SYMHC Classics: Franz Nopsca

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:08Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Veeve Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. Franz Knopsha was born May 3, 1877, or 148 years ago today, so our episode on him is our Saturday classic.

• 2:19Holly Frey?

  This originally came out on April 8, 2019. Enjoy.

• 2:26Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:37Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:42Holly Frey?

  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 1877 to 1933. And 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

• 3:25Holly Frey?

  could have managed. I mean, he 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 then 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

• 4:08Holly Frey?

  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.

• 4:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  So he was born on May 3, 1877, in Sichel, Transylvania, which is now the city of Deva, Romania. At the time, this was all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And as Holly noted earlier, his family was wealthy. His mother, Matild, 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.

• 4:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that connection was pretty helpful, maybe even pivotal, in Franz's life.

• 5:02Holly Frey?

  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. Ilona, 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 Ilona the skull, but regardless of which of those is accurate, it did pass from her to her brother and make him very curious indeed.

• 5:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Seuss, 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 18-year-old Franz that he needed to do his own legwork to figure out what he had. And Nopecha did exactly that.

• 6:01Holly Frey?

  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.

• 6:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 70-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.

• 7:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  And because of this work, he's considered one of the first paleophysiologists.

• 7:16Holly Frey?

  In 1899, Franz Knopch 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 22-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 seemed that the combination of youthful confidence and having worked outside of academia on his project made Knopch 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 22 and at one point he mentioned that the Belgian paleontologist Louis Dolo was really doing quite well for his age.

• 8:01Holly Frey?

  It was like, oh, you've contributed so much despite how young you are. And this was a man in his 40s. So Dolo, we should also say, had been in charge of the dig site where one of the most famous Iguanodon finds in history took place at this point.

• 8:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  But it was obvious to everyone present that he 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.

• 8:33Holly Frey?

  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. 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 Nopcha 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 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.

• 9:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 9:43Holly Frey?

  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 Nopcha's life, which takes an interesting turn. But first, we're going to hear from one of the sponsors that keeps Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 10:03Holly Frey?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 10:31Holly Frey?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 10:44Holly Frey?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  What the fans experienced is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 10:55Holly Frey?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 11:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but

• 11:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown-Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:08Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune

• 12:53Holly Frey?

  in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at nsl.sport.

• 13:39Holly Frey?

  In his early twenties, Franz Knopchow was making waves in paleontology. But he was also shifting his scientific curiosity to other subjects during this time. He 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 Louis Dreszkowick that he was close with. And the two men may have been romantically involved, although that's not entirely clear.

• 14:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  With money from his uncle, who was in the Austrian court, Franz mounted his first expedition into the mountains of Albania in 1903. 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.

• 14:35Holly Frey?

  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 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.

• 15:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Franz made numerous trips into Albania after 1903. And the funding for them eventually shifted from coming out of his uncle's pocket to coming from the empire itself because Nopcha 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.

• 15:32Holly Frey?

  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 map. So if we 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 Elmas 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. Nopcha named one of his discoveries, an upper Cretaceous turtle species that he discovered after Bajazid.

• 16:13Holly Frey?

  And he once wrote of Doda that, quote, "He was the only person who has truly loved me."

• 16:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 their far too early end, which we will get to later, Nopcha and Doda traveled together. And while Bajazid was supporting the aristocrats' work, he was also photographing and documenting the culture of the Muslim people of the Upper Rika 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 15th century. And Doda was capturing in photographs and in words, the isolation that Albanians felt

• 17:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  as they were cut off from the rest of the world and this whole geopolitical maneuvering of the Ottoman Empire.

• 17:07Holly Frey?

  Yeah, you can find some of his photographs online and they're really quite striking. I mean, one, when you consider like 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 1907, Franz and Bajazid found themselves in a rather precarious situation. They had been sent to the home of a man named Mustafa Lita in the mountains of Debra on the advice of an abbot that they had met. And Mustafa Lita was a bandit of some renown, described by Nopcha in his memoir as, quote,

• 17:52Holly Frey?

  "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.

• 18:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  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, Mustafa Lita kept coming up with other reasons to keep them there. He finally told them that they were his prisoners. He was demanding 10,000 Turkish pounds as a ransom for their return and another 10,000 if any of the dwellings of his people were damaged in any kind of a rescue attempt. At one point, Mustafa Lita attempted to bribe Bajazid to assist him in this whole plan by offering him 2,000 pounds to betray his friend. And Bajazid turned this down.

• 18:38Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he basically went back and told Franz, like, "You'll never guess what he just did." Told him the whole story and there was no, there were no secrets between them. Then Mustafa Lita 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, "500 armed men or opium and 20 men." Nopcha also discussed the matter with one of Mustafa Lita's attendants, a man named Dalip, who was displeased that their guests were being betrayed. So he thought Dalip might be on his side. And Dalip also wanted to work this situation to his own advantage and benefit.

• 19:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  According to Nopcha's memoirs, he and Dalip discussed three possible ways this whole situation could go. Quote, "One was that Mustafa Lita would demand his 10,000 pounds. My Albanian friends and Turkish troops would arrive. Lita's family lineage would be dishonored and everyone would be massacred." The second possibility was that Mustafa Lita would demand a bembaslik position for my release. In this case, I would try to calm down my friends and would endeavor to keep Turkish troops out of Calice and negotiate with the authorities. The end result in this event was unclear. The third variant was that Mustafa Lita would take me to Prisren and turn me in as a spy.

• 20:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  He would thus be amnestied by the government and I would support his request for a bembaslik.

• 20:11Holly Frey?

