Aegean and its neighbouring mainland and offshore regions. In the
1850s most of the area was still under Ottoman rule, except for the nascent
state of Greece, which at that time consisted of the central part of the
peninsula, roughly south of Euboia, and the Peloponnese. Research inves-
tigations in the Balkans north of the Greek state were thus negotiated with
Ottoman officials. Many of the visitors and scholars to the region still
thought of journeys around the Aegean as congenial settings rather than
targets of investigation. Over the next two decades, both the context of
research and approaches to it were transformed. The École française
came under the formal scrutiny of the French Académie des Inscriptions
et Belles Lettres, and its members were now required to provide regular
reports of their activities. The second director of the École française,
Albert Dumont, was responsible for setting up guidelines for the training
and research objectives of its members, and of theBulletin de Corres-
pondence Hellénique, in 1877, to disseminate research in the eastern
Mediterranean. He too travelled widely and published a range of mono-
graphs that gather documents and data from different parts of the
Balkans, includingLe Balkan et l’Adriatique, Les Bulgares et les Albanais,
in 1874, andInscriptions et Monumentsfigurés de la Thrace,in 1876. In
Sofia, the capital of the newly liberated state of Bulgaria, thefirst
National Museum was mooted alongside the National Library in
1878, although it did not open its doors to the public until 1905,
in the former Buyük mosque that still forms the Archaeological
Museum’s principal interior.^1
The twilight years of the Ottoman Empire were a fruitful period for
ambitious ventures, which aimed to capture geographical and topo-
graphical as well as historical data. In the half century prior to the First
World War, and in the wake of the subsequent territorial negotiations
and population transfers ratified at the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923,
scholarly activities ranged widely over the east Balkans. Some, like
G. Perrot, the Czech K. Jireček, or the Austrian Franz Kanitz, operated
independently or on behalf of national scientific organizations. Members
of the École française were active in the vicinity of Thessaloniki, in the
countryside around Plovdiv, in the middle Maritsa valley, as well as in
Philippi, Kavala, and Thasos (in addition to Delphi, Argos, Delos and
(^1) Leekley and Efstratiou 1980, 69; 148 for the earliest modern discoveries of ancient
remains on Olympos; Vokotopoulou 1985 provides a selection of extracts from early travel
accounts and reports of monuments and inscriptions by, among others, M. Cousinéry,
W. M. Leake, and M. Demitsas, focusing on the remains of Thessaloniki; Ruseva-Slokoska
1993 gives a full account of the foundation of the National Museum in Sofia; see also
Nikolov 2006.
2 Introduction