A common story, still often reported to this day, is that the lion was smashed to pieces during the subsequent Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), even using dynamite, by the klepht leader Odysseas Androutsos, who supposedly hoped to find it filled with treasure. This tale was current already in the 1830s, but has been strongly refuted. The five pieces (head, neck, chest, and forelegs) into which the statue was divided for most of the 19th century, before its reconstruction in 1902, bore no evidence of an explosion, but were cleanly cut, likely being the original pieces that formed the statue. Androutsos is held to have been the one to unearth the statue during his tenure as local military governor by Ali Pasha of Yanina in 1819, but the statue had likely fallen apart due to the poor quality of the pedestal's material.