May 3, 2025 • 26 mins
This 2019 episode covers Baron Franz Nopcsa, who lived an adventurous, scholarly life, funded entirely by his family money. He identified dinosaurs, inserted himself into Albanian politics, and wrote volumes and volumes of books and papers.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Franz Nopshaw was born May third, eighteen seventy seven,
or one hundred and forty eight years ago today, So
our episode on him is our Saturday classic. This originally
came out on April eighth, twenty ninety. Enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:30):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are talking about a
fascinating gent whose story I stumbled across while looking for
something else entirely, As is often the case with me,
I'm on one track and then I go ooh, what's
that shiny object? And then I'm on a whole other track.
He's very complicated and complex to look at and kind
(00:51):
of figure out who he was. He's Baron Franz Nopcha,
who lived from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen thirty three.
He was Transylvanian. He identified dinosaurs, He inserted himself into
Albanian politics and became a scholar on Albania, and he
wrote volumes and volumes of books and papers, and he
(01:12):
was one of those people that led that sort of adventurous,
scholarly life that only an aristocrat of his time could
have managed. I mean bypassed most formal education, and so
he was funded in all of these efforts by his
family money. It wasn't as though he was doing it
to make a living. He was just living and pursuing
his interests. And he was definitely a man clearly who
(01:32):
had and took advantage of his privilege, although he did
ultimately lose it. I also have to give you a
heads up listeners that this episode contains gun violence and suicide.
I feel bad because I know I've had to put
similar warnings on several episodes lately. I swear I am
not doing that on purpose. It's always like the thing
I find out late in the game and they go,
oh man, but that is near the end. So if
(01:55):
you would like to listen to most of the show
but maybe not get that, you can tap out if
you just leave after our second ad break, because it
comes after that. So if you just missed that last segment,
you won't get any of that. So. He was born
on May third, eighteen seventy seven, in Sechelle, Transylvania, which
is now the city of Deva, Romania. At the time
(02:15):
this was all part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and
as highly noted earlier, his family was wealthy. His mother, Matilde,
was from an aristocratic family. His father, Alexius, was the
vice director of the Hungarian Royal Opera. Franz was the
first of three children for the two of them, and
as children of a pretty wealthy family, he and his
(02:37):
siblings were well educated. They all spoke multiple languages, and
the family wasn't just wealthy, but also very well connected.
His uncle was well known in the court of Austria
and was a favorite of Empress Elizabeth, and that connection
was pretty helpful, maybe even pivotal, in Franz's life. And
when Franz was still a teenager, his sister brought him
(02:58):
something that would shift his life significantly because it sparked
what has often been called an obsession on Franz's part. Alona,
the sister, had found some sort of animal skull on
a riverbank while she had been out for a walk,
and she thought her older brother might help her figure
out what it was. There is an alternate version of
this story that you will sometimes read, which involves local
(03:18):
peasants bringing his sister Alona the skull, but regardless of
which of those is accurate, it did pass from her
to her brother and make him very curious. Indeed, that
was the same year that he was starting some studies
at the University of Vienna, so he decided to bring
it to one of his professors there, Edward Seus's, for identification.
They didn't get the help that he was looking for,
(03:40):
though Seuss initially seemed kind of intrigued by this whole thing,
but he lost interest and instead the professor told the
eighteen year old Franz that he needed to do his
own legwork to figure out what he had, and nopcha
did exactly that. Yeah, he returned to his family's castle
and he basically set up his own little research center there.
There were a lot of books already available to him
(04:02):
in the family library, and from those he gave himself
a foundational knowledge in geology, physiology, and anatomy. And then
he started reaching out to various scholars asking for more
research materials so that he could continue his self education.
And then he started his own amateur excavation site on
the riverbank where that skull had been found. So he
(04:24):
was an amateur, but he was doing meticulous work. He
found a number of other fossils as he was digging,
and he started applying the things that he knew about
animal physiology to the things that he found. He was
reconstructing the anatomy of what it turned out were seventy
million year old dinosaur bones from the late Mesozoic era.
For the next four years, he worked on figuring out
(04:46):
not only the anatomy of the species that he had
accidentally come across, but also its reproduction and its behavior.
And he did this once again by comparing things he
found like nests, to the nests of existing animals to
try to figure out where there were parallels and where
there were differences. And because of this work he's considered
one of the first paleophysiologists. In eighteen ninety nine, Franz
(05:11):
Nopcha was ready to show the scientific world what he
had been working on. So he went to the Austrian
Academy of Sciences, and, as a twenty two year old
with no formal scientific training beyond like his basically the
equivalent of high school, he offered up a lecture that
both wowed and insulted the scientific community. It seems that
the combination of youthful confidence and having worked outside of
(05:34):
academia on his project made Nopia completely comfortable telling well
known scientists that they were doing it wrong. He also
doled out some praise along the way, but in a
really condescending way. So again, he was twenty two, and
at one point he mentioned that the Belgian paleontologist Luis
Dolo was really doing quite well for his age. Age.
(05:54):
It was like, oh, you've contributed so much despite how
young you are, and this was a man in his forties.
So Dolo, we should also say, had been in charge
of the dig site where one of the most famous
Iguanadon finds in history took place. At this point, but
it was obvious to everyone present that you was brilliant.
