The buried statues of war

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http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3728

31.3.2013

The buried statues of war

The hiding of the ancient treasures of the National Archaeological
Museum on the eve of the German occupation of Athens, 1941.

ΣΧΟΛΙΑ (1) 599 Image 1: Preparing to bury the large Sounion Kouros.
© National Archaeological Museum

During a period of six months prior to the German invasion of Greece a
group of workers and archaeologists was digging the floors of the
National Archeological Museum to bury Athens’s most valuable
treasures: its Kouroi and Lekythoi.

On Sunday 27th April 1941 the German troops occupied Athens. Early the
next morning, when the German officers hurried up the marble steps of
the National Archaeological Museum, they were surprised to discover
that they were taking over an empty building. They couldn’t find a
trace of the thousands of valuable exhibits that were housed in the
country’s largest museum for the past sixty years of its existence.
Instead of statues they saw before them the few frozen and
expressionless archaeologists and guards who were on duty at the time.
To the officers’ persistent questions, the latter answered
enigmatically that antiquities are always where everybody knows they
are: under the ground. And it was true. The antiquities had in fact
returned underground – to the only ark in the world where they would
be safe.

Image 2: The empty room that German officers discovered when entering
the museum in late April 1941. © National Archaeological Museum Image
2: The empty room that German officers discovered when entering the
museum in 27th late April 1941. © National Archaeological Museum

The Greek governments were aware of the fragile European order well
before the war started. Since 1937 the Metaxas(2) government had
started corresponding with the Archeological Department of the
Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs to work out a common plan
of how to protect antiquities from potential air raids and street
fights. To the state’s demand that they put together catalogues and
classify the antiquities according to their importance, the
archaeologists of the department insisted that there was no way to
make such a choice and that all antiquities (exhibited or stored)
would have to be saved in the event of war. As a matter of fact, there
were internal recommendations in 1937 to transport the antiquities to
new places of storage, safe from fire or bombing, at “archaeological
towns” proclaimed sacred and inviolable by international agreements,
rather than spending large sums for the construction of shelters for
some of them. The area of the Acropolis was to be one of them. Yet,
reality dissolved any hopes and the few doubts about the impending
disaster.

Image 3: Preparing to bury the large Sounion Kouros. © National
Archaeological Museum

Preparations against the danger of destruction got more intensive with
time. With the declaration of war in October 1940, the Department of
Archaeology reacted instantly. With a letter sent out on 11th November
1940 to all local sections, it issued technical instructions “for the
protection of antiquities in the various museums from air-raid
danger”. These included two ways of protecting bulky and
non-transportable exhibits: The first one was “to cover the statue
with sandbags after protecting it with wooden scaffolding like the
sample” and the second one, which was deemed more effective, was to
bury the statues in the floor of the hall or the courtyard of the
museum or in protected courtyards and basements of public
institutions. The burying method was then described in full detail.
The statues were to be placed horizontally (like dead bodies in a
grave) at the bottom of the ditch which was to be clad in reinforced
cement, then covered by inert materials, after which the ditch was to
be sealed with a slab. As for copper and clay items, they were to be
stored in crates covered with waxed or tarred paper in order to resist
humidity.

Image 4: Vases were placed in crates and protected by waxed and
tarred paper. © National Archaeological Museum

At the National Archaeological Museum the alarm sounded off! By a
ministerial decree a committee in charge of hiding and securing the
museum’s exhibits was formed, headed by 3 Supreme Court Judges
(AEROPAGITES) and including the secretary of the Archaeological
Society George Oikonomou, the temporary director of the museum
Anastasios Orlandos, and professor Spyridon Marinatos, as well as
curators Giannis Miliadis, Semni Karouzou, Ioanna Konstandinou and
civil engineers and architects from the ministry. Volunteers
subsequently joined the team, such as the director of the Austrian
Archaeological Institute Otto Walter, the British archaeologist Allan
Wace, and the academician Spyros Iakovidis who was a freshman
archaeology student at the time. “Really early in the morning, even
before the moon had set, the people who had undertaken this job would
gather at the museum and they would leave for home really late at
night”. Semni Karouzou writes.

