According to Mellaart, he encountered a young lady called Anna Papastrati on a train from Istanbul to İzmir and noticed that she was wearing an unusual armband.
He therefore went to the house of Papastrati, who was a young Greek lady and spoke good English with a slight American accent.
The items were said to have been found in shallow graves near the city of Dorak, south of the Sea of Marmara, during the Greco-Turkish War.
Mellaart reported that he had seen photographs of the graves in which the Dorak treasure had been found and that there was a description of the discovery in Modern Greek, which he had also seen.
Investigations by the Turkish authorities and by journalists revealed, however, that the address on Kazim Direk Caddesi belonged to a commercial building in a street which had no residential houses.
In 1962, the Turkish press began to accuse Mellaart of smuggling the treasure out of the country in exchange for a cut worth 240 million Deutsche Marks.
There was eye-witness testimony that a thick-set foreigner had been seen near the find location at Dorak with a woman; one witness even identified Mellaart himself.
Enrico Giannichedda's work analyses the consistency of the treasure, the data from the drawings of finds never published by Mellaart, and the numerous inconsistencies in the reconstructions made in the past.