He actually had come to some well founded conclusions. His
(06:17):
late Cretaceous dinosaur was called the Telmatosaurus transylvanicus. It was
the first of dozens of species that he would identify
over his career. That first dinosaur he identified was little,
at least in dinosaur terms. It was no bigger than
a crocodile, which I suppose if you came across it
in the wild, might seem like a big animal compared
to you who for a dinosaur, not so much. Several
(06:39):
other species he found in that same area were also
relatively small. A theory started to circulate in the scientific
community that Nopia had somehow found only juvenile specimens, but
he did not agree with that assessment, and he worked
really hard to disprove it. To that end, he started,
among other things, microscopic examinations of the bones that he
(06:59):
had and cross section cutting very thin slices from his
samples to do his work, and from these he was
able to determine that the dinosaur specimens he had been
working with all along had been adults. His hypothesis was
that the area near the river had actually been an
island during the Cretaceous period, and that the limited environment
(07:19):
had also limited the size of the animals that lived there,
and this was something that he called island theory. The
idea was that fewer resources meant that smaller animals were
able to survive, while larger ones couldn't sustain their size
with the food sources, so the larger animals would die off. Yeah,
if that sounds familiar, it is, and we'll talk about
that a little bit at the end of the episode.
(07:41):
But next up, we're going to talk about kind of
the next phase of Noacha's life, which takes an interesting turn.
But first we're going to hear from one of the
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
In his early twenties, Franz Nopcho was making waves in paleontology,
(08:04):
but he was also shifting his scientific curiosity to other subjects.
During this time, he was an abandoning dinosaurs, but he
was just becoming interested in other things as well. Specifically,
he decided that he wanted to study the tribes of
the Albanian mountains, and this was a subject he learned
about from a Transylvanian count named Luis Draskovic that he
was close with, and the two men may have been
(08:26):
romantically involved, although that's not entirely clear. With money from
his uncle who was in the Austrian court, Franz mounted
his first expedition into the mountains of Albania in nineteen
oh three. Early on in this trip he did some
bird hunting and he shot several birds. This earned him
a reputation as a good shot, and that helped him
with some of his relationships with the locals. Although there
(08:47):
was a lot of danger in this undertaking, including some
attempts on his life. He and his uncle both kept
this trip a secret from Franz's parents. Yeah, eventually after
he came back from the trip, they came clean, but
they didn't don't really know that he was going off
to do this. And this kind of trip obviously is
something that he could not have done on his own
had he not been from a wealthy family with an
(09:09):
uncle willing to fund it. But that connection to his uncle,
and then his uncle's connection to the highest levels of
power in Austria Hungary at the time, actually shifted his
fortunes in a slightly unexpected way. Franz made numerous trips
into Albania after nineteen oh three, and the funding for
them eventually shifted from coming out of his uncle's pocket
(09:30):
to coming from the empire itself. Because Nopsha had been
recruited as a spy. The area where he was conducting
his research trips was right between the Ottoman Empire and
the Austro Hungarian Empire, so it made sense to make
his work, which involved mapping the area and studying the culture,
into an official but secret effort on the part of
(09:50):
the government. Yeah, this was obviously we'll talk about it
a little bit more. Kind of a time of destabilization
in that area, and so the Austria Hungary. He thought like, hey,
it would be really beneficial for us to know exactly
what's going on in this stretch of land. And he's
already making the map, so if we'd pay for these trips,
maybe he can just share his notes with us. So
(10:11):
that's what he did, and on one of these trips,
Franz met a man in a mountain village named Bajazid
Elma's Doda, and he hired him to be his personal secretary.
The two men were very close. They were together the
rest of their lives, and they probably were romantically involved.
Nopchin named one of his discoveries, an upper Cretaceous turtle
species that he discovered after Bajazid, and he once wrote
(10:34):
of Doda that quote, he was the only person who
has truly loved me. We should really not play down
the important role that Bajazid Doda made. He was a
scholar in his own right. And from the time they
met until they're far too early end, which we will
get to later, Nopcha and Doda traveled together and while
(10:56):
Bajazid was supporting the aristocrat's work. He was also photograph
and documenting the culture of the Muslim people of the
Upper break Of Valley. He wrote several books about the
Albanian people, and this was a time of great instability
in Albania. The Ottomans had ruled Albania off and on
since the fifteenth century, and Gota was capturing in photographs
(11:17):
and in words, the isolation that Albanians felt as they
were cut off from the rest of the world in
this whole geo political maneuvering of the Ottoman Empire. Yeah,
you can find some of his photographs online and they're
really quite striking. I mean, one, when you consider where
photography was at at the time, they're already really really
(11:37):
interesting to look at. But he does a really nice
job of just like capturing these moments in the lives
of these people that are just trying to figure out
their place in a world that is shifting around them
very rapidly, but that they have very little say in.
And they're quite beautiful, so I recommend them. During a
trip in nineteen oh seven, Franz and Bajazid found themselves
in a rather precarious situation. They had been sent to
(12:00):
the home of a man named Mustaf Alita in the
mountains of Debra on the advice of an abbot that
they had met. Mustaf Alita was a bandit of some renown,
described by Nopucha in his memoir as quote one of
the most dastardly robbers of Debra in all of Turkey
at the time. And despite that reputation, the two men
did indeed set out to meet him at his home.
(12:21):
They were welcomed and they stayed for several days as guests,
and at first they were sort of delayed from leaving
because of bad weather, but then as the weather cleared up,
mustaf Alita kept coming up with other reasons to keep
them there. He finally told them that they were his prisoners.
He was demanding ten thousand Turkish pounds as a ransom
for their return, and another ten thousand if any of
(12:44):
the dwellings of his people were damaged in any kind
of a rescue attempt. At one point, Mustaf Alita attempted
to bribe Bajazid to assist him in this whole plan
by offering him two thousand pounds to betray his friend
and Bajazid turned this down. Yeah, he basically went back
until Franza You'll never guess what he just did, told
him the whole story and there was no there were
(13:04):
no secrets between them. Then Mustaf Alita and the Baron,
Franz Nopcha discussed the situation and Nopcha kind of made
a deal and he was given five days to decide
who they should contact to get the ransom money. During
that time, he did manage to get a message out
to the abbot who had sent him to the robber,
and he told the abbot to send quote five hundred
(13:25):
armed men or opium and twenty men. Nopia also discussed
the matter with one of Mustaf Alita's attendants, a man
named Dalip, who was displeased that their guests were being betrayed.
