Baron Franz Nopcsa

Nopcsa 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. But his life was not entirely charmed. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff He Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and today we are talking about a fascinating gent whose
story I stumbled across while looking for something else. Entirely,

(00:23):
as is often the case with me, I'm on one
track and then I go, oh, what's that shiny object?
And then I'm on a whole other track. Uh. He's
very complicated and complex to look at and kind of
figure out who he was. He's Baron Franz Nopecha, who
lived from eighteen seventy seven to ninety three, and he
was Transylvanian. He identified dinosaurs, He inserted himself into Albanian

(00:46):
politics and became a scholar on Albania, and he wrote
volumes and volumes of books and papers. And he was
one of those people that lad that sort of adventurous
scholarly life that only an aristocrat of his time could managed,
I mean by passed 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

(01:08):
a living. He was just living and pursuing his interests,
and he was definitely a man clearly who 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

(01:29):
that on purpose. It's always like the thing I find
out late in the game and they go, oh, man um.
But that is near the end. So if you would
like to listen to most of the show but maybe
not get that, you can tap out if you just
uh 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

(01:50):
on May three, eighty seven in Sechelle, Transylvania, which is
now the city of Deva, Romania. At the time, 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

(02:12):
first of three children for the two of them, and
as children of a pretty wealthy family, he and his
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

(02:32):
was pretty helpful, maybe even pivotal, in Franz's life. And
when Franz was still a teenager, his sister brought him
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 river bank while she had been out for a walk,
and she thought her older brother might help her figure

(02:54):
out what it was. There is an alternate version of
this story that you will sometimes read, which involved local
peasants bringing his sister Ilana 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

(03:15):
it to one of his professors there Edwards Seuss for identification.
They didn't get the help that he was looking for,
though initially seemed kind of intrigued by this whole thing,
but he lost interest and instead the professor told the
eighteen year old France that he needed to do his
own leg work to figure out what he had. And
Noa did exactly that. Yeah, he returned to his family's

(03:37):
castle and he basically set up his own little research
center there. There were a lot of books already available
to him 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 at his own amateur

(04:01):
excavation site on the river bank where that skull had
been found. So he 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

(04:23):
the late Mesozoic era. For the next four years, he
worked on figuring out 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

(04:46):
this work he's considered one of the first paleophysiologists. In
eight Franz Noche 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

(05:07):
lecture that both wowed and insulted the scientific community. It
seems that the combination of youthful confidence and having worked
outside of academia on his project made Nopcha 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

(05:28):
two and at one point he mentioned that the Belgian
paleontologist Louis Dolo was really doing quite well for his age. Ah.
It was like, oh, you've contributed so much despite how
young you are. And this was a man in his forties.
Um So. Dolo, we should also say, had been in
charge of the dig site where one of the most
famous iguanadon fines in history took place at this point,

(05:51):
but it was obvious to everyone present that he was brilliance.
He actually had come to some well founded conclusions. His
Late Cretaceous dynasty or was called the Talmatosaurus translavannicus. 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

(06:12):
a crocodile, which I suppose of you came across it
in the wild, might seem like a big animal compared
to you, for a dinosaur, not so much. Uh. Several
other species he found in that same area were also
relatively small. A theory started to circulate in the scientific
community that Nopja had somehow found only juvenile specimens, But
he did not agree with that assessment, and he worked

(06:34):
really hard to disprove it. To that end, he started,
among other things, microscopic examinations of the bones that he
had in 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

(06:54):
that the area near the river had actually been an
island during the Cretaceous period, and that the limited environment
had also limited the size of the animals that lived there.
And this was something that he called island theory. The
idea that 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

(07:17):
die off. Yeah, if that sounds similiar, it is, And
we'll talk about that a little bit at the end
of the episode. But next up, we're going to talk
about kind of the next phase of Noche'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 Nocho

(07:43):
was making waves in paleontology, but he was also shifting
his scientific curiosity to other subjects during this time. It
wasn't 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 Dreskovic that he was close with, and the

(08:06):
two men may have been 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 H three. Early on in this trip,
he did some bird hunting and he shot several birds,
has earned him a reputation is a good shot, and
that helped him with some of his relationships with the locals.

(08:28):
Although there 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 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

(08:48):
had he not been from a wealthy family with an
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 H three, and the funding for them

(09:09):
eventually shifted from coming out of his uncle's pocket to
coming from the empire itself because Nopia 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

(09:30):
an official but secret effort on the part of 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 authorities thought like, hey, it would
be really beneficial for us to know exactly what's going
on in this this stretch of land. And he's already
making the maps. So if we pay for these trips,

(09:50):
maybe he can just share his notes with us. So
that's what he did, and on one of these trips,
Franz met a man in a mountain village named Bajeside
Elms 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.
Uh Noa named one of his discoveries and upper Cretaceous

(10:11):
turtle species that he discovered after Badges, and he once
wrote of Doda that quote, he was the only person
who has truly loved me. We should really not play
down the important role that bad 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

(10:32):
will get to later, Noa and Doda traveled together, and
while bad was supporting the aristocrats work, he was also
photographing and documenting the culture of the Muslim people of
the upper raak 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

