Spyridon Marinatos

Spyridon Marinatos
Spyridon Nikolaou Marinatos (– October 1, 1974) was a Greek archaeologist who specialised in the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. He is best known for the excavation of the Minoan site of Akrotiri on Santorini, which he conducted between 1967 and 1974. A recipient of several honours in Greece and abroad, he was considered one of the most important Greek archaeologists of his day.
A native of Kephallonia, Marinatos was educated at the University of Athens, at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the University of Halle. His early teachers included noted archaeologists such as Panagiotis Kavvadias, Christos Tsountas and Georg Karo. He joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1919, and spent much of his early career on the island of Crete, where he excavated several Minoan sites, served as director of the Heraklion Museum, and formulated his theory that the collapse of Neopalatial Minoan society had been the result of the eruption of the volcanic island of Santorini around 1600 BCE.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Marinatos surveyed and excavated widely in the region of Messenia in southwest Greece, collaborating with Carl Blegen, who was engaged in the simultaneous excavation of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos. He also discovered and excavated the battlefield of Thermopylae and the Mycenaean cemeteries at Tsepi and Vranas near Marathon in Attica.
Marinatos served three times as head of the Greek Archaeological Service, firstly between 1937 and 1939, secondly between 1955 and 1958, and finally under the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. In the late 1930s, he was close to the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, under whom he initiated legislation to restrict the roles of women in Greek archaeology, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the junta of the 1960s and 1970s. His leadership of the Archaeological Service has been criticised for its cronyism and for promoting the pursuit of grand discoveries at the expense of good scholarship. Marinatos died while excavating at Akrotiri in 1974, and is buried at the site.
Life
Early career and education
Spyridon Nikolaou Marinatos was born in Lixouri on the Ionian island of Kephallonia on . His father was a carpenter. 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. Marinatos joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1919 and was first posted to Crete as an (junior archaeological official). He conducted excavations on Crete between 1919 and 1952. His early excavations on Crete included the Minoan villa at Amnisos.
Marinatos was one of the first thirty-six students of the "Practical School of Art History", an archaeological training centre established by the Archaeological Society of Athens at the request of the Greek government, studying there in the 1919–1920 academic year. The school's instructors included noted archaeologists and folklorists such as Panagiotis Kavvadias, Christos Tsountas Antonios Keramopoulos and , while his fellow students included Karouzos and Semni Papaspyridi, later Karouzos's wife. Between 1921 and 1925, Marinatos completed military service in the Hellenic Army. He received his doctorate in 1925, with a dissertation supervised by the archaeologist on the depiction of marine animals in Minoan art.
In June 1926, Marinatos met the British archaeologist Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos, which Evans had been excavating since 1900: both had travelled to the site to assess the damage of an earthquake. Evans would become an influence on his theories of contact between Minoan Crete and ancient Egypt, and on his study of natural disasters in prehistory. Marinatos and Evans quarrelled in 1928–1929, when he challenged Evans over a trial excavation that the latter had initiated at Knossos without a permit, but Marinatos subsequently became Evans's long-term friend and intellectual supporter. In 1930, inspired by Evans, he gave a lecture in which he argued that the destruction of the site of Knossos had been caused by an earthquake. Other sides Marinatos excavated on Crete included Messara, Sklavokampos, the Geometric temple at Dreros, Tylissos and Eileithyia Cave.
As was common practice for Greek archaeologists at the time, Marinatos studied in Germany; he attended the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Halle. He arrived at Berlin in 1927, where his teachers included the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and the archaeologist . He attended Halle on a scholarship, which he won in 1928 while serving as deputy to , the senior ephor (archaeological inspector) of eastern Crete. At Halle, he studied under Georg Karo, the German archaeologist who had excavated at the Mycenaean site of Tiryns and published the finds from Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae. Xanthoudidis died suddenly in 1929; Marinatos returned early from Halle to succeed him, and was appointed as senior ephor of eastern Crete in March 1929. He served as director of the Heraklion Museum from 1929 until 1937. He considered his monthly salary of 3,500 drachmas inadequate, and told a Cretan newspaper that he was considering leaving archaeology over it.
During his time on Crete, Marinatos was credited with thwarting the efforts of local goldsmiths to produce and sell forged antiquities, which were commissioned by antiquities traders: he also successfully prosecuted Nikolaos Pollakis, a Cretan priest, in 1931 for illegal antiquities trading. He excavated at Arkalochori Cave in central Crete in 1934–1935, assisted by the Nikolaos Platon, where he uncovered the Arkalochori Axe. In 1936–1937, he undertook a lecture tour of the United States: his former teacher Karo, who had fled there from antisemitic persecution in Germany, asked Marinatos to forward on his behalf a series of postcards from Greece to various addresses in Nazi-occupied Europe. 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. This began a chain of allegations against Karo which, while ultimately dismissed as unproven, saw him labelled an "Enemy Alien" and denied US citizenship.