So he thought Dahlip might be on his side, and
Dalip also wanted to work this situation to his own
advantage and benefit. According to Nopta's memoirs, he and Alip
(13:46):
discussed three possible ways this whole situation could go. Quote
One was that Mustaf Alita would demand his ten thousand
pounds my Albanian friends and Turkish troops would arrive, Lita's
family lineage would be dishonored and every one would do massacred.
The second possibility was that Mustaf Aalita would demand a
bimbashlik position for my release. In this case, I would
(14:08):
try to calm down my friends and would endeavor to
keep Turkish troops out of Calis and negotiate with the authorities.
The end result in this event was unclear. The third
variant was that Mustaf Alita would take me to Priserin
and turn me in as a spy. He would thus
be amnestied by the government, and I would support his
(14:29):
request for bemba shlik. Yeah. Also for clarity, that first
option where everyone would be massacred, he was including himself
and Bajazide in it. He was like, if this goes down,
we're all gonna die. But maybe we can work out
one of these other options. So for a little bit
of additional clarity, A bimba shlik is a military position
roughly akin to that of an army major. Dalip agreed
(14:50):
to take these three possible scenarios to Mustaf Alita to consider,
and even as they negotiated after this with Mustaf Alita
and his men, Franz Nopcha and Bajaz Doda were making
backup plans in case the talks broke down, including hiding
a razor under a rug with the intention of killing
a guard and escaping out the window using sheets and
carpets to shim me down from the high floor. So
(15:13):
upon hearing these three options at first, Mustapha Alita told
his captives that he had captured them basically as a
joke to see if they were weak, and he said
that they could go free. But Nopzha thought that this
was a trap and he did not accept the offer.
The baron once again offered to campaign for the robber
to get his military position if he would turn him
over to the Turkish government as a spy, and Mustafhealita agreed.
(15:37):
So as they rode into the city of Prizren, Mustapha
Alita claimed that he had found Nopcha in disguise as
a local man along the trail and had captured this
spy to bring him to the proper authorities. Nopcha was
put into a prison cell, which he had been counting
on to separate him from his captor, and meanwhile Bajazid
was also taken to Pritzrin, but was released per the
(15:59):
terms of their agree and he was able to get
a note written by Nocha to the consulate there, and
then the consulate sent help. Before long this whole affair
was over. Mustaf Alita realized that he had been outsmarted
and headed back to his own territory. Bashizin's father had
gotten word of the kidnapping and had shown up with
a small army of men planning to kill Mustaf Alita,
(16:20):
but his son and Nopcha convinced him that he and
his men could stand down. During their travels, Franz became
well known in the various areas they visited. He built
up connections and friendships there, and he became fluent in
several different Albanian dialects. He became so invested in the
fate of Albania that he supported the idea of a
rebellion against the young Turks, and he actually saw himself
(16:42):
as the Albanian's potential leader in such a war effort.
There is obviously a little bit of a white savior
complex and play there, but he also felt he knew
more about warfare and the people they might be meeting
than anybody else. In nineteen thirteen, the Albanian Congress of
Trieste was organized. From February twenty seventh to March sixth
delegates from the various tribes of Albania came to discuss
(17:03):
their future as an independent nation and to petition the
great powers to recognize their status. This event and the
politics surrounding it could be its whole own subject, but
as it relates to Baron Franz Nopshka, the great powers
of the time, which were Austria, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Russia and Italy, all had in mind that they would
(17:23):
install a European as king, and Nopcha suggested himself for
the job, feeling that he knew more about the area
and its people than any other aristocrat that might be
installed in a position of leadership, and indeed he really
was recognized as the most knowledgeable candidate, both by people
in Albania and by the rest of the Assembly. But instead,
(17:45):
Germany's Prince Wilhelm of Vied was established as monarch, and
at that point Nopia declared that his Albania was dead.
After this disappointment, Nopsha faced a whole different hurdle and
that was the loss of his family fortune. During World
War One, he had resumed his spy work for Austria
Hungary and he had run guns to northern Albanian tribes.
(18:06):
He had even headed up in an Albanian division, but
he was often really frustrated at how the government was
handling things like occupation of Albanian territories. The Austro Hungarian
Empire collapsed in nineteen eighteen and Nopha's homeland became part
of Romania. With that point, his family estate was no
longer his property. And we're going to talk about the
(18:26):
last part of Franz Nopcha's life in a moment, but
first we will take another quick sponsor break. Hey, so
as we come back, I just want to remind you
that if you heeded our warning at the top of
the episode about some violence that's coming up and you
(18:47):
do not wish to hear it, this would be a
good time to check out and we bid you adieu.
But getting back to Franz Nopcha. While paleontology was becoming
a more established science at this point, as a self
taught scientist with a reputation for being kind of eccentric
and even rude, it was pretty difficult for the baron,
(19:07):
who at this point, you remember, had lost his fortune,
to make connections into the field that he had in
some ways helped to pioneer. In April nineteen twenty five,
Noptah was offered the position of director at the Royal
Hungarian Institute of Geology. He worked there until November nineteen
twenty eight. He reorganized the institute, which was a move
that was seen as a success, but he was never
(19:28):
really happy there and his health was suffering. At one
point he was in bed for an entire year. He
wrote extensively in his three years with the institute, though
he covered paleontology, geography, and ethnology along with other subjects.
