Milena Melfi
Visiting Fellow, Fall 2024
- AffiliationUniversity of OxfordResearch Project:The Archaeological Activity of the Greek Government in the Occupied Territories of Southern Albania (1913-1914)
Milena Melfi is an archaeologist of the ancient Greek world. She teaches Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford and is a Curator of casts of Greek and Roman sculpture at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford). She received her education in Classics in Italy, at the Universities of Pisa and Messina, and prior to settling at Oxford University she was a Fellow of the Italian (SAIA) and British (BSA) Schools of Archaeology in Athens, of the American Academy in Rome and of the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard. She worked on surveys and excavations in Greece, Sicily and Albania and is currently the UK director of the joint Anglo-Albanian excavations at the site of Dobra/Vagalat in southern Albania. Her research focuses on the archaeology of Hellenistic Greece, she has published books on the sanctuaries and cult of Asklepios and on the sanctuaries of Hellenistic Greece and more recently she has been focusing on the archaeology of Epiros and those regions of northern Greec, traditionally considered untouched by the world of the classical Greek polis.
About the Research Project
The Archaeological Activity of the Greek Government in the Occupied Territories of Southern Albania (1913-1914)
The aim of the project is that of reconstructing the archaeological surveys and excavations carried out in 1913 and 1914 by the archaeologists Demetrios Evangelidis and Konstantinos Romaios in the military occupied areas of Epirus, later Republic of Northern Epirus, before they were integrated into the modern Albanian state. This was an extraordinary adventure, with obvious political overtones, that in the course of a few months, and in a climate of uninterrupted warfare, provided a large amount of data in order to demonstrate the Hellenic origins of the area. Beyond the political aims, the scientific legacy of the Greek mission is particularly important because it provided the first and only well-documented archaeological survey of an area that was to go through serious geopolitical disruptions in the following periods: from the archaeological plundering of foreign occupying powers in between the two wars, to the isolation due to the establishment and collapse of the Communist state. This research will feed into my main research project on the archaeology of the Hellenistic settlements of southern Albania.