Cold Open

It’s the morning of June 15th, 1873, at an archaeological dig in northwestern Turkey.

Leaning on his cane, Heinrich Schliemann snaps at his crew to work faster. The sun is barely up, but he can already feel the heat gathering in the air, chasing away the last of the night’s chill.

All around him, men haul down tents and roll up canvas. They nail crates shut and load them onto half a dozen waiting carts. A hundred workers have spent months digging through this ancient mound in search of a mythical lost city. Now, they are packing up and preparing to leave. 

But there’s still one job to be done before Heinrich can take his finds away. As part of his excavation permit, all his discoveries have to be split with the Turkish government. So, an official inspector is carefully listing everything that goes into the crates, making sure that the government gets its share.

As the last one is sealed shut, the inspector shoots Heinrich a suspicious look. After a whole season of digging, these shards of pottery seem a disappointing result.

Heinrich just shrugs. But underneath his controlled expression, he can barely contain himself. 

Because the government inspector doesn’t know Heinrich’s secret—that he’s found far, far more than he’s letting on—a king’s ransom of gold jewelry, copper shields, and silver vases. And this treasure will never go to the Turkish government, because it's already been whisked away without anyone being the wiser. 

Heinrich Schliemann is convinced that he has found Troy, the legendary city that was besieged for ten years before it fell. And with this discovery, he believes he will soon win himself immortal fame and glory—just like the heroes of the ancient stories. Except Heinrich is no hero, and his discovery is not what he thinks it is. Other scholars will try to make him see the truth. But he will ignore and belittle them, and instead double down on his belief that he found Troy and its treasures during his first excavations in Turkey, which came to an end on June 15th, 1873.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is June 15th, 1873: The Fraudulent Discovery of Troy

Act One: An Obsession with Troy

It’s Christmas Eve, 1829, in Mecklenburg, Germany, more than forty years before Heinrich Schliemann starts digging for the lost city of Troy. 

In the cramped living room of a poor minister’s home, 7-year-old Heinrich and his siblings gather around a tree decorated with flickering candles and candied fruit. The air smells of pine and tallow and something sweet baking in the kitchen. Most of the time, the Schliemanns don’t have much money to spare—Heinrich’s father is a Lutheran pastor who has to stretch every coin he earns. But the holidays are different. Every Christmas, each child in the family receives a gift, and tonight, the room buzzes with the energy of children who are trying very hard to be patient. 

Heinrich waits his turn. Until finally, his father places a wrapped package in his hands. Heinrich tears it open and it’s a book—the Illustrated History of the World. It’s exactly what Heinrich wanted. 

He flips through the pages, his eyes lighting up with each illustration, until he lands on the section about the Trojan War. He pauses, soaking in the information. His father has been telling him stories about this for years—the great warriors Achilles and Hector, the ten-year siege, the wooden horse, and the burning city. But seeing it drawn out on the page is something else entirely. Heinrich lingers on a picture of Troy in flames, tracing over it with his fingers. Then he looks up at his father and asks if Troy is really gone. His father nods. It’s true—if it ever really existed, the city of Troy has been lost to history. 

Heinrich thinks about this for a moment. Then he announces, with complete seriousness, that when he’s older, he will find it himself. His father laughs. But for Heinrich, this is a moment when an obsession is born.

Ands Heinrich grows up, he never lets go of his dream. But the path to Troy turns out to be a long and winding one. 

As a boy, he works in a grocery store, but decides early on that he wants to see more of the world than just Germany. At 19, he secures a spot as a cabin boy on a ship bound to South America. He sets sail, full of ambition and confidence. But two weeks into the journey, a devastating storm wrecks the ship off the Dutch coast. Heinrich manages to drag himself to shore and ends up recovering in an Amsterdam hospital, lucky to be alive. 

Once he’s back on his feet, Heinrich abandons his previous plans and stays in Amsterdam. He takes up an office job at a trading firm where he quickly rises through the ranks. Heinrich soon discovers he has a gift for business and relentless self-promotion. And his hard work and ambition are matched by his natural skills as a linguist. He finds it easy to pick up new languages and becomes fluent in about eight of them.

Building on these talents, in 1846, the trading firm sends Heinrich to St. Petersburg in Russia. And within a year of arriving, he decides that there’s no point in being a middleman—he might as well go into business for himself. He starts his own import-export operation, dealing primarily in indigo.

