Priam's Treasure: from a Berlin flak tower to Moscow

In May 1945, weeks after the fighting in Berlin ended, Wilhelm Unverzagt handed over three wooden crates at the Zoo flak tower. He was director of the Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History. The Red Army held the concrete anti-aircraft tower. Der Spiegel reports that the handover was possibly on 26 May. The crates held gold from Troy.

Heinrich Schliemann, a German excavator, found the gold at Hisarlik, in what is now Turkey, in 1873. The Berlin State Museums give the date as 31 May. Other accounts say 27 May or 15 June. Schliemann called it Priam’s Treasure, after the king of Troy in Homer. The name is wrong. The hoard is from about 2450 BC, more than a thousand years before the Trojan War, according to the New York Times.

Schliemann dug under an Ottoman permit that required him to share his finds. The Berlin State Museums say he smuggled the hoard to Greece. In 1874 the Ottoman state sued him in Athens. A settlement let him keep it for a payment of 10,000 gold francs. No criminal case is reported. Turkey says that payment was not a purchase and did not transfer title. In 1881 Schliemann gave his Trojan collection to the Royal Museums in Berlin.

In August 1939 the museum packed its most valuable items in three crates, marked MVF 1 to 3. In January 1941 they went to the vault of the Prussian State Bank, then to the Zoo tower. The Berlin State Museums date the move to 1941. Der Spiegel puts it about a year after January 1941. In March 1945, when Hitler ordered museum treasures moved west, Unverzagt sent many items by barge but kept the Troy crates. No proceedings against him are reported. Der Spiegel says the crates left Berlin at the end of June 1945. Two secondary accounts give a flight on 30 June and an entry at the Pushkin Museum on 10 July.

Moscow said nothing. In 1958 the Soviet Union returned about 1.5 million items to East Germany, but not the gold. In 1991 the researchers Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov traced it to Moscow in ARTnews. On 25 August 1993 the Russian Culture Minister, Yevgeny Sidorov, said he had seen it. Many accounts say nobody outside Russia knew until 1994. The record shows the 1993 admission. Western experts first saw the objects in autumn 1994. On 16 April 1996 the Pushkin Museum opened a show of 259 items, the first public view since 1945.

Three sides claim the hoard. Germany says the collection belongs to the Berlin museum that Schliemann named as its custodian, and it has asked for its return many times. Turkey filed a claim after the 1993 admission. It says Schliemann removed the finds without consent. Russia passed a law in 1998 that made cultural valuables taken in the war federal property. On 20 July 1999 the Constitutional Court upheld it for items of former enemy states. The Art Newspaper listed Priam’s Treasure among the items it would keep in Russia. The Berlin State Museums call the law a breach of international law.

The objects are in Hall 3 of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The New York Times reported on 21 August 2026 that Russia calls the gold fair compensation and will not return it. Gesche Rintelen, of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said talks on looted art have stopped since Russia attacked Ukraine. Turkish officials ask for the gold to go to Troy. Ownership is not settled.