Panagiotis Efstratiadis

Panagiotis Efstratiadis or Eustratiades ( el, Παναγιώτης Ευστρατιάδης) (1815 – ) was a Greek archaeologist. He served as Ephor General of Antiquities, the head of the Greek Archaeological Service, between 1864 and 1884, succeeding Kyriakos Pittakis.

Efstratiadis was born on the Greek island of Lesbos, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He studied archaeology under the prominent epigrapher Ludwig Ross at the University of Athens, and in Germany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Returning to Greece in 1843, he worked as a teacher alongside his archaeological work for the next twenty years.

He was a founding and prominent member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society greatly involved in the practice and publication of Greek archaeology throughout the 19th century. From 1851 until 1858, a period of financial trouble for the society, he was one of its few remaining members. He worked alongside Pittakis on the society's excavations of the so-called 'Psoma House' in Athens from 1852, and on its excavations of the Theatre of Dionysus near the Acropolis of Athens between 1861 and 1867. During his tenure as Ephor General, he oversaw the construction of what became the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

Efstratiadis is remembered for his efforts to protect Greece's archaeological heritage, particularly on the Acropolis of Athens, though his determined efforts to prevent the illegal excavation and export of antiquities were often undercut by the Greek state's limited financial and legal resources to do so. He is also significant for his expansion of the Archaeological Service and his patronage of Panagiotis Stamatakis, who succeeded him as Ephor General and whom he appointed to oversee the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae.

Early life and career

Panagiotis Efstratiadis was born on the Greek island of Lesbos, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1815. He studied at the University of Athens under Ludwig Ross, who had served between 1834 and 1836 as Ephor General of Antiquities, the head of the Greek Archaeological Service. In 1837, Efstratiadis received a government scholarship to study in at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where he was taught by the classicist and philhellene Friedrich Thiersch, and to read classical philology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. One of his teachers in Berlin was August Böckh, the compiler of the , a series of publications aiming to collate all known inscriptions from ancient Greece. In Germany, he studied alongside Stefanos Koumanoudis, later described as "the undisputed giant" of Greek epigraphy.

Efstratiadis remained in Germany for six years, returning to Greece in 1843 to work as a teacher. He took his first post in a secondary school ( ''gymnasium'') in Nafplio, followed by a position as headmaster of another ''gymnasium'' in Athens, which he held until 1863.

Archaeological Society of Athens

Efstratiadis was a founding member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society with significant responsibility for archaeological work and heritage management in Greece throughout the nineteenth century. The Society was formed in 1837, largely through the initiative of the self-taught archaeologist Kyriakos Pittakis, the merchant and philanthropist Konstantinos Bellios, the poet Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (who became its first secretary) and the Minister for Education Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, who became its first president. The Society held its first meeting on , in the Parthenon.

Efstratiadis was also a founding member in 1848 of the Archaeological Association (), established by Rangavis as a national academy for Greek science and culture. The association's first publication was accompanied by a letter in Ancient Greek written by Efstratiadis, extolling the contribution of Greeks to the study of the humanities and the role of modern Greeks in communicating epigraphical knowledge to the wider European world. In 1849, Efstratiadis wrote the Ancient Greek text of the ''Decree of the Benefactors'' (), a pseudo-classical stele erected by the association to honour those who had contributed financially to it. The archaeological historian Nikolaos Papazarkadas has described the stele as "one of the earliest attempts at integrating, however awkwardly, epigraphical knowledge in contemporary cultural practices."

From 1851, following the resignation of Rangavis as its secretary, the Archaeological Society stagnated, having largely run out of money. Efstratiadis became one of Society's few remaining members, serving as vice-secretary and as a member of the board. The society's financial troubles in this period were exacerbated by its 1852 purchase of a house in the Plaka district of Athens, known as the ''Psoma House'' after its owner, Louisa Psoma. The purchase was driven by Pittakis, who believed that the house was the site of the (the ancient city's assembly building) and the temples known as the and the , and required the society to raise 12,000 drachmas by selling shares it owned in the National Bank of Greece. Efstratiadis assisted Pittakis with the excavation of the site, alongside another member of the society named D. Charamis. The excavation failed to furnish the extensive ancient remains predicted by Pittakis, though it did uncover numerous ancient inscriptions, which Efstratiadis published in three volumes. The archaeologist later found that the antiquities discovered at the house were associated with the late Roman walls of the city.