Between 1934 and 1935, Marinatos excavated a Mycenaean cemetery on his native island of Kephallonia, where he discovered two chamber tombs. The project was funded by Johanna Goekoop, the widow of the Dutch businessman and amateur archaeologist Adriaan Goekoop, who had paid for excavations by Marinatos's former teacher Kavvadias on the island in 1899.
First directorate, professorship and Messenia
Marinatos served as Director General of Antiquities and Historic Monuments, the head of the Greek Archaeological Service, from 1937 until 1939, succeeding , who moved to the more prestigious office of Director General of Antiquities, Letters and Arts. Shortly after his promotion, he left Crete to become a professor at the University of Athens, where he introduced the first teaching of Near Eastern archaeology. His students at Athens included the archaeologists and Stylianos Alexiou. When a joint excavation between the University of Cincinnati, represented by Carl Blegen, and the Greek Archaeological Service under Kouroniotis discovered in 1939 the remains of the Mycenaean palace at Pylos, Marinatos played an important role in facilitating the purchase of the site and in popularising its identification as the "Palace of Nestor".
In May 1939, Marinatos discovered and excavated the battlefield of Thermopylae, funded and assisted by Elizabeth Humlin Hunt. His excavation was widely reported in the Greek and foreign press, and played an important ideological role for the nationalist government of Ioannis Metaxas. In the same year, Marinatos published an article in the journal Antiquity arguing that the Neopalatial civilisation of Crete had been destroyed by the eruption of the volcanic island of Thera, based on his discovery at Amnisos of a large quantity of volcanic pumice that had been worn away by water, which he took as evidence of tsunamis similar to those that followed the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. 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 subsequently further delayed by the Second World War. Later, in 1950, he suggested that the story of Atlantis may derive from an oral tradition of myths concerning the eruption of Thera.
During the winter of 1940–1941, at which time Greece was under invasion from Italy, Marinatos collaborated with the British archaeologist Alan Wace to study the façade of the Treasury of Atreus, a late Bronze Age tomb at Mycenae. In 1945, he replaced Kouroniotis, who had died the same year, as the Greek representative in the excavations at Pylos. Blegen offered to collaborate with Marinatos on the excavation of the palace, but Marinatos opted instead to excavated sites in the wider area of Messenia, with the aim of finding hitherto-undiscovered Mycenaean cemeteries and settlements. His method of consulting local farmers and hunters about the location of surface finds allowed him to discover sites previously unknown to archaeology.
Marinatos returned to Messenia in 1952, representing the Archaeological Society of Athens, when he uncovered a wealthy cemetery at Volimidia, around 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. He excavated a total of thirty-one tombs at Volimidia in 1952–1954, 1960 and 1964–1965. Between 1956 and 1957, Marinatos excavated the second, unplundered, tomb at Routsi. Between 1960 and 1965, Marinatos excavated the tombs at Peristeria. Other sites he excavated in Messenia included Mouriatada, Katarrhaki and Palaiohoria – all in the area of Koukounara – Voroulia and the at Voidokilia known as the "Tomb of Thrasymedes". In total, he produced thirty-five publications on the subject of Mycenaean Messenia. Working in Messenia until 1966, he discovered over twenty archaeological sites, including a monumental building with frescoes at Iklaina, a burial tumulus at Papoulia, and the tomb at Charakopeio. He built a house in Volimidia in the 1960s, which he owned until his death.
Marinatos travelled to Germany in 1947 in an effort to recover Greek antiquities looted during the Second World War. In 1949–1951, he returned to Crete, excavating at Vathypetro. He briefly returned as director of the Archaeological Service in 1955, but was forced to resign in 1958 by the Prime Minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis. He served as rector of the University of Athens in 1958–1959, remaining as a professor there until 1968.
Regime of the Colonels, Akrotiri and death
Recalled to head the Archaeological Service by the recently-installed military junta in 1967, Marinatos established an archaeological journal, the Athens Annals of Archaeology, and was credited with facilitating the resumption of the American excavations in the Athenian agora in 1969. He 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. At Vranas, near Tsepi, he excavated four prehistoric tumuli in 1970 on behalf of the Archaeological Society of Athens, and partially excavated a nearby classical tumulus known as the "Tumulus of the Plataeans". Marinatos believed that this was the burial mound of the soldiers of Plataea who died during the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, but his identification has generally been rejected.
