Panagiotis Kavvadias or Cawadias (; – 20 July 1928) was a Greek archaeologist. He was responsible for the excavation of ancient sites in Greece, including Epidaurus in Argolis and the Acropolis of Athens, as well as archaeological discoveries on his native island of Kephallonia. As Ephor General (the head of the Greek Archaeological Service) from 1885 until 1909, Kavvadias oversaw the expansion of the Archaeological Service and the introduction of Law 2646 of the year 1899, which increased the state's powers to address the illegal excavation and smuggling of antiquities.
Kavvadias's work had a particular impact on the Acropolis of Athens, and has been credited with completing its "transformation[...] from castle to monument". Between 1885 and 1890, he removed almost all of the Acropolis's remaining medieval and modern structures, uncovering many ancient monuments in the process. He also played a role in the extensive reconstruction of the site by the architect and engineer Nikolaos Balanos. Though praised initially, the work caused considerable damage to several monuments and was almost completely deconstructed and rebuilt during the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Kavvadias oversaw the opening of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, organised its first collections, and wrote some of its first catalogues.
As an administrator, Kavvadias was regarded as energetic, centralising and autocratic. His career saw significant modernisation in the practice of archaeology in Greece, and he reformed and professionalised the Archaeological Service. His patronage of Athens's foreign archaeological schools was credited with promoting the development of Greek archaeology, but was also criticised by native Greek archaeologists. He created further discontent among the Archaeological Society of Athens by reducing its role in favour of the governmental Archaeological Service. After the Goudi coup of 1909, dissatisfaction in the Greek press and among his subordinates in the Archaeological Service led to his removal from office, from the Archaeological Society and from his professorship at the National University of Athens, though he was able to return to public and academic life from 1912, and remained active in Greek archaeology until his death in 1928.
Early life and education
Panagiotis Kavvadias was born on in , a village on the island of Kephallonia. His family had been prominent during the , the period of Venetian occupation which lasted from 1500 until the French conquest of 1797. At the time of his birth, Kephallonia and the other Ionian Islands were a protectorate of the United Kingdom; they were transferred to Greece in 1864.
Kavvadias studied philology at the National University of Athens, and was awarded a scholarship by the Greek government for postgraduate study at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. At the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he studied archaeology under Heinrich Brunn. Brunn, credited as "perhaps the foremost German archaeologist of [his] era", had revolutionised the study of Greek art history in the 1850s through his methodical, analytical study of literary texts alongside works of art. His use of the anatomical details of ancient sculpture to draw conclusions about its chronology, place of origin and authorship has been called the most important influence in the nineteenth-century "narrowing and sharpening" of the discipline of Classical art history, and therefore in moving the basis of the discipline away from connoisseurship towards empirical observation. Kavvadias later credited Brunn as a great influence on his own archaeological practice. Kavvadias also followed a course in epigraphy at the Collège de France in Paris under Paul Foucart, a French epigrapher later credited as "the doyen of our field" by the classical archaeologist Salomon Reinach, and also studied in Berlin, London and Rome.
Archaeological career
After finishing his studies, Kavvadias returned to Greece, where he entered the Archaeological Service. In 1879, he was appointed as an ephor, an official with the responsibility of supervising, managing and protecting archaeological heritage – the first such official to be retained by the Archaeological Service in addition to the Ephor General, its professional head. In 1881, he published a short history of Greek archaeology. One of his first postings was to the excavations of the French School at Athens on the island of Delos, which had been running since 1873: he was there in 1882, working alongside Reinach, who later wrote that Kavvadias had seemed "full of enthusiasm and ambition".
The first major excavations Kavvadias led personally were at Epidaurus in Argolis, which began in March 1881. In their first year, the excavations uncovered the theatre, and subsequently revealed several buildings and inscriptions within the Sanctuary of Asclepius and the nearby Sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas on Mount Kynortion. Following the retirement of Panagiotis Efstratiadis in 1884 and the death of his successor, Panagiotis Stamatakis, less than a year later, Kavvadias was elevated to the position of Ephor General in 1885. He handed over responsibility for the site to his protégé Valerios Stais, but continued both to work at the site and publish the results of its excavation until his death in 1928.
Kavvadias excavated frequently around Kephallonia, aiming to discover so-called 'Homeric' sites and remains of Odysseus's Ithaca. He made his first excavations on the acropolis of the island of Same, near the island known in modern times as Ithaca, in 1883. Kavvadias uncovered a gate, but considered his finds insignificant as the only material uncovered dated from the Archaic to the Roman period (that is, ), rather than the 'Homeric' Late Bronze Age (). In 1889, he discovered Mycenaean chamber tombs and fragments of Mycenaean vessels in the area of Leivatho, near the village of Mazarakata, which provided the first proof of the presence of Mycenaean civilisation on the island. He excavated again at Same and Leivatho in 1899, with funding from Adriaan Goekoop, a wealthy Dutch amateur archaeologist, finding more structures on Same but none which predated the Classical period. He carried out further work on the island in 1908, in 1909 – when he discovered two small Mycenaean tholos tombs at – and in 1913.