In total, he wrote almost two hundred different works, and
roughly a quarter of them were about Albania and its people.
(19:50):
And Nopcha's health continued to decline. In nineteen twenty eight,
he gave the opening remarks at a Paleontological Society conference
that he had invited to come to Budapest, but he
was so weak at that point that he had to
give his lecture from a wheelchair, and in his mind
he believed that his career was basically over. And that
his lecture would likely be his last work. It was not.
(20:10):
He continued to write a great deal in the next
several years, but he resigned from his job just a
few months later, and he and Bajazid first took a
motorcycle tour of Europe, starting in Italy, until they ran
out of money, and then they moved to Vienna. On
April twenty sixth, nineteen thirty three, Franz Nopsha was living
in an apartment in Vienna with Bajazid Doda, and they
(20:31):
had been living there together since he retired from his
job at the Geological Institute, and that day, while Bajazid
was asleep, Nopsha sent the housekeeper away on an errand
and then he shot his sleeping companion and then himself,
killing both of them and Nopcha. This was clearly something
he had been planning to do, because he left behind
(20:52):
a lot of envelopes for people like lawyers and whatnot.
But he also left behind a note for the police
and it read quote, the motive for my suicide is
a nervous breakdown. The reason that I shot my longtime
friend and secretary, mister Bajazid Elma's Doda in his sleep,
without his suspecting is that I do not wish to
leave him behind, sick in misery and without a penny,
(21:13):
because he would have suffered too much. I wish to
be cremated. This entire incident was described in detail in
Vienna's new free Press, all the way down to autopsy
details and Nopsha's note, and it ran under the unfortunate
and sensational headline quote bloody drama. In the Singerstrass scholar
commits murder and suicide. Quickly, a lot of the scholarly
(21:36):
work that Nopsha and Doda had done was eclipsed by
the dramatic story of their death, and the two men
were actually buried across the street from one another. Doda
was buried in a Muslim section of one of Vienna's cemeteries,
and Nopcha's cremated remains were interred in a vault, and
their burials were coordinated so that the two were placed
in their final resting places at exactly the same time.
(21:59):
While Nopia had left a list of his unpublished work
with a colleague named Norbert Jokel, along with instructions about
who to contact to have them published, that publication didn't
happen initially. There were financial issues and Jokil held onto
the works but was killed by Nazis in the early
nineteen forties. The remaining manuscripts are in the Austrian National Library,
(22:21):
but some of what's believed to have been his most
comprehensive writing on Albania has been lost. Yeah, a lot
of his fossil work was actually retained because before his
death he had sold a lot of it to I
think the British Museum, so it's still intact most of
that research. But a lot of his Albanian work that
people think is probably some of the most important, is
(22:42):
completely mia. We have no idea where it ended up.
Throughout his life, the passionate and obsessive Franz Nopcha had
dealt with health issues which are a little bit nebulous
in terms of what we actually know about them. He
was prolific in his work, but his efforts were often
interrupted throughout his life by what he called shattered nerves,
and his mother told people at various times, even when
(23:04):
he was an adult, like she would kind of write
notes to excuse him from things, saying that he had
a recurring illness but she never really gave details about them.
Even in his own memoirs, he doesn't really detail his
personal thoughts or feelings. It's all kind of like, here
are the things that happened, but he doesn't really discuss
the personal aspects of those experiences at all. That's a consequence.
(23:26):
It's still something of a struggle for historians to really
get a sense of what Nosha was like as a person.
Even his colleagues at the time described him as enigmatic
and hard to read. He was really passionate about his work,
and he could be generous with his research. He didn't
seem like he was seeking fame, but he did think
he was way ahead of most other people, and he
(23:47):
was prone to mood swings, which could make him very
unkind to the people around him. Yeah, there have been
a lot of theories put forth about what exactly was
his problem in terms of mental health, but those are
always tricky, as we've discussed many times on the show,
like to diagnose somebody post mortem is a whole messy thing,
particularly for someone who's just doing a casual assessment from
(24:10):
a historical standpoint rather than someone who's actually trained in psychology.
But in a paper on Nopsch's work, written by David B.
Weishample and Wolf ernst Rife, The writers make a really
nice point about how privilege and a lack of formal
education kind of robbed Nopcha of his ability to turn
a critical eye to his own work and perhaps consequently
(24:30):
learn to moderate his behavior. They wrote, quote, yet to
characterize Nopcha as arrogant is to overlook the obvious problem
of combining in one person a high level of intelligence
and creativity not often tempered with the ability of self criticism.
Nopcha's studies in tectonic geology, evolutionary biology, paleo biogeography, and
(24:52):
sexual dimorphism prove his ability to intelligently discover problems and
solve them in remarkable ways. Ability to criticize his own
work acted both against and for Nopia. Against because of
outlandish and easily falsified ideas which he presented on paper,
and four because he excelled at assembling disparate ideas into
(25:13):
new frameworks. A lot of his ideas that were met
with skepticism while he was living have come to be
pretty widely accepted in the year since his death. For example,
his idea that the area known as Hotzig had been
an island during the Cretaceous period, has been supported by
additional research over the years. His island theory about limited
resources causing dwarfism and species is now known as the
(25:36):
Island Rule, although it's credited in its more formally detailed
form is Foster's Rule, which is named for a biologist J.
