53 Facts About Spyridon Marinatos

Spyridon Marinatos is best known for the excavation of the Minoan site of Akrotiri on Thera, which he conducted between 1967 and 1974.

Spyridon Marinatos received several honours in Greece and abroad, and was considered one of the most important Greek archaeologists of his day.

Spyridon Marinatos discovered and excavated the battlefield of Thermopylae and the Mycenaean cemeteries at Tsepi and Vranas near Marathon in Attica.

Spyridon Marinatos served three times as head of the Greek Archaeological Service, first between 1937 and 1939, secondly between 1955 and 1958, and finally under the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974.

Spyridon Marinatos died while excavating at Akrotiri in 1974, and is buried at the site.

Spyridon Marinatos studied at the University of Athens from 1916, where he competed unsuccessfully with Christos Karouzos for a scholarship, beginning a lifelong rivalry between the two.

Spyridon Marinatos joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1919 and was first posted to Crete as an.

Between 1921 and 1925, Spyridon Marinatos completed military service in the Hellenic Army.

Spyridon Marinatos received his doctorate in 1925, with a dissertation supervised by the archaeologist Georgios Oikonomos on the depiction of marine animals in Minoan art.

In June 1926, Spyridon Marinatos met the British archaeologist Arthur Evans at the site of the Minoan palace at Knossos, which Evans had been excavating since 1900: both had travelled to the site to assess the damage of an earthquake.

Spyridon Marinatos arrived at Berlin in 1927, where his teachers included the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and the archaeologist Gerhart Rodenwaldt.

Spyridon Marinatos attended Halle on a scholarship, which he won in 1928 while serving as deputy to Stefanos Xanthoudidis, the senior ephor of eastern Crete.

Xanthoudidis died suddenly in 1929; Spyridon Marinatos returned early from Halle to succeed him, and was appointed as senior ephor of eastern Crete in March 1929.

Spyridon Marinatos served as director of the Heraklion Museum from 1929 until 1937.

Spyridon Marinatos considered his monthly salary of 3,500 drachmas inadequate, and told a Cretan newspaper that he was considering leaving archaeology over it.

Spyridon Marinatos successfully prosecuted Nikolaos Pollakis, a Cretan priest, in 1931 for illegal antiquities trading.

Between 1934 and 1935, Spyridon Marinatos excavated a Mycenaean cemetery on his native island of Kephallonia, where he discovered two chamber tombs.

Spyridon Marinatos served as Director General of Antiquities and Historic Monuments, the head of the Greek Archaeological Service, from 1937 until 1939, succeeding Georgios Oikonomos, who moved to the more prestigious office of Director General of Antiquities, Letters and Arts.

Shortly after his promotion, Spyridon Marinatos left Crete to become a professor at the University of Athens, where he introduced the first teaching of Near Eastern archaeology.

In 1939, Spyridon Marinatos undertook a lecture tour of the United States.

Unsure of Karo's intentions, Spyridon 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.

Spyridon Marinatos's excavation was widely reported in the Greek and foreign press, and played an important ideological role for the nationalist government of Ioannis Metaxas.

Spyridon Marinatos decided to excavate on Thera to test his hypothesis, though the initially muted scholarly reaction to his ideas led him to reconsider his intention to begin this work in 1939, and it was further delayed by the Second World War.

Spyridon Marinatos travelled to Italy, Germany and Austria on 1 May 1948, with the military rank of, to recover Greek antiquities looted during the Second World War.

The trip lasted seventy-five days and was often frustrated by the non-cooperation of archaeologists, officials and soldiers from other Allied powers, but Spyridon Marinatos succeeded in recovering the Aphrodite of Rhodes as well as objects looted from Knossos by the Nazi general Julius Ringel.

Spyridon Marinatos returned to Messenia in 1952, representing the Archaeological Society of Athens, when he uncovered a wealthy cemetery at Volimidia, around 5 kilometres to the north-east of the Palace of Nestor: he described this discovery as "very encouraging" and considered the tombs to belong to Homeric Pylos, ruled by the mythical Nestor.

