Greek Archaeological Service
The Greek Archaeological Service is a state service, under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, responsible for the oversight of all archaeological excavations, museums and the country's archaeological heritage in general.
The Greek Archaeological Service is the oldest such institution in Europe: it was founded in 1833, on the back of state efforts to regulate antiquities that had been ongoing since at least 1825, and given its legal basis in 1834. Its officers were known as "ephors" for most of its history, and have included some of Greece's foremost archaeologists, including Christos Tsountas, Valerios Stais, and Semni Karouzou. Its directors, originally under the title of "Ephor General", have included Kyriakos Pittakis, Panagiotis Kavvadias and Spyridon Marinatos, and have been influential both in the excavation and conservation of Greek antiquities and in the shaping of archaeological law.
Initially a small department, usually comprising only the Ephor General, the Archaeological Service gradually expanded over the second half of the nineteenth century. Panagiotis Efstratiadis began the process of recruiting additional archaeologists and expanding the service's operations outside Athens, while Panagiotis Kavvadias expanded its numbers further and instituted a competitive system of examination for prospective ephors. The service's prestige declined following the ousting of Kavvadias in 1909, though its operations expanded to include a museum of Byzantine archaeology and via the archaeological law of 1932, which gave it authority to issue excavation permits to Greece's foreign archaeological institutes. Under the dictatorial prime minister Ioannis Metaxas and the service's director Spyridon Marinatos, legislation passed in 1939 banned women from joining the Archaeological Service or serving as the directors of museums and regional ephorates. This ban was overturned in 1959 by John Papadimitriou, who secured additional funding and political independence for the service.
The Archaeological Service was again reorganised in 1982, following Marinatos's return to the directorship under the Regime of the Colonels: this reform ended the use of the title of "ephor" for archaeological officials. In 2014, it was again reformed to amalgamate the ephorates of prehistoric and classical archaeology with those of Byzantine and later archaeology, creating a single regional unit for each area of Greece.
Early history
The Greek Archaeological Service is the oldest such service in Europe, being founded in 1833 and formally legally instituted in 1834. Following lobbying from the humanist scholar Adamantios Korais, the Greek interior minister, Grigorios Dimitrios issued a decree in 1825, which was the first governmental attempt in Greece to regulate collections of antiquities and ensure the protection of ancient remains. A further decree, issued in 1827, prohibited the export or sale of Greek antiquities outside Greece. Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of independent Greece, appointed the Corfiote antiquarian Andreas Moustoxydis as "Director and Ephor" of the first national archaeological museum, then on the island of Aegina, in October 1829. Mustoxydis resigned in March 1832, following the assassination of Kapodistrias.The Archaeological Service was formally instituted by a decree of 1833 by the Minister for Education, Spyridon Trikoupis, founded the Greek Archaeological Service. Trikoupis appointed the Bavarian architect Adolf Weissenberg as "Ephor of Antiquities" with responsibility for "the conservation, discovery and collection of the archaeological treasures of the kingdom". Three others were appointed with the title of 'sub-ephor' : Kyriakos Pittakis, for central and northern Greece; Ludwig Ross, for the Peloponnese, and for the Aegean Islands. The service was given formal legal constitution by a law of. Officers of the Archaeological Service were known as ephors.
Weissenberg's short tenure saw the passage of the Archaeological Law of 10/22 May 1834, which named all antiquities in Greece as the "national property of all the Greeks", asserted the ownership of the state over all archaeological sites not already on private land and created the core administrative structure of the Archaeological Service. He was accused by Ross of lacking interest in antiquities, and also attracted the enmity of Josef Ludwig von Armansperg, head of the regency council of the underage King Otto, by trying to organise opposition to his government alongside the regent Georg Ludwig von Maurer,. Both Weissenberg and von Maurer were sacked in September 1834 and recalled to Bavaria. In Weissenberg's stead, Ross was named as Ephor General of Antiquities, with Pittakis and Athanasios Iatridis as his assistants. Ross was himself forced to resign in 1836, following a public feud with Pittakis over a series of inscriptions known as the "Naval Records", of which Ross had sent sketches to the German scholar August Böckh for the Inscriptiones Graecae, his compilation of ancient Greek inscriptions, despite having not yet received approval to publish them. The affair became a focal point for Greek resentment against the mostly Bavarian northern-European scholars who, on the invitation of King Otto, dominated Greek archaeology.
On Ross's resignation, Pittakis was appointed ephor of the Central Public Museum for Antiquities, making him the most senior archaeologist employed by the Greek Archaeological Service and its de facto head. He received the title of Ephor General in 1843. Pittakis served until his death in 1863, making widespread excavations, restorations and demolitions on the Acropolis of Athens, including the destruction of the Parthenon mosque, large-scale restorations to the Propylaia, and authorising the use of explosives by the French scholar Charles Ernest Beulé to uncover what became known as the Beulé Gate.