Bristol Foster, who wrote a paper establishing the idea in
nineteen sixty four. And Sachel Castle, the family home of
Franz Nopsha, has fallen into ruin and it has, through
historical conservation efforts, been placed on a list of cultural
(25:57):
Heritage sites in Romania with the intent that the government
will provide financial support for restoration and upkeep, although those
funds have actually been slow to materialize, so it is
still in a pretty sad state of disrepair at this
point
Happy Saturday. Franz Nopshaw was born May third, eighteen seventy seven,
or one hundred and forty eight years ago today, So
our episode on him is our Saturday classic. This originally
came out on April eighth, twenty ninety. Enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:30):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are talking about a
fascinating gent whose story I stumbled across while looking for
something else entirely, As is often the case with me,
I'm on one track and then I go ooh, what's
that shiny object? And then I'm on a whole other track.
He's very complicated and complex to look at and kind
(00:51):
of figure out who he was. He's Baron Franz Nopcha,
who lived from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen thirty three.
He was Transylvanian. He identified dinosaurs, He inserted himself into
Albanian politics and became a scholar on Albania, and he
wrote volumes and volumes of books and papers, and he
(01:12):
was one of those people that led that sort of adventurous,
scholarly life that only an aristocrat of his time could
have managed. I mean bypassed most formal education, and so
he was funded in all of these efforts by his
family money. It wasn't as though he was doing it
to make a living. He was just living and pursuing
his interests. And he was definitely a man clearly who
(01:32):
had and took advantage of his privilege, although he did
ultimately lose it. I also have to give you a
heads up listeners that this episode contains gun violence and suicide.
I feel bad because I know I've had to put
similar warnings on several episodes lately. I swear I am
not doing that on purpose. It's always like the thing
I find out late in the game and they go,
oh man, but that is near the end. So if
(01:55):
you would like to listen to most of the show
but maybe not get that, you can tap out if
you just leave after our second ad break, because it
comes after that. So if you just missed that last segment,
you won't get any of that. So. He was born
on May third, eighteen seventy seven, in Sechelle, Transylvania, which
is now the city of Deva, Romania. At the time
(02:15):
this was all part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and
as highly noted earlier, his family was wealthy. His mother, Matilde,
was from an aristocratic family. His father, Alexius, was the
vice director of the Hungarian Royal Opera. Franz was the
first of three children for the two of them, and
as children of a pretty wealthy family, he and his
(02:37):
siblings were well educated. They all spoke multiple languages, and
the family wasn't just wealthy, but also very well connected.
His uncle was well known in the court of Austria
and was a favorite of Empress Elizabeth, and that connection
was pretty helpful, maybe even pivotal, in Franz's life. And
when Franz was still a teenager, his sister brought him
(02:58):
something that would shift his life significantly because it sparked
what has often been called an obsession on Franz's part. Alona,
the sister, had found some sort of animal skull on
a riverbank while she had been out for a walk,
and she thought her older brother might help her figure
out what it was. There is an alternate version of
this story that you will sometimes read, which involves local
(03:18):
peasants bringing his sister Alona the skull, but regardless of
which of those is accurate, it did pass from her
to her brother and make him very curious. Indeed, that
was the same year that he was starting some studies
at the University of Vienna, so he decided to bring
it to one of his professors there, Edward Seus's, for identification.
They didn't get the help that he was looking for,
(03:40):
though Seuss initially seemed kind of intrigued by this whole thing,
but he lost interest and instead the professor told the
eighteen year old Franz that he needed to do his
own legwork to figure out what he had, and nopcha
did exactly that. Yeah, he returned to his family's castle
and he basically set up his own little research center there.
There were a lot of books already available to him
(04:02):
in the family library, and from those he gave himself
a foundational knowledge in geology, physiology, and anatomy. And then
he started reaching out to various scholars asking for more
research materials so that he could continue his self education.
And then he started his own amateur excavation site on
the riverbank where that skull had been found. So he
(04:24):
was an amateur, but he was doing meticulous work. He
found a number of other fossils as he was digging,
and he started applying the things that he knew about
animal physiology to the things that he found. He was
reconstructing the anatomy of what it turned out were seventy
million year old dinosaur bones from the late Mesozoic era.
For the next four years, he worked on figuring out
(04:46):
not only the anatomy of the species that he had
accidentally come across, but also its reproduction and its behavior.
And he did this once again by comparing things he
found like nests, to the nests of existing animals to
try to figure out where there were parallels and where
there were differences. And because of this work he's considered
one of the first paleophysiologists. In eighteen ninety nine, Franz
(05:11):
Nopcha was ready to show the scientific world what he
had been working on. So he went to the Austrian
Academy of Sciences, and, as a twenty two year old
with no formal scientific training beyond like his basically the
equivalent of high school, he offered up a lecture that
both wowed and insulted the scientific community. It seems that
the combination of youthful confidence and having worked outside of
(05:34):
academia on his project made Nopia completely comfortable telling well
known scientists that they were doing it wrong. He also
doled out some praise along the way, but in a
really condescending way. So again, he was twenty two, and
at one point he mentioned that the Belgian paleontologist Luis
Dolo was really doing quite well for his age. Age.
(05:54):
It was like, oh, you've contributed so much despite how
young you are, and this was a man in his forties.
So Dolo, we should also say, had been in charge
of the dig site where one of the most famous
Iguanadon finds in history took place. At this point, but
it was obvious to everyone present that you was brilliant.