(10:54):
on since the fifteenth century, and Doda was capturing in
photographs and in words, the isolation that Albanians felt as
they were cut off from the rest of the world
and 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 like

(11:15):
where photography was at at the time, they're already really
really 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 um. And they're quite beautiful, so I recommend them.
During a trip in nineteen o seven, Franz and Bajaesid

(11:37):
found themselves in a rather precarious situation. They had been
sent to 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 Nopeche in his memoir as
quote one of the most dastardly robbers of Debra. In
all of Turkey at the time, and despite that reputation,

(11:59):
the two men indeed set out to meet him at
his home. 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

(12:21):
Turkish pounds as a ransom for their return, and another
ten thousand if any of the dwellings of his people
were damaged in any kind of a rescue attempt. At
one point, Mustaf Alita attempted to bribe Bases to assist
him in this whole plan by offering him two thousand
pounds to betray his friend, and turned this down. Yeah,
he basically went back and told Franz like you'll never

(12:42):
guess what he just did, told him the whole story
and there was no there were no secrets between them.
Then Mustaf Alita and the baron Franz Nopcha discussed the
situation and Nocha kind of made a deal and he
was given five days to decide who they should contact
to get the ransom money. In that time, he did
manage to get a message out to the abbot who

(13:03):
had sent him to the robber, and he told the
abbot to send quote five hundred armed men or opium
and twenty men. Nopea also discussed the matter with one
of Mustaf Alita's attendants, a man named Dlip, who was
displeased that their guests were being betrayed, so he thought
Delippe might be on his side. Uh and Delipe also
wanted to work this situation to his own advantage and benefit.

(13:25):
According to Nopa's memoirs, he and Elipe 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 everyone would do massacred. The second possibility
was that Mustaf Alita would demand a bimbosh lik position

(13:47):
for my release. In this case, I would try to
calm down my friends and would endeavor to keep Turkish
troops out of Kali's and negotiate with the authorities. The
end result in this event was unclear. The third variant
was that mustaf Alita would take me to prisonon and
turn me in as a spy. He would thus be
amnestied by the government, and I would support his request

(14:11):
for bambush leak. Yeah. Also for clarity, that first option
where everyone would be massacred, he was including himself and
Badges in it. He was like, if this goes down,
we're all going to die. But maybe we can work
out one of these other options. So for a little
bit of additional clarity, a bambush leak is a military
position roughly akin to that of an army major. Delip

(14:31):
agreed to take these three possible scenarios to mustaf Alita
to consider, and even as they negotiated after this with
mustaf Alita and his men from Nopcha and bajes 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 shimmy down from the high floor.

(14:54):
So upon hearing these three options at first, mustaf 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 Nopcha thought that
this was a trap, but 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

(15:14):
over to the Turkish government as a spy, and Mustafilita agreed.
So as they rode into the city of preets, m
Mustafilita claimed that he had found Noche 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

(15:38):
was also taken to preets Ran, but was released per
the terms of their agreement, 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's father had
gotten word of the kidnapping and had shown up with
a small army of men planning to kill Mustaflita, but

(16:02):
his son and Noche 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 as

(16:24):
the Albanians 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 nine thirteen, the Albanian Congress of Trieste
was organized. From February to March. Six delegates from the
various tribes of Albania came to discuss their future as

(16:45):
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 France Nosha, the great powers of the time,
which were off Trea, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Russia and Italy all had in mind that they would
install a European as king, and Nopcha suggested himself for

(17:09):
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 Germany's Prince Wilhelm A Vid was established as monarch,

(17:30):
and at that point Nopecha declared that his Albania was dead.
After this this appointment, Nopcha 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.
He had even headed up in an Albanian division, but

(17:50):
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 Nopia'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
last part of Franz Nopja's life in a moment. The
first we will take another quick sponsor break. Hey, so

(18:20):
as we come back, I just want to remind you
that if you uh he did our warning at the
top of the episode about some violence that's coming up
and you do not wish to hear it, this would
be a good time to check out and we bid
you a jia um. But getting back to Franz Nopcha.
While paleontology was becoming a more established science at this point,
uh as a self taught scientist with a reputation for

(18:43):
being kind of eccentric and even rude. It was pretty
difficult for the baron, who at this point, you remember,
had lost his fortune to make connections into the field
that he had in some ways helped a pioneer. In April,
was offered the position of director at the Royal Hungarian
Institute of Geology. He worked there until November night. He

(19:03):
reorganized the institute, which was a move that was seen
as a success, but he was never 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

(19:24):
almost two hundred different works, and roughly a quarter of
them were about Albania and its people and no just
health continued to decline in 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,

(19:44):
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. 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 Bajasid first took a motorcycle tour of your up
starting in Italy until they ran out of money, and
then they moved to Vienna. On April three, Franz Nope

(20:07):
Shaw was living in an apartment in Vienna with Doda,
and they had been living there together since he retired
from his job at the Geological Institute and that day,
while Bo was asleep, Nope just sent the housekeeper away
on an errand, and then he shot his sleeping companion
and then himself, killing both of them. And nopeja uh.

