Schliemann and the Search for Troy
A Childhood Obsession Made Real
Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822 in Neubukow in the Duchy of Mecklenburg, the son of a Protestant minister who read him stories from the ancient world. He claimed in his autobiography — a document historians treat with considerable caution — that he had been gripped since boyhood by the conviction that Homer's Troy was a real place buried somewhere in the Aegean world. What is undeniable is that by the time he arrived in northwestern Anatolia in the late 1860s, he had already made and partially lost and remade several fortunes through trade in indigo, saltpetre and war supplies during the American Civil War, and had taught himself a dozen languages, including ancient and modern Greek.
His approach to archaeology was shaped by this background as a self-made businessman rather than a trained scholar. He was impatient, certain of his intuitions, willing to spend his own money prodigally, and not above doctoring or embellishing his account of events when it served his narrative. These qualities produced some of the most important discoveries in the history of the discipline and simultaneously caused irreparable damage to the very site he sought.
Hisarlik and the Question of Location
The identification of Hisarlik, a mound in the Troad region of northwestern Turkey near the mouth of the Dardanelles, as the likely location of ancient Troy was not Schliemann's alone. The British diplomat Frank Calvert had purchased land at Hisarlik in the 1850s and conducted limited test excavations, concluding that the mound concealed a Bronze Age city. He communicated this view to Schliemann during the latter's visit in 1868 and pointed him toward the site. The extent to which Calvert's contribution was subsequently absorbed and underacknowledged by the more famous and aggressive Schliemann has been a subject of revisionist scholarship since the 1990s.
The competing candidate for Troy's location was the site of Bali Dag near Bunarbaşi, then favoured by many scholars. Schliemann dismissed it on grounds largely derived from his reading of Homer — the distances implied in the Iliad's narrative seemed to him to fit Hisarlik better. He obtained a firman (excavation permit) from the Ottoman authorities and began work at Hisarlik in 1870, initially without full legal authorisation.
Excavation and Destruction
Schliemann's method at Hisarlik was driven by speed and a single purpose: to reach what he believed was Homer's city. He employed large teams of workers, sometimes several hundred at once, to dig wide trenches through the mound from the surface downward. What he did not yet understand — and what the discipline of stratigraphy would only gradually teach the field — was that Hisarlik contained not one ancient city but a stratified sequence of at least nine major occupation layers accumulated over roughly 3,500 years, from the Early Bronze Age around 3000 BC through to Roman-period Ilium in late antiquity.
In his rush to reach lower levels, Schliemann cut through and destroyed much of Troy VI and Troy VII, the two layers now considered by most scholars to correspond most closely to the Bronze Age city of the Trojan War period — if that conflict has any historical basis. Troy VI flourished from roughly 1700 to 1300 BC as a substantial fortified settlement with monumental stone walls, large ashlar masonry towers and freestanding buildings of impressive scale. Troy VIIa, which followed, shows evidence of destruction by fire around 1190 BC, a date that fits within the plausible range of any historical event underlying the Trojan War tradition.
Priam's Treasure
In May 1873, near the bottom of his great cutting, Schliemann found a hoard of metal objects — gold and silver jewellery, cups, weapons, and two large golden diadems — buried against a stone wall in a layer he identified as the second settlement, Troy II. The find was spectacular: thousands of gold pieces including what Schliemann immediately called Priam's Treasure and famously photographed on the face of his wife Sophia.
The problem was threefold. First, Troy II dated to around 2400–2200 BC, a full millennium before any plausible Trojan War; Priam, if he existed, could not have owned this treasure. Second, Schliemann had removed the hoard secretly in violation of his agreement with the Ottoman government, which was entitled to a share of discoveries. The Ottomans revoked his excavation permit, and Schliemann was eventually fined. Third, the treasure disappeared during the Second World War — removed from Berlin for safekeeping and then taken by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. It surfaced in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 1993, where it remains, the subject of ongoing repatriation disputes involving Germany, Greece, and Turkey.
Mycenae and the Mask of Agamemnon
Barred temporarily from Hisarlik, Schliemann turned to mainland Greece. At Mycenae in the Argolid, he excavated within the great Lion Gate, the massive entrance to the Bronze Age citadel built around 1250 BC, in 1876. Inside the city walls he found Grave Circle A, a series of shaft graves cut into the bedrock and packed with extraordinary grave goods: golden death masks, bronze swords with inlaid decorations, amber beads, faience objects. When he lifted one of the gold masks and glimpsed the skull beneath, he sent a famous telegram to the King of Greece: 'I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.'
He had not. The shaft graves date to around 1600–1500 BC, predating any plausible Trojan War period by several centuries. But the finds were genuine and extraordinary, the richest Bronze Age burials then known from Greece, and they established beyond serious doubt that the Homeric epics were grounded in a real and sophisticated Bronze Age world rather than in pure fantasy.
Wilhelm Dörpfeld and the Refinement of Hisarlik
In 1882 Schliemann brought in Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a trained German architect and archaeologist, as his collaborator. Dörpfeld introduced systematic stratigraphic recording and architectural documentation, and it was largely his work that allowed the nine main layers at Hisarlik to be disentangled. After Schliemann's death in Naples in 1890, Dörpfeld continued excavations and identified Troy VI as the most plausible candidate for Homer's city based on its scale and date — a view that remained influential for decades.
The site was excavated again by Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati between 1932 and 1938, who refined the chronology further and argued that Troy VIIa, destroyed by fire around 1190 BC, was the better match. In the 1990s, Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen began the most recent major excavation campaign, using geophysical survey to reveal a substantial lower town surrounding the citadel mound — far larger than previously suspected, with a population potentially in the tens of thousands.
Troy Today
The site of Troy (Troia) at Hisarlik in Çanakkale Province, Turkey, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. The citadel mound is open to visitors, with a wooden replica Trojan horse at the entrance — a concession to popular imagination that serious archaeologists accept with varying degrees of resignation. The stone walls of Troy VI are the most visually impressive survival, with sections of massive ashlar masonry still standing several metres high. A dedicated on-site museum opened in 2018.
The question of whether any historical conflict underlies the Iliad remains genuinely open. What Schliemann demonstrated, despite the damage he caused and the liberties he took, was that the Aegean Bronze Age was real, complex and connected across long distances. His methods were those of his time and his personality; the field he helped create has spent the century since correcting his mistakes and building on his finds.
Open the map to explore Hisarlik, Mycenae and the other Bronze Age sites of the Aegean world that Schliemann brought to international attention.