He actually had come to some well founded conclusions. His
(06:17):
late Cretaceous dinosaur was called the Telmatosaurus transylvanicus. It was
the first of dozens of species that he would identify
over his career. That first dinosaur he identified was little,
at least in dinosaur terms. It was no bigger than
a crocodile, which I suppose if you came across it
in the wild, might seem like a big animal compared
to you who for a dinosaur, not so much. Several
(06:39):
other species he found in that same area were also
relatively small. A theory started to circulate in the scientific
community that Nopia had somehow found only juvenile specimens, but
he did not agree with that assessment, and he worked
really hard to disprove it. To that end, he started,
among other things, microscopic examinations of the bones that he
(06:59):
had and cross section cutting very thin slices from his
samples to do his work, and from these he was
able to determine that the dinosaur specimens he had been
working with all along had been adults. His hypothesis was
that the area near the river had actually been an
island during the Cretaceous period, and that the limited environment
(07:19):
had also limited the size of the animals that lived there,
and this was something that he called island theory. The
idea was that fewer resources meant that smaller animals were
able to survive, while larger ones couldn't sustain their size
with the food sources, so the larger animals would die off. Yeah,
if that sounds familiar, it is, and we'll talk about
that a little bit at the end of the episode.
(07:41):
But next up, we're going to talk about kind of
the next phase of Noacha's life, which takes an interesting turn.
But first we're going to hear from one of the
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.
In his early twenties, Franz Nopcho was making waves in paleontology,
(08:04):
but he was also shifting his scientific curiosity to other subjects.
During this time, he was an abandoning dinosaurs, but he
was just becoming interested in other things as well. Specifically,
he decided that he wanted to study the tribes of
the Albanian mountains, and this was a subject he learned
about from a Transylvanian count named Luis Draskovic that he
was close with, and the two men may have been
(08:26):
romantically involved, although that's not entirely clear. With money from
his uncle who was in the Austrian court, Franz mounted
his first expedition into the mountains of Albania in nineteen
oh three. Early on in this trip he did some
bird hunting and he shot several birds. This earned him
a reputation as a good shot, and that helped him
with some of his relationships with the locals. Although there
(08:47):
was a lot of danger in this undertaking, including some
attempts on his life. He and his uncle both kept
this trip a secret from Franz's parents. Yeah, eventually after
he came back from the trip, they came clean, but
they didn't don't really know that he was going off
to do this. And this kind of trip obviously is
something that he could not have done on his own
had he not been from a wealthy family with an
(09:09):
uncle willing to fund it. But that connection to his uncle,
and then his uncle's connection to the highest levels of
power in Austria Hungary at the time, actually shifted his
fortunes in a slightly unexpected way. Franz made numerous trips
into Albania after nineteen oh three, and the funding for
them eventually shifted from coming out of his uncle's pocket
(09:30):
to coming from the empire itself. Because Nopsha had been
recruited as a spy. The area where he was conducting
his research trips was right between the Ottoman Empire and
the Austro Hungarian Empire, so it made sense to make
his work, which involved mapping the area and studying the culture,
into an official but secret effort on the part of
(09:50):
the government. Yeah, this was obviously we'll talk about it
a little bit more. Kind of a time of destabilization
in that area, and so the Austria Hungary. He thought like, hey,
it would be really beneficial for us to know exactly
what's going on in this stretch of land. And he's
already making the map, so if we'd pay for these trips,
maybe he can just share his notes with us. So
(10:11):
that's what he did, and on one of these trips,
Franz met a man in a mountain village named Bajazid
Elma's Doda, and he hired him to be his personal secretary.
The two men were very close. They were together the
rest of their lives, and they probably were romantically involved.
Nopchin named one of his discoveries, an upper Cretaceous turtle
species that he discovered after Bajazid, and he once wrote
(10:34):
of Doda that quote, he was the only person who
has truly loved me. We should really not play down
the important role that Bajazid Doda made. He was a
scholar in his own right. And from the time they
met until they're far too early end, which we will
get to later, Nopcha and Doda traveled together and while
(10:56):
Bajazid was supporting the aristocrat's work. He was also photograph
and documenting the culture of the Muslim people of the
Upper break Of Valley. He wrote several books about the
Albanian people, and this was a time of great instability
in Albania. The Ottomans had ruled Albania off and on
since the fifteenth century, and Gota was capturing in photographs
(11:17):
and in words, the isolation that Albanians felt as they
were cut off from the rest of the world in
this whole geo political maneuvering of the Ottoman Empire. Yeah,
you can find some of his photographs online and they're
really quite striking. I mean, one, when you consider where
photography was at at the time, they're already really really
(11:37):
interesting to look at. But he does a really nice
job of just like capturing these moments in the lives
of these people that are just trying to figure out
their place in a world that is shifting around them
very rapidly, but that they have very little say in.
And they're quite beautiful, so I recommend them. During a
trip in nineteen oh seven, Franz and Bajazid found themselves
in a rather precarious situation. They had been sent to
(12:00):
the home of a man named Mustaf Alita in the
mountains of Debra on the advice of an abbot that
they had met. Mustaf Alita was a bandit of some renown,
described by Nopucha in his memoir as quote one of
the most dastardly robbers of Debra in all of Turkey
at the time. And despite that reputation, the two men
did indeed set out to meet him at his home.
(12:21):
They were welcomed and they stayed for several days as guests,
and at first they were sort of delayed from leaving
because of bad weather, but then as the weather cleared up,
mustaf Alita kept coming up with other reasons to keep
them there. He finally told them that they were his prisoners.
He was demanding ten thousand Turkish pounds as a ransom
for their return, and another ten thousand if any of
(12:44):
the dwellings of his people were damaged in any kind
of a rescue attempt. At one point, Mustaf Alita attempted
to bribe Bajazid to assist him in this whole plan
by offering him two thousand pounds to betray his friend
and Bajazid turned this down. Yeah, he basically went back
until Franza You'll never guess what he just did, told
him the whole story and there was no there were
(13:04):
no secrets between them. Then Mustaf Alita and the Baron,
Franz Nopcha discussed the situation and Nopcha kind of made
a deal and he was given five days to decide
who they should contact to get the ransom money. During
that time, he did manage to get a message out
to the abbot who had sent him to the robber,
and he told the abbot to send quote five hundred
(13:25):
armed men or opium and twenty men. Nopia also discussed
the matter with one of Mustaf Alita's attendants, a man
named Dalip, who was displeased that their guests were being betrayed.