  Yeah, also for clarity, that first option where everyone would be massacred, he was including himself and Bajazid in it. He was like, if this goes down, we're all gonna die. But maybe we could work out one of these other options. So for a little bit of additional clarity, a bembaslik is a military position roughly akin to that of an army major. Dalip agreed to take these three possible scenarios to Mustafa Lita to consider. And even as they negotiated after this with Mustafa Lita and his men, Franz Nopcha and Bajazid 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.

• 20:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  So upon hearing these three options, at first, Mustafa Lita 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 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 Mustafa Lita agreed.

• 21:17Holly Frey?

  So as they rode into the city of Pritsren, Mustafa Lita 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 Pritsren, but was released per the terms of their agreement. And he was able to get a note written by Nopcha to the consulate there, and then the consulate sent help.

• 21:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Before long, this whole affair was over. Mustafa Lita realized that he had been outsmarted and headed back to his own territory. Bajazid's father had gotten word of the kidnapping and had shown up with a small army of men, planning to kill Mustafa Lita. But his son and Nopcha convinced him that he and his men could stand down.

• 22:04Holly Frey?

  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 in play there, but he also felt he knew more about warfare and the people they might be meeting than anybody else.

• 22:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1913, the Albanian Congress of Trieste was organized from February 27th to March 6th. 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 Nopška, 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.

• 23:05Holly Frey?

  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 Veed was established as monarch. And at that point, Nopcha declared that his Albania was dead.

• 23:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  After this appointment, Nopcha faced a whole different hurdle, and that was the loss of his family fortune. During World War I, 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 1918, and Nopsha's homeland became part of Romania. With that point, his family estate was no longer his property.

• 24:05Holly Frey?

  And we're going to talk about the last part of Franz Nopsha's life in a moment. But first, we will take another quick sponsor break.

• 24:14Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 24:59Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at nsl.sport.

• 25:41Speaker 07

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiral. I love the 60s. I feel really jealous that I wasn't alive for it. I'd be interested, like... Knowing what that was like and seeing the way culture and art has progressed today, how do you find it? Wait a minute. I'm sorry, I have so many questions. Sorry. You're not nervous, are you? I am nervous. You are? I am. I feel like insecure about my experience. I know I shouldn't, but you know, I'm 20. I haven't really lived my life yet.

• 26:24Speaker 07

  And then sitting in front of somebody that has lived an enormous life is intimidating. And sometimes I feel like talking about myself is just not as interesting. So that's why I feel a bit nervous. I'll try and I'll try and ignore it, though. Please, dude. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:51Holly Frey?

  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 Knopch, 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.

• 27:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  In April 1925, Knopch was offered the position of Director at the Royal Hungarian Institute of Geology. He worked there until November 1928. 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 200 different works, and roughly a quarter of them were about Albania and its people.

• 28:02Holly Frey?

  And Nopcha's health continued to decline. In 1928, 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.

• 28:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  On April 26, 1933, Franz Nopcha 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, Nopcha sent the housekeeper away on an errand, and then he shot his sleeping companion and then himself, killing both of them.

• 28:58Holly Frey?

  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, Mr. Bajazid Elmas 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."

• 29:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  This entire incident was described in detail in Vienna's new Free Press, all the way down to autopsy details and Nopcha's note. And it ran under the unfortunate and sensational headline, quote, "Bloody Drama in the Sangerstrass: 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.

• 29:53Holly Frey?

  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.

• 30:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Nopcha had left a list of his unpublished work with a colleague named Norbert Jokel, along with instructions about who to contact to have them publish, that publication didn't happen. Initially, there were financial issues, and Jokel held on to the works but was killed by Nazis in the early 1940s. 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.

• 30:39Holly Frey?

  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.

• 31:24Holly Frey?

  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.

• 31:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a consequence, it's still something of a struggle for historians to really get a sense of what Nopcha 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.

• 32:04Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there have been a lot of theories put forth about what exactly was 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 postmortem is a whole messy thing, particularly for someone who is just, you know, doing a casual assessment from a historical standpoint, rather than someone who is actually trained in psychology. But in a paper on Noapsha's work, written by David B. Weishampel and Wolf Ernst Reif, the writers make a really nice point about how privilege and a lack of formal education kind of robbed Noapsha 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 Noapsha as arrogant is to overlook the obvious problem

• 32:49Holly Frey?

  of combining in one person a high level of intelligence and creativity not often tempered with the ability of self-criticism. Noapsha's studies in tectonic geology, evolutionary biology, paleobiogeography, 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 Noapsha, against because of outlandish and easily falsified ideas, which he presented on paper, and for because he excelled at assembling disparate ideas into new frameworks.

• 33:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of his ideas that were met with skepticism while he was living have come to be pretty widely accepted in the years since his death. For example, his idea that the area known as Hotsig 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 in species is now known as the island rule, although it's credited in its more formally detailed form as Foster's Rule, which is named for biologist J. Bristol Foster, who wrote a paper establishing the idea in 1964.

• 34:00Holly Frey?

  And Sashel Castle, the family home of Franz Noapsha, 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.

• 34:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Support for restoration and upkeep, although those funds have actually been slow to materialize. So it is still in a, a pretty sad state of disrepair at this point.

• 34:50Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  Wait, I came in for two things. How is this $47? All right, we're gonna need a plan here.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  Just start simple with Bank of America Advantage Safe Balance Banking. No overdraft item fees, no monthly maintenance fee if you're under 25.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Oh, that's actually really simple.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Safe Balance Banking: One Less Thing to Figure Out. Learn more at bofa.com/simplebanking. Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC.

• 36:27Speaker 06

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rally so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at nsl.sport.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.