SYMHC Classics: Franz Nopsca

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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,

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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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