Gold, Glory and Chaos: The Wild Life of Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann was the kind of man who made history by accident and controversy by design. He didn’t start out planning to dig up ancient civilisations—he just happened to get rich, bored, and obsessed with proving that Homer’s Iliad wasn’t a fairy tale. Picture a Victorian adventurer in a dusty waistcoat, quoting Greek poetry while swinging a pickaxe. Archaeology in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly polite science; it was part treasure hunt, part theatre, and Schliemann played the lead with gusto.
He was born in 1822 in a small German town where dreams of glory had to fit inside a candlelit room. As a boy, he read about Troy and declared that he would find it one day. Everyone laughed, which only guaranteed that he’d spend the rest of his life proving them wrong. He made his fortune trading everything from indigo to gold dust, retired at thirty-six, and decided to chase a poem. Most people would have bought a villa. He bought shovels and dynamite.
By the time he arrived in what’s now northwestern Turkey, the academic world was still squabbling over whether Troy ever existed. A British amateur, Frank Calvert, had already pointed out a mound called Hisarlık near the Dardanelles as a likely spot. Schliemann, never one to share credit or listen to advice, decided to make it his personal stage. He hired workers, ignored local authorities, and began digging with all the restraint of a man looking for buried treasure in his own back garden.
Methodical he was not. Schliemann’s idea of archaeology involved hacking through ancient layers until something shiny appeared. He tore through the strata of Hisarlık like a child unwrapping presents, unaware he was destroying what future generations would desperately wish he’d preserved. His passion for discovery was genuine, but his impatience was catastrophic. Still, luck—or destiny—was on his side. In 1873, he hit gold. Literally.
He called it “Priam’s Treasure”: a hoard of golden goblets, jewellery, diadems, and swords he claimed once belonged to the king of Troy. It was the archaeological equivalent of shouting Eureka! while holding someone else’s necklace. To make things worse, he smuggled the loot out of the Ottoman Empire wrapped in his wife Sophia’s shawl. She later posed for photographs wearing the so-called “Jewels of Helen”, and the image of a young woman draped in Bronze Age gold went viral in the nineteenth-century sense—engraved prints, newspaper spreads, society gossip. She became an icon. He became infamous.
Academics were appalled. They accused him of fakery, theft, and destruction. Schliemann didn’t care. He had the headlines, the treasure, and the glory. He even told stories about how he’d recited Homer aloud every night to train his ear for the ancient world—as if fluency in epic poetry might help you read the earth itself. For him, digging wasn’t about data. It was destiny.
And yet, despite the chaos, he was right about one thing. Troy was real. Beneath the hill of Hisarlık lay the ruins of multiple cities built on top of each other, some destroyed by fire, others by war. Later archaeologists confirmed that one layer—Troy VIIa—matched the period described in the Iliad. The walls, the towers, even signs of siege. It wasn’t proof that Achilles or Helen had existed, but it was enough to blur the line between legend and history.
Schliemann’s next act took him to Mycenae in Greece, where he unearthed gold masks, swords, and elaborate graves. One mask in particular caught his eye, and he triumphantly declared, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!” It was a magnificent find, but slightly awkward when scholars later dated it to centuries before the Trojan War. Accuracy wasn’t his strong suit; marketing was.
By then, he had become a celebrity. Newspapers adored him, museums tolerated him, and the public couldn’t get enough. He was the original self-made explorer—part scholar, part showman. His tales were full of embellishments, his records riddled with creative interpretation, but he had charisma. He made archaeology exciting, even sexy. The Victorians loved a man who could turn myth into something tangible. So what if he blew a few layers of history to dust along the way?
His legacy is complicated. He proved that great myths can hide real places, but he also showed how obsession can destroy the very things it seeks to uncover. Every archaeology student learns his name with a mix of awe and exasperation. His techniques were appalling, his instincts extraordinary. Without him, Troy might still be dismissed as fiction. Because of him, part of Troy will never be studied properly. He was both the hero and the villain of his own epic.
When Schliemann died in 1890, he left behind ruins, riches, and riddles. His tomb in Athens looks like a temple, naturally. Carved scenes from the Iliad remind visitors that this was a man who didn’t just read Homer—he lived it. The treasure he smuggled vanished during World War II, resurfacing decades later in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. The irony would have delighted him: his greatest discovery turned out to be a wandering artefact itself, captured, lost, and rediscovered across empires.
Visit Hisarlık today, and you can still stand where Schliemann once dug, staring at the remains of nine ancient cities layered like chapters in a very long book. The wind carries the same dust he kicked up, though it whispers rather than shouts. Somewhere under your feet lie traces of kings, farmers, soldiers, poets—and one overconfident German who refused to take no for an answer.
What makes his story timeless isn’t just the gold or the ruins. It’s the audacity. Schliemann believed that stories mattered enough to chase across continents, that myth might hold a grain of truth, and that sometimes madness is the price of revelation. He blurred the boundary between history and performance, science and spectacle. He forced the world to see that even legends deserve a second look.
Every era has its dreamers. Ours build rockets; his dug holes. Both hope to touch something ancient and divine. Schliemann’s pickaxe may have been crude, but his conviction carved a place for Troy not just in textbooks, but in imagination itself. For all his flaws, he reminded us that sometimes, believing too much is exactly what it takes to find what others call impossible.