The storing of the statues would take place according to the size and
importance of each one. The bulkiest among them would be lined up
standing in deep ditches that had been dug in the floors of the North
halls of the museum, whose foundations happened to lay on softer
underground. Improvised wooden cranes were used in order to lower the
statues into the ditches, and were handled incessantly by the museum’s
technicians. The ditches that were reminiscent of mass graves enclosed
a dazed multitude of forms, such as the one illustrated in the most
valuable of photographs from the museum’s archive (images 5 &6).
Amongst the forms of the statues standing awkwardly in their new grave
we find one of the anonymous protagonists of this epic of concealment:
a technician looking absent-mindedly at the camera lens. As he ponders
the uncertain fate of the times, he completely blends in with the
surrounding crowd. ‘’If there was no damage done to the marbles
despite all the displacements, it is mainly due to the fact that the
manager of the workers team at the time was, and remained until the
first years after the war, the old experienced and devoted sculptor of
the Greek museums, Andreas Panayotakis”, Semni Karouzou recounts.

Image 5: The ditch that was to house the museum’s exhibits for the
years to come. © National Archaeological Museum

“In October 1940, when Italy declared war, I had just entered the
first year of University” remembers Spyros Iakovides, member of the
Athens Academy, in an interview. “The hiding effort had already
started and I offered to volunteer. They sent me to one of the storage
rooms where there were huge crates. My job was to wrap the Tanagra
figurines(3) in old newspapers and then place them carefully in the
crates. After that, a special committee took over. We all worked
against the clock, in fear of the German invasion, and of course, with
utmost care. The Tanagra figurines were easy to wrap. But the vases
were very fragile. The work was done in the museum’s basements. The
statues were placed like people in a demonstration. Then sand was
poured on top, separating the statues from each other yet covering
them completely. Finally, a slab of concrete was poured on top. The
windows in these basements were sealed with sandbags. This way,
nothing could happen during an air raid”. The wooden crates with the
clay vases, the figurines, as well as the copper items, were placed in
the semi-underground extension of the museum, which had just been
completed, towards Bouboulinas street. Subsequently, the rooms were
filled up to the ceiling with dry sand in order to resist ruptures to
the concrete ceiling in the event of bombing.

One memento of this boxing-in endeavour was captured in a photo, the
only one showing the museum artisans in a moment of rest. They are
looking into the lens without expression – people whose fate during
the hard years of the German occupation of Athens is unknown. Semni
Karouzou has preserved the name of one of them: “During the whole work
of the uprooting and boxing-in of the antiquities of the Collection of
Vases and Small Artefacts, a leading role was played by a head
artisan, the late Giorgios Kontogiorgis – an architect and one of the
artisans who offered so much towards the fame and safety of the
antiquities. Along with the antiquities, the boxing-in included the
valuable museum inventory catalogues, i.e. the books documenting and
registering its treasures.

These crates were handed over to the general treasurer of the Bank of
Greece on 29th November 1940(4). On 17th April 1941 the wooden crates
filled with the golden objects and famous treasures from Mycenae were
delivered to the headquarters of said bank. It was the final act of a
six-month operation that had succeeded in saving the immeasurable
treasures of the largest museum in the country. “The view of the
museum in April 1941, stripped from all its content, was an image of
abandonment. Naked walls, dug-up floors in many halls, empty
showcases”. This was the view seen by German officers on the morning
of Monday 28th April: the first day of the German occupation of
Athens.

Image 6: Statues placed standing next to each other before the ditch
is filled with sand. © National Archaeological Museum In the
difficult years that followed, the museum did not remain deserted. The
State Orchestra was housed in the large Mycenaean Room. The Central
Post Office occupied a large area of the west wing, to the right of
the entrance. The Ministry of Welfare provided its services via rooms
on the first floor, towards Bouboulinas street, while a special Health
Service was installed in a room of the old building, off Tositsa
street. “Unfortunate women, outcasts of society, were obliged to pay a
visit there”, Semni Karouzou wrote. The offices of the museum staff
were crammed into a small corner of the new building, together with
its now useless equipment, its empty showcases, certain paintings from
the National Gallery, and the General State Archives. In one of the
basements of the new wing, communal meals for the guards and museum
staff were prepared. The thick smoke stains on certain parts of the
ceiling can still be seen today.

