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Bribed his way out of a POW camp, then rewrote Mycenae

George Mylonas was a Greek archaeologist whose life was shaped early by catastrophe: born in Smyrna, he fought in the Greco-Turkish War, witnessed the city's destruction in 1922, and survived capture and torture before American friends bribed his release. He rebuilt his career through the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, then crossed to the United States to study under David Moore Robinson at Johns Hopkins, working alongside him at the excavation of Olynthus. From there he moved through American academia—Chicago, Illinois, and finally Washington University in St. Louis, where he settled from 1933 until his retirement in 1969, all the while returning to Greece for seasons of digging.

His reputation rests mainly on Mycenae, where he and John Papadimitriou uncovered Grave Circle B in the early 1950s and where he later spent decades, from 1957 to 1985, re-excavating the citadel that Christos Tsountas had cleared but never fully published. Mylonas established a chronology for the site's fortifications and palace, traced the extent of its approach routes, and named its Cult Center after concluding it served a religious function. He also dug extensively at Eleusis, Aghios Kosmas, Pylos and elsewhere, and was an unusually energetic fundraiser, cultivating wealthy patrons in St. Louis and founding the Mycenaean Foundation, which built a hostel and clinic in the village near Mycenae. He became the first foreign-born president of the Archaeological Institute of America and later chaired the committee overseeing conservation of the Acropolis monuments after returning permanently to Greece.

His scholarship carried a strong belief that Greek myth could be verified through excavation, leading him to argue that Agamemnon's reign and the Trojan War could be dated archaeologically, and to claim he had found the tombs of the legendary Seven against Thebes and a Bronze Age temple to Demeter at Eleusis matching the Homeric Hymn. These interpretations were controversial even at the time and have largely been rejected by later scholars, who see no solid link between the myths and the material remains. Even so, he is credited with bringing coherence to Mycenae's excavation history, connecting Tsountas's unpublished work with that of Alan Wace, and his 1927 dissertation is regarded as an early systematic synthesis of Neolithic evidence from Greece and Crete. He died in Athens in 1988, shortly after a heart attack, and was buried in the village beside the site he had spent so much of his life uncovering.

He was the first foreign-born president of the Archaeological Institute of America u2014 a man who had been a prisoner of war three decades earlier.

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