Discoverer of Troy

By Steve Dykes

Nancy Joaquim (CFA’60). Sophia: A Woman’s Search for Troy. Montrose Hall. In this novel, first published in Germany in 1996 to 1994, Joaquim explores the nineteenth-century story of Sophia Schliemann and her husband, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, as they discover and excavate the citadels of ancient Troy and Mycenae, illuminating the legend of the Trojan War of Homer’s Iliad. Just seventeen when they meet and marry, Sophia soon becomes an industrious ally in her older husband’s obsessive search for Troy, and on the Hill of Hissarlik in Turkey, they unearth the ancient city of the time of Helen of Troy.

Fame plays havoc with their relationship, and the Schliemanns separate. Sophia continues the work, figuring that if there was a Troy, so must there be the Greek citadel across the Aegean Sea from which Agamemnon’s thousand ships had come. On her own, she excavates the Grave Circle of Mycenae. Sophia and Heinrich reunite and their dreams coalesce. “Others would follow in Sophia’s footsteps as Mycenae opened its magnificent lost secrets to the world with additional treasures and signs of ancient life that would only add credibility and precision to the first discoveries made by the beautiful young Greek woman who had gone to Mycenae with a broken heart and left it a legend,” Joaquim writes. “Many official honors would come to her, but none ever compared to the satisfaction her heart knew in having tied Troy to Greece.”

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