Despite the loss of its function as a museum, the building remained
undamaged until the end of the Occupation. Until “the nightmare riots
of December 1944″ (between troops of the left resistance and the
combined British and governmental forces) that is, when “airplane
strikes” totally burnt down a part of the wooden roof, and a section
of the first floor was transformed into prisons for the detainees.
Some of the bullet-riddled walls have been preserved to this day,
forming the backdrop of the museum staff offices today. And despite
the long and labourious restoration of the building and its exhibits
in the post war years, the hidden surprises that have trickled to the
surface since then have been many. Even the second, rigorous
renovation that was recently completed unearthed more of the Museum’s
well-buried secrets. Is this the last of them? Living and working
among these walls, one knows that statements concerning chronological
certainty are not admissible.

_________________________________
Translated from Greek by Diana Issidorides, Margarita Ovadia and Ares
Kalandides

The article was first published in Greek in the Lifo magazine.
(http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3704)
It appears simultaneously at
http://blog.inpolis.com and
http://theplayfulmind.wordpress.com
Link to the National Archaeological Museum, Athens

Notes
(1) Kostas Paschalidis is an archaeologist and works as curator of
antiquities at the Prehistoric Collection of the National
Archaeological Museum of Athens.
(2) Ioannis Metaxas was dictator in Greece between 1936 and 1941.
(3) The Tanagra figurines were a mold-cast type of Greek terracotta
figurines produced from the later fourth century BCE, primarily in the
Boeotian town of Tanagra.
(4) Italy declared war to Greece on 28th October 1940.

References (in Greek) Christopoulou, Α., “National Archaelogical
Museum and Modern Greece. Parallel stories”, “Archaologia kai Technes”
113 (December 2009), 5-10.

Vernardou, Ε., “A hiding different from all others. Operation ‘Hidden
Treasures’”, Available at
www.psaxtiria.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-2897.html

Kaltsas, Ν., “The National Archaeological Museum”, Athens 2007, 20.
Available at www.latsis-foundation.org/megazine/publish/ebook.php?book=31&preloader=1

Karouzou, S., “Short History of the National Museum”, in Karouzos, S.
National Archaeological Museum, Collection of Sculptures, Descriptive
catalogue, Athens 1967, ια’-κ’.

Karouzou, S, “The National Museum after 1941”, To Mouseion 1 (2000),
5-14. (This is the old publication by S. Karouzou which was included
in the proceedings of the 1st Conderence of the Associations of Greek
Archaeologists, Athens 30th March-3rd April 1967, Athens, 52-63.)

Nikolakea, Ν., “The protection of antiquities during World War II”
Tsitopoulou, M. (ed), “…I reported in writing”. Treasures of the
Historical Archive of the Archaeological Service, Athens 2008, 57-59.

Paschalidis, K. “The founding, history and adventures of the National
Archaeological Museum, 130 years of service in one lecture. Available
at:
www.blod.gr/lectures/Pages/viewlecture.aspx?LectureID=737#.UTcIWTbYhgU.facebook

Petrakos, V. X. “The antiquities in Greece during the war 1940-1944»,
O Mentor 31 (1994), 73-185.

Salta, M. “National Archaeological Museum” in Garoufalis, D.N. &
Konstantinidi-Sybridi, E. (eds.) Archaeology in Greece. The greatest
archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and the treasures of
the Greek museums, Athens 2002, 116-119 (Series: History of
Civilisations No2 by the magazine “Corpus”).

Flessa, V. “At the edge”, interview with the acedemician S. Iakovidis
at the New Greek Television (26/10/2012, 23:00 hrs). available at:

www.ert.gr/webtv/net/item/8196-Spyros-Iakwbidhs-Archaiologos-Akadhmaikos-26-10-2012#.UUo0TDfQ709

Πηγή: www.lifo.gr

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