Spyridon Marinatos built a house in Volimidia in the 1960s, which he owned until his death.

Spyridon Marinatos briefly returned as director of the Archaeological Service in 1955, but was forced to resign in 1958 by the Prime Minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, and was succeeded by John Papadimitriou.

Spyridon Marinatos discovered the Mycenaean cemetery of Tsepi, near Marathon, excavating it personally between November 1969 and October 1970, and frequently returning to visit and direct the excavations over the succeeding years.

Spyridon Marinatos visited Thera in 1962 and 1963, and began excavations in 1967.

Spyridon Marinatos circumvented the difficulty of excavating the remains, which were buried beneath approximately 150 feet of pumice, by tunnelling into the site from a gully that cut through it.

The excavations were funded partly by the Archaeological Society of Athens, from whom Marinatos secured 60,000 drachmas, and partly by the naval engineer James W Mavor, who collaborated on the excavation for its first year and supplied $2,000, which he had received as an advance for his collaboration on a book about Atlantis.

Spyridon Marinatos was removed from the leadership of the Archaeological Service on 31 January 1974.

On 1 October 1974, Spyridon Marinatos died while excavating at Akrotiri.

Spyridon Marinatos was initially buried on the excavation site, near the place of his death; his grave was moved outside the ruins.

In 1939, Spyridon Marinatos initiated legislation which banned women from joining the Archaeological Service or serving as the directors of museums and regional ephorates, as part of a broader scheme of misogynistic legislation promoted by the Metaxas government.

Spyridon Marinatos, described in a modern study as "utterly devoted" to the regime, was immediately reappointed to replace him, under the title of "Inspector General of the Services of Archaeology and Restoration".

Spyridon Marinatos was listed in 2015 as "belong[ing] to a special archaeological generation that renewed Greek archaeology" by the archaeological historian Vasileios Petrakos.

The story of Atlantis is generally considered to be an "invented myth" by the Athenian philosopher Plato, rather than a genuine oral tradition, and most modern scholars consider the attempt to link archaeological finds to the characters and places of the Homeric poems, as Spyridon Marinatos did for Pylos, Volimidia and Voidokilia, to be fundamentally misguided.

Spyridon Marinatos's leadership has been characterised as promoting himself and the pursuit of impressive finds at the expense of scholarship.

Spyridon Marinatos was made a member of the Academy of Athens, Greece's national academy, in 1955, and was its president at the time of his death.

Spyridon Marinatos was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1966.

Spyridon Marinatos was a doctor of the University of Palermo, as well as an honorary member of the Archaeological Institute of America, of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.

Spyridon Marinatos held a visiting membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as memberships of the British Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and the Spanish Pastor Foundation for Classical Studies.

Spyridon Marinatos was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, the and the British Academy.

Spyridon Marinatos was made a commander of the Order of the Phoenix, a knight of the Order of George I, and in 1938 an officer of the French Legion of Honour.

Spyridon Marinatos was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, Italy's most senior honour.

Spyridon Marinatos had interests in medicine, astronomy, botany and biology, which informed his archaeological work.

Between 1925 and June 1974, Spyridon Marinatos maintained a scrapbook of his appearances in the academic and popular press, which eventually grew to around four hundred pages.

Spyridon Marinatos maintained a particular association with the newspapers and, publishing articles in the former between 1928 and 1961 and in the latter from the 1950s until its closure in 1967.

Spyridon Marinatos maintained a long-running collaboration with the conservator Zacharias Kanakis, who worked with him on excavations between 1934 and 1970.

Spyridon Marinatos was married twice, to Maria Evangelidou in 1927 and, at the time of his death, to Aimilia Loverdos.

Spyridon Marinatos's daughter by Loverdos, Nanno Marinatos, is a scholar of Minoan culture.