Schliemann. St-Petersburg. Troy
17 June 1998 - 1999

On June 17, 1998, the exhibition "Schliemann. St. Petersburg. Troy." opened in the museum. More than 400 works in ceramic and bronze are on view in the room of the New Hermitage. It focuses on the most colourful archaeologist of the 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), who made a fortune as a merchant in St. Petersburg and spent it excavating the site of the ancient city of Troy. Originally, Schliemann gave his collection to the German nation but it was shipped to Russia in 1945 after being appropriated by the Russian army's Trophy Brigade; the gold is still in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and the ceramics and bronzes in the Hermitage. It is these latter Trojan treasures that are exhibited for the first time since 1945 in the context of St-Petersburg when Schliemann lived there.