By the time Heinrich is in his early 40s, he’s made a fortune. But he’s still restless and wants more. So, he decides to retire from commerce to become a student of the world. Heinrich travels extensively and even takes classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, one of the most prestigious universities in Europe. There, he learns about the fast-developing and exciting new field of archaeology. And it ignites a spark within him. 

Surrounded by all these brilliant scholars, Heinrich wants to make a name for himself and decides the best way to do that is to strike out on his own again and find the lost city of Troy. Most of the scholars of the era are convinced the Trojan War was nothing more than a myth. But Heinrich believes otherwise. And if he can prove it, he’ll go down in the history books as one of the greats. 

So with this dream in mind, he travels to Greece first, then Turkey, carrying a copy of Homer wherever he goes. He compares the various sites he visits with what’s in the text and he’s looking for specific things. The site has to be close to the sea, with both hot and cold springs. But it also has to be small enough that Achilles could have chased Hector around its walls several times, as Homer describes in The Iliad.

But nowhere he visits seems right. It’s frustrating.

Then, in August 1868, Heinrich meets Frank Calvert, an English archaeologist living in western Turkey. Frank is Heinrich’s exact opposite. Where Heinrich is brash, impulsive, and wealthy, Frank is cautious, methodical, and perpetually underfunded. He’s been slowly excavating the region for years and believes he’s already located Homer’s Troy underneath an ancient mound at a place called Hisarlik. He shares this information with Heinrich, who practically jumps for joy—the site fits perfectly. And then, there’s even better news—Frank’s family already owns part of the land. All he needs is the money to do a proper dig. 

Frank will suggest that he and Heinrich join forces, and that will be music to Heinrich’s ears. Frank has done all the heavy lifting, and now, all Heinrich will need to do is swoop in and claim the glory. 

Act Two: The Discovery

It’s 1873 in Hisarlik, Turkey, three years after Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert began digging in the area.

The sun beats down as Heinrich walks through a large excavation site, keeping a close eye on the workers he’s hired. Over a hundred men swing pickaxes and haul dirt in the heat—all under his instruction. Heinrich is now three seasons into his search for Troy. But it’s been a frustratingly slow process, filled with false starts and dashed hopes. Heinrich is growing impatient feeling that, with all the money he’s spent, he deserves to make this discovery—even if he’s not in fact the one who identified the site in the first place.

That would be Frank Calvert, the quiet and modest Englishman who did the real intellectual work to get them where they are now. Years of careful study and exploratory digs convinced Frank that this mound conceals Homer’s Troy. He willingly shared everything with Heinrich —his research, his access to the land, his connections—all in hope of discovering the lost city together. But ever since the excavations began, Heinrich has steadily sidelined Frank. 

And when Heinrich orders his team to dig an enormous, 45-foot-deep trench straight through the mound, Frank begs him to reconsider. They need to slow down and dig more cautiously. The mound at Hisarlik is made up of several layers of occupation. Some date from Roman times. Others reach all the way back to the Early Bronze Age. Frank says each one deserves to be studied. And if they aren’t careful, in their pursuit of Homer’s Troy, they run the risk of destroying the other Troys that came before and after it. 

But Heinrich ignores Frank. He only cares about the Troy of legend, which he believes he’ll find at the lowest levels of the mound. To him, everything above is just rubble. So pickaxes, shovels, and at times, even dynamite are put to work, and the crew all but tear the site apart. By the time they’re done, Hisarlik looks less like an archaeological dig and more like a mine.

But at the bottom, Heinrich doesn’t find what he is looking for. His workers discover plenty of artifacts as well as traces of walls and buildings, so there was undoubtedly an ancient city here. But there’s nothing that points conclusively to it being Homer’s Troy. 

Then, on May 31st, 1873, everything changes. 

Heinrich is on-site as usual that morning, supervising his crew, when one of the workers unearths a copper pot. Behind it, Heinrich spots a flash of gold and his heart rate spikes. 

He tells the worker to take a break and then calls over his foreman, his most trusted digger. Together, they drop down into the trench. Above them, a stone wall juts out precariously—one wrong move, and it could come down on top of them. But Heinrich doesn’t care. Excitedly, they start digging out the copper pot. And once it’s free, they find more objects behind it, glinting amid the dry earth. It’s a treasure trove unlike anything they've found before. 

Heinrich is convinced that he’s found his proof. This is royal gold—surely the riches of King Priam himself, the legendary ruler of Homer’s Troy.

