On March 29, for the first time, President Tsatsos presented the two prizes of the Alexander Onassis Foundation which was created in the will of the late Aristotle Onassis. The Athenae Prize, which is awarded to persons or organizations who contribute to the rapprochement of peoples and the respect for human dignity, was awarded to Simone Veil in her capacity as the first elected President of the European Parliament. The Olympia Prize, which is awarded to persons or organizations who contribute to the solution of ecological and environmental problems, was presented to former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in his capacity as Chairman of the British Committee for Saving the Acropolis.
In a brief address spoken in the marble and gold central hall of the Old Parliament on Stadiou Street, President Tsatsos said, “I would like to add a few words which were difficult for Mrs. Christina Onassis to say. Aristotle Onassis, whom I had the good fortune to know, continues the great tradition of national benefactors who are especially characteristic of our people.”
Although both prizes were presented this year, in the future each will be awarded every other year, as organized by an international committee along the lines of the Nobel Prizes. Besides these, the Alexander Onassis Foundation has set up scholarships and research grants which in the last two years have reached a total of one million dollars. It will, as well, finance the building of a major hospital to be built on Syngrou Avenue. In this way, the name of Onassis joins those of Sinas, Averof, Syngros, Benakis, Tositsas, Bodossakis and the brothers Rizaris and Zappas in a line of eminent public benefactors which goes back to the foundations of the modern Greek state, with the addition that the Onassis bequests will be’not only national but international, which befits the memory of a man whose fortune was itself international.
The Unguarded Vineyard
FOR the protection of the nation’s heritage there are today only eighty-six night watchmen guarding six thousand five hundred archaeological sites. Of these, three thousand three hundred are churches filled with Byzantine and Post-Byzantine icons. Half of them lie in remote rural areas and their only protection against theft is a rusty lock. The two thousand ancient sites themselves are so flimsily fenced in that large and small marble finds are carried away with the greatest of ease. The situation is such that the Greek treasure is open to plunder and has become, in the words of the Minister of Culture, Dimitrios Nianias, “an unguarded vineyard which is inviting robbery and contraband”. Greek antiquities that have been smuggled out of the country turn up for sale all over the world. The problem is exacerbated because there is no adequate inventory of the national treasure and the church has not been helpful in collaborating with the state in assembling one. Indeed, the Ministry of Culture’s attempts to collect icons and other religious artifacts from rural churches and place them in museums connected with Metropolitan sees have met with ecclesiastical opposition. A famous Crucifixion stolen over a year ago from a church in Monemvasia, and valued at over two million dollars was recovered, along with thirty other icons, by police in Kolonaki a short while ago. Although the icon had been cut into three pieces, it can be reasonably well restored.
A growing number of artifacts are being smuggled abroad, however, the favoured spots of rendezvous for this traffic being off the coasts of Qorfu, southern Crete, Rhodes, Chios’ and Kythera which is the most unguarded maritime area in the Greek seas.
In spite of repeated warnings by the Ministry, the tightening of police security and the offering of rewards to citizens giving information on stolen antiquities, on March 26, four works by the most famous sixteenth-century Greek icon painter, Michael Damaskinos, were stolen from the Monastery of Osios Loukas. Besides portraits of the Blessed Luke himself and St. John the Baptist, two large icons — one of Christ and the other of the Virgin and Child — were torn from the iconostasis at either side of the central door leading into the sanctum. The Ministry of Culture at once telegraphed the police at all borders. The famous paintings are catalogued, photographed and published by the Archaeological Service which may make them more difficult to sell abroad. Meanwhile, however, the national treasure continues being depleted.
The Archanes Affair
THE subject of human sacrifice in Minoan Crete was brought to public discussion at the Archaeological Society on Friday, April 11. The lively session which packed the main auditorium and the hall outside concerned the finds excavated at Archanes under the direction of John Sakellarakis and Efi Sapouna Sakellarakis last summer. Monitored by Professor Panayiotis Zeppos, the discussion opened with a ten-minute resume of the excavations by John Sakellarakis who had presented a 2 and a half hour detailed lecture to the Society on February 14 from which was drawn in part, the report published in the March issue of the Athenian. The excavators have argued that they found a Minoan temple standing low on the north slopes of Mount Youchtas, consisting of a corridor and three chambers filled with over four hundred artifacts of a sacral character found in situ. Among the finds of the central chamber, two life-sized clay feet were discovered which supported the trunk of a wooden cult statue. The west chamber, otherwise free of finds, contained three skeletons, one of which lay prostrate on its stomach in a corner; a second was a youth found in a foetal position lying on a raised structure with a ritual knife on his side; and a third, an adult male, was found lying beside him wearing the insignia of authority. In the corridor, a fourth skeleton was found, as well as the scattered fragments of a unique bull-vase.
The excavators argued that, with the help of anthropologists, coroners and forensic experts, they had uncovered an act of human sacrifice whose ritual had been interrupted by an earthquake which had overthrown the building and killed the three other persons.