So he thought Dahlip might be on his side, and
Dalip also wanted to work this situation to his own
advantage and benefit. According to Nopta's memoirs, he and Alip
(13:46):
discussed three possible ways this whole situation could go. Quote
One was that Mustaf Alita would demand his ten thousand
pounds my Albanian friends and Turkish troops would arrive, Lita's
family lineage would be dishonored and every one would do massacred.
The second possibility was that Mustaf Aalita would demand a
bimbashlik position for my release. In this case, I would
(14:08):
try to calm down my friends and would endeavor to
keep Turkish troops out of Calis and negotiate with the authorities.
The end result in this event was unclear. The third
variant was that Mustaf Alita would take me to Priserin
and turn me in as a spy. He would thus
be amnestied by the government, and I would support his
(14:29):
request for bemba shlik. Yeah. Also for clarity, that first
option where everyone would be massacred, he was including himself
and Bajazide in it. He was like, if this goes down,
we're all gonna die. But maybe we can work out
one of these other options. So for a little bit
of additional clarity, A bimba shlik is a military position
roughly akin to that of an army major. Dalip agreed
(14:50):
to take these three possible scenarios to Mustaf Alita to consider,
and even as they negotiated after this with Mustaf Alita
and his men, Franz Nopcha and Bajaz Doda were making
backup plans in case the talks broke down, including hiding
a razor under a rug with the intention of killing
a guard and escaping out the window using sheets and
carpets to shim me down from the high floor. So
(15:13):
upon hearing these three options at first, Mustapha Alita told
his captives that he had captured them basically as a
joke to see if they were weak, and he said
that they could go free. But Nopzha thought that this
was a trap and he did not accept the offer.
The baron once again offered to campaign for the robber
to get his military position if he would turn him
over to the Turkish government as a spy, and Mustafhealita agreed.
(15:37):
So as they rode into the city of Prizren, Mustapha
Alita claimed that he had found Nopcha in disguise as
a local man along the trail and had captured this
spy to bring him to the proper authorities. Nopcha was
put into a prison cell, which he had been counting
on to separate him from his captor, and meanwhile Bajazid
was also taken to Pritzrin, but was released per the
(15:59):
terms of their agree and he was able to get
a note written by Nocha to the consulate there, and
then the consulate sent help. Before long this whole affair
was over. Mustaf Alita realized that he had been outsmarted
and headed back to his own territory. Bashizin's father had
gotten word of the kidnapping and had shown up with
a small army of men planning to kill Mustaf Alita,
(16:20):
but his son and Nopcha convinced him that he and
his men could stand down. During their travels, Franz became
well known in the various areas they visited. He built
up connections and friendships there, and he became fluent in
several different Albanian dialects. He became so invested in the
fate of Albania that he supported the idea of a
rebellion against the young Turks, and he actually saw himself
(16:42):
as the Albanian's potential leader in such a war effort.
There is obviously a little bit of a white savior
complex and play there, but he also felt he knew
more about warfare and the people they might be meeting
than anybody else. In nineteen thirteen, the Albanian Congress of
Trieste was organized. From February twenty seventh to March sixth
delegates from the various tribes of Albania came to discuss
(17:03):
their future as an independent nation and to petition the
great powers to recognize their status. This event and the
politics surrounding it could be its whole own subject, but
as it relates to Baron Franz Nopshka, the great powers
of the time, which were Austria, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Russia and Italy, all had in mind that they would
(17:23):
install a European as king, and Nopcha suggested himself for
the job, feeling that he knew more about the area
and its people than any other aristocrat that might be
installed in a position of leadership, and indeed he really
was recognized as the most knowledgeable candidate, both by people
in Albania and by the rest of the Assembly. But instead,
(17:45):
Germany's Prince Wilhelm of Vied was established as monarch, and
at that point Nopia declared that his Albania was dead.
After this disappointment, Nopsha faced a whole different hurdle and
that was the loss of his family fortune. During World
War One, he had resumed his spy work for Austria
Hungary and he had run guns to northern Albanian tribes.
(18:06):
He had even headed up in an Albanian division, but
he was often really frustrated at how the government was
handling things like occupation of Albanian territories. The Austro Hungarian
Empire collapsed in nineteen eighteen and Nopha's homeland became part
of Romania. With that point, his family estate was no
longer his property. And we're going to talk about the
(18:26):
last part of Franz Nopcha's life in a moment, but
first we will take another quick sponsor break. Hey, so
as we come back, I just want to remind you
that if you heeded our warning at the top of
the episode about some violence that's coming up and you
(18:47):
do not wish to hear it, this would be a
good time to check out and we bid you adieu.
But getting back to Franz Nopcha. While paleontology was becoming
a more established science at this point, as a self
taught scientist with a reputation for being kind of eccentric
and even rude, it was pretty difficult for the baron,
(19:07):
who at this point, you remember, had lost his fortune,
to make connections into the field that he had in
some ways helped to pioneer. In April nineteen twenty five,
Noptah was offered the position of director at the Royal
Hungarian Institute of Geology. He worked there until November nineteen
twenty eight. He reorganized the institute, which was a move
that was seen as a success, but he was never
(19:28):
really happy there and his health was suffering. At one
point he was in bed for an entire year. He
wrote extensively in his three years with the institute, though
he covered paleontology, geography, and ethnology along with other subjects.
In total, he wrote almost two hundred different works, and
roughly a quarter of them were about Albania and its people.
