/ world today news/ The “Treasure of Priam”, also known as the “Gold of Troy”, discovered in today’s Turkey by the German entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, eventually ended up in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. How did it get to Russia and does the country really hold the rights to the collection?
A small hall in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Shop windows are crammed with women’s gold jewelry, stone axes and bowls. It is in this hall that visitors contemplate the “Treasure of Troy”, found during excavations on the territory of present-day Turkey and donated to the Berlin Museum by the German entrepreneur Heinrich Schliemann.
A man of destiny
Heinrich Schliemann’s career began in an ordinary Dutch office. Soon, however, his incredible talent for foreign languages earned him a promotion: he was sent as a company representative first to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow. Schliemann received Russian citizenship in 1846, and in 1852 he married Ekaterina Luzhina, the daughter of a successful Russian merchant.
Heinrich Schliemann with his wife. Photo: Getty Images
But Schliemann was not destined to stay in Russia. As he travels the world, he begins to search for the long-lost treasure of Troy. In 1873, while excavating the Hisarlik Hill in present-day Turkey, he discovered his first treasure. “The discovery of Priam’s Treasure is an international sensation,” said Vladimir Tolstikov, chief curator of the collection and director of the museum’s Department of Art and Archeology of the Ancient World. Schliemann continued his archaeological activities almost until his death in 1890. According to various sources, he discovered between 19 and 21 treasures. The discoveries were donated to the city of Berlin, where they were kept in the Museum of Prehistoric and Early History until 1941.
Military trophies
After 1941, the treasures were initially stored in the basement of a bank in Berlin. When the aerial bombardment begins, they are moved to an anti-aircraft bunker. In April 1945, when Soviet troops stormed the capital of the Third Reich, the collection remained under the permanent care of Wilhelm Unferzag, director of the Museum of Prehistoric and Early History. Tolstikov says that Unfertzag, who feared that the collection might be destroyed, went to the Soviet soldiers and voluntarily handed over the crates of exhibits to them. In July 1945, the treasure was flown to Moscow.
The dispute over the treasure
When, after the war, the Germans discovered that the treasure was missing, they began to search for it all over the world. The location of the treasure was not revealed until 1994. “Only two people in the entire world knew where it was: the director of the Pushkin Museum and the curator of the collection,” says Tolstikov.
Vladimir Tolstikov. Photo: Nadezhda Seryozhkina
The secret of the Trojan treasure could have remained hidden for a long time if Grigory Kozlov, an employee of the Russian Ministry of Culture, who had access to the archives and service correspondence, did not publish information about the treasure in the American press in 1990. Russia’s culture minister Yevgeny Sidorov has no choice but to order the collection to be put on display. Experts from Germany and other countries were invited to Moscow in 1995 to examine the collection and sign a document on its authenticity. The 1996 exhibition was a great success.
Just then, Germany makes an official protest and demands that the exhibits be returned. The Russian parliament reacted in 1998 by passing a law “On cultural property transferred to the USSR as a result of the Second World War (WWII) and located on the territory of the Russian Federation”. The document states that all objects are “Russian property and federal property”. “The law enters into force and no one can break it,” notes Tolstikov. “Our German colleagues understood that they would not be able to do anything about it, so now we are successfully working together and organizing joint exhibitions.”
The law of Russia
World War II ends with the definitive surrender of Germany. “This is a legal issue and it has legal consequences,” says Alexandra Skuratova, associate professor at the Department of International Law at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). The “Treasure of Troy” can be seen as partial compensation for the destruction of Soviet cultural values: according to official statistics, more than 160 Soviet museums and 4 thousand libraries were damaged during the war, and 115 thousand books were destroyed.
Treasures of Troy in the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Photo: Lori/Legion-Media
Skuratova also noted the fact that the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was adopted in 1954, after the Second World War. As for the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, international agreements are not retroactive “unless the treaty provides otherwise.” The parties to the Hague Convention have not expressed an intention to make the document retroactive, so the sources in question cannot be applied in the Priam’s Treasure case.
It should also be noted that the USSR voluntarily returned to Germany about 1.7 million exhibits, including the entire priceless collection of the Dresden Old Masters Picture Gallery and the relief of the Pergamon Altar, although officially the USSR was not obliged to do so.
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