Marinatos's most notable excavation was the site of Akrotiri, a Minoan settlement on the island of Thera whose existence had first been established in 1867. His decision to investigate the site followed Platon's excavations of Zakros on Crete, which began in 1961 and uncovered pumice: Platon announced in the Greek press that this discovery was proof of Marinatos's theory of the volcanic destruction of Minoan civilisation. Marinatos visited Thera in 1962 and 1963, and began excavations in 1967. He circumvented the difficulty of excavating the remains, which were buried beneath approximately 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 $2000, and partly by the naval engineer James W. Mayor, who collaborated on the excavation for its first year and supplied the same amount, which he had received as an advance for his collaboration on a book about Atlantis.
Within five days of the excavation's start on 24 May, Marinatos uncovered remains of a structure in the Minoan architectural style, as well as pottery of Cretan origin. He was called back to Athens on official business and to commence the purchase of the land, and only able to return on 21 June, a week before the first season was due to conclude. The excavation was supported by forty local pumice miners, and uncovered the first traces of frescoes, over a total of six days of work across the season. Between 1971 and 1972, he excavated a structure he called the "West House"; the frescoes found there were called "one of the most important monuments of Aegean art yet found" by the archaeologist Peter Warren in 1979. By 1974, the excavated area totalled approximately .Marinatos was removed from the leadership of the Archaeological Service on 31 January 1974. No official reason was given for the dismissal, though the general Dimitrios Ioannidis, who had taken power in a coup of November 1973, considered him a potentially subversive "liberal". On 1 October 1974, Marinatos died while excavating at Akrotiri. Contemporary accounts related that he had died from a fall, while giving instructions to a worker; a later narrative emerged that he had been struck by a collapsing wall. At the time of his death, most of his excavations were not fully published. He was initially buried on the excavation site, near the place of his death; his grave was subsequently moved outside the ruins. Marinatos's deputy Christos Doumas, who had worked with him at Akrotiri since 1968, took over the site and published the first full report of its excavation in 1983.
Politics
Marinatos held strong right-wing and Greek nationalist views. In a letter of 1928, he described his fellow Greek archaeologists as "Bolsheviks or social reformers of no international recognition"; in 1949, he visited the concentration camp of Makronisos, used to imprison communists during the Greek Civil War, and wrote that there was "no finer school" in Greece. In the late 1920s, he was a supporter of Eleftherios Venizelos, a broadly liberal politician who had brought Greece into the First World War on the side of the Entente. The archaeological historian Andreas Vlachopoulos has judged that Marinatos's politics rarely influenced his work, but that he made "nationalist exaggerations in favour of the Greek race" during his excavations around Marathon. During the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, which began in July 1938, Marinatos and the Athenian intellectual establishment enjoyed official support: Metaxas had previously visited Marinatos at archaeological excavations, and attended a lecture by him on 13 March 1940. Marinatos was invited by the Nazi government of Germany to speak at the Sixth International Conference of Classical Archaeology, held in Berlin between 21 and 26 August 1939, as a representative of the Metaxas administration. The conference has been described by the archaeological historian Georgia Flouda as "a propaganda venue" for German archaeology. In the late 1960s, Marinatos served on a fundraising committee to raise a monument to Metaxas in Argostoli on Kephallonia.
In 1939, 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. In a public address of 28 October 1941, commemorating Metaxas's defiance of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini the previous year, Marinatos praised both Metaxas, who had died that January, and the exiled George II, whom Metaxas had restored to the throne. Despite the ongoing Axis occupation of Greece, his comments were broadcast on national radio and garnered a strong reaction from the Greek public: the historian Yanis Kordatos denounced Marinatos in the left-wing newspaper , and Karouzos and Yannis Miliadis wrote to the collaborationist Prime Minister, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, criticising Marinatos's conduct.
When the military junta known as the "Regime of the Colonels" seized power in 1967, they dismissed the director of the Archaeological Service, Ioannis Kontis, considering him politically unreliable. 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". According to Doumas, Marinatos's support was an important factor in the legitimisation of the junta's rule. Marinatos promoted his own supporters and oversaw the sacking of many Greek archaeologists, making particular efforts to remove his political opponents, women – particularly Semni Karouzou, who was forced into exile in Italy and Germany – and adherents of progressive, non-traditional methodology. According to his daughter Nanno, he became disillusioned with politics in the last year of his life, particularly following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974, and wrote in a letter that he was "a citizen of Minos and live[d] in 1500 BCE".
Assessment and legacy
Until 1974, Marinatos and his followers were considered a dominant force in the Greek archaeological establishment. An Athens newspaper reported his death with the headline "the oak tree of archaeology has fallen". In 2021, the archaeologist Jack Davis called Marinatos one of the great figures of Greek archaeology. He was listed in 2015 as "belong[ing] to a special archaeological generation that renewed Greek archaeology" by the archaeological historian .
