From: tm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Theoharis Mihailidis)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: Manolis Andronikos - The Times article
Date: 7 Apr 92 11:15:01 GMT
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.


 The least I can do to honour the last of the great archeologists is to post the
follownig article which was published in " The Times" on Monday 6th April.
 I have typed it in as it appeared on the newspaper:

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		   Professor Manolis Andronikos,
     	   Greek archeaologist and scholar, died in Salonika
          on March 30 aged 72. He was born on October 23,1919.

 The spectacular discovery by Manolis Andronikos of the treasure-filled Macedo
nian royal tombs at Vergina in 1977, as well as the gravestones of Macedonian
commoners, produced substantial evidence that ancient Macedonia had been popula
ted by Greek tribes since at least the fourth century BC.
 The Greek government is now wielding this historical argument to deny neighbou
ring Slavs of the disintegrating Yugoslav federation (whose ancestors settled 
in the Balkans after AD600), the right to use the name "Macedonia" for their so
vereign state north of the Greek province of that name.
 Born in Bursa, Turkey, Andronikos was aged three when his family was forced to
flee to Salonika following the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor. Later he
studied classical archeology in the University of Salonika and it was a student
in the late 1930s that he first took part in the excavations conducted by his 
teachers in Vergina, a small village 50 miles southwest of Salonika.
 He graduated in 1940, the year Greece joined the war. After his country was
occupied by the Axis forces, he served briefly as a schoolteacher in Thrace,
before escaping to the Middle East to join the Free Greek Forces. At the end of 
the war he resumed teaching. However, after obtaining his doctorate in Salonika
in 1952 with a treatise on Plato and the Arts, he pursued studies on a British
Counsil scholarship in Oxford under John Beazley, Lincoln Professor of Classical
Archeology and Art, who became his mentor.
 He was elected lecturer in classical archeology at Salonika University in 1957,
rising to full professor in 1964. Between 1952 and 1961 he excavated at various 
sites in northern Greece, but his passion was the site Vergina which he was 
convinced could be identified with ancient Aigae, the early capital of 
Macedonian kings.
 In 1962, while excavating a large mound there, he found that earth-fill
contained dozens of broken funerary slabs from some nearby fourth century BC 
cemetery destroyed by later invaders. The names inscribed on the tombstones were
unquestionably Greek. He was certain that they had belonged to ordinary 
Macedonians - not noblemen. He saw this discovery as a refutation of arguments
that the Macedonians had been "barbarians" living under a Hellenised elite. But
more extraordinary discoveries were to follow.
 In November 1977, Andronikos stunned his audience in the packed amphitheatre of
Salonika University when he announced: "I have just found the grave of King 
Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. I found his very bones in a golden
casket."
 He had struck two royal graves. The first had been looted, but there was a 
magnificent mural painting showing the Rape of Persephone, which he compared to
works of the Renaissance. The other, unplundered, held two marble sarcophagi
containing burial caskets of gold. One, whose lid was embossed with what came
to be known as the 16-point star of Vergina, bore King Philip's bones shrouded
in purple and gold cloth, topped with a gold wreath. Miniature ivory portraits
of the Macedonian royal family lay near by, along with the sceptre, full armour
and a fine ceremonial shield.
 Since then more than ten other royal tombs have been uncovered by Andronikos,
as well as, in 1982, the theatre where King Philip was assassinated at his 
daughter's wedding in 336 BC. One of his latest discoveries in the Vergina mound
was a headless marble statue with an inscription in Greek dedicating it to the
goddess Eucleia on behalf of Euridice, Philip's mother.
 As his excavations yielded finds important both archeologically and politically
Andronikos was given a carte-blanche budget by the then prime minister(now 
president), Constantine Karamanlis, a Macedonian himself. Honours were lavished
on him by learned societies and institutions in Greece and abroad. He was made
an honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
 Only a few days before his death President Karamanlis awarded him the country's
highest distinction, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix. He was repre
sented at the ceremony by his family.

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   I hope that some people in this newsgroup read this very carefully.
			
                        Theoharis Mihailidis, Imperial College
 				London