TROY'S LOST TREASURE

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From the time he was a child growing up in Ankershagen, Germany, in the early part of the 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann knew his destiny. He vowed that when he was a man, he'd prove that the people, places and events that had entranced him in Homer's Iliad--Helen and Agamemnon, the siege of Troy and the magnificent city itself--were more than just legends. Or so he later wrote. Like many of Schliemann's tales, this one may have been a trifle exaggerated. "In general, scholars accept the fact that Schliemann told a great many lies," says David Traill, a classicist at the University of California at Davis and author of a 1995 biography of Schliemann. The man was also a war profiteer, a dabbler in black markets and a smuggler, whose wheelings and dealings have three nations squabbling more than a century after his death. Schliemann did eventually find the lost city of Troy, near the Turkish coast, but he dug right through the layers corresponding to the Homeric period and largely destroyed them. The Troy he found was at least a thousand years older than he believed.

None of that will matter much to people who visit Moscow's Pushkin Museum over the next year, though. For all his character flaws and sloppy science, Schliemann still unearthed one of the richest archaeological troves ever found. And beginning this week, 259 of the thousands of objects he dug from the Turkish soil in the late 1800s will go on public display for the first time in 50 years: diadems of woven gold, rings, bracelets, intricate earrings and necklaces, buttons, belts and brooches as well as anthropomorphic figures, bowls and vessels for perfumed oils.

It will also be the first time in decades that scholars have had access to the treasures and to a comprehensive catalog of the objects. The catalog, says Mikhail Treister, a curator at the Pushkin, is a "colossal work" that involved photographing each object, creating a complete description of it and assembling scientific articles and translating the text into seven languages. It will be available in English next month (Abrams; $60).

The consensus is that despite Schliemann's penchant for improving on the truth, most of his findings were legitimate and remarkable. No doubt remains that Troy existed, or that the mound known to Turks as Hissarlik is the site of the ancient city. Says Traill: "The great majority of Schliemann's reporting was borne out in detail after detail by subsequent archaeologists."

Where the story breaks down, though, it breaks down in a big way. That's almost certainly the case with what Schliemann called Priam's Treasure, a group of spectacular objects he found in 1873. "I cut out the treasure with a large knife," Schliemann wrote, "which it was impossible to do without the very greatest exertion and the most fearful risk of my life, for the great fortification wall, beneath which I had to dig, threatened every moment to fall down upon me."