The Greek Treasures: by Irving Stone.

This is an astounding story of one man with comparatively little education but tremendous determination and perseverance, proving history scholars of his day wrong with sheer evidence of archeological finds. Everyone else was agreed upon Homer's work being myth; Schliemann forced them to reconsider this.

Schliemann family was of German origin as the name indicates, and not very well to do; Heinrich Schliemann had been in US since a tender age, mostly fending for himself, and the era was good to those with initiative and force and self reliance, with some sharpness and business acumen.

Not very much educated, he did very well in business on his own, but had deep interests in some matters of literature and history, one of them being Troy. He was convinced unlike the scholars of his day that Homer's work was based on history, and was determined to fond Troy.

To this end he in his middle age went to Greece, and since he was an outsider who would find it difficult to get permissions for excavation from the government, arranged through middlemen to find a Greek wife for himself so he could carry out his mission. Fortunately he found a young woman who understood and was as interested when she heard his purpose.

Sophia was from a not very well to do family, as Heinrich had been, but that does not necessarily amount to lack of higher interests and aspirations, as commonly thought in west (or pretended, at least). She cared about various aspects of the issue, and the turning point of conviction in marrying him was the fact that he intended to restore the glory of Greece to the Greek nation by turning over his finds to Greece, which he was convinced of successfully finding.

After some unsuccessful attempts he realised he needed to excavate in a region that was now in Turkey, since the boundaries of culture and state are fluid over the millennia and what was once all Greece was now divided in Greece, Turkey and other nations. (Alexander was Greek, for example, but he was from a region that is now the nation of Macedonia, independent of Greece.) So they moved to Trukey with their teams, obtained the necessary permissions - which included working with supervision of the Turkish government and promise not taking out any significant findings.

But of course no western nation or person ever intended honouring any such promises made to any eastern country (think Elgin marbles named after the man who took away inestimable treasures of Greece to be housed in British museum and referred to diminutively as marbles, as if it were playing marbles which are little glass ball toys for little boys, rather than beautiful marble statues, works of art and of inestimable significance to history, and a Greek national treasure as well) - and nor was Schliemann an exception.

When the find did happen finally against all hopes dimmed by the time, he took care to dismiss all workers for the day and for next day, and the trusted part of his contingent ran with the treasure from the country. The workers did suspect and inform and they were pursued, but escaped with most of the finds, including the treasure of gold of Troy they had found.

With this success though Heinrich was encouraged subconsciously to change his mind about restoring the treasure to Greece, which broke his young Greek wife's heart. Nevertheless he deliberated, and perhaps she might have agreed it was a safer choice to leave it to US for sake of safety of the treasure, except his final choice rested on the nation of his origin, Germany. The treasure was exhibited with great pride in Berlin before wwii.

Post wwii which followed soon enough, the treasure was missing, and there was no telling where it had gone. The government and high officials had taken away treasures of all sort including art works from private owners, especially those sent to concentration camps to be murdered, and a good deal of it was missing as well, then and now. There were guesses that alpine tunnels were used for the storage of this stolen property and were sealed, and it was impossible to go about finding them without a clue as to where, since arbitrary dynamiting of suspicious locations would destroy the very treasures that were being attempted to be located whereabouts of by any authority.

Irving Stone tells this story with his usual good way of writing historical novels, wholesome and informative.

(Troy treasure including gold was fortunately another story, as came to light post fall of Berlin wall etcetera - Russian government admitted to having taken it to Russia.)