The occupier’s ancestors

The Italian School of Archaeology, too, was swept up in the war, which saw three directors succeed one another in quick succession. Alessandro Della Seta was dismissed under the racial laws; his successor, Guido Libertini, was removed from office for having abandoned the School. After 8 September 1943, Luciano Laurenzi refused to pledge allegiance to the Social Republic and was interned for eight months. The School’s premises changed hands between Fascists, Republicans, Swiss protection, Greek authorities and British troops: from a centre of learning to an occupied territory.

In Macedonia and Thrace, which were under Bulgarian control, the search for ancestral roots took a different turn. The regime in Sofia, led by the archaeologist Bogdan Filov, sought arguments for annexation in history and ethnolinguistics. Priority was given to medieval monuments and manuscripts; the presence of Slavic-speaking populations was exploited to support territorial claims; antiquity was stripped from the Greek national narrative and reattributed to a Thracian origin. Each excavation, manuscript or place name was assigned a mission: to confer historical legitimacy upon a newly drawn border.

Greek archaeologists attempted to salvage what they could. Before the troops entered, the artefacts from the National Archaeological Museum were evacuated and brought to safety in pits, crypts and storage facilities. Elsewhere, there were thefts, illegal excavations and damage to monuments; the reverence for antiquity did not preclude the use of men as tools for excavations.

The battle over artefacts continued after the liberation. Scattered artefacts and damaged archives marked the reopening of foreign schools. The Monuments Men surveyed the damage, but their lists gave priority to classical antiquities and Christian monuments: Jewish heritage all but disappeared from the inventories of those who had come to save it.

The conference thus reconstructs a second occupation, one that is less visible on military maps. Italians, Germans and Bulgarians sought evidence of their claims in monuments, languages and the subsoil. Each chose the ancestors that suited them best. Archaeology played its part: it provided genealogies, maps, prestige and alibis. The regimes bowed down before the ancient Greeks and trampled on the modern ones. The living could resist; the dead, far less so.