Kavvadias published the first reports of his excavations in the Government Gazette (), an official publication normally used for laws and royal decrees. The Archaeological Service had lacked an official publication since 1860, when it had ceased to produce the Archaeological Newsletter (), taken on in 1862 by the Archaeological Society of Athens as its own journal. Instead, news of its excavations and activities was normally released in journals or newsletters. In 1888, Kavvadias began to publish the monthly Archaeological Bulletin () on behalf of the Service. He edited all of its volumes between 1885 and 1892 himself, after which publication of the journal ceased until 1915.
During his period as Ephor General between 1885 and 1909, Kavvadias's main project was the excavation and subsequent restoration of the Acropolis of Athens. Until 1890, in collaboration with the German archaeologist and architect Georg Kawerau, he excavated or re-excavated almost the whole site, removing nearly all of its remaining post-Classical structures and discovering dozens of works of ancient sculpture, particularly Archaic . After 1890, the work on the Acropolis primarily consisted of restoration, particularly of the Parthenon, Erechtheion and Propylaia, overseen by Nikolaos Balanos, who directed the project largely independently.
Kavvadias initiated the excavation of the Kabeirion in Boeotia in 1887, later continued by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. In 1889, he was given permission to initiate excavations at the sanctuary of Lykosoura in Arcadia, which he took to be the sanctuary of Despoina described by the Ancient Greek geographer Pausanias. These excavations were conducted in their first season by , and in 1890 by Kavvadias himself. They uncovered the temple of Despoina and discovered part of a cult group of statues – the work of the Messenian sculptor Damophon – showing Despoina seated on a double throne alongside Demeter, accompanied by Artemis and the Titan Anytos. In 1900, during rescue excavations in the Outer Kerameikos, he uncovered the Nessos Amphora, a late seventh-century BCE amphora which he took to be a container for a cremation burial from the nearby Dipylon cemetery. In modern times, the vase has become the name-piece of the Nessos Painter, and was described by John Beazley as the "chief example" of early black-figure vase painting, as well as establishing the Nessos Painter as "the earliest Greek artist whose personality we can grasp."
Between 1902 and 1903, he excavated the Heraion of Samos alongside the future prime minister, Themistoklis Sofoulis, then a lecturer at the National University of Athens. He also oversaw the first reconstruction of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, excavated by , between 1902 and 1908. According to his obituary in the Greek newspaper , he also served as director of the archaeological department of the Ministry of Education.
Excavations at Epidaurus (1881–1928)
On , Kavvadias began excavations on behalf of the Archaeological Society of Athens at Epidaurus, with the aim of uncovering the theatre described by Pausanias. These were the first excavations undertaken by the Society outside Athens, apart from minor and small-scale rescue excavations. In 1881, the excavations uncovered the theatre, as well as two (inscribed stone slabs) in the Sanctuary of Asclepius. The , dating to the late fourth or early third century BCE and sometimes called 'miracle inscriptions', recorded the names of at least twenty individuals and the means by which they were healed – usually miraculous dreams or visions. The excavation and publication of these contributed significantly to Kavvadias's early archaeological reputation.
In 1882, Kavvadias uncovered the (circular temple) and the Temple of Asclepius, followed by the in 1883. In 1884, he excavated the Temple of Artemis and the Great Propylaia, and reconstructed a row of columns in the western stoa of the . The excavations continued until 1927: Valerios Stais, whom Kavvadias appointed as an ephor of the Archaeological Service in 1885, joined them as a supervisor in early 1886, after Kavvadias's elevation to Ephor General, and became field director in 1887. In 1896, Kavvadias excavated the first parts of the nearby Sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas on Mount Kynortion. That year, the French architectural historian Charles Chipiez described the excavation of Epidaurus as "of capital importance to the history of Greek architecture", though he criticised the restrained and limited reconstructions drawn up by the German Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who worked with Kavvadias and illustrated his publication of the excavations, in favour of the more lavish reconstructions created in 1895 by the French architect Alphonse Defrasse – reconstructions which, by the later 20th century, were considered largely erroneous. Kavvadias's report on his excavations of the Roman-period at the site, which he published in 1900, has been described as "invaluable" for the amount of evidence it preserves, much of which has been lost through later deterioration in the building's condition.