77 Facts About Georg Karo

Georg Heinrich Karo was a German archaeologist, known for his research into the Mycenaean and Etruscan cultures.

Georg Karo was twice director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens, in which capacity he excavated the Mycenaean site of Tiryns and the Temple of Artemis on Corfu.

Georg Karo taught briefly at Bonn between 1902 and 1905, before moving to the DAI in Athens as Dorpfeld's deputy.

Georg Karo's views made him unpopular with the Entente-backed government that ruled in Greece after the First World War, and he took an academic post at the University of Halle, which he held until 1930.

Georg Karo returned to Germany in 1952, and became an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg.

Georg Heinrich Karo was born in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice.

Georg Karo lived in Berlin until the age of six, when his father, having lost his job due to illness, moved the family to Florence, where Georg Karo spent the remainder his childhood.

Until 1885, Georg Karo was educated by private tutors in Florence, including Carl Schuchhardt, later known as a pioneer of prehistoric archaeology in Germany.

Georg Karo initially specialised in philology, later writing in his memoirs that he found archaeology "completely foreign" and that he "only embarrassed himself" when attempting it.

Loeschcke held that the tradition of classical art should be traced into the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the second millenniumBCE: Georg Karo received his doctorate under him in 1896, with a thesis entitled.

Georg Karo later took part in Evans's excavations at Knossos, and the two became lifelong friends.

Georg Karo moved in 1905 to Athens to take up a post, at Loeschcke's recommendation, as second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens, deputising for the archaeologist Wilhelm Dorpfeld.

From 1909, Dorpfeld, who had reached the pensionable age of fifty-five, abdicated most of his duties as director in order to focus on his own research into the works of Homer; Georg Karo was generally acknowledged as the institute's main figure and director from this point onwards.

Georg Karo turned down a post at the University of Giessen during this period.

Georg Karo was made an officer of the Austrian Order of Franz Joseph shortly afterwards.

In Greece, Georg Karo conducted archaeological excavations at Tiryns and of the Temple of Artemis on Corfu.

Georg Karo became closely connected with the German court of Wilhelm II, who became interested in Karo's work at Tiryns and Corfu and whom Karo frequently visited at the Achilleion, the Kaiser's summer palace on Corfu.

In 1911, Georg Karo secured 10,000 marks from Wilhelm towards the DAI's budget, which he justified to the Kaiser as an essential means of ensuring German "national prestige" through establishing parity with Greece's other foreign archaeological schools.

Georg Karo maintained close relations with the directors of these institutes, particularly Maurice Holleaux of the French School, Bert Hodge Hill of the American School, and Alan Wace of the British School at Athens.

Georg Karo became a favourite of Sophia of Prussia, Wilhelm II's sister, who married Constantine I to become Queen of Greece in 1913.

Georg Karo's work established the chronological relationships of the finds from Grave Circle A, and therefore allowed the beginning of the systematic study of Mycenaean material culture.

Georg Karo edited a pro-German magazine and argued against the so-called "atrocity propaganda" spread by the Allies about Germany and its Ottoman allies.

Between 1914 and 1916, the German Foreign Office's newly created Office for Propaganda occupied rooms in the DAI, and Georg Karo provided them with assistance, particularly working as a translator.

Georg Karo was not present for the discovery ; it was initially excavated by the Greek archaeologist Apostolos Arvanitopoulos, who was stationed in the region as a reserve officer of the Hellenic Army and who invited Georg Karo to return and study the finds with him.

Georg Karo further excavated the find-spot in September 1916: he interpreted the discovery as loot piled up by tomb-robbers, a view which was immediately and almost universally accepted in the archaeological community, though further study in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has suggested that the deposition was either an attempt to conceal valuable goods or a ritual deposition of them.

Georg Karo was removed from his post as director, despite the objections of Queen Sophia, though most of his subordinates remained in their roles.

In May 1917, Georg Karo travelled to the Ottoman Empire to assist the archaeologist Martin Schede in preserving ancient monuments, though he was widely believed to be involved in attempting to secure ancient artefacts for illicit export to Germany.

Georg Karo complained that the rapid development of infrastructure by the Ottoman army frequently destroyed ancient sites, and that neither he nor the army itself could prevail upon the soldiers to preserve archaeological remains.

Georg Karo was rebuked by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, considered among the most respected of Germany's classicists, and forced to leave Turkey; he departed for a holiday in Switzerland.

Towards the end of the war, amid growing tensions between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over the status of western Anatolia, Georg Karo was asked by Halil Edhem, the director of the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, to visit the ancient site of Sardis along with another archaeologist, Hubert Knackfuss, and to assess the veracity of reports that Ottoman forces had vandalised the ruins and excavations there.

Georg Karo was widely suspected of being in Turkey to spy on the situation of the Greek-speaking population of the eastern Aegean region.

Accordingly, in July 1920, Georg Karo formally wrote to the directors of the DAI in Berlin, requesting to be dismissed from his post in Athens and complaining about the Greek government's treatment of him there.

In 1922, Georg Karo met Helene Wenck, the daughter of the historian Karl Wenck, and a great-niece of Heinrich Schliemann.

Around 1924, Georg Karo was a member of the acquisition committee of Athens's National Archaeological Museum, in which capacity he successfully argued against their acquisition of the so-called "Ring of Nestor", a purportedly Minoan artefact that Georg Karo believed to be a forgery.

Georg Karo remained at Halle until 1930, when he returned to Athens as director of the DAI.

In September 1932, Georg Karo was mooted as a potential candidate for the presidency of the DAI.

