When he was eleven years old, his father paid for his enrollment in the Gymnasium (grammar school) at Neustrelitz, but he had to leave it after three months.

[3][4] Heinrich had to transfer to the Realschule (vocational school) after his father was accused of embezzling church funds[5]: 15  and made his exams in 1836.

[citation needed][6] At age 14, after leaving Realschule, Heinrich became an apprentice at Herr Holtz's grocery in Fürstenberg.

[5]: 70  He laboured for five years until he was forced to leave because he hurt his chest, lifting a heavy barrel and coughing up blood.

By the end of his life, he could converse in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, besides his native German.

[10][11] Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento buying and reselling over a million dollars' worth of gold dust in just six months.

Schliemann propounded this story in his autobiography of 1881, though he clearly was in St Petersburg that day, and "in actual fact, ...obtained his American citizenship only in 1869.

"[13] According to his memoirs, before arriving in California he dined in Washington, D.C., with President Millard Fillmore and his family,[14] but W. Calder III says that Schliemann didn't attend but simply read about a similar gathering in the papers.

There he attempted to live the life of a gentleman, which brought him into contact with Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin (1826–1896), the niece of one of his wealthy friends, whom he married on 12 October 1852.

At the time he began excavating in Turkey, the site commonly believed to be Troy was at Pınarbaşı, a hilltop at the south end of the Trojan Plain.

[27] The layer that Schliemann referred to as "the Burnt City"[28] and believed to be Troy is now thought to be from 3,000 to 2,000 BCE,[29] too early to be the location of the Trojan War as Homer describes it.

Schliemann later admitted fabricating it; at the time of the discovery, Sophia was in fact with her family in Athens, following the death of her father.

Schliemann ended up sending 50,000 gold francs to the Constantinople Imperial Museum, and got permission for further excavations at Hissarlik.

Schliemann at first offered his collections, which included Priam's Gold, to the Greek government, then the French, and finally the Russians.

Dr. Wilhelm Unverzagt protected the three crates containing the Trojan gold when the Battle of Berlin commenced, right up until SMERSH forces took control of the tower on 1 May.

On 26 May 1945, Soviet forces, led by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Antipenko, Andre Konstantinov, deputy head of the Arts Committee, Viktor Lazarev, and Serafim Druzhinin, took the three crates away on trucks.

[9][26][31] In 1876, he began digging at Mycenae, under the supervision of Panagiotis Stamatakis, a Greek archaeologist attached to the excavation as a condition of Schliemann's permit.

She was the niece of one of his wealthy friends in St Petersburg and they had three children; a son, Sergey (1855–1941), and two daughters, Natalya (1859–1869) and Nadezhda (1861–1935).

[37] A former teacher and Athenian friend, Theokletos Vimpos, the Archbishop of Mantineia and Kynouria, helped Schliemann find someone "enthusiastic about Homer and about a rebirth of my beloved Greece...with a Greek name and a soul impassioned for learning."

Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.

Schliemann was a German adventurer and con-man who took sole credit for the discovery, even though he was digging at the site, called Hisarlik, at the behest of British archaeologist Frank Calvert.

[...] Eager to find the legendary treasures of Troy, Schliemann blasted his way down to the second city, where he found what he believed were the jewels that once belonged to Helen.

[1]A 2005 article presented similar criticisms when reporting on a speech by University of Pennsylvania scholar C. Brian Rose: German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was the first to explore the Mound of Troy in the 1870s.

During this period he was criticized and ridiculed of claims to fathering an offspring with a local Assyrian Girl sparking infidelity and adultery which Schliemann did not confirm or deny.

"[43] His rough excavation, conclusory interpretation and appropriation of artifacts were criticised by contemporary antiquarians, among them Spyridon Comnos and Stephen Salisbury III.

"[45] In 1874, Schliemann also initiated and sponsored the removal of medieval edifices from the Acropolis of Athens, including the great Frankish Tower.

[46] The eminent historian of Frankish Greece, William Miller, later denounced this as "an act of vandalism unworthy of any people imbued with a sense of the continuity of history",[47] and "pedantic barbarism".

[48] In his excavations at Troy, Schliemann found many swastikas adorned on pottery[25] and consulted with Aryan nationalist Émile-Louis Burnouf to identify the symbol.