It was during a lecture at Ankara University in Turkey, when Zeynep Boz’s professor evoked the fate of the storied gold of ancient Troy, that Boz first felt the full painful loss of her country’s treasures that had been transported abroad.
Known as Priam’s Treasure, the jewelry, vessels and other precious objects were dug in the 1870s by the German entrepreneur and pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann from the site of the city described by Homer.
After being taken to Germany, the gold was spirited to Moscow at the end of World War II by Soviet troops. Boz’s professor recounted traveling to Russia to see the gold but facing frustration.
“He was denied access to his own cultural heritage,” said Boz, whose job is now to reclaim Turkey’s ancient treasures, as head of the country’s Department for Combating Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property.
The 4,500-year-old artifacts still sit in Moscow, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. With claims by Russia, Germany and Turkey, they are frozen in a bitter three-way international dispute unlikely to be resolved soon.
Turkey hopes — with an optimism unmatched by many experts — the gold will be like a reverse Odysseus, whose long journey back from Troy is told by Homer in “The Odyssey.”
Like the wandering Odysseus, who is played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new film, the Turkish government is fixated on a journey home. They want to reunite the trove with the place it was separated from — perhaps even in a museum that opened near the archaeological site in 2018.
“The Odyssey begins at Troy and is ultimately a story about the longing to return home,” Boz said. “It would be fitting if the extraordinary journey of these objects ended not with another transfer between distant custodians, but with their reunion with the city that gives them meaning.”
Schliemann, a wealthy merchant and showman, had long pursued the legend of “windy Troy.” His announcement of the discovery of the ancient city in northern Anatolia, on the Aegean coast at the mouth of the Dardanelles, made headlines worldwide.
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In antiquity, the location was linked to the Troy of Homer’s epics and was a place of pilgrimage for Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. But over the centuries, its location became a mystery, its reality even doubted.
Schliemann wasn’t the first to identify the mound of Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey as the likely site of Troy, and he was not the first to excavate there. His rushed, indiscriminate methods are condemned by archaeologists.
Nevertheless, the subsequent scholarly consensus has supported his identification.
“He uncovered a lot of material very quickly that suggests it was a major Bronze Age city and the site of many battles, and so seems to verify that Troy was an important place that likely inspired Homer,” said Rachel Kousser, a professor of classics and art history at the City University of New York.
The discoveries at Troy confirmed that it was far more than a place of myth. They suggested that the stories of Homer about the war between the Trojans and the ancient Greeks might have their roots in historic events.
“It cemented the historicity of Troy with the physical remains of a majestic city,” said Susan Heuck Allen, visiting scholar in the classics department at Brown University and author of “Finding the Walls of Troy.”
“They showed the world that there existed contemporary civilizations that were related and they fought and they were destroyed, and Homer told a story celebrating these memories in poetry,” she said.
The soil of Anatolia also yielded treasure. After digging a large trench through the heart of the mound at Hisarlik, Schliemann discovered gold pendants, ritual axes, shields, brooches, rings, bracelets and more.
He declared them to be Priam’s Treasure, after the legendary king in Homer’s “Iliad.” (The abduction of Helen by the king’s son began the conflict that was the Trojan War.)
Among the most impressive hauls in archaeological history, it included jewelry that Schliemann, with his skill for self-promotion, proclaimed might have belonged to Helen of Troy. In one famous photograph, he had his wife, Sophia, pose as Helen wearing some of the jewels.
In fact, Schliemann had burrowed right past the layer of Homer’s Troy to find the gold from an earlier Bronze Age settlement, dating to around 2450 B.C., more than a thousand years before the accounts described in the epics.
Turkey says the treasures were excavated on territory that is now Turkey and smuggled by Schliemann to Athens without permission from the Ottoman authorities who governed the region then.
At the time, the Ottomans sued Schliemann in a Greek court and Schliemann paid a large settlement. Turkey now says the payment in no way amounts to a purchase of the gold or a transfer of ownership.
Turkey also argues that the site at Troy is the only place that can show the gold in its historic context.
“The question is not simply one of ownership or monetary value,” said Rustem Aslan, who directs the excavation at Troy on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “It concerns the right of a country and a local community to preserve, study and present the cultural heritage originating from its territory.”
In 1881, Schliemann donated the Trojan hoard to Germany, but it disappeared from storage in an antiaircraft bunker in Berlin during the final days of World War II.
Many feared Priam’s Treasure had been destroyed. In the 1990s, however, Russia acknowledged that Soviet troops had taken the bounty as spoils of war. The revelation — followed by an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum — immediately inflamed tensions over the collection’s ownership.
Russia, insisting the gold is proper compensation for Nazi acts, says it has no intention of returning it.
Germany maintains its claim of ownership but concedes that talks with Russia are going nowhere.
“Since the beginning of the war of aggression against Ukraine, all discussions on the subject of looted art have come to a complete standstill,” said Gesche Rintelen, a spokeswoman for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin museums.
Russia’s actions violate international law, said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues and an emeritus professor at DePaul University College of Law, but its government is unlikely to surrender the treasures.
“They should return it to Germany, and let Germany and Turkey sit down and work something out,” she said. Turkey’s case, she said, will require Turkey to demonstrate that it made efforts to get the collection back from Germany before World War II. It will also require a clear understanding of events surrounding Schliemann’s excavation and export.
“It’s unlikely we are ever going to know for sure what happened,” Gerstenblith said.
Several experts think the standoff will continue despite Turkey’s dreams. “I feel they ought to have it back,” Kousser said. “Are they likely to succeed? No.”
There is, however, a precedent for returns. Artifacts from Troy are scattered in other museums around the world, including in Berlin and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
In 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology made an indefinite term loan to Turkey of 24 gold jewelry pieces after testing showed they had probably originated from Troy or nearby. In return, Turkey committed to loaning artifacts to the museum.
It’s a loan procedure that experts think could one day help Priam’s Treasure get back to Turkey.
Such a return, Boz said, would “affirm that the passage of time, the consequences of war and repeated transfers between states or institutions cannot erase the circumstances in which objects were originally removed or extinguish a claim maintained from the beginning.”