(19:50):
And Nopcha's health continued to decline. In nineteen twenty eight,
he gave the opening remarks at a Paleontological Society conference
that he had invited to come to Budapest, but he
was so weak at that point that he had to
give his lecture from a wheelchair, and in his mind
he believed that his career was basically over. And that
his lecture would likely be his last work. It was not.
(20:10):
He continued to write a great deal in the next
several years, but he resigned from his job just a
few months later, and he and Bajazid first took a
motorcycle tour of Europe, starting in Italy, until they ran
out of money, and then they moved to Vienna. On
April twenty sixth, nineteen thirty three, Franz Nopsha was living
in an apartment in Vienna with Bajazid Doda, and they
(20:31):
had been living there together since he retired from his
job at the Geological Institute, and that day, while Bajazid
was asleep, Nopsha sent the housekeeper away on an errand
and then he shot his sleeping companion and then himself,
killing both of them and Nopcha. This was clearly something
he had been planning to do, because he left behind
(20:52):
a lot of envelopes for people like lawyers and whatnot.
But he also left behind a note for the police
and it read quote, the motive for my suicide is
a nervous breakdown. The reason that I shot my longtime
friend and secretary, mister Bajazid Elma's Doda in his sleep,
without his suspecting is that I do not wish to
leave him behind, sick in misery and without a penny,
(21:13):
because he would have suffered too much. I wish to
be cremated. This entire incident was described in detail in
Vienna's new free Press, all the way down to autopsy
details and Nopsha's note, and it ran under the unfortunate
and sensational headline quote bloody drama. In the Singerstrass scholar
commits murder and suicide. Quickly, a lot of the scholarly
(21:36):
work that Nopsha and Doda had done was eclipsed by
the dramatic story of their death, and the two men
were actually buried across the street from one another. Doda
was buried in a Muslim section of one of Vienna's cemeteries,
and Nopcha's cremated remains were interred in a vault, and
their burials were coordinated so that the two were placed
in their final resting places at exactly the same time.
(21:59):
While Nopia had left a list of his unpublished work
with a colleague named Norbert Jokel, along with instructions about
who to contact to have them published, that publication didn't
happen initially. There were financial issues and Jokil held onto
the works but was killed by Nazis in the early
nineteen forties. The remaining manuscripts are in the Austrian National Library,
(22:21):
but some of what's believed to have been his most
comprehensive writing on Albania has been lost. Yeah, a lot
of his fossil work was actually retained because before his
death he had sold a lot of it to I
think the British Museum, so it's still intact most of
that research. But a lot of his Albanian work that
people think is probably some of the most important, is
(22:42):
completely mia. We have no idea where it ended up.
Throughout his life, the passionate and obsessive Franz Nopcha had
dealt with health issues which are a little bit nebulous
in terms of what we actually know about them. He
was prolific in his work, but his efforts were often
interrupted throughout his life by what he called shattered nerves,
and his mother told people at various times, even when
(23:04):
he was an adult, like she would kind of write
notes to excuse him from things, saying that he had
a recurring illness but she never really gave details about them.
Even in his own memoirs, he doesn't really detail his
personal thoughts or feelings. It's all kind of like, here
are the things that happened, but he doesn't really discuss
the personal aspects of those experiences at all. That's a consequence.
(23:26):
It's still something of a struggle for historians to really
get a sense of what Nosha was like as a person.
Even his colleagues at the time described him as enigmatic
and hard to read. He was really passionate about his work,
and he could be generous with his research. He didn't
seem like he was seeking fame, but he did think
he was way ahead of most other people, and he
(23:47):
was prone to mood swings, which could make him very
unkind to the people around him. Yeah, there have been
a lot of theories put forth about what exactly was
his problem in terms of mental health, but those are
always tricky, as we've discussed many times on the show,
like to diagnose somebody post mortem is a whole messy thing,
particularly for someone who's just doing a casual assessment from
(24:10):
a historical standpoint rather than someone who's actually trained in psychology.
But in a paper on Nopsch's work, written by David B.
Weishample and Wolf ernst Rife, The writers make a really
nice point about how privilege and a lack of formal
education kind of robbed Nopcha of his ability to turn
a critical eye to his own work and perhaps consequently
(24:30):
learn to moderate his behavior. They wrote, quote, yet to
characterize Nopcha as arrogant is to overlook the obvious problem
of combining in one person a high level of intelligence
and creativity not often tempered with the ability of self criticism.
Nopcha's studies in tectonic geology, evolutionary biology, paleo biogeography, and
(24:52):
sexual dimorphism prove his ability to intelligently discover problems and
solve them in remarkable ways. Ability to criticize his own
work acted both against and for Nopia. Against because of
outlandish and easily falsified ideas which he presented on paper,
and four because he excelled at assembling disparate ideas into
(25:13):
new frameworks. A lot of his ideas that were met
with skepticism while he was living have come to be
pretty widely accepted in the year since his death. For example,
his idea that the area known as Hotzig had been
an island during the Cretaceous period, has been supported by
additional research over the years. His island theory about limited
resources causing dwarfism and species is now known as the
(25:36):
Island Rule, although it's credited in its more formally detailed
form is Foster's Rule, which is named for a biologist J.
Bristol Foster, who wrote a paper establishing the idea in
nineteen sixty four. And Sachel Castle, the family home of
Franz Nopsha, has fallen into ruin and it has, through
historical conservation efforts, been placed on a list of cultural
(25:57):
Heritage sites in Romania with the intent that the government
will provide financial support for restoration and upkeep, although those
funds have actually been slow to materialize, so it is
still in a pretty sad state of disrepair at this
point
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.