The outgoing president, Gerhart Rodenwaldt, urged against his appointment on the grounds that a Jewish president could be a political liability if the Nazi Party were to gain power, and Georg Karo declined to stand.

Georg Karo was one of several figures in German classical archaeology, including Ludwig Curtius, the head of the German Archaeological Institute at Rome, to be removed from office under Nazi racial laws.

Georg Karo resigned as chair of the DAI's board in 1933, fearing that his Jewish ancestry would be used against the institute.

Georg Karo offered his resignation as director, but the DAI's Berlin president, Theodor Wiegand, refused it.

Georg Karo moved to Munich, where he lived with his step-sister.

Georg Karo remained in contact with the DAI, both in Athens and Berlin, and was consulted in 1937 by the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture about the salaries of DAI employees in Athens.

Georg Karo was made an honorary doctor of the University of Athens in 1937, as part of its centenary celebrations.

Georg Karo worked as a writer in Munich, but returned to Athens for study in 1938.

Georg Karo maintained close connections with archaeologists, particularly from Britain and the United States, throughout his career.

Georg Karo made a particular impression upon Ida Hill, the wife of Bert Hodge Hill.

Ida wrote in 1900 that Georg Karo was "more like an Englishman" than a German and was "a great ladies' man".

From 1938, Georg Karo planned to leave Germany permanently: he later stated that he had intended to leave in September, but was required to remain to care for his elderly step-sister.

Georg Karo died on 19 December; Karo applied for a Greek visa early in 1939 in the hope of being able to pass from there to the United States as a refugee.

Georg Karo was supported by the Greek royal family, who allowed him to bypass the general refusal of the Greek government to issue visas to Austrian and German Jews.

Georg Karo obtained his American visa through the support of friends at the ASCSA, particularly Blegen and Hill.

Georg Karo first took up a visiting professorship at the University of Cincinnati, which he obtained through the assistance of Blegen, a professor at the same institution.

Georg Karo left Cincinnati in 1940 and taught as a visiting professor at Oberlin.

Georg Karo delivered the eight 1941 and 1942 Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin, the first series of which were published as his monograph Greek Personality in Archaic Sculpture in 1948.

From his arrival in the United States, Georg Karo was accused of working or spying for the Nazi government.

Unable to meet Marinatos in person, Karo sent him a letter containing eleven postcards, all showing an image of the Penn Museum and inscribed with a short greeting, signed pseudonymously "George Barbour".

Georg Karo asked Marinatos to send these from Greece to eight addresses in Germany and three in Prague, which had recently been annexed by Nazi Germany.

Unsure of Karo's intentions, Marinatos gave the letters to his benefactor Elizabeth Humlin Hunt, in whose home he had been staying, to dispose of: she handed them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and further claimed to have been told by Harry A Hill, director of the American Express office in Athens, that Karo had received money from the Nazi government while in the city.

Meanwhile, T Leslie Shear, the director of the ASCSA's excavations in the Athenian agora, accused Karo of having been an agent for Germany during the First World War, an accusation repeated by the classicist Daniel Lewis.

The classicist John Franklin Daniel accused Georg Karo of being a sleeper agent for Germany in the US.

Georg Karo was nevertheless placed under parole, denied US citizenship, and labelled a "Nazi" in the official records of the affair.

Georg Karo was required to testify before an Enemy Alien Hearing Board in Cleveland on 18 April 1942 to avoid internment, something that he wrote would be "a death sentence" at his advanced age.

Georg Karo's parole was lifted on 15 November 1945, but he remained ineligible for American citizenship and retained the official status of "Enemy Alien" until the end of 1946.

Georg Karo took a visiting lectureship at the University of Kansas City in 1945, after the end of the Second World War in September, but generally lived in Oberlin until the summer of 1947.

Georg Karo's contract was extended each year until 1952, thanks to pressure on the college's president exerted by Karo's students; Karo served as head of Claremont's classics department.

Georg Karo applied to be recognised as a victim of Nazi persecution, which would entitle him to government support as well as a resumption of his pension as an employee of the DAI: his application was accepted late in 1952 after Adenauer's personal intervention.

Dissatisfied with life in America, Georg Karo returned to Germany on 9 July 1952.

Georg Karo died in Freiburg im Breisgau on 12 November 1963.

In September 1919, Georg Karo contributed an article to the magazine demanding the revision of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1921, Georg Karo wrote a book criticising the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, denying claims of Germany's guilt for the start of the war, and attacking British imperialism.

Georg Karo was called to testify before a district court in Munich in spring 1922 on the question of German war guilt; this appearance gained him international recognition as one of the foremost experts on the subject.

Georg Karo's biographer Astrid Lindenlauf has written that he was "fond of the radical right", and that he was a member of the right-wing German Lecturers' Association for several years, giving speeches at the group's annual meetings until 1929.

Georg Karo taught part-time at the in Berlin, which promulgated a nationalist, anti-democratic ideology; it was run by the historian Martin Spahn, later an early member of the Nazi party.

In 1932, Ludwig Curtius wrote that Georg Karo "belong[ed] neither wholly to archaeology nor to politics", which Lindenlauf has interpreted as an indication of the importance of the political aspects of his role in German archaeology.

The DAI became known for its support of the Nazi state, and Georg Karo hoped that the new regime would bring about renewed excavations at Olympia, which indeed began in 1936.

In 1941, Georg Karo boasted of having personally secured the funding for these excavations in a meeting with Hitler.

Notes taken by Bert Hodge Hill record that Georg Karo was critical of Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939.