door with tanks.

And when the bombardment falls silent, it can only mean one thing.

Nazi command has been forced to surrender.

Outside his room, there is a tramping of feet, then screaming and shouting as Russian troops pour through the corridors of the tower.

People who were sheltering inside are led away.

Unversakt keeps his door locked, but he knows there is only so much more he can do to preserve the cultural assets for the glory of his nation.

His priority must be to the artifacts themselves.

Making up his mind, he unlocks the door.

Amid the chaos of the Russians taking the tower, the archaeologist sets off through the Warren of corridors, fighting his way between people.

He manages to find a Soviet commander and explains that he has has something that may be of interest to Moscow.

Days later, members of the Soviet Arts Committee arrive.

Unverzakt leads them through the tower to see the collection he has been guarding.

He figures it is better to let experts seize the treasures rather than leave the fragile objects to be destroyed by soldiers or looters on the rampage in the aftermath of war.

There is an uneasy atmosphere between the men as Unverzakt picks up a crowbar and wrenches the lid off one wooden crate.

He knows what the war has cost the Soviet Union.

Hundreds of Russian museums and libraries bombed to oblivion.

Thousands of churches containing irreplaceable artwork incinerated.

The cultural loss is almost as devastating as the human cost.

These men are here for compensation.

The German opens box after box, revealing his nation's treasures.

Finally, he leads the Russian curators to the last three crates.

Carefully, he slides the teeth of the crowbar under the lid and lifts,

wincing as the nails are ripped from the wood.

The men lean in as gold lights up their faces.

Undversacht has saved the best to last.

A collection from the dawn of history.

The golden jewels of Priam.

The treasures of Troy.

On the 30th of June, 1945, the three crates are loaded onto an aircraft and flown from Berlin to Moscow.

They go into storage at the Pushkin Museum.

but in a special collection that means they are not catalogued or shown to the public.

For 50 years, it is not known what became of the Trojan gold.

Many scholars in the outside world believe it was destroyed, another casualty of World War II.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the Russian authorities finally admit that the collection is in their hands.

In 1996, the jewels are exhibited for the first time and remain in Moscow today.

Twice looted, first by Heinrich Schliemann from Hisalik, and then by the Soviet Arts Committee from Berlin, the ancient treasures that may also have survived the Trojan War live to see another epoch.

Meanwhile, the stories of Troy and its heroes survive in books and on screen.

Of course, it's a great story, and it can be recreated as it has been on film, as a story of warfare and love between men and women, men and men, all of that.

One of the great contrasts that we get from Homer is between the carefree life of the gods.

It doesn't matter what they do or whether they fight mortals and get wounded.

In the end, they're immortal.

They'll keep going, they'll survive to live another day, but mortals will not.

Human beings are transient.

We're like the leaves on the tree that fall to the ground.

then new leaves come and bloom.

So the idea of this continuity of human life and almost our insignificance.

But the wonderful thing about that is the whole of the epic supports the notion that you can gain the reputation you want to as a warrior by being sung about.

So, it also promotes the importance of literature, and Homer is at the root of all of that.

So, I think that is why the Trojan story has always resonated and will continue to do so.

According to another German archaeologist called Manfred Kaufmann, a 20th century expert who worked at Troy, the question is not, did the Trojan War really happen, but why should we doubt that it happened?

There is nothing in the archaeology that disproves the story, and much in the story that inspires archaeologists and historians.

Due to damage inflicted by the likes of Schliemann, a man who so desperately wanted to find Troy that he ended up destroying it, We may never know if the Trojan War was one battle that took place around 1200 BC, or many battles, or if it ever happened at all.

But thanks to the determination of true believers, we do at least know that the city did exist.

But Homer was not just a poet, but also a historian.

And heroes once strode the windy plains of Troy.

Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Dracula, he becomes an immortal creature as we have created him.

because we've dealt into his past.

The devil, the torturing, the impaling.

A bit of a mystery, but look at the end product.

He lives on to this day, and we keep asking the questions of origin of Count Dracula as Vlad Dracula, and it's still a wonderful discussion and argument to be had.

That's next time.

If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noiser Plus.

Head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions for more information.

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