(20:28):
This was clearly something he had been planning to do,
because he left behind 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 Mr bajes Elma's
Doda in his sleep without his suspecting is that I

(20:50):
do not wish to leave him behind, sick in misery
and without a penny, because he would have suffered too much.
I wish to be cremated. This entire incident was to
scribed in detail in Vienna's new Free Press, all the
way down to autopsy details and Nopesa's note, and it
ran under the unfortunate and sensational headline quote bloody drama

(21:11):
in the singer Strauss scholar commits murder and suicide. Quickly,
a lot of the scholarly work that Nopcha 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 Noa's cremated remains were

(21:31):
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. While Nopha had left a
list of his unpublished work with a colleague named Norbert Yokel,
along with instructions about who to contact to have them published,
that publication didn't happen initially. There were financial issues, and

(21:53):
Jokol held onto the works but was killed by Nazis
in the early nineteen forties. The remaining manuscripts are in
the aust In National Library, 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 too, I think the British Museum, so

(22:15):
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 completely am i A. We
have no idea where it ended up. Throughout his life,
the passionate and obsessive Franz Noche had dealt with health
issues which are a little bit nebulous in terms of
what we actually know about them. He was prolific in

(22:36):
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 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 um he doesn't really detail his personal thoughts

(22:58):
or feelings. It's all kind of like, here the things
that happened, but he doesn't really discuss the personal aspects
of those those experiences at all. That's a consequence. It's
still something of a struggle for historians to really get
a sense of what no Show 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,

(23:19):
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
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
was his problem in terms of mental health, but those

(23:39):
are always tricky, as we've discussed many times on the show,
like to diagnose somebody postmortem is a whole messy thing,
particularly for someone who's just um, you know, doing a
casual assessment from a historical standpoint, rather than someone who's
actually trained in psychology. Um. But in a paper on
Noes's work written by David B. Whit Shample and Wolf
ernst Rife, the writers make a really nice point about

(24:01):
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 learned to moderate
his behavior. They wrote, quote, yet, to characterize Nopche as
arrogant is to overlook the obvious problem of combining in
one person a high level of intelligence and creativity not

(24:22):
often tempered with the ability of self criticism. Nopcha studies
in tectonic geology evolutionary biology, paleo biogeography, and sexual dimorphism
prove his ability to intelligently discover problems and solve them
in remarkable ways. The inability to criticize his own work
acted both against and for Nopcha. Against because of outlandish

(24:46):
and easily falsified ideas which he presented on paper, and
four because he excelled at assembling disparate ideas into new frameworks.
A lot of his ideas that were met with skepticism
while he was living have come to be pretty wide
we accepted in the years 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

(25:09):
additional research over the years. His island theory about limited
resources causing dwarfism and species is now known as the
Island rule, although it's credited and it's more formally detailed
form as Foster's rule, which is named for a biologist J.
Bristol Foster, who wrote a paper establishing the idea in
nineteen sixty four. And Social Castle, the family home of Franzinopsha,

(25:32):
has fallen into ruin, and it has through historical conservation
efforts been placed on a list of cultural 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. Do
you have some listener mail to take us out today?

(25:54):
I do, um, and it is not sad or scary
at all. It is from our listener, David, and I
thought it would be fun to do a fun email
after what it's kind of a sad end to an
interesting life, he writes, High ladies, I finally had to
email you, not because I have some great moment to
share or some additional point to add to one of
your great episodes, though someday I hope I get that chance.

(26:18):
I am now one of your listeners who have listened
to the entire library. Is there a club for this?
The sad thing about doing that is now I have
to wait for the next episode. I spent the last
two years listening to your podcast only. I guess I
can now add some more. The others will be happy.
I look forward to maybe seeing one of your live
shows when the opportunity arises. I hope you to do.

(26:38):
I wanted to share a few points about your podcast
that maybe you already know, but I thought they were interesting,
at least to me. One, it is amazing how close
we may have come to the history stories you've told.
Being born in nineteen sixty three, I may have been
alive just after a person died, or just before an
event or some similar time issue. Two. I saw the
growth changes length of your whole show. Very nice. Three.

(27:00):
I am always amazed at your research skill. I envy
you in that ability. I will laugh and interject my
own thing of like. I don't know, I feel sloppy
about it sometimes. For I love your effort to show
people the history of some political issues, especially after this
past presidential election. It's amazing as to how similar some
issues have been throughout history racism, religion, sexism, etcetera. I

(27:23):
really hope your podcast open some eyes. But either way,
I appreciate it. Uh. And then he gives us a
little request, a couple of requests actually, and he says,
thanks again for a wonderful podcast in the many hours
of enjoyment you provide. Okay, so um, I did not
read this for self aggrandizement, even though it is all lovely,
lovely compliments. But his thing about a club gave me

(27:43):
an idea which we will get to work on, which
is that we should have a T shirt for me
people that people can get in our our tea public
store that says like I listened to them all or something.
So we'll work with designers and get that figured out.
But it seems like such an obvious thing and I
hadn't thought about it, So thank you David are giving
us that idea. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff

(28:04):
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(28:27):
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.