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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...
...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...
There it stayed until the end of World War II, when the advancing Red Army arrived in Berlin in 1945 and confiscated art by the truckload. The world believed Schliemann's gold was lost. Curators at the Pushkin knew better. It wasn't until 1991, however, that Russian art historians Grigorii Kozlov and Konstantin Akinsha, who had ferreted out the existence of the artifacts, announced the discovery to the West. It took two more years for the Pushkin and the Russian government to fess...
That's not surprising, in view of the predictable embarrassment the news has caused. "Why the exhibit was not put on earlier is one of those questions to which there is no answer," says Vladimir Tolstikov, chief curator of the Pushkin's classics department, who has known about the treasure for two decades. Under the Soviets, he says, "we were always told, 'Your job is to take care of these objects and not to get mixed up in things that are none of your business...
That doesn't mean other nations are cheering the Russians on, however. Germany is negotiating to recover all the artwork seized by the Soviets in 1945, including Priam's Treasure. "Contrary to custom," sniffs a statement from Berlin's Museum of Early and Pre-History, "the Pushkin Museum will be exhibiting the Schliemann gold without the participation of its owner." German curators have even broached the idea of lending the lesser Schliemann artifacts they still possess to the Pushkin, presumably in exchange for a return loan. But so far there has been no response...