The man who found Troy may have dug straight through it
Heinrich Schliemann, a grocer's apprentice turned rich merchant, set out to prove Homer's Troy was real and excavated the mound at Hisarlik. His work boosted the case that the Iliad echoes history, but his trenches through nine layers of ruins are accused of destroying the very level thought to be Homeric Troy.
Born in 1822 in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Schliemann was the son of a poor Lutheran pastor who read him the Iliad and the Odyssey. He later claimed that at seven he vowed to dig up Troy. Poverty ended his schooling; at 14 he was apprenticed to a grocer in Fürstenberg, where he said a drunken miller reciting Homer lit his passion. In 1841 he shipped out as a cabin boy bound for Venezuela, was wrecked within twelve days, and washed up in the Netherlands.
In Amsterdam he rose from messenger to bookkeeper, joined the trading firm B. H. Schröder in 1844, and was posted to St. Petersburg two years later. He taught himself languages, including Russian and Greek, married Ekaterina Lyschin in 1852, and made money in indigo. By 1858, aged 36, he could afford to retire.
His self-told life story is not always reliable. He claimed to have personally watched a great fire sweep San Francisco in 1851, placing it in June although it happened in May, while he was actually in Sacramento, apparently drawing on a local newspaper. A PhD from the University of Rostock in 1869 is also disputed: David Traill argues it rested partly on borrowed material, while researchers in the university archives contradict him.
The Troy identification owes much to someone else. Most people then placed Troy at Pınarbaşı, and Schliemann's test digs there disappointed him. It was Frank Calvert, an English amateur and local expert, who pointed to Hisarlik and invited him to dig on land Calvert's family owned. Schliemann went on to Mycenae and Tiryns and is often called the father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology. He died in December 1890.
Source: Heinrich Schliemann
