Semni Karusou

Semni Papaspyridi-Karouzou (; 1897 8 December 1994) was a Greek classical archaeologist who specialized in the study of pottery from ancient Greece. She was the first woman to join the Greek Archaeological Service; she excavated in Crete, Euboea, Thessaly, and the Argolid, and worked as curator of ceramic collections at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for over thirty years. She experienced political persecution under the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. She has been described by the archaeologists Marianna Nikolaidou and Dimitra Kokkinidou as "perhaps the most important woman in Greek archaeology", and by the newspaper To Vima as "the last representative of the generation of great archaeologists".

Early and personal life Polysemni Papaspyridi, who went by Semni, was born in 1897 in Tripoli, Greece.Efn|1897 is given as her birth date by Nikolaidou & Kokkinidou 1998; She took the name Papaspyridi-Karouzou on her marriage in 1930 to Christos Karouzos, also an archaeologist. She joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1921 as a curator of antiquities at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, becoming the first woman to do so. Karouzou then worked on excavations at Bronze Age sites at Herakleion, on Crete, and the classical site of Eretria, on Euboea. In 1928, she (along with Christos Karouzos) was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship to study at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin; when she returned to Greece in 1930 she was promoted to the post of Ephor of Antiquities (head of an ephorate, an archaeological administrative district), an achievement described as a "feminist victory" by the activist Avra Theodoropoulou. worked in ancient Epidaurus; and worked to preserve historic buildings in the town of Nafplio, where she later published a guide.

Curatorial work In 1933, Karouzou became curator of the ceramic collections at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, a post she held for over thirty years (until 1964). For most of this period women were prohibited from joining the Archaeological Service under a law introduced by the dictator Ioannis Metaxas in 1936, and existing women members were refused promotion to the highest posts as museum directors or ephors. She also wrote extensively on the museum's collections of ceramics and stone monuments, as well as on new archaeological discoveries. Her monograph on the Amasis Painter, a major painter of Attic black-figure pottery, was described by a reviewer as "a scholarly and valuable study". Karouzou's earliest studies on the painter go back to 1931, and she was invited to write her monograph on the painter in 1938. This monograph was published after the war in 1956.

On the outbreak of the Greek–Italian war in 1940, Karouzou and her husband (along with other archaeologists, museum guards, and their families) packed away the museum's collections for safety during World War II. This led to Karouzou being allowed to leave the country to spend time visiting exiled Greeks in Rome and Lyon and to work as an invited scholar at the University of Tübingen and the University of Geneva.

Archaeologists Nikolaidou and Kokkinidou (specialists in the history of Greek archaeology) describe Karouzou as "perhaps the most important woman in Greek archaeology", and refer to her "continuous scholarly effort, broad intellectual perspective, social contribution and democratic sensitivity" and the innovative nature of her approach to ancient artefacts, particularly iconography on pottery, by which she "moved beyond the images to real people, their everyday life, attitudes and ideologies".

Karouzou died in December 1994. In its announcement of her death, the Greek newspaper To Vima called her 'the last representative of the generation of great archaeologists'.

Selected publications

National Museum: Illustrated Guide to the Museum, , 2000. (Experiences and memorials), 2.2, 1984, pp. 1–61 Nauplion (in Greek: ). , 1979.The Amasis Painter, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Grèce 2: Athènes, Musée National 2'', Paris, 1954 (publication of the National Museum's classical vase collections)