Shortly after the society's elections of , the society commissioned Efstratiadis, Pittakis, its president , and three architects – Lysandros Kaftanzoglou, Panagis Kalkos and – to report on the state of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens. The Erechtheion had undergone restoration works under Pittakis between 1837 and 1840, a project later described by the archaeological historian Fani Mallouchou-Tufano as characterised by "enthusiasm … innocence, naivety and ignorance", which included the use of improvised material, including tree trunks, to restore the orthostates of the temple.

In April 1854, on the outbreak of the Crimean War, British and French troops occupied Athens' harbour, Piraeus, with the aim of preventing Greece from assisting the Russian Empire against Ottoman Turkey. The occupation led to an outbreak of cholera, which lasted from June 1854 to January 1855 and killed around 3,000 people, including the Archaeological Society's president, Georgios Gennadios. The situation deepened the society's financial crisis such that it effectively ceased to exist until 1858, though Pittakis continued writing and publishing the society's academic journal, the ''Archaeological Journal'' (). At the instigation of the Minister for Education, Charalampos Christopoulos, the society reformed in 1858, and was helped in restoring its membership by the collapse of the Archaeological Association, which had folded in 1854. Efstratiadis joined the society's council on its reformation, serving until 1883.

Between 1861 and 1867, Efstratiadis conducted excavations in the Theatre of Dionysus, near the Acropolis of Athens. In 1863, he led the archaeological society's excavations in the Kerameikos cemetery, one of the few places where ancient funerary monuments could be found , owing to the unusual depth at which the site was buried. Efstratidis' work has been praised by the archaeological historian Lena Costaki for his practice of collecting chance finds and expropriating private land when necessary to ensure the coherency of the excavations. His published scholarly output was limited; apart from the publication of the Psoma House inscriptions, he wrote fifteen articles in the ''Archaeological Journal'' on epigraphical matters between 1869 and 1874. However, studies of his notebooks and papers in the twenty-first century have revealed important unpublished inscriptions.

Ephor General of Antiquities

After the death of Pittakis in 1863, Efstratiadis succeeded him as Ephor General of Antiquities, the head of the Greek Archaeological Service. In an era when few Greek archaeologists worked outside Athens, Efstratiadis took an interest in antiquities throughout Greece: during 1869–1870, he supported the excavation of inscriptions on the island of Euboea, not only following his legal duties as Ephor General in instructing the local prefect and government as to their excavation and conservation, but writing directly to local scholars, mayors and police, asking their help in conducting rescue excavations and in locating finds, protecting them from looting, and transporting them back to Athens. His handwriting from this period has been described as "hasty, nervous and illegible", and as indicative of the strain that Efstratiadis's intense workload placed upon him.

One of Efstratiadis's major responsibilities was the curation and protection of monuments on the Acropolis of Athens. He maintained a daybook of excavations and events on the Acropolis. His entries testify to his struggles with profiteering by those buying the stone blocks taken from the medieval Frankish Tower at the Propylaia, with complaints from local residents that unstable piles of spoil from the excavations were endangering their homes, and with looting of antiquities, as well as the challenges of protecting objects and monuments from weathering once they had been exposed to the elements. He carried out excavations of the Stoa of Eumenes, on the Acropolis's south slope, between 1864 and 1865.

In 1874, the German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann proposed to fund the demolition of the Frankish Tower. Efstratiadis obtained ministerial approval for the project, which would be carried out by the Archaeological Society, though the final removal of the tower was delayed until 1875 by administrative reluctance and the personal intervention of King George. The demolition was controversial: due to the tower's origins in Athens's period of foreign rule, it was widely viewed within Greece as an intrusion on the earlier Greek remains of the Acropolis, though commentators from the rest of Europe valued the tower for its aesthetic appeal and as a symbol of the continuity between ancient Greek and western European culture. Schliemann's actions were widely criticised outside Greece, though Archaeological Society defended them as a means of "the restoration of the Greek character of the shining face of the Acropolis, pure and unsullied by anything foreign".

