On Sunday April 27, 1941 German troops entered and occupied the city of Athens after facing strong Greek resistance in the north.
The following morning, on April 28, Nazi officers entered the National Archaeological Museum to survey its treasures and determine what would be confiscated and moved to Germany.
But the building was empty.
Curators and archaeologists at the museum had seen the writing on the wall. Six months before the first Nazi soldier would set foot in Athens, they hatched a plan to protect and preserve thousands of treasures from Greece’s glorious ancient past.
Following the country’s war declaration in October 1940, the Greek Ministry of Culture’s archaeology department reacted instantly and issued a letter to all museums with instructions on how to protect antiquities from air raids and other acts of war.
Instructions included two ways to protect bulky treasures: the first method was to cover the statue or item with sandbags after protecting it with wooden scaffolding and the second method, which was deemed more effective, was to bury the statues in the ground.
After the National Archaeological Museum organized its committee, the monumental operation to hide thousands of objects was under way.
“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, a curator at the time, wrote in museum archives.
Massive trenches were dug in the basement of the museum, often extending under streets and avenues that surrounded the vicinity of the building on Bouboulinas Street in central Athens. Above, meanwhile, city life went on in the bustling capital.
“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,” Karouzou wrote.
She added that museum technicians used improvised wooden cranes to lower the statues into ditches “reminiscent of mass graves.”
Museum technicians and staff painstakingly filled the underground trenches one by one with extreme care. Once the antiquities were placed in the concrete-fortified trenches, they were topped with sand and eventually filled with dirt for further concealment and protection.
While the hiding operation was taking place, museum registrars were completing the meticulous process of cataloguing each and every item. This cataloguing included the items’ location in the ground and method of preservation. The registrars needed to record as many details as possible for those who would one day uncover the treasures.
The crates of antiquity registration were handed over to the general treasurer of the Bank of Greece for safe keeping. Along with the records, wooden crates filled with the golden objects and famous treasures from Mycenae were delivered to the headquarters, as they were considered to be the most priceless treasures of all.
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 — 10 days before the first Nazi soldier would arrive.
When Nazi officers arrived at the museum on the morning of Monday, April 28th, it was a surreal image.
The entire museum had been stripped of all its content. There were naked walls and empty showcases and not a single trace of an antiquity in sight. One by one, museum staff reported in a line up to receive their new conquerors.
The German officer sent to occupy the building asked persistently where the treasures were and the staff sat motionless and speechless, preserving the secret operation to hide the treasures.
Not a single treasure was ever found from the massive collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the secret location of the antiquities was never revealed.
The efforts of the museum’s curators and archaeologists preserved for generations to come important statues like the Kouros and other timeless Greek antiquities. These antiquities were eventually dug up and put back on display years after the liberation of Athens in 1944.
All photographs from the archives of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
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9 comments
Who said Greeks can’t organize again?
Pity they could not bury the Parthenon when lord Elgin was on the AcropolIs ! That would have saved the marbles from theft!!!
A pity that the Greeks were burning the old marbles to make cement after the building had been destroyed after an explosion when it was used as a munitions dump. Have you seen what has happened to any marble which remained on the site? I guess that you are one of those who thinks that every item in museums round the world should return to the country of origin. Everything which would have returned to Iraq would now be under threat of destruction or already lost…
Where did you read that “Greeks” were burning old marbles!
Iraq comes into play in this article – how???
You lost me…
Just send them all home where they belong…
Enough with ENESCO – UN – Government bureaucracy – redditch – bs – and such!!!
All Greek Artifacts need to go home ASAP…….
My understanding is that the Acropolis marbles were being dismantled and used by the Christians for houses, etc. These were simply pagan objects to them. The Turks also had no special reverence for these ancient things. By carting them off, Elgin saved them from certain desruction during thar time. We have to understand the historical context of these actions. The question as to return them must consider totally new contexts.
I was glad to find this article and the compelling photographs from the Museum’s archives. A recent book The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas details attempts to prevent the Nazi confiscation of art by various museums. Athens is not discussed in the book but this article shows us how the National Archeological Museum staff prepared for Hitler’s arrival. He would surely have shipped off most of treasures for his planned Fuhrermuseum or his own private collection. We must be forever grateful to those who made such great efforts to safeguard the classical heritage of Greece.
I don’t see how the English were any better than the Germans in the case of looting archaeological treasures or the French in that case as well.
Look at the statue of Athena even now in our modern time and era it remains in London..
Also take the time to visit the Louvre and you will see the glory of our Greek ancestors sitting in France away from its rightful home.
Is there any information regarding the Antikythera Mechanism during this time? Was it even on display in the 1930s or 1940 or was it stored in a repository? Where was it hidden prior to April 28, 1941? Caves? Underground? Are there any existing photographs of it being hidden away by staff? That singular, anomalous artefact is an often ignored gem and barely attracted any serious scholarly attention after it’s initial discovery. It would be nice to have any photographic evidence or any more information regarding this intricate mechanism around this period.