Expansion and reform (18711909)
Pittakis was succeeded by Panagiotis Efstratiadis, a prominent member of the Archaeological Society of Athens. Efstratiadis expanded the work of the Archaeological Service outside Athens, supporting excavations on the island of Euboea. He also secured ministerial approval for the 1875 demolition of the medieval Frankish Tower on the Acropolis, carried out by the Archaeological Society with funding from the German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, and sent his personal assistant, Panagiotis Stamatakis, to supervise Schliemann's 1876 excavations of Mycenae. Efstratiadis attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to use the state's powers against the illegal excavation and export of antiquities: in 1867, he denounced the epigrapher and art dealer Athanasios Rhousopoulos for selling the so-called Aineta aryballos to the British Museum, calling him "university professor, antiquities looter", while in 1873 he failed to prevent the art dealer Anastasios Erneris from selling a series of funerary plaques, painted by Exekias, to the German archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld. The archaeologist and archaeological historian Yannis Galanakis has judged that the limited financial and legal resources available to Efstratiadis, as well as the lack of political will to assist him on the part of the Greek state, meant that his goal of controlling the illegal excavation and trade of antiquities was "impossible to achieve".Until the mid-1870s, the Greek Archaeological Service consisted entirely of the Ephor General himself, sometimes supported by a personal assistant. In 1871, the privately organised Archaeological Society of Athens, which had taken on some of the state's responsibility for excavating and managing cultural heritage, began to appoint its own travelling ephors, known as 'apostles'. The primary duties of these 'apostles' were to conduct archaeological work throughout Greece, to combat archaeological looting and the illegal trade in antiquities, and to persuade citizens to hand over antiquities, particularly those acquired illegally, to the care of the state. The first of these was Stamatakis, whose work formed the basis for several public archaeological collections throughout Greece. From the 1870s, the Archaeological Service began to employ its own ephors, expanding continuously until the early 1910s. These ephors generally had responsibility for a particular region of Greece: Stamatakis, for example, was recruited in 1875 to oversee antiquities in Central Greece. Efstratiadis also recruited Panagiotis Kavvadias, followed by Konstantinos Dimitriadis in 1881 and by five further appointments in 1883 and 1885, including those of Christos Tsountas and Valerios Stais. This expansion continued throughout the next two decades, providing the core of the service's twentieth-century administrative apparatus.
On Efstratiadis's retirement in 1884, Stamatakis succeeded him: he established several local archaeological museums around Greece, but died of malaria less than a year after his appointment, and was succeeded by Kavvadias in 1885. Kavvadias finished the excavation of the Acropolis and the removal of almost all of its post-classical structures. He also published the service's first periodical, the monthly Archaeological Bulletin, expanded its portfolio of museums, and worked to increase the influence of the Archaeological Service at the expense of that of the Archaeological Society, of which he was also a prominent member. He created much of the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern Archaeological Service. Through a royal decree of, he established the Archaeological Receipts Fund, which used the proceeds of the sales of tickets, casts and catalogues by museums to fund the conservation and restoration of ancient monuments. He was also behind the Royal Decree of, which created the first systematic division of Greece into archaeological regions.
Kavvadias continued the recruitment of new ephors: by the end of his tenure, the Service had recruited over a dozen, including Habbo Gerhard Lolling and Konstantinos Kourouniotis, and established operations on the island of Crete, then an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. He also imposed the first formal academic criteria for ephors – his predecessor as Ephor General, Panagiotis Stamatakis, had received no university education or formal archaeological training – requiring that all ephors be graduates of the University of Athens, and either to have undertaken postgraduate study in archaeology or to pass an examination in archaeology, history, Ancient Greek and Latin. In 1887, he imposed the stricter requirement that all potential ephors hold a doctorate in either philology or archaeology, and that they subsequently pass an interview before a board composed of professors of classics, archaeology and history. Following the Goudi coup of, Kavvadias's subordinates launched their own so-called "mutiny of the ephors", angered by his style of leadership, which has since been described as both "authoritarian" and "tyrannical". He was forced to step down, following heavy criticism in the press, in December 1909. The Greek government subsequently reorganised the Archaeological Service. Kavvadias's duties were given to the archaeologist Gabriel Byzantinos, who was shortly afterwards replaced by, the director of Athens's Epigraphical Museum. Under Law 3721, dated, the General Ephorate was abolished, in favour of a more collective system of management where the function of the Ephor General was assumed by the 'Archaeological Board', a ten-member committee of university professors, ephors and the directors of Athens's museums, on which the newly titled Director of the Archaeological Service had a single vote. The country was re-divided into seven archaeological districts, replacing the nine established by Kavvadias in 1886.