In July 1866, Efstratiadis hired Panagiotis Stamatakis, then aged around twenty and with no formal archaeological education, as his personal assistant. When Schliemann was granted permission by the Greek government in 1874 to excavate at Mycenae, Efstratiadis insisted that Stamatakis should accompany the excavations as the state's overseer and representative. Efstratiadis was highly suspicious of Schliemann, and remained in continuous contact with Stamatakis by letter throughout the excavations, which eventually took place in 1876.

Efstratiadis's handling of Schliemann's case mirrored his earlier treatment, in January 1866, of the art dealers Grigorios Bournias and Ioannis Palaiologos, who had asked permission to excavate in the Profitis Ilias area of Athens. Efstratiadis noted that the law obliged him to grant permission, as the excavation was on private land and the landowner's consent had been given, but insisted that the excavation should take place under strict supervision. Efstratiadis also opposed the removal of antiquities from Greece: 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". Efstratiadis eventually ensured that Rhousopoulos was fined 1,000 drachmas (the same as the price for which he had sold the ) for the sale, but he was restricted by the need to retain good relations with the art dealers of Athens, who undertook more excavations in this period than either the Archaeological Society or the Archaeological Service and usually offered to sell the artefacts they uncovered to the state. Furthermore, the state had limited legal powers to respond to the illegal export of antiquities. In 1873, for example, Efstratiadis noted in his records the illegal export by the art dealer Anastasios Erneris of a series of funerary plaques, painted by Exekias, to the German archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld, but was unable to prevent or reverse the sale. 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".

Other major projects of his period as Ephor General included the construction of the Old Acropolis Museum between 1865 and 1874. The building necessitated excavations in the northern and north-eastern parts of the Acropolis: excavations here of the so-called (the ceremonial dump into which the Athenians had placed the remains of the Persian destruction of the Acropolis in 480 BCE) brought to light many notable works of ancient sculpture. He also oversaw the construction of the Central Museum under the architect Panagis Kalkos, which began in October 1866; after numerous delays due to financial limitations and political instability, the museum's west wing opened to the public in 1881.

Efstratiadis's tenure as Ephor General saw the foundation of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens in 1874 and its first excavations at Olympia from 1875–1881, as well as the beginnings of the excavation of Eleusis in 1882 under the Archaeological Society of Athens. He also oversaw the beginning of the expansion of the Archaeological Service, which had previously consisted entirely of the Ephor General. In 1879, Panagiotis Kavvadias was recruited as an ephor, 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.

Efstratiadis retired as Ephor General in 1884, and was succeeded by his protégé Stamatakis. He died in Athens on .

Personal life

Little is known of Efstratiadis's private and family life. His son, Michael, became a lawyer and donated a cache of Panagiotis' papers to the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1932.

In person, Efstratiadis was known to be meticulous, independent and highly protective of the antiquities in his care. His contemporary, the Greek writer , described him as "always moderate, self-sufficient ndfaithful to his duty". He was also introverted, private and withdrawn: no known image or photograph of him survives. An 1882 letter from Stefanos Koumanoudis reveals something of his character:

Efstratiadis maintained a friendly correspondence with his former teacher, August Böckh, and sought his advice on behalf of the Archaeological Society in 1851 over the reading of an inscription, now known to be from the base of the Phrasikleia Kore. In the same year, he wrote to Ludwig Ross, who had been dismissed from his professorship at Athens following the 3 September 1843 Revolution, which had forced King Otto to remove Ross and most of his fellow northern Europeans from public service. Ross sent Efstratiadis what Petrakos has termed an "affectionate and laudatory" reply.

Honours and legacy

According to an 1889 obituary, Efstratiadis was considered the foremost Greek epigrapher of his day. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Prussian Crown, and elected as both a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin and a member of the . In 1868, he was awarded the silver cross (the lowest grade, also known as ''knight'') of the Greek Order of the Redeemer, Greece's national order of merit.

Efstratiadis was considered a key figure in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Skokos judged that the museum "would undoubtedly not exist without fstratiadis'stireless efforts." In 2021, Costaki described him as one of the "founding fathers" of Greek archaeology, alongside Pittakis and Koumanoudis.

A conference in Efstratiadis's memory was held at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in December 2015, hosted by the Greek Epigraphical Society ().

Footnotes

Explanatory notes

References

Bibliography

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Efstratiadis, Panagiotis
1888 deaths
Greek archaeologists
19th-century archaeologists
People from Lesbos
1815 births
Ephors General of Greece
Greeks from the Ottoman Empire