Heinrich Schliemann or the power of childhood's dreams

Today I write on an historic figure I am not completely sure to admire.

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), the famous German archaeologist had a lot of dark side to his personality. 

The historians are not very clear on the way he made his extraordinary material wealth.

From my perspective and I might be wrong, he looked like an opportunistic business man with only a few principles. He was also very much obsessed by being remembered as one of the best archaeologists of his time. Fame was something extremely important to him.

There is a part of his psyche that I find fascinating and this is what we should focus in priority.

Heinrich Schliemann had been offered by his father a beautiful illustrated book of the Iliad when he was eight years old.

He had learned the text by heart and fixated the drawings in his memory.

While everybody thought at that time that Homer had written a beautiful story in the shape of an exciting fairy tale, Schliemann had the conviction that Troy existed and that Agamemnon, Paris, Helen, Achilles and Hector had really lived a long long time ago.

The famous archaeologist kept his convictions to himself for a very long time and only after reaching a very high level of fortune, did he allow himself to start excavation campaigns in Turkey.

It is only at the age of 47, retired from his Russian business and divorced from his first wife that he moved to Istanbul.

For the next twenty years, he had only one obsession: rediscovering Troy and the traces of his famous heroes.

As Schliemann put himself in his diaries, "the Gods allowed him to fulfill his dreams."

It took him three long campaigns to reach the 9th level of stratification, the one who contains the traces of the great fire of the destruction of Troy.

A little while after, he was able to adorn his Greek second wife with what he thought were the jewels of Helen.

Before he died of an ear infection, he contemplated the golden mask and the mummy of Agamemnon.

Ethically pure or morally corrupt, full of himself or not, Schliemann poses the question of the power of childhood's dreams.

If Schliemann had not been that much influenced by his readings at the age of 8, we would still be searching for the ruins of Troy today. We might not even have started.

How much are you influenced by your first readings? How much is your early memory impacted by your childhood dreams?

And are you still listening to your inner child?

PS: for the ones interested, I highly recommend you to watch the great BBC documentary of the fantastic Michael Wood called "In Search of the Trojan War" 1985