Heinrich doesn’t tell anyone about what he’s found. Instead, he illegally smuggles the treasure out of Turkey to his home in Athens. That’s in violation of his excavation permit, which states he must share half his finds with the government. But Heinrich does not care. Nothing will stop him from claiming this glory entirely for himself. 

And soon after this discovery, Heinrich officially wraps up the digging season in mid-June, then sails for Greece. In Athens, he reunites with his wife, Sophia—and more importantly, with the treasure. He drapes Sophia in the ancient gold jewels and takes a photograph of her, calling her his modern-day Helen of Troy.

And in the press, Heinrich spins a romantic story that she was with him when he found the treasure, and that he collected it all in her red shawl before bringing it to Athens. He insists that the hoard of treasure was all found at the exact same time in the exact same place.

But in truth, Sophia wasn’t there at all. And only part of the treasure was found that late May morning. The rest was discovered earlier in the season and added to the collection to make the find seem more impressive. 

It’s not the first time that Heinrich has twisted the truth to make himself look better. But his lies will soon catch up with him. And Frank Calvert, the man Heinrich so cruelly cut out of his discovery, will soon call it all into question. 

Act Three: The Truth

It’s 1874, at a farm near Hisarlik in western Turkey, a year after Heinrich Schliemann unveiled the so-called “Priam’s Treasure” to the world.

Frank Calvert is at his desk, surrounded by books and notes. In his usual careful, methodical style, he’s writing a newspaper article that calls all of Heinrich’s recent claims into question. 

Before Heinrich even discovered the so-called treasure, Frank had been looking at the pottery that had been dug up during the excavation. It was the sort of thing Heinrich would never stop to think about. But Frank did. And he noticed that something was off about the artifacts coming out of the lower levels of the mound. If Heinrich was right, then they should have looked like Late Bronze Age pottery. But everything indicated that they were actually from the Early Bronze Age—which came at least a thousand years before the supposed time period of the Trojan War.

And it’s not just Heinrich’s sloppy science that Frank criticizes. By smuggling the treasures out of the country and then boasting about it in the press, Heinrich has infuriated the Turkish government and damaged the reputation of archaeologists everywhere. As Frank puts it, Heinrich’s actions “cast a slur upon science itself, by making its name a cloak for deception.”

Frank publishes his article anonymously, but Heinrich has no doubt who’s behind it—and he’s furious. He takes his revenge also in print writing an account of his excavations that becomes a bestseller in Europe and the United States. In it, he dismisses and denigrates not just Frank’s achievements, but his character. He describes Frank as an incompetent scientist and a dishonest man.

When Frank reads this, he can’t believe Heinrich’s shamelessness. None of it is true. And if anything, Heinrich is the dishonest, unscientific one. 

So Frank refuses to back down, and the bitter feud between the former partners continues. Having made himself unwelcome in Turkey, Heinrich takes his quest for fame and fortune to Mycenae, in southern Greece. He’s convinced another Homeric legend is waiting to be dug up there. And in 1876, deep in a shaft grave, he uncovers a magnificent gold funeral mask. With his characteristic bravado, he declares that he’s gazing upon the face of King Agamemnon himself, the man who conquered Troy.

The public and the press are dazzled by this announcement, but scholars are again skeptical. Like “Priam’s Treasure,” they suspect that the mask predates its supposed owner by several centuries and a pattern is becoming hard to ignore—Heinrich has an extraordinary instinct for finding things. But he has almost no instinct for knowing what those things actually are. 

Over the years, the questions about Heinrich’s methods and claims will only grow. The scholarly recognition he craves so deeply will never quite arrive. And when he dies in 1890, he’ll still be trying to cement his legacy. 

Back in Turkey, meanwhile, excavations at Hisarlik will continue. The same year Heinrich dies, Frank and a new crew finally find Late Bronze Age pottery in a different part of the site. The discovery confirms what Frank has argued for nearly two decades—Heinrich dug straight past Homeric Troy and destroyed much of it in his rush to gain glory.

The man who found Troy had been right about where it was buried. But until his dying day, Heinrich Schliemann never understood that getting the right answer the wrong way could do more harm than good. It was a lesson that Frank Calvert had been trying unsuccessfully to teach him ever since Heinrich finished his major excavations at Troy on June 15th, 1873.

Outro

Next on History Daily. June 16th, 1903. Henry Ford incorporates the Ford Motor Company, marking the beginning of one of the world's most influential automobile manufacturers.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Alex Burns.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.