In the 1870s, Sophia Schliemann appeared at high-society gatherings wearing an ancient gold diadem and cascading necklaces she believed were the jewels of Helen of Troy. In doing so, she accidentally exposed an international smuggling operation. This episode separates the man from the myth in the life of Heinrich Schliemann, the wealthy businessman with a classics PhD from Rostock who set out to prove Homer’s epics were history when scholars considered the search for Troy a fool’s errand.

We give credit to Frank Calvert, the English diplomat and amateur archaeologist whose family owned the Hisarlik mound and who pointed Schliemann to the right spot after his failed dig at Pinarbasi. Then we dismantle the fabricated tale of Priam’s Treasure, explain how Carl Blegen’s stratigraphy proved Schliemann dug centuries too deep, and follow the gold from Ottoman lawsuits and a bribe for new permits to Berlin, a flak tower during the fall of the city, and its decades-long disappearance into Moscow.

• Why Schliemann’s trench-driving methods destroyed the very layers he was studying
• The lunch-break story, the shawl, and the admission that Sophia was in Athens at the time
• What was actually in the hoard: gold diadems, 8,750 small gold objects, plus copper axes and terracotta cups
• The imprisonment of Ottoman official Amin Effendi for Schliemann’s crime
• Germany’s looted-art claim versus Russia’s 1998 law on displaced cultural valuables