Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Judgment of Paris (1528).
Fig. 9. The false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye was built by the Germans.
Most modern biographies of Schliemann are based on his autobiography, which was long ago acknowledged to be a rather doubtful source. For example, check the frequently republished biography of Schliemann, considered to be classical, written by the German historian Heinrich Alexan der Stoll.[11]
According to one of them, Heinrich Schliemann was born in a poor German family and became keen on Troy when he was eight, after he had got an illustrated History of the World by Georg Ludwig Jerrer for Christmas. The book contained a picture of Ilion aflame with its huge walls and gates, through which Aeneas fled with his father on his shoulders. Not wishing to believe that Troy was only a fairy tale told by Homer, the boy decided by any means to find the legendary city. It is commonly believed (and guides leading tourists in Troy insist on this very version) that Schliemann was the only man all over the Earth, who believed that the Trojan War had really taken place. Using geographic hints from Homers poems, he found and excavated Troy! Since that time, everything written by Homer started to be taken as the absolute historical truth.
The only one who believed Well, if an outright lie can be called a wrench, lets call it a wrench. But first of all, let us tell you about the kind of person that Schliemann was.
Heinrich Schliemann was raised in a troubled family (his father, a Protestant priest, was a libertine and an embezzler of state property), and he had to earn his living from the age of fourteen. For five long and boring years, he had been working as an errand boy in a grocers before he decided to change his life cardinally and applied for a job as a sea cadet on a schooner sailing to Venezuela. The vessel ran into a storm, and Schliemann told that he was among the few survivors. According to the newspapers, there were no victims in that shipwreck, though, but why would anyone bother spoiling such a wonderful story with some truth
It was so much more interesting to imagine himself like Robinson Crusoe setting his foot on the Dutch land with a torn blanket over his shoulders. Anyway, having found a job in one of the trade houses of Amsterdam, Schliemann started studying languages. Schliemanns gift for languages was an authentic medical fact. He mastered fifteen languages, including Russian, which, by the legend, he studied from pornographic poems by Barkov.
The Schliemanns method of language studying is rather popular today; its essence is in the oral narration of text fragments in the foreign language. Step-by-step memory gets used to a new language, and receptivity to the new type speech increases. It is interesting that most adherents of this method have no idea of what Heinrich Schliemann did besides these studies.
Knowledge of Russian allowed Schliemann to come to Russia as a commercial representative. One year later, in 1847, he took out Russian citizenship. The newly-minted Andrei Aristovitch founded his own company and quickly grew rich supplying the indigo dye and Chilean saltpetre. He was into any business that promised profit. Of course, at the time of gold fever, Schliemann was in America, buying gold sand from gold diggers for a mere song and thus doubling his fortune. During the Crimean War, Schliemann was selling weapons to both sides, but he made a greater profit supplying cardboard-soled boots to the Russian army. Before abolition of serfdom in 1861, Schliemann bought up paper necessary for printing large posters with the manifest to resell it to the Russian government at an exorbitant price