The excavation of Akrotiri was recognised within Marinatos's lifetime as his most significant contribution to scholarship. Shortly before Marinatos's death, the British archaeologist Reynold Higgins noted that the excavations at Akrotiri had been called "the most important classical excavation since Pompeii"; they were covered by media from Europe, the United States, Australia, Iran, Japan, and China, and prompted a special edition of National Geographic magazine in 1978. The site is known as one of the best-preserved settlements from the ancient world, and is particularly important in the study of Minoan art, especially wall-painting.
Several of Marinatos's archaeological hypotheses were controversial in his time and have since been rejected. The editors of Antiquity appended a postscript to his 1939 publication about the Thera eruption, stating that they believed the evidence currently insufficient to support Marinatos's hypothesis that the eruption had destroyed Minoan civilisation. Contemporary excavators on Crete found little supporting evidence for it, and it attracted few adherents until Platon's work at Zakros in the early 1960s. In the later part of the twentieth century, more detailed analysis of the pottery from both Crete and Akrotiri indicated that the eruption occurred several generations before the end of Neopalatial civilisation, and the latter is now generally attributed to human causes. 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 Marinatos did for Pylos, Volimidia and Voidokilia, to be fundamentally misguided.
Marinatos's leadership has been characterised as promoting himself and the pursuit of impressive finds at the expense of scholarship. During his third period at the head of the Archaeological Service, he was criticised for his abolition of the rigorous examination process by which new ephors were selected, and his approach to recruiting and promoting colleagues has been described as driven by cronyism and political manoeuvring. His colleague at the University of Athens, Nikolaos Kontoleon, wrote that Marinatos's administration "constituted an unprecedented attempt to curtail the scholarly activity of Greek archaeologists ... [and] exercised oppression [which] dismembered a whole service". According to the archaeological historians Dimitra Kokkinidou and Mariana Nikolaidou, his management had "a disastrous impact on future developments", as his methods and priorities were adapted by his successors after the return to democracy.
Personal life, honours and character
Marinatos generally affected to excavate in a pith helmet. His house, which he used as a classroom during the German occupation of Athens of 1941–1944, was designed in the style of Minoan architecture. He had interests in medicine, astronomy, botany and biology, which informed his archaeological work. The archaeologist Emily Vermeule, who excavated with Marinatos at Akrotiri, called him a "crack revolver shot, diplomat, astronomer, linguist, and portly wit". His former student Stylianos Alexiou later recalled listening Marinatos play classical music on the violin. He may also have written a novel.
Marinatos was known to be strong-willed and sometimes stern. His former student, the archaeologist Yannos Lolos, described him as "an archaeologist in the grand tradition", "an austere and imposing figure" and as a gifted speaker, "restless and indefatigable as an excavator". Marinatos's colleague Yannis Miliadis, however, wrote in 1937 that he had "good intentions, up to the point that they [were] confronted with his personal interests". During his quarrel with Evans in the late 1920s, archaeologists of the British School at Athens, particularly John Pendlebury, accused Marinatos of being "German-minded" and of anti-British prejudice, a claim that Nanno Marinatos has condemned as unfounded.
Between 1925 and June 1974, Marinatos maintained a scrapbook of his appearances in the academic and popular press, which eventually grew to around four hundred pages. He cultivated relationships with newspaper editors, such as Miltiadis Paraskevaïdis and Athina Kalogeropoulou (also an archaeologist): he frequently invited Paraskevaïdis to his home at 47 Polyla Street in Athens to give him interviews and photographs for publication. He 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.
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. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1966. He was also 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 . He held a visiting membership at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, as well as memberships of the British Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and the Spanish . He 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. He 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. He was also awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, Italy's most senior honour.
Marinatos maintained a long-running collaboration with the conservator Zacharias Kanakis, who worked with him on excavations between 1934 and 1970. Marinatos was married twice, to Maria Evangelidou in 1927 and, at the time of his death, to Emily Loverdos. His daughter, Nanno Marinatos, is also a scholar of Minoan culture. After the elder Marinatos's death, a bronze bust of him was erected in the garden of the Archaeological Museum of Chora, which holds many finds from his excavations in Messenia; one of the town's major streets is also named after him.
Selected works
Footnotes
Explanatory notes
References
Works cited
1901 births
1974 deaths
Greek archaeologists
Mycenaean archaeologists
Minoan archaeologists
Academic staff of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
People from Paliki
Members of the Academy of Athens (modern)
Herder Prize recipients
Archaeologists of the Bronze Age Aegean
20th-century archaeologists
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
Members of the American Philosophical Society