The first speaker to follow Mr. Sakellarakis was Nicholas Platon, the noted archaeologist who has brought to light the Minoan Palace at Kato Zakros. He claimed that architecturally the building in question could not be a temple at all, but was a priests’ house connected with the peak sanctuary on the top of Mt. Youchtas, lying some 400 metres higher and several kilometres away. Mr. Sakellarakis rebutted the architectural critique by quoting from Platon’s own texts.
With equal brevity and persuasiveness Mr. Sakellarakis single-handedly refuted the objections of a succession of archaeologists: Mrs. Sakellariou, on the clay feet; Mr. Doumas, on the ritual knife; Mr. Lambrinoudakis, on human sacrifice parallels in later times; Mr. Zois, on the lack of further excavation in the surrounding area; Mr. Korres, on the lack of proof of the sacral character of the building and the finds; and others. In all, the intentions of these critiques, surprisingly, seemed more designed for the purpose of pricking holes in a carefully constructed interpretation than offering up any reasonable alternative to it. If, possibly, these were the intentions, the results were quite to the contrary, as the audience clearly felt more convinced of Mr. Sakellarakis’ interpretation at the end of the discussion than it had at the beginning.
A more contributive stand was taken by Mr. George Romaios, an expert on comparative folklore, who amused the audience (after the series of vague and negative views which had preceded him) by saying “it was necessary to admit that the dead had been found.” Not only did Romaios support the theory of human sacrifice but suggested that there was a blood relationship between the thirty-eight-year-old priest and the young victim. “A father sacrificing his son in times of great peril is a familiar phenomenon in cultures of many periods,” he said.
Dr. H. W. Catling, director of the British School, approached the discussion in a quite different light. He first referred to what he described as “the embarrassing discovery” made recently by Professor Peter Warren at Knossos in which an indiscriminate heap of children’s bones were discovered bearing the marks of a knife like those of a butcher’s after the flesh has been removed, suggesting not only sacrifice but cannibalism. He went on to commend the Sakellarakis for the thoroughness of their investigation and for their willingness to reveal the course of their investigations to their fellow-archaeologists. Referring to those who oppose the Sakellarakis’ conclusions, it was, he said “rather like a work’s having fifty critics before it had reached publication.”
It was in this more generous spirit that the New York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium was held on February 25 at the Institute of Fine Arts on the topic of the Excavations at Archanes. Present were both John Sakellarakis and Efi Sapouna Sakellarakis. The chief interlocutors and their principal subjects of inquiry were Professor Guenter Kopcke of New York University on architectural finds, the bronze blade, and the lack of evidence of non-perishable materials in the west chamber; Professor H.G. Buchholz of Giessen University, presently at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, on the purpose of the tripartite design of the temple; E. Harrison of New York University on the reconstruction of the cult statue. The memoir of the discussion concluded: “The excavators’ interpretation of the findings was well received and no alternative to their interpretation was offered. Both excavators were warmly commended for the obvious precision and care with which the recovery proceeded, and for the method and clarity of their presentation. The meeting was the longest ever to have been held in the history of the New York Aegean Bronze Age Colloquium, and it was also the_ best attended ever. Didactically, the presentation was masterful.”
It must beconfessed that the subject of human sacrifice is an unpleasant one, particularly in a Minoan context whose popular image of bullfights and flowers, of topless ladies and sophisticated plumbing had seemed until now so perfectly suitable to a culture that preceded “the grandeur that was Greece”. If this feeling lies somewhat subliminally behind the arguments (mainly Greek) which try to reject the idea of human sacrifice (let alone cannibalism), for reasons of ethnic sensitivity, this is certainly understandable and can only arouse sympathy, but it certainly has no place in scientific discussion.
It has been said of Heinrich Schliemann that his techniques were those of a tomb plunderer and of Sir Arthur Evans that his reconstruction of a Minoan Palace was a masterpiece of the Art Nouveau style. The fact remains that a science like archaeology which excavates the past creates its own historical past while doing so, which, reasonably, reflects the immediate preoccupations and ideals which archaeologists themselves hold. Given the highly relative character of this matter, it is perhaps best to conclude on more solid ground with a maxim of archaeological investigation expressed forty years ago by the eminent archaeologist and philosopher, R.G. Collingwood: “Experience soon taught me that one found out nothing at all except in answer to a question; and not a vague question either, but a definite one. That when one dug saying merely, ‘Let us see what there is here,’ one learnt nothing, except casually in so far as casual questions arose in one’s mind while digging: Ts that black stuff peat or occupation-soil? Is that a potsherd under your foot? Are those loose stones a ruined wall?’ That what one learnt depended not merely on what turned up in one’s trenches but also on what questions one was asking: so that a man who was asking questions of one kind learnt one kind of thing from a piece of digging which to another man revealed something different, to a third something illusory, and to a fourth nothing at all.”
