Troy- Schliemann's Trench

In 1868, Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman, began to excavate the site. He was determined to find the city which had been destroyed in the Trojan War, so he dug a great trench across the site, looking for a walled city that had been destroyed by fire. He scattered anything in his way, including part of a Greek temple. Unfortunately he dug right past the actual level he was looking for. Famously, he found, or claimed to have found 'Priam's Treasure', consisting of bronze axes, a plate cauldron and vase of bronze, gold vessels and gold jewellery. He found it in June 1873, claiming that his wife Sophia had helped him smuggle it off site in her shawl (she wasn't actually there at the time). He smuggled it out of Turkey, to Germany and presented it to the German Government and was displayed in a Berlin museum. It disappeared in WW2 and re-surfaced in Moscow in 1994. (www.forumancientcoins.com)